BIOL 4015

This was an awesome course for getting lab experience in Drosophila genetics, or just laboratory research experience in general! I was very skeptical about working with flies before taking this course, but transgenic fly larvae allow you to observe some really interesting, powerful genetic tools. You get assigned a group on the first day or two of class (4-5 people) and you will work with this group for the rest of the semester. We started out doing Journal Club presentations -- each group presented on a scientific journal article that related to the lab research -- and then transitioned into actual hands-on experiments with live flies. Fluorescent microscopy is another big element of the course/research, which was also very cool. At the beginning of the semester, class meetings were very regular and took up the whole time, but as the semester went on, each group had different things going on and "class" would just be groups working on their own stuff for 45 minutes or so. Sometimes Siegrist didn't really have anything to lecture on and would just let us go an hour early! There were many occasions were we kind of made up for that free time by coming in to do time-specific things with the flies outside of class, but nothing ridiculous.
The last thing that we did was to make a research poster for a departmental poster session, which is a great experience to have under your belt if you plan on doing anything in research beyond just a class. There were a couple of quizzes during the semester but no big exams; the main assignments were fairly short lab reports. Overall, this class did not require a lot of mental energy or stress, but was very worthwhile!! Would recommend.