I had been putting off quantum physics and time was running out. I was worried forth semester physics at MIT was going to be tough, but then through some miracle of providence the EE department decided that a solid state chemistry chemistry class plus Into to Biology could be substituted for quantum physics.
Because I had already taken a solid state chemistry class, all I had to do was take a basic introductory biology class; how difficult could that be? It turns out that biology is hard, very hard.
The other students that filled the large lecture hall weren’t ordinary first year students; they were pre-med students. Instead of relaxing by the swimming pool reading a colorful text with pictures of jelly fish and beetles, it felt more like I was taking swim lessons with a few hundred sharks.
The lectures by Professor Luria were great (he had won the Nobel prize four years before) but the number of facts seemed impossible to remember. My fellow students were writing down literally every word written or uttered during each lecture. There wasn’t any mention of jelly fish or bugs or pea plants, but there were complex diagrams depicting even more complex biochemical pathways. I was accustomed to math classes and engineering classes and computer science classes. Biology was very different, more facts and less study of how to apply fundamental principles to prove some theorem or solve some engineering problem.
I survived the Biology class, but it would have been a lot easier for me to take the physics class.
Because I had already taken a solid state chemistry class, all I had to do was take a basic introductory biology class; how difficult could that be? It turns out that biology is hard, very hard.
The other students that filled the large lecture hall weren’t ordinary first year students; they were pre-med students. Instead of relaxing by the swimming pool reading a colorful text with pictures of jelly fish and beetles, it felt more like I was taking swim lessons with a few hundred sharks.
The lectures by Professor Luria were great (he had won the Nobel prize four years before) but the number of facts seemed impossible to remember. My fellow students were writing down literally every word written or uttered during each lecture. There wasn’t any mention of jelly fish or bugs or pea plants, but there were complex diagrams depicting even more complex biochemical pathways. I was accustomed to math classes and engineering classes and computer science classes. Biology was very different, more facts and less study of how to apply fundamental principles to prove some theorem or solve some engineering problem.
I survived the Biology class, but it would have been a lot easier for me to take the physics class.