<p>How's this concentration? How's the department? Are teachers any good? Besides this, are there any other interesting concentrations... Any input would help.</p>
<p>I’m a grad student in a lab in the SCRB department, which runs the HDRB concentration.</p>
<p>I really like the department, and the undergrads in my lab who have chosen to concentrate in HDRB seem happy and satisfied with the curriculum. The course for which I was a teaching fellow got very high evaluation scores last semester, and from my perspective as a teaching fellow, the department seems very concerned with making sure students are being well-served by the courses available. Research opportunities are widely available. The whole department is in the process of moving to newly-renovated lab space in Cambridge, which will help with research opportunities and departmental cohesiveness.</p>
<p>The SCRB department is a good place to be a student.</p>
<p>Thanks for that!</p>
<p>Sorry to revive an old thread…</p>
<p>Is it of benefit for an undergraduate to specialize so much within biology?
For instance, I am interested in HDRB, but I am also interested in genetics, biochemistry, and biophysics. Would a broad education in Chemical and Physical Biology or Molecular Biology serve an undergraduate better?</p>
<p>Thanks</p>
<p>Well, one question to ask yourself is what you are interested in doing with your biology degree. Grad school? Medical school? Something else?</p>
<p>If you are particularly interested in one subfield of biology as an undergraduate, it’s not a problem to specialize, especially if you take the initiative to take some broader courses within biology more generally. And, of course, the benefit is that you get to take specialized courses that are very interesting to you.</p>
<p>As an undergraduate, I double-majored in biology and neuroscience (at MIT), and I felt that classes from both degrees were useful to me as a graduate student. I would have been admitted to graduate school with only one degree or the other, and I knew very early on as an undergraduate that I wanted to specialize in neuroscience, so picking only the neuroscience degree wouldn’t have been a hindrance to me. </p>
<p>At Harvard, you won’t need to pick a concentration until sophomore year, so you can take some time to determine whether you’d prefer to be in a more general or a more specialized program. Labs like mine take undergrad thesis students from all of Harvard’s biology concentrations.</p>
<p>I guess I just find it confusing why Harvard would only have specialized programs while MIT has just a general biology major. I feel like it would allow for more exploring than just one year of intro classes.</p>
<p>Well, Harvard also divides the biology faculty into more departments than MIT does. Just different strokes for different folks.</p>
<p>But MIT does have a separate neuroscience program (Brain and Cognitive Sciences). And despite its name, MIT’s biology department is really only a molecular and cellular biology department – there is no MIT equivalent of the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department at Harvard, for example.</p>
<p>cutiedida, I think the point that Harvard’s biology concentrations are often more specialized than those at other schools is generally true. You can, for example, get a degree in neurobiology without ever learning any molecular or cellular biology per se. </p>
<p>However, if a broader and more general foundation is what you want, that’s possible in almost all of the individual biology curricula. For example, neurobiology will give you credit for taking molecular biology or cell biology – it just doesn’t /require/ it. </p>
<p>Additionally, MCB and CPB are pretty broad. I’m an MCB concentrator, and I chose MCB because, as you say, it’s a broader educational basis. MCB/CPB are great because so many different courses count for the concentration – upper level physics, math, chemistry, all of the MCB courses, and all of the upper level SCRB courses. Additionally, two foundational courses in chemistry, two in physics, and two in math are required for CPB. So it’s pretty broad even beyond biology!</p>
<p>Also, even in more specialized concentrations like neuro and OEB, Ls1a and Ls1b are required. So everyone gets a year of more general introductory biology before going on to specialize. It’s not that much, but it’s something.</p>
<p>It’s also important to note that some of the concentrations are really similar in terms of their requirements. MCB and CPB are nearly identical (I’m thinking about switching and the difference would only be 2 courses), and both are pretty similar to HDRB. MCB/CPB/HDRB are somewhat more different than HEB/OEB/Neuro, but it’s really not that difficult to switch in sophomore spring or even junior fall. So if you’re not sure in sophomore fall that you know enough to decide how to specialize, you have time to switch later. </p>
<p>I agree that it makes me a bit uneasy that some of my friends in neurobio seem to know almost no cellular biology, and that it’s strange that their concentration allows it. But if you’re looking for a broad knowledge base, you can certainly find it at Harvard.</p>