<p>I'll be taking those courses in Fall.
I'm hoping that those with experience in these subjects can suggest some great tips on how to do well on these courses.
Thanks.</p>
<p>Someone told me genetics involves a lot of memorization. I don't know if this is true or not. Also, would it be bad to take ochem and genetics concurrently?</p>
<p>Genetics is probably the least memorization-intensive class that will be covered in a medical school curriculum. Of course I realize you're not in medical school, but the point is that among science classes, it's not very memorization heavy.</p>
<p>You're going to have to take something concurrently with organic chemistry. May as well be genetics.</p>
<p>good luck, I heard you have to memorize a lot of stuff.
of course you have to memorize a lot of stuff in O-Chem too or at least according to my friend you do.. He said he had to remember the whole carbon cycle ( in thats a thing) I think he was just trying to scare me but I can never be too sure.</p>
<p>I don't know about genetics but from what I'v heard, Biochem is supposed to be fairly difficult and intensive; at least in my school. It's probably because of the mix of Bio/Orgo memorization along with understanding key concepts etc that might make it laborious challenge</p>
<p>I thought biochem was very easy (not sure why orgo is a prereq). Yes, you'll have to memorize the carbon and urea cycles and maybe a couple others but it's generally pretty simple.</p>
<p>I'm not sure that I totally agree with BDM on this one. Not saying that genetics is super heavy on rote memorization like say anatomy, but there's a pretty fair amount that can be required of students. Like most things it'll depend on the prof. The big concepts may not be picky, but knowing the specific RNA polymerases and the locations of your important promoter regions (or if you have a particularly mean genetics professors, the specific sequences recognized by your restriction endonucleases), can require a lot of memorization.</p>
<p>And then more specifically for medical genetics, keeping track of chromosomal microdeletions associated with specific diseases and constellations of symptoms can be a real *****. I tended to ignore these, as I didn't find most of them particularly high yield, but I did have at least 1 question on Step 1 that identified a disease by it's chromosomal deletion. There were several others where that information was given, though other information was more relevant.</p>
<p>Well, least by comparison.</p>
<p>I'm taking Genetics and Biochemistry right now. Biochem is okay, but Genetics is a killer! At my school, it's as hard as Orgo. I had a midterm a while ago, and the prof gave us a really hard one. She said her reason of doing that was to give those who excel the chance to be distinguished from others. In other words, to weed people out. My first midterm result sucked so much, only 6 percent higher than the average, but only because I didn't study hard. The class will be curved, so I should only worry about how I do with respect to others in the class. I'd be able to pull off an A if I start studying from now on and get close-to-perfect marks on second midterm and final, but I'm worried, because the prof is infamous for giving us "weed-out" exams. I thought Genetics would be a breeze without much studying, but I was wrong.</p>
<p>I'm also in Genetics right now...</p>
<p>It's more memorization than other bio classes in that you either know a term or you don't. As opposed to say, Cell Biology where I can remember a series of events (receptor binds signal, membrane protein attaches to receptor, pore opens up, etc.) and make an inferential guess at something's name based on its function (what cleaves a protein signal in the mitochondrial matrix? the mitochondrial processing peptidase).</p>
<p>Other than that, Genetics is not very hard. Still, I didn't do as well as I hoped I would on our first midterm; the test was entirely short answer format and points were taken off for every little nitpicky thing.</p>
<p>The good thing is, I don't need to worry about my test grades alone as much as most of the class because I'm taking the class for honors credit... we honors students need to write a paper and hand it in at the end of the semester, which counts for a major portion of our grade; should be an easy A, which can only help my grade.</p>
<p>Which helps demonstrate the point that sometimes honors courses are easier.</p>
<p>You might not get bonus points for taking them, but sometimes the grades come back higher.</p>