Ok, so I’m in a bit of a predicament. I thought I had to do 18 credits of course work in the first year of my program. NRSC 500 and NRSC 501 are 6 each, which means two 3 credit electives. I did Bioc 510 last semester, and was going to do Bioc 521 this semester, which is a research critique course, but it overlaps with the NRSC course which is core to the program. So my other option was to take Bioc 535, a course on genetic techniques used in yeast systems - would be very informative, but half the class usually fails the final (50%) and only one person has finished the final since the course was introduced, heh. The good news is that the undergrads in the course have 8 assignments, but as grad students we would only have to modulate class discussions then write the final, which isn’t too bad. It’s based on problem solving and is open book, but if you can’t think of something or you have a headache it might not go over well.
Well, anyway, Blair found out that if you go direct from Bachelors to PhD and get A’s in your courses that you only need 12 credits… so only the core NRSC courses. What we know is that you need to do 12 in the first year, but we don’t know if you have to do the other 6 credits later. Personally, I want to get all my courses over with so I can focus on research (the good stuff!). We all talked to Liz and she confirmed only 12 were required, but didn’t specify if 12 were for this year, so I emailed Dr. Vincent and hopefully he’ll straighten all this up! I really think Bioc 535 would be useful, but not worth the stress, so I might just audit it.
