Professor Hong is probably one of the best professors I have had during my time at UCLA. She is incredibly kind. She really tries to help the students no matter what. She is open to changing her class in favor of the students. Lectures are great, they are clear and what you should know is explained. The lab reports aren't terrible, but i would suggest starting early, chipping away at it slowly. The only thing I will say is that her bruinlearn was hard to navigate for a little while. It didn't occur to me until later she puts all of her important info on the home page.

I think the class material itself was not difficult. I did well on just about every lab report. However, I do think that Dr. Hong's lectures were not very good. I think she had too much detail go into her lectures, she could have been much more clear and concise. But overall, the labs were not difficult, and I think they were a fair amount of work and analysis. But the exams are what really tanked my grade, I never knew what to expect. The lab report questions were not similar to exam questions, and the worksheets were not of much help (much vaguer on the exams). This is why my grade ended up being so low, both exams were curveballs for me. She wanted very precise answers to very vague questions. The TA's and lab sections are what made this class bearable. I think I have a good understanding of how to perform lab techniques and analysis, just her exam methods were not good.

This class was an interesting experience, which I would attribute to the fact that the grade you have on BruinLearn is probably nothing like the actual grade you're going to end up with (in a way that benefits you). The promised lack of a curve so that "everyone can get an A" is true, but even though you're not competing for grades the grade scheme still kicks you in the ass. This is because everything is on an invisible rubric with really, really specific requirements meaning you'll just be dropping points because there was some random detail that you knew but didn't think was necessary to talk about. The lab reports are a huge part of your grade and take a really long time (don't procrastinate), but there's pretty much no guidance on what's expected of you other than "just talk about the data and what you interpreted from it." There's also an enormous amount of subjectivity with said specific rubric, so luckily everyone gets normalized to the highest TA's grade distribution. But if you get a harsh grading TA like I did, it means you have to stress out about a 60% on your lab report (ended up being 100%) for no reason.
Other than the grades being enigmatic, this class content was fairly average. The labs themselves are pretty tedious and if you have any wet lab experience it'll probably be boring. I tried getting out early but it was pretty hard because lab equipment is shared, which sucks because then you end up spending a long time waiting for the centrifuge and spectrophotometer. Fortunately there isn't a lot of pre and post-lab work.
As a lecturer and professor, Dr. Hong-Hermesdorf is awesome. She's super sweet and accommodating, and she covers the material fairly well. I found some of the conceptual backings of the experiments to be pretty interesting, and I'd attribute like 50% of that to Dr. Hong-Hermesdorf being super excited to teach and really knowledgeable about the material. The midterms are a little more tricky than you might expect but they're honestly super fair and doable.

The material taught in this class isn't extremely challenging, and as far as the midterm and final go, you'll do fine so as well you put in the effort to study for them. What's demanding of this class, however, are the lab reports, of which you are expected to write up 3 (all ranging between 15 - 20+ pages). However, if you are really interested in biochemistry and lab work, then I can absolutely say that these reports (and the lab sessions you'll spend time on for) are extremely interesting, fun, and an overall great experience. Professor Hong is extremely caring and very approachable herself, and it's evident that she wants her students to succeed. If you find yourself struggling, absolutely feel free to reach out to her for help.

I loved Professor Hong. She was super sweet and genuinely wanted you to succeed in the class. The class was relatively easy in terms of the things you learn, in my opinion, the midterm and final were completely fair and there was nothing to trick you. HOWEVER, the lab reports are very time consuming and can be graded pretty harshly. This class is manageable if you take other classes with lighter work loads.

Great professor. She is helpful and kind. Lectures were well done. I wish she provided more information about the expectations in the lab reports. Everything felt a little vague so it was hard to so well in those. Fair exams.

153L with Dr. Hong-Hermesdorf was, to put it succinctly, a stressful experience.

The class is mostly subdividable into its lab section (as it is a lab class), and its lecture portion. I'll talk about the latter first, since it's the simpler thing to comment on.

Dr. Hong's lectures are okay. I found them worth attending (and you'll have to do so, because iClicker is used in this class), but the lecture often gets derailed by something or another. Regarding the tests- I felt that both tests were within the bounds of what I would call fair. She's also really helpful in most cases, with some notable exceptions regarding the lab reports.

