BIOSCI107

In terms of content, I enjoyed this paper the most out of all my first semester papers. I guess this is because it focuses around the human body at a cellular level, and I really enjoyed learning things I had never even heard about before.

Structure

Lectures

The content for this paper is taught in seven lecture blocks. The second half of the semester I found a heck of a lot more interesting as a whole, but my favourite block overall was embryology!

1. Cells and Tissues — body systems; epithelial tissue; connective tissue; muscle tissue and nervous tissue.
   These 4 lectures hit me like a bag of bricks. The content isn’t actually that hard, and the lecturer is pretty great, but there is just so much that he says. I didn’t even know my strategy for taking notes and I had no idea what I was doing, and this paper seemed so much more fast-paced than the others from the get-go. So be prepared to feel so overwhelmed by this section, but just know that the content isn’t actually very hard and you are just adjusting to uni at this stage. Listen to the lectures again at home to reassure yourself that you haven’t missed anything if you are concerned.
2. Cell Structure and Function— cell anatomy; transcription; translation; protein structure & function; cell signalling; cell cycle; bioenergetics.
   This topic is not super riveting and makes you feel like you are sitting through another BioSci101 lecture. However, that is also a bonus of this topic, there is a fair bit of crossover with 101, meaning that you can kill two birds with one stone. There was a new lecturer in my year and apparently she is a much nicer test writer, and her section was relatively straightforward (think Level 2 Bio, with some extra info at the end).
3. Embryology and Development — fertilisation & implantation; gastrulation & morphogenesis; differentiation of tissues; post-implantation and the placenta.
   You either love it or you hate it! The lecturer is great and so much fun and her lectures are basically hour-long colouring-in sessions! However, the fun of colouring-in masks the difficulty of this section. It took me a lot of hours to get my head around it and to finally work out how everything fit into place. Not to mention, there is a lab related to this that everyone is petrified about. I will talk more about my tips for studying for this block and its lab in another post (yea, literally the only lecture block with its own post).
4. Cell Processes — membrane properties; epithelia properties; membrane transport; glucose movement; chloride movement; cystic fibrosis.
   To be very honest, I cannot remember much of how this block was…I guess that means it was neither particularly hard or easy or interesting, it just was. I think it got more interesting as the block progressed as the lecturer started going into disease applications. In the first part of the block, the lecturer went through the fundamentals, which whilst not so interesting, was probably better than just being chucked in the deep end.
5. Blood and Immune — blood; immunity; antibody-mediated immune response; HIV & AIDS.
   This block was honestly, pretty confusing. I felt like I was missing a whole lot of key background information, and instead was being swamped with details. However, once you work through it and get your head around how everything fits together, the exam questions seem easy. The lecturer said he is not interested in the details and rather the basic concepts, and he made his test questions exactly to this. I think I ended up getting 100% in his section in the exam. The exam questions were definitely a relief after what was a confusing block of lectures.
6. Excitable Tissues: Neurons — neuron structure; resting membrane potential; generation of action potentials; transmission of action potentials; synaptic transmission.
   I actually only went to one of these lectures. I found the lecturer really hard to listen to (just my personal opinion), so ended up waiting till the lectures for this block were over (using the time to study 107 instead) and then crammed the neuron lectures all into one afternoon to get it over with. I would normally recommend never letting yourself get behind, but if you do it only once or twice, with the certainty of a day planned to catch up, you should be fine. Ideally, always go to the lectures and never get behind, but if you can’t make it for some reason or another, you can catch up. Don’t leave it too long though, I have seen firsthand that things can spiral out of control if you keep postponing your catch up day.
   In terms of the block itself, the content is not hard, nor heavy. All the content will most likely be new to you, so there is that hurdle to jump. But once you familiarise yourself with the concepts, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Don’t let him scare you with all the equations and such, I don’t even think you get tested on them.
7. Excitable Tissues: Muscles— skeletal muscle structure and function; smooth muscle structure and function; cardiac muscle structure and function.
   I really liked the lecturer for this topic, she explained everything so nicely that I don’t think I was even once confused. She has quite a relaxing voice too which was nice to listen to. This topic was a great way to finish off the course as it deals with something in the body that is quite tangible. This unit builds on some of the ideas you learn in the neurons unit, so it is a good idea to be up-to-date on that block before this one starts being lectured.

