BigRed2015

I'll be a sophomore this upcoming fall and my courses so far are as follows:

BIOMI 2900- General Microbiology
BIOMI 2911- General Microbiology Laboratory
CHEM 3570- Organic Chemistry for the Life Sciences
CHEM 2510- Intro. to Experimental Organic Chemistry
BIOEE 1780- Intro. to Evolutionary Biology and Diversity
AEM 2400- Marketing

Comes out to 17 credits. I'll be majoring in Biological Sciences with a concentration in General Biology and going for a minor in Business. My freshman year consisted of taking the two required intro. biology classes for the major along with the biog1500 lab and general chemistry. These courses were pretty manageable. My question is: Is taking two science labs unrealistic? Any comments and/or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks.

Equilibrium

It will be challenging, but doable. If you find it overly challenging you can always drop a class

BigRed2015

Appreciate the feedback. BIOEE1780 and AEM 2400 shouldn't be as bad as the others, I guess but if it's too challenging, I might just take off the Microbiology lab.

faustarp

at first I opened this thread and thought you were a freshman, and I would have say no way! I think this could be good for a sophomore, though. orgo lab takes up a pretty substantial amount of time, as you probably know.
I think you should be ready to drop microbio lab if you have to, but at least give it a shot. I know some people who took it and it seemed like they were doing really cool stuff, so don't go down without a fight, you know?

last thing: as a sophomore, have you considered trying to get involved with research on campus? do you have an overall career goal? if the answer is no that's totally fine, but if you want to go into research or medicine then you might want to start thinking about contacting labs this year.
(maybe you already are all set with this stuff, and you just want to talk scheduling, in which case that is awesome. if not, consider that if you work in a lab, your scheduling needs/preferences will change depending on the demands there.)

BigRed2015

Thanks for your response. A few questions on my part: How is the courseload for Orgo/Orgo Lab? Is it mostly sheer memorization or more application based? I'll give this schedule a shot for a few weeks before deciding whether or not to drop one of the courses.

I did some lab work, though not research, the Spring semester of my freshman year and now am looking into finding a lab who would you take an undergraduate student. Do you have any tips on how to accomplish this? Thanks.

faustarp

I would say in most cases, the orgo classes are not going to be sheer memorization. the reason for that is that you need to learn various principles of orgo and then apply them to new-to-you problems. that is the content of all the exams for the lecture. the issue will end up being how you learn those principles. you will probably need to do a lot of memorization at that step, because there are a lot of different rules/concepts to remember.
for lab, you need to do substantial pre-lab questions and also lab write-ups every week. it is relatively time-consuming, compared to other 2 credit classes I've taken. for the written exam in that class, some if it is going to be sheer memorization, since you are supposed to be able to reproduce things you saw on the board weeks ago.

to find a lab, here is what you should do:
research the various labs at Cornell that are interested in the same parts of biology you are. learn about what the professor does by reading their website, and figure out a bit about why you like it. email a couple of them explaining who you are and what your academic/work experience is. keep these emails full of info but short and clear, since Cornell professors get tons of email. if you don't hear back from anyone, email again within the next two weeks.
before or concurrent to these efforts, you could also go talk to some of the people in the OUB, and see if they have additional suggestions or ideas. there are some people there whose jobs are devoted to undergraduate research in biology, so they are in a good position to help you out. they know lots of labs/professors and could provide some personalized advice to you, or even help you make initial connections with people.