BIOL 4340

The class is fairly straightforward: you have class twice a week, and each class 2 people will present a different scientific paper from the 30's-60's that's relevant to the section of the class you're looking at. However, sometimes you will go over papers together, and the first 2 weeks of the class you read this book called Galvani's Spark which isn't too bad. Every thursday you'll have a one-question quiz that's about one of the papers you've read this week, and those normally aren't too bad if you just re-read the paper summaries on the last page prior to class. Mellon is knowledgeable about the papers cause he's so old that he's written some of them and was around when all these were first published. For the final exam you get to choose one of a few main topics from the course and write an essay about it. I'm a Cog Sci major focusing in Neuro and I enjoyed this class; would definitely recommend.

This is a great 4000-level Bio. The small class size allows you to really get to know the professor and the other students. The first few weeks you read Galvani's Spark, which sets up most of what you will learn the rest of the semester. The rest of the course is broken up into three sections: conduction of the nervous impulse, sensory physiology, and synaptic physiology. There are two scientific papers to read per class and one person will present each paper during class. As long as you meet with him before your presentation to go over the paper, it will be easy. The number of times you present depends on how many people are in the class, but we each presented twice. Towards the end of the semester, we presented papers as a class so that we just went through the figures and explained what was going on in each figure. Some of the papers are long and hard to understand, but it's not too hard to bs your way through. Every Tuesday, there will be a one-question short answer quiz that he says could come from any of the four papers that week, but I think always came from the Tuesday papers. Professor Mellon is really cool because he knows and worked with a lot of the researchers you read about. If you're looking for an upper-level bio with not too much work and you want to learn about the beginnings of neuroscience research, take this class.

Terrible, awful, worst class. You basically have readings every class, a quiz on every reading (which are awful), and then you have to do a presentation on a reading, which is graded HARSHLY. The papers are so more difficult... you have to spend hours simply figuring out what the paper is trying to stay. Do. Not. Take. The professor is also so dry and boring.