Human bio and other things in UCSC???

aquafina14
Sun, 25 Mar 2012 12:05:17 +0000

I’d say that biology is a semi-competitive major here. I’ve had a lot of professors tell us “You wouldn’t want an adequate surgeon giving you open heart surgery” as a way of encouraging us to do better. Most lower division/introductory classes are a lot larger than upper division ones. When I took the intro chem series we had like 400 people in our class, but now that I only have upper divs left for my major my classes usually have 50-70 people.

Human Bio is a BS. It used to be called ‘Health Sciences’ so it’s the ‘pre-med’ ish major here. This major requires that you take a quarter of medical Spanish and do an Internship. This major covers most (if not all) of the requirements for med school so people that want to become doctors usually major in this.

I have noticed that its really easy to tell which professors actually care about your progress and which ones are just there because they have to teach in order to get grant money for research. I have absolutely LOVED every upper division professor I have had. These classes, for the most part, students chose which ones to take so it’s the people that actually want to be there. For the lower divs a lot of those are required for everyone (I don’t like chemistry, but I had to take it as a pre-req for the intro bio series) so some of these professors aren’t as amazing. But I found this understandable; they wanted to teach what they love doing and their students don’t care.

I believe we have a strong science program. I’m an Ecology and Evolution major, so it’s really marine bio based which makes it convenient for me to be able to find research that’s right out in the Bay. My friend is a tour guide and she once mentioned that our science departments don’t have many ‘famous’ statistics, but one of our former professors was the first to map the entire human genome (while he was at UCSC) so I’d say that we are a strong science school, no matter what side of biology you go to. People don’t get either a A or F…you can get anywhere in between as well(:

There are 10 colleges: Cowell, Stevenson, Crown, Merrill, College 9, College 10, Porter, Kresge, Oakes, and College 8