Great lecturer. Very organized. To be honest, I feel privileged to have professors as caring as him to teach a difficult course. He really cares about the students as a big group and react to our performance in class. Can't inmagine his efforts in making this class so great!

This was Ryan's first time teaching Chem 153A, with insufficient time to prepare. Nonetheless, I saw significant improvement in how he presented the material throughout the quarter.

A lot of people were bashing him on group me because they thought the exams were graded harshly. They don't understand that Ryan is not actually the one grading the exam. Each exam consisted of 8 questions and Ryan had 8 TAs combined from two lectures, meaning each TA graded 1 questions. Students were very rude and critical of him on the group chat after each exam. This is biochem though, it is not supposed to be easy. It shouldn't be an easy A. You got to work hard for the grade you earn.

To be frank, I thought that all his exams were very fair. I sure didn't get a 100% on them, but they were fair. The study guides he provided us were very extensive, but it was an accurate representation of exam content, along with the homework. In all of the classes I have taken at UCLA, this is the first time a professor offered midterm and final study guides. So be thankful.

Now moving on to the quizzes, they were all memorization based. I literally memorized everything the night before and still got 100% on all quizzes. Is there a lot of memorization in this class? YES, is it as bad as Chem 14D, NO!!

Lastly, I really respect Ryan's efforts to correcting mistakes throughout this quarter. He said he would give people some points back on midterm I because he understood that the answer key and some questions weren't as clear as he hoped. On top of that, he said that he was doing all the regrades himself! With a mountain of regrades to do, he had to deal with some impatient and inappreciative students that were constantly rushing him. He has a life too, you know.

I poured my heart and SOUL into this class and absolutely love it. I don’t know my grade yet but I actually feel like I learned so much so I’m not super focused on what U actually got. Dr. Lannan is very engaging and I loved going to his lectures. I thought I didn’t like biology but I ended up being sad when this course was over. I will say that I thought the exams were hard. The questions are fair with the occasional tricky question, but they are graded super harsh which makes them more difficult than they actually are. His OH are helpful and all the LA’s are super knowledgeable so I benefited a lot from the review sessions. As long as you stay on top of the content, you’ll be fine. Would definitely recommend

This class was by far my favorite ever taken at ucla and that was mostly due to Professor Lannan. The class is especially interesting and I was sad when it ended. Lannan is great at explaining the content and even though he goes fast you're still able to understand. I personally believed the exams were very fair as many of the questions were almost the exact same from practice exams and the new ones were manageable if you understood the content. He also held a lot of office hours and went through concepts in more detail and at a slower pace which was super helpful. He gives extra credit on the exams, through short surveys, and an extra credit project at the end so this really helped too. I honestly have nothing bad to say about him and it really shows how much he enjoys teaching and tries to help students understand the material. Overall, highly recommend taking this class with Professor Lannan as he makes it interesting and enjoyable!

Lannan was thrown into the course with two weeks warning. It was his first quarter teaching, and I thought he did an excellent job. I have had less prepared and less organized professors who have been teaching the course for years. Overall I really enjoyed having him as a professor and would take a class he is teaching again. Ryan truly cared about our success, which you would think would be something you could say about all professors, but I cannot say I can. He seemed to relate to us and empathize more, having finished his own PhD and school relatively recently. You could tell he wanted us to succeed, and his problem sets reflected the difficulty of his exams, which was extremely nice. There were weekly problem sets, and going to both his and the TA office hours was extremely helpful for working through them. This is the only class I have ever attended office hours for, and I highly recommend going because they made the class very manageable. His exams were very reasonable and did not throw any surprisingly terrible questions at us. They were also scaled up to match the average of the other 14C lecture for the exam we had a lower average for. There was also extra credit given for discussion attendance and a video project at the end. I think people were unfairly judgmental of him and too harsh all quarter… he did an amazing job and I felt I really understood the material more than in 14A and B. This class made me thing I liked chemistry (but I am being proven wrong in 14D), which just shows that Ryan is good at his job, especially given this was his first quarter.

CHEM 153A with Lannan was definitely not easy but if you really study it is definitely possible to get an A. I would recommend reviewing the learning objectives and rewatching the lectures because he expects you to know things that he mentions, sometimes just in passing. I would also highly recommend going to his office hours, they're really helpful. And the reviews which complain about the specificity with which he grades are accurate, he expects a lot of detail in his rubrics, so honestly try to write down every little detail you can think of on the tests. I liked Lannan though, he was tough but mostly fair and very concerned with student learning.

