[BIOL W3004] Neurobiology I: Cellular & Molecular

Professor Hua is a gem, especially amongst the Bio professors at Barnard. On the first day of class, she told us that we were her first priority, and research came second - how many other professors in the science departments have told students this (and actually meant it)? I can tell you my answer: zero! Yes, this class is challenging and the readings get progressively more difficult to decipher, but as long as you study hard, you will be fine. Each exam requires a greater amount of memorization, but is excellent preparation for graduate/professional school. Professor Hua can sometimes be difficult to understand, but I feel that most people blow this out of proportion. If you don't understand something, she will bend over backwards to explain it in as many ways as it takes for you to obtain a firm grasp of the topic. She will meet with you anytime, provided you email her in advance or talk to her about it in class, and she also holds lengthy review sessions to answer questions before the exams. Furthermore, after the first exam, she gives a "comment card" to students so that she can learn from the things that they found helpful or difficult to understand in order to improve teaching for this class and future classes. Student input is extremely important to her, and she takes it very seriously and works on any problem areas with the class (such as difficult to understand exam questions or topics). I highly recommend this class, both because the content is interesting and very useful and because Professor Hua is extremely intelligent and well-versed on the topic and devotes herself tirelessly to her students. You don't find too many professors like her in science departments, so take advantage of the opportunity!

Professor Hua is very nice, but not the greatest instructor. I'm not sure how good the Columbia class is in comparison, but this class requires a lot of independent studying to grasp the material. Don't expect to get very much out of lecture. Although not the best thing to say, it's probably better to miss lectures, study the material thoroughly on your own and then go to her for office hours to ask questions about what you don't understand. The main use I got out of lectures was knowing what we were going to be tested on rather than an understanding of the material. Her tests are somewhat hard to understand too, because of wording issues. Not the best class in the world, but not the worst. Definitely a fairly thorough introduction into the concepts of neurobiology.

Professor Hua is a great professor. She clearly loves what she teaches and she puts in a low of extra time to help students as much as possible. Her accent can make understanding lectures difficult in the beginning, but you soon adjust to it. She is also very aware that her accent can cause difficulties as is more than happy to repeat things. Hua is a very nice professor who cares about her students. The material is really interesting and Hua provides great lecture notes and explains the material well, which can often be challenging. Hua says she does not curve, but the final grades are curved a little. If you like this subject, I definitely reccommend taking this class.

I think there's a reason for the lack of reviews on Dr. Hua. She is an incredibly nice person but not necessarily the greatest professor. If you are a neuroscience major at Barnard, you cannot avoid taking Neurobiology and it looks like Dr. Hua's going to be teaching it for a while.
The good news? She is incredibly warm, friendly and understanding and if you go to her office hours she is willing to teach and explain the material over and over again. She is very patient, never patronizing, and truly cares about the success of her students. She is much more skilled in explaining concepts on a one to one basis as opposed to lecturing in class.
The bad news? She is not the greatest or most organized lecturer. She additionally has an accent that may take time getting used to and understanding. However, I overall found the material to be fascinating. It can be overwhelming and intimidating but its Neurobiology! What did you expect?
Recommendations? Spend a little bit of time with the material each day and go to Dr. Hua's office hours or make an appointment with her the moment you realize you don't understand a concept. Go see her even if you think you DO understand a concept. Knowledge in the class tends to build so missing what seems like a small idea may be disastrous in the long run. Dr. Hua uses PowerPoint slides during lecture and has handouts of her notes in outline form. I never found these to be too useful and rewrote these using supplementary information from any notes I took in class and from the textbook (which is quite horrible and I would recommend checking out the Kandel Neuro book for clarification on certain concepts). I also found reviewing for exams in a group to be very helpful.
And because I don't feel like writing a separate review, here's a little something about the lab in Neurobiology, also taught by Dr. Hua - fantastic! It's really really long and takes up an entire afternoon once a week but the length of the class actually made it more relaxed and she doesn't mind if you take small breaks here and there. It was one of the most fascinating lab courses I've ever taken. Microdissections, electrodes, crayfish! What could be better? The manual can definitely be improved and there are mostly full lab write ups (which take a long time) but I really enjoyed the class.

I enjoyed this class because the material was interesting, but it took me half the semester to figure out how to study for the exams and read the papers. As a professor, Jian assumes that you know more than you probably do, in particular basic circuit physics and experimental procedures. He does, however, speak rather slowly (because english is his second language) and writes on the board which both allow you to take good notes in class. While he does require us to memorize endless details, they all come straight from the class notes or papers. The exams are going to focus not on how something works, but instead on how it would work if you did X to it, and how this increases our understanding of the system as a whole. Neurobio is a field still in progress so the focus of the class is very experiment oriented. You need to know why we believe so and so. The first test is almost all physics and most of the class drops it. After that it gets better. If you decide to take this class, I recommend the following for tests:

1. Write down everything he says in class including anything he says you do not need to know and memorize ALL of it. (do not focus on the book)
2. Study in groups, because you will inevitably miss something.
3. Make flash cards for numbers, statistics and chemicals
4. Understand the "story" of each process (biochemical pathway, different parts involved) using the book to fill in the gaps.
5. Make a list of experimental procedures described in class and in the papers and how each works. Toxins, Markers, and there effects on larger processes. He will ask you to "design" experiments on exams.
6. If he describes a specific experiment, know it well.

For reading papers:
1. There are helpful resources in the Bio library on the 6th floor of Fairchild.
2. Focus on understanding the diagrams, these are what usually appear on exams, in particular the techniques used to produce the image and what we learn from it.
3. If you have the time, especially for the final, go through the paper with a set of flashcards. For each step in the researchers thought process make a question and write down the answer. You will need to know how they reasoned the design of the experiment and their conclusions.
4. For the really detailed papers, use your best judgement on what is important. For example, we did a paper on the crystalized structure of rhodopsin. While we did not need to know every amino acid, we did need to know the ones that caused kinks in the chain, and what sequences allow the effects described in class. Also, we did a paper on the structure of a potassium channel, the point of the paper was how ion selection was achieved, and a key part to this involved the dimensions of the channel. These precise dimensions for the channel in angstroms were on our exam. Figure out what the paper is getting at and memorize those statistics.

Although Professor Yang knows the material and runs a pretty good lab, he has no clue as to how conduct the class, give exams and communicate with students. With his heavy-accented English, he gives lectures that are so boring that students fall asleep toward the end. He also tries to make all the material as hard as possible, even in the easiest topics. Yang constantly introduces the most minute and unnecessary details that only obstruct the concepts.

Moreover, on his tests, he asks the most minute and unnecessary details. For example, he would ask you about the Angtrom width of the channel in the lower middle part. Or to recite an amino acid that was a part of some protein that functioned in one of the pathways that was described in 12-page research paper. (And those questions, of course, would be worth about 10 points).

Yang does not know how to communicate with his students either. I hated this class, although I must admit that the material we learned was very interesting.

A good class--hard if you have no background in it (intro bio and some physics), but not too bad otherwise if you're willing to spend the time studying and reading the recitation papers. Prof Firestein is great--he keeps the class interested, he's funny, and if he's a little disorganized, it's never a problem. The class (primarily in the recitations) is very good at teaching you to read research papers. Firestein's tests tend to focus on the important concepts rather than nit-picky details. Part of the course is taught by Prof Yang who isn't nearly as interesting, will ask questions requiring detailed knowledge (e.g. how many neurotransmitters are in a vesicle), and writes small on the board, but is tolerable. Both profs provide practice exams before the midterms, so you have some idea what to expect ahead of time.