BIOL 4230

BEWARE: This course DOES REQUIRE PREVIOUS PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCE. I'm not sure why this course is taught through the Biology Dept.- it should be taught through Computer Science. You will be struggling through the entire class if you have no programming experience (however, there is not much need for a biological background). The course is computer science heavy and the exams favor those with a comp sci background. I spent hours (and I mean HOURS) working on the homework that was supposed to take 4 hours ( and I'm sure it did for the comp sci people) with little guidance because there is no TA or office hours. Professor Pearson knows what he's talking about and is very helpful but there's only so much that can be done for someone that doesn't have the base knowledge needed for this course. If you're interested in bioinformatics you're better off taking an Intro to Programming course before this course.

This course is advertised as not requiring previous programming experience, but you should definitely have some programming experience to take this class. I have a little programming experience, but luckily my roommate is a CS major and was able to help me through using Unix. I was hoping that I would learn a lot of skills in this class that I would be able to use for biology research, but I only really learned how to do two types of bioinformatic analyses. I wouldn't take this class unless you're familiar with programming - it won't teach you that much.

This is a great class to take if you are interested in learning the fundamentals and foundations of bioinformatics and genetics/genomics analysis. Pearson was a guy that was really active in the early days of bioinformatics and made a lot of contributions to the field that we still use today. His class is part theory and statistics behind the analysis software, part computer programming, and part practical application. Like some of the other reviewers have said, you need to have at least a little background in programming to succeed. I had a mainly R-based background with some python from 2 years ago so I struggled to use UNIX early on. Unlike other reviewers, I really liked the class and learned a lot. I got a better background of the principles behind the statistics and programs I use regularly. I also learned of several new ones. I would say that this is a very well-rounded survey of bioinformatics methods, but he does like to use the more primitive/old version of a given method (like edgeR over DESeq2) mainly because the math and statistics is more simple and easy to explain to pure biologists.

If you are just looking for a 4000-level class to complete the biology major, DO NOT take this class. I would say that the class is very different from typical biology classes and most people are probably looking to get into medicine, where these skills will not be needed. I could sense the frustration of people who were not interested in the theory or application of these concepts and they usually only saw this as a class in programming and not concepts, and so they walked away not really learning much. If, however, you do computational biology or want to in the future, this class is the perfect primer to get you into other areas. This is the only class I know of in our biology department that deals with computational biology/bioinformatics.

The most difficult part of this class are the weekly homeworks. I often spend many hours on a problem that needed five minutes at most mainly because I was unfamiliar with UNIX. The tests are take-home and not a lot of memorization is needed. Projects are hit or miss. This semester, our evolutionary tree project was a mess and lots of people had issues with it. That being said, none of these were that time consuming, and if you put in the effort, expect a good grade.