CS 4501

This review is for the special topic Computational Biology / Biological Computing.

This course was kind of a mess but saved by the fact that it was on an interesting topic and the grading was very generous. The topic of the course was DNA -- the course acted like a biology course for non-bio majors and occasionally had connections to CS (we talked some about algorithms to solve bio problems and talking about a DNA-based computer). However, there were definitely stretches of the semester where the lecture material was 90% bio with only minor CS tie-ins. The topics were very interesting to me and sometimes Evans was a good lecturer and sometimes he got way too distracted by tangents.

For assignments, the class had 2 partner jupyter notebook projects, which were pretty hard but doable, and 3 in-class paper quizzes, which were pretty fair. It also had a large open-ended final group project that you started less than a month into the semester. The projects ranged in scope and relation to CS -- my group's felt more like a high school research project, but others coded a bio simulator. It felt like Evans expected you to put a lot of time in but most people didn't. There were readings for the first half of the semester but you didn't really have to do them. The saving grace was that he grades on essentially a poor/fair/good/great scale and as long as you get mostly good/greats (very doable), you'll get an A. #tCFfall22

Very boring class. Lectures are long and rambling and didn't really help at all with the assignments. We had 3 assignments that were kinda related to the material but were kinda confusing and took longer than they should have. The final project could be about basically anything you want and could involve doing/making/researching something of your choosing - most groups just ended up making a website or paper with some research about a specific topic. The grading in this class didn't make any sense - it involved different colors and stars idk? Definitely skip this class unless you really like biology and CS. Overall, it wasn't that much work but it was a total waste of time and very boring.

Do not take Computational Biology with David Evans.
1. The lectures are incredibly useless - he just kinda rambles about nothing related to the homeworks (which are pretty time consuming and I wish the lectures would've helped with them).
2. David Evans is petty. No one went to his lectures and he used that as an excuse to shit on the students - which is unprofessional and rude. We asked a harmless question and he went off on us for even asking only to suggest doing that exact thing because our project didn't have any value and was disappointing. He made sure to let us know how disappointed he was in us in his petty slack message.

Overall super rude guy and to be honest I've heard him say some pretty questionable statements regarding COVID and China and telling students to change their foreign name to more westernized names. Perfect ex of a privileged old white dude.