MICB 430 ~ Micro Inquiry

Course Taken: Thursday 1:30 - 5pm (rarely went to 5pm)
Format: Each professor "taught" for 1/3 of the course. Students present every other week about an assigned primary literature article in partners. One student will present the paper while the second student will present the implications & critique the paper. Thus, each student will present twice for each professor--once as a reviewer, once as a critic.
Grading Scheme: Unsure, but I assume each professor's section is worth 1/3 of the grade.
Textbook: none
Class Average: 92%
Personal Experience: This course may be a lot of work depending what papers you get assigned, and how comfortable you are at reading primary literature. Often the papers are out of your field, so you would need to read one review to understand the significance of the paper. If you want weekly journal club on various papers, and work on your presentation skills this course is for you. While it may be a bit of work every other week, the benefit is that there is no midterm or final and most students do extremely well in the course. The class size is about 10 students since typically only Honours students take the course.

Answers to readers' questions:

Can non-honours people take it? Yes, non-honours people often take it. My year we had 12 people in the course, and only 5 people were honours. Talk to Dr. Kion to register.
Do you recommend it for people not familiar with primary literature, can you become better at reading papers/ presentations? This is a great course to get better at reading papers since it just forces you to read way more than you would otherwise read. When I did the course, we had to present fortnightly; however, this may have changed since then. This course does not “teach” you how to read papers, but it does make you improve. You tend to present the papers with a partner, so you and your partner can bounce ideas/ struggle through the paper together. If you get really stuck, you can always go to the prof. They tend to be super helpful, and easily approachable. One thing to remember is when you present, only present the figures which depict the main point(s) of the paper and not every single figure.

Micro Inquiry