Laboratories

There are five 3-hour labs for this paper, one every two weeks. Labs for this paper vary from the very cool to the very mundane, but mostly they are relatively easy to score highly in. You have an assignment sheet to complete during each lab and each lab has a pre-lab assignment. All five labs count towards your final grade. Lab content is not examined in the test/exam.

The pre-lab assignments are quizzes on Canvas that are open the week prior to your lab. Make sure to get this done before the start of your lab week, no matter what day your lab is on, as everyone has the same due-date. The quizzes have a 60 minute time limit and consist of 7 MCQs. I would suggest reading through the lab material and having both that, and the textbook (if you have it) on hand while you do the test to look up any answers you are unsure of. The pre-lab is worth 3.5 marks towards your overall lab mark.

You don’t need to bring your safety glasses to your biology labs, just your lab coat. Make sure your hair is tied back if it is long.

1. Histology — at the start of this lab you will learn how to use a microscope (which I much appreciated as Level 2 Bio microscopy internal seemed too long ago for me to remember anything at all). After you are confident in the use of a microscope you will spend the remainder of the lab looking at various histology slides. You will examine a rat kidney section; a rat duodenum section (overall); the mucosa of a rat duodenum and the oesophagus and trachea of a rat. You will have to make a couple drawings of what you see and you will have to answer a some short written questions at the end of the assignment.
2. Embryology — when I did this paper, I got such a shock at how early on this lab was. I had heard people from previous years talking a lot about this lab and I just figured it would come later on in the year. Turns out, it is in your fourth week or something like that…crazy! As I said before, I will be writing another post about this lab and this block of lectures, so I won’t go into too much detail here. Most memorable part of the lab: my tutor started playing the final countdown in the hectic last few minutes and told us “as soon as the song ends, you must not touch your embryos anymore.” The song has a tendency to fade out and in again, and so there were many times where I absolutely freaked because I thought I had run out of time. I ended up with full marks on this lab, and I think that it’s entirely possible for you to get that too, just have a read of my other post once it is up!
3. Osmolarity — in this lab you will do experiments to investigate the effects of osmosis and tonicity on cell volume. This lab was the most frustrating lab of all the 107 labs, as your grade is determined by how good your results are. We found that sometimes, no matter how carefully you work, the results don’t come out quite right. I would suggest being ultra careful and pedantic about everything in this lab, because it really sucks to be marked down because of your results. My partner and I had one outlier, and that brought our grade down, whereas in other streams, as long as they provided reasons for their outliers, grades were not affected. Whilst a reduced lab grade seemed like a big deal at the time, in the end, it was worth so little, it didn’t really matter. You gotta have good perspective in biomed, every small mistake feels like your dreams are over, but look big picture and see how far you have come!
4. Haematology — in this lab you will consolidate your understanding on the structure, function and distribution of red and white blood cells. As part of this, you will prepare a slide of a blood sample to view under the microscope. And then you will count…and count…and count…and count. Yup, all this lab is is counting blood cells. Honestly I felt like I was going cross-eyed! There are so many and they are so small! Other than the pain of concentrating on counting for a few hours, this lab is not difficult! After you have collected your data, you will use that to talk about the difference between a healthy patient and a patient with Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia.
5. Muscle Function and Fatigue — this was a new lab the year I did it. Previously, students had to dissect a single muscle fibre out of a rat leg, which understandably, was super stressful and difficult. In my year, we had to do a discussion on the role of calcium ions and ATP in muscle contraction, and then do a write up of our answers. After this, we just had to do a whole lot of mini experiments using our own muscles to see different modes of contraction and understand muscle fatigue. It was actually quite fun and a pretty chill lab (if you like your lab partner).

At the start of each lab, the tutor will go through the common mistakes and model answers for the previous lab. After this, they will give you a run-down on what is going to happen in the lab you are in and they will go through some additional key points to what is in your manual. Take notes on a blank page in your lab manual during this, as they often happen to drop answers for the assignment sheet in their explanation.

Don’t be afraid to ask the demonstrators/tutor any questions you may have. You will find they are even helpful with the answers to your assignment sheet, if you ask in the right way. Never ask what the answer is though. I would just talk them through my thinking and have a discussion with them surrounding the assignment, and I found they offered very helpful tips here are there!

Bring a vivid marker to all your labs (even in other subjects — they are handy for naming things, and helping you remember what is what).

