This class was the bane of my existence. I would rather be in BE 100 than this class any day. Besides a handful of guest lecturers, this class was pretty much a waste of time and it has wayyyyy too much busy work for a two-unit class. I can see this class being semi-useful if you are a freshman. But if you are a sophomore or a transfer (junior) it is pretty much a waste of time. I am not someone who leaves everything for the last minute but this class was super annoying in that I always ended up leaving all the work last minute.

The class has two long article summaries which u have to write in single space, 11pt font, and a final summary about what you learned, and a bunch of other busy work. My best advice is to try and get all the assignments as early as you can so that you can focus on your other classes that actually matter. The assignments are not hard, they are just extremely pointless and boring.

He's a nice person but not the best professor. He is very vague at telling you what you need to know and often tells you to post a question on Piazza when you ask him something in person (he won't even answer the Piazza question until much later). A lot of students felt that there was a lot of ambiguity and unclarity near the end of the class due to mistakes in lectures and slides that he didn't clear up until last minute. In my opinion, this is one of those classes where you never feel prepared for exams regardless of how much you study. He gives very few practice problems, making it hard to raise your grade once you do bad on one exam. Additionally, exams are graded relatively harshly-- you need to have specific phrases in your answers to even get credit on some of them. This class will also make you question what the point of lecture is. Linsley uses the "flipped classroom" style where instead of lecturing in class, he relies on student questions and like four clicker questions over the span of two hours. To actually understand what goes on in "lecture," you have to watch around three hours of videos beforehand, which he tends to post very last minute (4-6 hours before midnight on Sunday and they are very information overload). He will also sometimes cancel or delay class last minute, which is very annoying considering that this class is typically an 8 AM. Overall, it's a shame that such an interesting class is taught so poorly. The way this class is run with the asynchronous videos, mediocre lectures, vague responses, and lack of practice questions to reinforce concepts makes it extremely unenjoyable and probably one of the worst classes I've taken at this school. He always tells us he appreciates our effort and reassures us that everything is fine (which is nice) but it's disappointing to see the lack of effort on his side to help us succeed as students.

I deeply care about this class as I am pre-med and find the information valuable, but I believe it needs a major redesign, especially the slides. There is often too much information on the slides, including figures that are sometimes skipped or not explained well enough, leaving students confused about what material is essential and what is just extra information. It is also overwhelming to see a slide filled with content all at once—it would be much clearer if points, pictures, and figures appeared gradually with animations. Additionally, some concepts taught in class seem to contradict information from other sources. I understand that models of complex systems require assumptions, but these assumptions are not always clearly outlined, which can lead to confusion depending on the logical approach taken.
Beyond the slides, I also believe the grading system needs improvement. It does not seem fair that grades below an A are curved while an A is not—either all grades should be curved or none at all, similar to other STEM courses. The exam grading could also be adjusted, as the questions are often broad, and it feels like every possible detail must be mentioned to receive full credit. A better approach might be to award full points if a student correctly identifies most key points rather than requiring every detail. While I find this class valuable, I believe these changes would greatly improve the learning experience.

I will preface by saying that I honestly really enjoyed the guest speakers and learning about their research and/or experiences in industry. It's definitely a good introduction to careers in bioengineering, and helps you get an idea of what specific areas you might be interested in. The guest speakers are a mix of professors, graduate students, and alumni, and it was nice to see how many people got to where they are now.

However, I did feel like this was a lot of work for a 2 unit course. We had to do weekly reflections on the guest lectures, weekly research article readings, one 2-page group research article summary, one 2-page individual research article summary, an informational interview, a 3-step resume draft and review process, a self-assessment reflection, an internship/job search, a library search quiz, and a 4-page career essay. Overall, this just felt like a lot of busy work, and most of it wasn't really beneficial. It was particularly frustrating because all of the other engineering majors take 1-unit introduction seminars that don't have homework or discussion sections, and are only graded on attendance to lecture. That being said, as long as you put in a decent amount of effort, you should be find for the class. The TAs were super nice, and my TA in particular would go out of her way to help students even if it wasn't particularly related to the class.

This class was definitely an easy A, but it was not super enjoyable. If the class consisted of only seminars and different guest speakers, I would've liked the class a lot more but there was a lot of busy work that did not teach me much useful information and took a ton of time. The workload of this class (2 units) was similar to the workload of my 4-5 unit courses. There was also an assignment where we had to write a group essay, which was pretty annoying and impractical. Additionally, as someone who is looking into becoming a doctor, there wasn't much focus on that career pathway - almost all the guest speakers were in industry, grad students, or professors that did not go to medical school.

