“Why do we need explosive detection methods? Terrorists. Because they all want to increase your entropy?”
– Joel Brockmeyer
So classes have officially started. All I had today was BBS 501: the “BBS” stands for “Basic Biomedical Sciences” and, essentially, this class is Graduate School Biochemistry (officially titled “Beginning Basic Biomedical Sciences I”, I think). Today we began a few lectures on thermodynamics, hence the aforementioned quote regarding entropy…spoken by Joel during my Junior Chemistry Seminar class Junior year at Truman…
If today’s class is any indication of the future, then it shouldn’t be too terribly hard for the first few weeks. We had a review on thermodynamics, and by “review,” I mean back to Freshman year of college. I’m sure it’ll get more difficult, but flipping through the first few weeks of the syllabus, all I can see is stuff I’ve, at the very least, heard of if not studied on multiple occasions in various classes throughout undergrad. I think the primary difficulty will be in the sheer amount of material, however. As in, I’ve got this class weekday mornings at 9:00 am…so when I have my first test in just over 2 weeks, I’ll have had about 11 lectures…which is the equivalent of almost a month of lectures (MWF) at Truman. So yeah, I dunno…it could be easy…could get a lot harder really quickly…
The exams will be completely in essay form and we are assured 3 hours to take the exam and each lecture will be covered by only one question on the test…therefore, we are relatively aware of what’s going to be on the test already…that, and we are being told to a). get the previous tests from upperclassmen and b). that the questions are very similar from year to year.
Graduate school?! So far, it sounds a lot easier than I would have thought in many of my undergrad classes…on the other hand, I’ve only had one day to deal with…but, then again, I only have two real classes to worry about: this one and a class twice a week that deals with reading “classic” papers (i.e. the original Watson and Crick DNA structure paper, etc.).
Only time will tell, I guess…
Wow, that doesn’t sound too bad at all. Eventually I’ll write all about the honor code and stuff herein my new blog! Yay! But how do I link mine to here and stuff? You should let me know. Thanks! Later dude!