Taking courses out of sequence

Bigredmed
Mon, 28 May 2012 11:49:25 +0000

It really depends on what the topics in the courses are. Bio, compared to chem and physics, is much less sequential. And that fact that Bio 2 doesn’t require Bio 1 as a pre-req makes me think that you should be okay.

For example at my UG, Bio 101 was all the macrolevel bio - more of a survey course that introduces concepts that will be explored way more in depth if you were a bio major, like that organisms are made up of cells, that individuals within a species interact with others of their species and with different species or that evolution is the driving force of biodiversity. You’ll probably spend an inordinate amount of time on phylogeny and other outdated concepts that while helpful in organizing in a broad sense, aren’t actually that useful the higher you go. In other words, what a decent HS biology course should have already taught you. It was a course designed to give the business major who needed to get a science out of the way a broad exposure to the field, or to give the person who didn’t know what biology was a chance to see a small glimpse of what the field had to offer.

Meanwhile Bio 201 (has since been renumbered to Bio 102) was the first bio course that actually “meant” something - this was a class focused only on cell structure and function, and it, not Bio 101, was the class that higher level biology courses listed as a pre-req.

This sort of setup - where the 101 class is a survey of the entire field and subsequent classes are the ones that actually teach that stuff in depth - is very, very common. It certainly happened in my sociology classes (I was a sociology major), the intro to Econ class I took (which stands alone as the only class I ever dropped during UG), and my intro psychology course. All were just touching the surface, none really added much to my education at the next level except to say “I’ve heard of this before - briefly”, and if they hadn’t been pre-reqs wouldn’t have been worth the tuition dollars.

So, look at the upper level bio courses and see if they require Bio 1 in order to take . If they don’t, and you can get into them with Bio 2 instead, then don’t worry about it,(watch out for the OR, my UG Bio 101 OR 102 was the pre-req for all the upper level bio courses - just had to have one).

Oh and for the record, I never took Bio 101, and in fact, my friends and I (when we were junior/senior pre-meds), used to joke about the number of people we’d meet who would say “Oh, I used to be pre-med” and then you’d ask them what made them change their minds, and it’d invariably be Bio 101 and the corresponding lab (which was a ridiculous amount of work) that made them reconsider their career plans. It seriously was probably the number one course for weeding out pre-meds and it wasn’t even a required class in any sense…

So you might not even need to take Bio 1, and can instead fulfill your year of bio courses for med school requirements with a more interesting upper level course.