This introductory bioengineering class does teach you a lot about the field, though it seems to focus more on biomedical engineering over other forms of bioengineering such as prosthetic engineering. It consists of asynchronous busy work that overall is pretty easy; but still, I appreciate how it gives you the skills needed to prepare for a career as an engineer (ex. practice with writing reports, article summaries, and even a chance to make your resume professional as a freshman which are free points and a free upgrade for you!).

Sometimes, the guest speakers may not be of the biggest interest to you, however, I would probably recommend staying anyway to interact with fellow bioengineering classmates and to learn more about the other fields (even though you may already be familiar with them and because of this, you know it's not up your alley). The discussions basically reminded you about the upcoming deadlines, but I loved how my TA was readily available and willing to give feedback when I asked her for it.

Overall though, I would say the big goal of this class is to get to know the field and most of your classmates for the next 4 years. While this may not be as fun as making carbon fiber rods or whatever, I think the skills COULD be useful in the future, so just keep that in mind when taking this class.

This class was a good introduction to what you can do with a BioE degree (as advertised). As someone who wants to take a more environmental and less medical approach to BioE, the class was VERY med focused, which was a little disappointing, but reflective of the current state of the industry.
The class itself was not hard, but it was A LOT more work than all the other engineering seminars for no good reason. You get a lot of practice reading academic papers and a start on your career/internship searches though.

This class is very different than other engineering classes and it is heavily designed for all the pre-meds. However, the class still has lots of very very interesting information and I learned a lot about biocompatibility and the immune system. However, Professor Linsley isn't the best at telling you what you really need to know for the exams. The lectures COVER a lot of information and although he says "not to memorize" you do have to know the content very well to do good on the exams (aka memorize). The exams test deeper understanding and not just memorization but you do need to have all the terms memorized so you can give deeper explanations. This year was his second time teaching and so the exams were mostly free response and some multiple-choice questions. The main problem for this class was that since there was so much information on the slides and he never told us what are the important things we needed to know it meant that it was very easy to lose a few points here and there which resulted in lots of % drop (since the exams were only out of about 50 points, so each one point mistake was worth 2%). However, he and the TAs were nice enough to offer a small extra credit opportunity and they also graded the final exam very leniently.

We also did lose a few days of class time because of all the annoying protests so he had to cut out some stuff. The main problem for this class is the fact that he doesn't use his own slides, and rather uses the ones from the previous professor.

Overall this class is very different from other engineering classes as it isn't very computational and rather much more understanding of biology and how that incorporates into the design of biomedical devices and implants. He is a good guy but just not a very good teacher but I am hoping he will be better next year since he will have more experience.

This is the intro to bioengineering seminar, which incoming freshmen and incoming transfers into bioengineering take. It's a 2 unit class as opposed to the 1 unit class of literally every other engineering major because there's more work. Like there's an actual lecture and a discussion, and you have to go to all of them.

The lecture is comprised of guest speakers coming every week, and you have to make weekly journal entries on them which you turn in.

During discussion, you usually do something based on a reading assignment you get for the week, and you have to annotate the reading on Perusall and respond to people's comments. It's tedious but fine.

There are two article summaries you have to do for this class. The first one is a group one, and the second one is individual. You really need to plan ahead for it. My group took 3 days for the article summary and got an A, but I knew other groups that got C's and B's on the summary.

Other than the article summaries, there's a bunch of other busy work such as searching for a job, taking this useless life values survey, and a career essay at the very end that summarizes what you learned.

It's meant to be an easy A, but the work involved is way more than other engineering seminars.

One third about materials science, one third about blood clotting, and one third about the immune system. One of those classes that's hard not necessarily because of the material, but because of the simply odd test questions. For better or worse, almost your entire grade is made of a few tests that each have a small number of questions, so the workload is manageable but your grade is very sensitive to each mistake.

I think this class deserves credit for an especially bizarre grading policy that was implemented after people did badly on the first exam: if you score top 5 in the class for the second midterm or final, you get an A in the class automatically. That only helps the very best people in the class do even better. If you topscore on the second exam, you have no reason to touch the last third of the material, so you end up less educated than everyone else. Also the second exam was optionally online, so you could easily cheat your way into this policy. The median grade for the final was slightly below 60%, so this policy clearly did not do much to improve things. It's fine to reward people for doing well, but to see that most of the class is struggling and address that by boosting the top 10 people even higher is funny.