The concepts class, that I am currently taking, is taught by two professors that are very knowledgeable about Virology and Immunology.  With two professors in this class, I am pretty sure they got to discuss all the details about this course prior this semester. However, I don’t think they had to prepare a lot of material since they only gave 3 basic lectures about virology and immunology. The remaining days of the class will be dedicated for student presentations, where they have to discuss an article from a list given by the professors. Although, teachers might not have to prepare a lot of materials, they do have to read the articles that students are presenting for class, so there could be a discussion. In my perspective, graduate level classes, specially our concept classes are mostly build like the class I just described. I believe it is build this way for students to have a more discussion based like type of class instead of just listening to the professor talk for the entire class. These types of classes help the students not only to make them strength their presentation skills but also to promote brainstorming and critical thinking, of course if the students are reading the papers! Hahaha

I was the first student to present in this Virology class. Yep, that was a huge mistake since I have never taken a virology class but now that I think about it … It wasn’t that bad! I taught myself some basic virology from scratch and I am proud I succeeded in this presentation 🙂

There was one time I had to design a class because I was in charge of the Honors lab section for BIOL 2108K. This experience taught me a lot of things that I will probably fix if I ever come back at teaching this lab. I had the opportunity to teach this one semester and I couldn’t continue because my qualifying exam was approaching. My theme for this lab was cancer biology because my research has a little to do with this and I was feeling comfortable enough to share this knowledge with my students. Prior to teaching, I had to prepare many things starting by asking myself what do I want my students to take from this class? I knew I wanted to introduce some basic cancer biology concepts as well as cancer research and some genetics. I also had to change some pre-established labs, so they could fit with my theme. I opted for ordering easy Carolina kits since it was the most accessible to us. Overall, I think it was a successful semester, my coordinator gave back some feedback that students wrote on their evaluations and they felt that this subject was very interested. I am just so glad I was able to share some part of my research with my students and they were able to enjoy some fun experiments along the way.