Speaking of the lab reports-they are an entirely different beast. Fortunately, Dr. Hong-Hermesdorf equalizes all grades between different lab sections to the lab section with the highest grade, so your grade on all of your TA-graded work (such as lab reports, flowcharts, and whatnot) are more of a function of how much better you are compared to the rest of your sectionmates rather than how good of a score you get back (however, if you can get great raw scores, that is a good thing- Dr. Hong doesn't penalize you for having a high raw score thanks to having a nice TA). However, the mental stress and energy this class puts on you is something else. Lab reports can stretch to 10-20 pages long, and are due in a week after the last relevant lab, which is absolutely brutal if you're not used to this (I wasn't- this class was the first class for which I spent all-nighters on).

Additionally, Dr. Hong-Hermesdorf has a rather "the best way to learn is to burn yourself" mentality- although she does provide some scaffold for your first lab report, it's often a battle to wrangle out what exactly should or should not be reported in which manner to obtain as many points as possible. Having a good TA is what makes or breaks these reports, as having a good TA means that you can ask them what is being looked for in order to maximize your score and actually write a good lab report. That also means that if your TA is unhelpful, you can and will get absolutely wrecked by the lab reports. While you won't really suffer any damage to your grade from this thanks to the Dr. Hong-Hermesdorf equalizing the grades between TA's, it will stress the hell out of you and make this class much more miserable than it reasonably should be.

Oh, and there is one final group project where you look at a paper and present part of it- it's really not that bad IMO, and it was the easiest part of the class.

Dr. Hong is one of those rare professors that genuinely cares about her quality of teaching. She is a very kind-hearted and caring person, and it shows. During lab sections, she will stop by and chat with both you and the TAs. She even spent the time to memorize my name.

Many students complained about the structure of the class, but I believed that they were necessary evils. These included the 4-hour lab sections and the three lab reports, each around 20 pages long. This class is time consuming and will require a lot of effort on your part, there is no doubt about that. However given that this is a lab class introducing us to laboratory methods, I find it fitting that we would have 4-hour lab sections and lab reports. They just so happened to be for Dr. Hong's class.

Her midterm and final were decently difficult. I find that she tries to improve the content of her course and the quality of her problems each following quarter, so problems on the midterm that were poorly worded or that covered material that wasn't taught won't show up the following quarter. That being said, her exams were still tough. She makes you memorize a lot of lab procedure and will ask you to write it down step-by-step. However, she does post a study guide problem set with over 100 conceptual problems, which was extremely helpful. She is an extremely accommodating professor and hosts review sessions for the midterm and final and workshops for the lab reports.

For biochemistry majors: This lab is something you can't avoid, so why the hell are you reading this review. Just take the class and get through it. You'll come out of it with a lot of valuable information and some laboratory experience (if you don't have any wet lab research experience).

For any other major: I'm assuming that a lot of MIMG majors will take this class. I would recommend avoiding it. Between the 4-hour weekly lab sections and the 3 lab reports, this class is extremely time consuming and really only worth it if you are extremely interested in understanding the chemistry behind laboratory techniques such as Western blots.

All in all, Dr. Hong is an extremely caring and sweet professor. She struggles with her explanations some times, but given that English isn't even her first language, I think she's doing quite well. This is one of those classes where you schedule around it so that you can put most of your efforts and focus onto it while your other class can sort of run in the background or on autopilot.

Dr. Hong was very concerned for the success of her students because she offered lots of extra office hours to help us write the lab reports. The review sessions were very engaging because she let us actively answer each other questions, and she was around to help us solve any questions that our groups could not answer. The material we learned from the lecture is strongly connected to what we did in the labs, so we can apply what we learned in the lecture to run the experiment effectively and have ideas to explain our results in the discussion part. I planned to use this class to practice my lab skills to help me work in labs after I graduate, and I gained what I wanted because I gained lots of knowledge about the mechanisms of lab techniques such as SDS-PAGE and Bradford assays, I became more careful after doing the experiments, my team-work skill increased after I work with my labmates and TA during the lab, and my writing and critical thinking skills increase after writing the lab reports. I also like the way Dr. Hong compares the biochemistry concepts with real-life scenarios to help us understand things longer and more clearly. For example, I still remember how imidazole acted like a single person to release the group of Histidine from the seats of the Ni-NTA party.