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If you are even remotely curious about this field, you should 100% take this course.
I decided to take BC on a whim because I was tired of pure CS courses, and it was probably my favorite course ever and made me rethink my specialization. Professor Susana Vinga is one of the best and sweetest teachers I've had (up there with Luísa!) and the course is very well structured.
I do consider the workload heavy, since being from MEIC meant I lacked a lot of bases to understand some things (you'll be taking this course with mostly students from MEBiom/MBioTech/MBio for whom it's mandatory) but the...
Project is very time-consuming for how much it ends up being worth in terms of grading.
The lectures are very full of information and each class pdf has 50-150 slides. The labs are fun and the professor explains everything so you will understand them even with minimal or zero revision beforehand. The MAP are easier than the labs because they’re only 45 minutes so while the exercises aren’t hard you don’t have time to hesitate. You will pass the tests if you go to the labs and study the slides. There’s a final group project that isn’t too hard if evenly divided by the group, the project is in R but they don’t care about the code they only care about the report
An interesting course for those in CompSci with an interest in biology.
Classes: The theoretical classes had 3 different teachers, I thought all of them were ok. Some of the subjects we talked about, like sequence alignment, are better explained in labs than in class. None of the biology concepts were too complicated, most if not all of the topics were talked about in high school biology. In general, I believe it's a relatively easy course.
Evaluation Methods: The course had two tests during the semester, which I felt was an effective way to test our knowledge without being...
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The only part I liked about the course was the beginning, where you apply algorithms related to the subject. I feel like that was the only thing I actually absorbed from the entire course.
The way the professor presents the material is way too confusing, and again, it’s too much content, which even turns simple things like the labs into seven-headed monsters if you rely on the slides (not to mention we had to do mathematical proofs in a bioinformatics course, something I never really understood the point of).
On top of that, the professor wasn’t the same throughout the semester:...
Bad course. There's an overload of material: in some lectures, the professor goes through 150+ slides, each with different content, without giving you a real chance to understand much of it. The course is driven by quantity over quality: you’re expected to 'learn' tons of information superficially, but never go in-depth on anything. The issue with this is that when the exam comes, you’re left with piles of material to memorize, since you never really know what will be asked.
The labs and projects are easy and fun. The content itself is actually interesting, the only problem is...