From Week 06's recitation class, I heard BioClubTA (Georg) mention that TAs want to track how much time students spend on this class. Considering my background that has little to no prior biology knowledge aside from what I learned in grade 12, and given that I'm not so good in English in listening, speaking, and writing (I estimate myself to be at B1 level), I think my experiences from my background might be helpful for people like me who want to hop into this field to try something new.
(Remarks: I fixed some of my grammar mistakes with the help of Notion AI)
My background that related to my performance in this course
- English proficiency: around B1 level
- little to no prior biology knowledge
- I have some experiences in using Python and Google Colab to do AI projects, so I can spend less time in code-based lab than some lab that require biology knowledge
| week |
estimated hours |
| bootcamp1 |
6 |
| bootcamp2 |
5 |
| bootcamp3 |
9 |
| 1 |
20+ |
| 2 |
20+ |
| 3 |
8 |
| 4 |
15 |
| 5 |
14-18 |
| 6 |
10 |
| 7 |
5 |
| 9 |
2 |
| 10 |
1 |
| 11 |
|
time logs
- Bootcamp part1
- 6 hours in total
- 2025-01-30: 1 hours
- 2025-03-25: 4 hours
- watch in 1.25x speed
- take note (focus on gathering some keywords and topics)
- in some parts, I cannot distinguish between important concepts that I need to focus on to understand bigger building blocks build from that concepts later in this course, and optional details. I heard a lot of unknown domain-specific terms in Genome Engineering Methods part, but this might be fine considered that those unknown terms might be reused a lot in this course anyway.
- write this log takes 1 hours.
- Bootcamp part2
- Bootcamp part3
- 9 hours in total
- 6 hours
- focus on benchling part
- didn’t understand
- 2025-04-01: 2 hours 30 mins
- focus only benchling part
- take note (draw diagrams)
- week1
- estimated 10-20+ hours in total (didn’t track)
- lecture: 4 hours
- Homework: a lot, I spend several days thinking about project ideas.
- week2
- estimated 10-20+ hours in total (didn’t track)
- lecture: 4 hours
- understand 10-30% of the content.
- recitation class (MIT): 2 hours (very handy)
- homework: 8-20 hour
- week3
- estimated 8 hours
- lecture: 4 hours
- recitation class(mit and tokyo bioclub): 3 hours
- homework: estimated 1 hours
- week4
- estimated 15 hours
- lecture 5 hours
- ricitation class (mit + bioclub): 4 hours
- homework: estimated 4-8 hours, took several days to finish
- week5
- estimated: 14-18 hours
- main class
- spend many hours to listen (estimated 6 hours)
- recitation class
- spend 1 hours in recitation class
- do homework (first half)
- [[2025-04-02]]
- spend 1 hours to listen some part of recitation class (26 min)
- 25 min left
- [[2025-04-03]]
- [[2025-04-04]]
- [[2025-04-08]]
- 30 mins: take note from captured slide
- 5 hours: do homework part B (80%) + trobleshoot some notion bug
- [[2025-04-22]]
- 1 hrs: do part B 20% (revised HW instruction, modify and run code, upload result on notion)