Assessment

Theory Component (80%)
- MasteringA&P Activities (4%)
- Incourse Test (36%)
- Final Exam (40%)

Practical Component (20%)
- Laboratories (20%)

It is important to note that in any science subject, you must pass the theory and practical components separately in order to actually pass the subject. This means that you must get 10% (out of a possible 20%) in your labs/practical AND 40% (out of the 80%) in the theory to pass.

MasteringA&P Activities

This is a platform with activities to ‘consolidate’ your learning. It is in the form of mainly multichoice and drag-and-drop questions. There is approximately one activity per lecture, so I tried to keep on top of these daily. They have due dates in chunks, so aren’t due daily, but I found it sooooo painful to try do them all at once. When I got home from a day of uni, and the last thing I wanted to do was study, I used to do these quizzes to start with something easy to get myself motivated into studying. I think you get 5 attempt per question, which is more than enough. Your 4% does depend on how many questions you get right, so do try to get them all right, because they are easy marks.

Handy tip: Copy and paste the question into Google, and you can often find yourself the answers. I mean obviously they encourage you not to do this because it doesn’t help your learning, but in all honesty, I found it was much better to take less time on this and to put time into actually studying as it wasn’t super helpful.

Incourse Test

There is a 100 question MCQ test halfway through the semester. It will be in the evening and lasts two hours (most likely 6:30–8:30pm). This tests the first three blocks of the course (Cells & Tissues; Cell Structure & Function; Embryology & Development). After this test, you won’t be examined on this content again in this course! The final exam does not examine this material. As this test examines half the course content, it is worth a lot (36%), which is only 4% less than the final exam, so make sure you are prepared!

Final Exam

The final exam also is a 100 question MCQ that lasts for two hours. This tests the final four blocks of the course (Cell Processes; Blood & Immune; Neurons and Muscles).

Laboratories

Your lab mark incorporates both the mark from your pre-lab and your assignment sheet that you completed in your lab. So, if your pre-lab was worth 3.5 marks and your assignment was 14.5, you will have a final score out of 18. Just a tip for the assignment sheet, you can discuss answers with your partner, but do not write the same answer word-for-word as each other, as you can both lose marks for plagiarism. As there are five labs, each lab is worth 4% towards your final grade.

How I Studied

I don’t really think this was the most time effective study strategy, but it apparently worked, so I will just tell you what I did. You should definitely develop with your own study strategy and it is perfectly okay if that strategy is different for every single paper. Just do what works and makes you feel most confident. However, if something isn’t working, don’t be scared to try something else — you will save time in the long run.

(Note: I studied differently for embryology, but as I have said, I will be talking about that in another post).

Before the lecture, I would download the lecture slides and convert them to PowerPoint (I explained this in another post [see the section titled ‘Soda PDF’]). In the lecture, I would make notes in the ‘Notes’ section below the slides in PowerPoint. This meant all my notes were in one place.

Once I got home, I would do my MasteringA&P and then I would condense and type out the notes from my courseguide, lecture slides and lecture notes into a Word document, adding pictures from the slides where it helped.

An example of what my collated notes looked like from one block.

Once I had finished typing this out, I would make flashcards out of the content from the lecture from that day. I would practice these flashcards right before bed, or when I was eating a snack (or when I couldn’t face doing more involved studying).

When it came time for tests or exams, I used my strategy from high school which was to make posters with all the information I needed to know. I found this helpful in high school as it forced me to go over all the information and condense it down, and then writing it out helped me remember. I could also visualise where information was on the poster when I was in a test or exam which helped with recall. The difference between high school and uni was that there was a LOT more content. I used to get my NCEA papers each onto an A3 of paper….ha. So this took a big effort to get all the uni content on the paper. I do enjoy making posters, but it did take a lot of time. Personally for me, it was worth it, as in the exam I made a poster for each block, and performed a lot better than first semester where I only really kinda did one for embryology. Posters definitely don’t work for everyone though.

My posters I made for the final exam

After making posters, I would work through my flashcards, with my posters in front of me, so if I got stuck, I could look up the answer and make sure I stored it in my head. Once I was confident with all this, I would finally do practice tests. They don’t offer many practice tests, so I tried to save these till I was more or less ready in order to gauge how I might do. If I got questions wrong, I would go back to my posters and learn the content again.

You will probably find yourself dedicating a disproportionate amount of time to this paper, and that is okay. It is probably the most difficult paper from first semester. Despite this, I really enjoyed it, and I hope you will too!

Be sure to check out my embryology post as well!