Visiting a class in a few weeks. Which one should I sit-in for?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Rice University
1

I’m a junior in high school at the moment and I’m very interested in attending Rice for my undergraduate studies. I scheduled a campus tour and have the option to attend a class at the university while I’m there. I plan to go into the bioengineering (biomedical engineering) field. Rice has the following bioengineering classes available for me to attend on the day I am going:

Statistics for Bioengineering – Course covers application of statistics to bioengineering. Topics include descriptive statistics, estimation, hypothesis testing, ANOVA, and regression.

Bioengineering Thermodynamics – This course provides a mathematically rigorous and quantitative coverage of the fundamentals of thermodynamics with applications drawn from contemporary bioengineering problems. Fundamental topics will include the Zeroth, First and Second Law, Entropy Inequality, Gibbs and Helmholtz Free Energies, The Third Law, Maxwell Relations, chemical potential, equilibrium, phase transitions, solution thermodynamics, protein-ligand binding and statistical mechanics. Advanced topics will include transcription factor-DNA binding, nucleic acid hybridization, translation initiation and genetic circuits. The course will cover the role that thermodynamics plays in molecular engineering and synthetic biology.

Bioengineering Design II – Senior Bioengineering students will design devices in biotechnology or biomedicine. This project-based course covers systematic design processes, engineering economics, FDA requirements, safety, engineering ethics, design failures, research design, intellectual property rights, environmental impact, business planning and marketing.

Numerical Methods – Introduction to numerical approximation techniques with bioengineering applications. Topics include error propagation, Taylor’s Series expansions curre fitting, roots of equations, optimization numerical differentiation and integration, ordinary differential equations, and partial differential equations. Matlab and other software will be used for solving equations.

It would be very helpful if one of you could give me advice on which class I should visit for a day. Thank you!

2

Go to whichever one appeals to you the most, honestly. You could check the profs on “rate my professor”, but then you would likely be picking the best prof and not seeing what else it COULD be like in a class there. :slight_smile:

3

I don’t really recommend the stats for bioengineering class as it’s basically a statistics class and won’t show much about bioengineering. I’m guessing the same could be said for numerical methods as it sounds more math-related than bioengineering.

I think the design class would be a lot of fun, since you’ll be introduced to both a fundamental of engineering itself (design) and how it applies to bioengineering. Bioengineering thermo might also be interesting, but would probably be a pretty dense lecture

4

I would vote for the design class also, because you can kind of actually see what they are doing (I guess). And unless you really want to see how those advanced science/math classes look like, you will very likely find yourself are like listening to some alien language and get bored very quickly in those class because of all those mathematics involved…

5

I wouldn’t recommend using RateMyProfessor for Rice professors. Rice has an internal ratings system that isn’t published that students can use, and thus, RateMyProfessor isn’t very active or probably accurate for Rice.

You may consider looking into observing ENGI120 (INTRODUCTION TO ENGINEERING DESIGN) which is a freshman class that is group-based that - although not Bioengineering specific - provides a good idea what group engineering projects look like at Rice.