<p>Hey guys I'm an incomming freshmen and a Biology major. I was just curious if you guys have any advice for me class wise. I am sort of confused on which classes to take, and in what order. Or any teachers to avoid. Any suggestions about anything related to the major or UCLA would be appreciated!
Thank you!</p>
<p>Have fun and enjoy yourself.
If you are attending Summer Orientation, you will learn about what classes to take; my guess is you’d begin with Chem 20A, the appropriate math class, and a third class that’s less important and will probably be a GE because most of the classes you want will be pretty full.</p>
<p>When you’re searching for classes, use bruinwalk.com to look up teacher reviews to know how difficult teachers are, who’s nice and who’s not, etc</p>
<p>Life Science majors(biology, neuroscience, MIMG, MCDB, psychobio, etc) generally do the 14 series of chemistry and the 3 series of math. Your counselor is basically going to advise you to take chem 14a, math 3a(or whatever you test into based on AP scores, they will tell you), and a GE, and that is what many of us did. Some decided to do a cluster to get most of the GE classes done. I’ve taken Women’s Studies 10 and Italian 46 as GE’s and both were fun and easy though the reading can get a bit much. My friend did the Mythology cluster and thought it was okay; interesting but A LOT of work given that it’s three classes that fulfill 4 GE requirements plus writing II. If you just want your GE’s done and a cluster topic sounds interesting enough then you might want to do that, I wanted more variety and spread them out. </p>
<p>For chemistry 14 series, you will either have Lavelle or Scerri. People don’t like Lavelle very much, but I didn’t think he was too bad. If you’ve taken AP Chemistry than Lavelle isn’t too difficult, he just skips over things that he feels we should already know from basic chemistry. Scerri is more conceptual and doesn’t skip over things like Lavelle does so a lot of people I know prefer his teaching style. Look them up if you want a better idea. </p>
<p>Math 3 series I’ve had Murfet (he’s decent, but he spends waaaaaay too much time proving equations; we spent an entire lecture deriving the derivative equation, though his Australian accent made up for it), Mike Williams (he was awesome, he loved playing with colored chalk, I’d recommend him if possible) and Ma (he’s nice, but not really a good teacher)</p>
<p>The chem series needs to be done 14ABCD, the labs(BL, CL) can be done whenever. The math 3 series is done ABC, and either concurrently with 3C or after you take the Physics 6 series. At some point you need to start the life science series. LS2,3,4 need to be taken in that order, but LS1 can be taken whenever. These four series (chem, math, LS, physics) are your prerequisites that you take during your first two years, and every life science major (and most premeds, life science major or otherwise) take them.</p>