I dedicated the majority of my time to this class and I genuinely enjoyed taking it with Lannan so much! Dr. Lannan is the best Chem professor I’ve had at UCLA, and he cares deeply about students and he genuinely wants them to succeed. He presents biochemistry in a simplified and digestible way, that still helps you develop a deep understanding of the material. Lannan offers ample resources and opportunities for students to reach out for help, so definitely utilize them all if you can. The campus wire for this class is really active and helpful for answering content questions, (and you get extra credit for answering/asking questions, so take advantage of it!) Lannan’s office hours are helpful if you actively participate, or at least go in knowing what you don’t know. You won’t get much from just sitting and listening, so definitely review the slides, homework, practice midterms, etc. beforehand. His exams are fair, but they definitely increased in difficulty (compared to previous quarters and the first midterm imo.) I highly recommend studying his slides really well as he often expects you to use his same wording on exam answers as shown on his slides. Understanding each problem of the homework, attending the review sessions/OH and asking questions, and engaging with the LA’s during discussion section will help you succeed on exams too. His quizzes are essentially free points, as they are mostly just memorization.

This class is not easy by any means due to the sheer amount of content expected to be memorized in just 10 weeks. I would definitely make sure you have a good amount of time to dedicate to it during the quarter. With that being said, Lannan is a really amazing professor and I would totally recommend taking 153A with him!

Went into this class knowing it was going to be difficult and I would need to put in alot of effort, however I personally think this class is not set up for you to succeed. Professor Lannan is nice, but I found his lectures to be extremely confusing. It felt like he was trying to verbally figure out what he was saying, as he was lecturing, and he would always backtrack and have to reword his thoughts. He rushes through the material in class rather than making it digestable and focusing on the quality/organization of his explanations. The homeworks are graded on accuracy, but theyre not too bad, and the quizzes are memorization (so easy points). However, the exams are a whole other story. Biochem is generally ALOT of info for a quarter class, but the information expected of you to master for the exams is overwhelming.

Lannan provides learning objectives with topics to focus on and he claims they are helpful, but they still dont give you a good idea of what to expect from the exam. He provides old exams which are practice, but I genuinely think that the practice exams were always easier than the exams he wrote for our class. He would give SOME repeats, but for the most part you need to master ALL the info. Our second exam was horrible because it was the length of the final, but we were only given 'midterm' time, so the time crunch was unreasonable. The exams also felt like Lannan was trying to make them harder from previous quarters (students from previous quarters agreed). Something else that was disappointing was that Lannan claimed for the exams to be fair, and that students that put in the effort would be able to succeed. I completely disagree with that because myself and other students that put in excessive effort, still did not get a grade on exams that correlated with their efforts and intelligence.

Lannan also walks away from students as they are asking questions, and office hours feel like youtuber meet and greets (too many try hards). There are no resources to really succeed in this class, aside from your TA, but thats only even helpful if you get a good TA (mine was whatever). Discussion was also pointless (attendance was mandatory tho), you just do homework but my TA could never really explain things well (I heard the same about a few other TA's).

Chem 153A isn't going to be easy and there's a lot of material to memorize and understand but Lannan did an excellent job at teaching material during lecture and his tests were incredibly fair and manageable. He also provided a lot of extra credit, making it easy to do well even in a notoriously hard class. I highly recommend.

How the class works:
Every week there were Homework assignments where one question is graded for correction and the others are graded for completion. There were 3 quizzes, which are just pure memorization of biological pathways and their metabolites (easy points). 2 midterms and a Final. 2% extra credit.

My Thoughts:
Ryan was a decent professor for this class. You will see a lot of people complain about him, but really they should be directed towards the class itself. 153A is not meant to be an easy class, and it seriously takes a lot of studying to do well. Prof. Lannan can only do so much to make the class more approachable for students. Yes, he was disorganized at the start of the quarter (keep in mind, it's his first time teaching this class and he was told he was teaching this class a week or two before the quarter started). Towards the end of the quarter, Ryan definitely grew a lot as a professor, and he was way more organized with his lectures. Personally, all of the exams were fair if you studied for them, especially MT2 and the final exam.

That being said, this class is far from perfect. My biggest gripe with this class is how much content it tried to cover, and how little we were actually tested on. For all of the exams, Lannan would give us a study guide, but those study guides were just bullet points of every detail in the class. He did this for both midterms, and for the final he gave us a study guide which essentially had every detail from weeks 7-10 along with the very helpful message of "look at MT1 and MT2 study guides." When it came to final, we were barely tested on 3/4 of the material covered in class, and it was frustrating to see all the work I put in while studying just go to waste. Also, the exams would usually ask vague questions like "What process is this very similiar to?", and I felt like those were extremely general given how specific biochemistry is. You either know exactly what he is asking about, or you don't. This is very unfair to students because it doesn't actually test their knowledge, you are just testing if they can read your mind about what you are trying to vaguely ask. Sucks that this class is MTWF because it can easily feel overwhelming in this class.

My advice:
DO NOT get behind on lectures. Once you fall in the loop of "Oh, I'll watch it later" , it's virtually impossible to catch up with all of the material.

Focus on the study guides he gives you. They aren't really all that helpful bc they aren't specific about what exactly will be tested, but it helped me streamline my studying

Review HWs. Some of the questions on the exams will be reminiscent of these.

This class is by no means an easy class. Anyone that says otherwise is lying to you. However, it is definitely doable with Ryan. I don't think he is the problem.