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.

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.

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 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.

Looks like a lot of work, really isn't. Kinda boring tho but its a required course so whatever.

Basically, an A in this class is guaranteed. However, you do have to put a relatively heavy amount of work in for a 2 unit class. The article summary takes a very long time to do. It took me like 12 hours, and that's not even longer than average. Definitely start a few days in advance. The podcast was annoying, but the bar is set very low for an A on that so don't stress. You can skip lecture if you want, because you only have to ask one question, and once that's done it doesn't matter. However, the guest lecturers were often pretty interesting so I liked going (most of the time) anyway. The second part of lecture, which he calls "writing workshop," is literally completely useless and basically the equivalent to 6th grade English class. Feel free to leave after the guest lecturer. A nice little GPA booster with no stress, but more work than it should be.

Our grading scheme ended up being 10% in-class question (ask once throughout the quarter), 15% a library assignment, 25% article summary, 10% abstract, 35% for the group podcast, and 5% for some surveys/questionnaires.

This class basically just consists of guest lecturers coming every week and talking about their research. We had a few assignments due throughout the quarter based on the class reading articles and summarizing them/utilizing library tools. Final project was a group project based off a chosen topic (we were given a list). The work load was pretty light in the first few weeks but we ended up having this 12-15 minute podcast assignment due week 10, which was not fun to worry about during finals. If anything, I'd follow the recommended schedule and get writing and recording done early.