Seminar in Biology

[smilin1590]

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Has anybody taken Seminar in Biology before? If so maybe you can enlighten me on what exactly it is. Here is the course description from my school

This seminar provides for the discussion of biological developments and topics of current interest

I was told class presentations are involved. Just want to know if anyone else has any more info that would be awesome.

 

[nyanko]

It sounds like the type of class where you read and discuss journal articles and such. More of those sorts of courses tend to be at the graduate level than the undergraduate level, though. For instance, most of my graduate courses have had at least one or two days a week of that type of discussion in addition to the normal lectures and exams, and one of my graduate courses has been entirely journal discussion. What it means in terms of individual effort: you're expected to critically read the week's article(s) and each session a different person will "present" the paper somehow, whether it's leading discussion or expanding on some of the main points or providing an opinion critique or whatever. Often you're graded on the presentation(s) that you do in addition to your level of participation in discussions when you aren't presenting. Sometimes professors will assign questions on readings for every session to make sure everyone reads them and those could be graded too.

They're usually more narrow in focus than "biology" though. Is it just a normal course you can register for that's worth a grade and has a fixed number of credits or does the description say anything about contacting the instructor or that topics may vary by semester?

 

[smilin1590]

Your description somewhat clarifies what others at school have been trying to explain. I just was a little confused about exactly what they were saying. It is an undergrad class required to gain my degree in zoology. It's worth a half credit, it meets once a week and I need to take it like 4 times before graduation. Hopefully not to difficult 🙂

 

[Minnerbelle]

For my undergrad, one seminar was required to meet any major requirement i think. i took the seminar course on immunology. because the undergrad bio curriculum only has limited coverage of immunology, it we did have quite a bit of textbook reading. we used a textbook that is most commonly used in med schools, and had to study the hell out of it (each chapter was so dense it took over 10 hrs to read a chapter). Most other seminar courses don't use textbooks at all, and focus primarily on journal articles.

it was very presentation heavy, and we had at least one presentation per class. the course met twice a week, and it would be that a pair of students would present a chapter of the book material one day, and the other day would be journal article presentations/case study presentation. pretty much 2 students would present for about 20 min, and we would discuss. for journal articles/case studies, we would have a very long discussion.

students also had to write a 20 pg paper on an immunology topic (i wrote mine on the superantigen vs. heat shock protein vs. regulatory T cell theories for the etiology of Kawasaki Disease). this also came with two presentations.

most seminar courses didn't have a final exam, but we had an open note, open book, open internet, take home final that covered course content.

 

[aspiringDVM]

My senior seminar in biology course was similar to those described above: lots of discussion, often student led (our topic was "sex differences"). About halfway through the semester everyone chose a focus and gave a presentation/wrote and annotated bib/ turned in 25-30 page paper on their topic. I expect it's pretty variable depending on the school.