<p>I already applied for colleges, but I still can't decide my majors for college.
I m thinking about bio, chem, or biochem. </p>
<p>First of all, i just want to know about college biology</p>
<p>How's college biology like?
In general, please tell me about assignments, lab, tests, etc.
Is there a lot of reading and writing? (as a daily assignment,or essays?)</p>
<p>Whoa! Stressing about majors already? Slow down there! Generally, schools don’t require you to declare a major right off the bat. I would recommend that you take advantage of that time to sample some other fields because you never know how experience can change your perceptions and interests. </p>
<p>One of my friends started out as a hardcore bio major/pre-med, but then he found that he really liked international relations. So he switched his major and now works for Samsung in South Korea, in their marketing department. I was a bio major and am now in med school, but I was seriously reconsidering my choices after taking some anthropology courses. Maybe you really have found your life’s passion in biology/chemistry, but this is still something I think you should keep in mind. Just a thought.</p>
<p>With that said, I guess I should now try to answer your actual questions lol. The simple answer is: it’ll vary a lot depending on the class. In my experience, there’s generally not a whole of writing involved, except in lab classes, where I’d be expected to do write-ups of my weekly labs or something. I didn’t do a lot of reading in my intro level bio classes either, apart from looking at my textbook for studying. The reading started to pile on once I reach the higher level classes because they focused on current ideas, methods, and advances, which required me to read a lot of scientific papers. There was also some more writing involved because we had to critique the papers we read, and in certain classes, we would discuss the ethical and political issues involved in modern medicine and science. </p>
<p>In my intro level bio classes, we didn’t have regular assignments, and our grades were solely determined by two or three big exams. But you have to remember that intro level courses are often weed-out classes, where your success is based solely on how much you can cram in and then regurgitate during exam time. I hated it, but things got much better once I got to my higher level courses. I started getting regular assignments that actually counted in my grade and exams that tested my problem-solving and creative thinking abilities. Exams also became less singularly important, or they were done away with entirely.</p>
<p>As for what college biology is like in general, there’s a lot of variation depending on your school. If you’re majoring in biology at a smaller, maybe liberal arts school, then it’ll be more relaxed, but you’re not going to have as many opportunities. If you go to a larger, research university, then you’ll have a whole array of learning of opportunities at your fingertips. However, your intro classes are going to be much more crowded, competitive, and stressful. The general agreement among my classmates is that our basic bio courses sucked, but that things improved dramatically when we got to our upper level courses because we could choose what we wanted to take based on interest, and we were challenged more to think and learn rather than to memorize and regurgitate.</p>
<p>Sorry about the long response (I think in a couple places, it turned into a bit of a rant lol). I hope this helps, and feel free to message me if you want to know more :)</p>
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<p>They may not (though schools under budget pressure like many mid-level state schools may, and may make it hard to change major since they are not reserving excess capacity for major changers), but you still need to select courses that allow you to go into any of the majors you are considering. For example, the chemistry major may require more rigorous chemistry, physics, and math courses than the biology major.</p>
<p>But note that chemistry and biology tend not to have very good job and career prospects at the bachelor’s degree level, according to <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/internships-careers-employment/1121619-university-graduate-career-surveys.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/internships-careers-employment/1121619-university-graduate-career-surveys.html</a> . If you like chemistry, see if majoring in chemical engineering is suitable for you, since it has better job and career prospects at the bachelor’s degree level.</p>
<p>Whoa! thank you for responses.</p>