u/Asomns47

This post is basically is basically just meant to be a "post-CMTH480 clarity" type of post, because as everyone knows I fought like hell to get it offered and so maybe there are some people curious about how everything is like after the fact. Does it live up to expectations or nah? And I wanted to let everyone know about "bird" course that teaches useful material.

Basically, if you like math and wanna raise your GPA, this course would probably be your cup of tea. Like, I think it basically is an open elective that is a math bird course (though you still need to review the slides and grind practice qs). If you took or are currently taking CMTH380 (the previous course) with Iryna Manzhos right now, it's structured very similarly to that course. I think depending on how our cohort feels about it, word may spread to others or friends of people in this class about this course and it may be offered again. Unironically, if you took something like QMS210 and you took MTH380 in the past (either in Chang or in day school), this would be hella easy for you. This course makes everything extremely straight forward (there is some decent overlap with CQMS210 as well). This course is usually offered only in Winter or Spring. I have no complaints to be honest, it is very straight forward and I'm learning a bunch of new content that I enjoy and practicing it.

This post is more so targeted at chemistry-adjacent, biology, life science, biomedical sciences and any other biology or medical adjacent major. I realized my post title is shit.

I'm a biology major at TMU, and I just had a thought that in this mess of grade inflation, uni acceptances, and 'senioritis', people may be neglecting to learn things for the sake of learning things. I'm just wondering, why don't more of you guys take courses through your board in the main terms or in the spring-sumer terms to learn more critical background for uni? Like, once you graduate, doing courses like these (if that's what you prefer) is going to cost you money. So if you have all your other courses in your top 6 locked in, you won't end up functionally paying anything (even for spring-summer courses that are online based through your board), and it won't affect your top 6. Your education, while in high school, is tax-funded so take advantage of that and just improve your knowledge and maximize how many courses you take while in high school. If you're heading into STEM (namely biology or chem adjacent majors), it is incredibly incredibly helpful to do all 3 maths and all 3 sciences just to make yourself a more scientifically literate individual.​ I would highly recommend that anyone wanting to perform at the A+ levels in their first year of uni do this: take all 3 maths and all 3 sciences in high school. It will save your life in physics 1 and physics 2 (and any mathy courses at any point in your degree). It will give you more options to discover yourself with later down the line in university. Maybe you like biophysics, I don't know. Maybe you like mathematical biology and wanna learn how to code calculus-related concepts as it applies to biology. My interest of study lies in the molecular biology subfields and how that intersects with probability and statistics and coding, so idk how this field of mathematical biology is like (https://www.torontomu.ca/calendar/2026-2027/courses/mathematics/MTH/630/) I figure I should mention but linear algebra is a prerequisite.

I'm ngl, the average biology or biomed major at my uni is more scared (or avoids them more heavily) of math-like courses or coding and data science courses than a cat near water, much to their own detriment. Averages tend to be lower in such classes (mandatory classes I mean like physics 1 or physics 2, not electives) with people doing terribly even though the content is not actually the worst. On biology research based subreddits, you may see an opinion from grad students that math (namely probability and statistics) and coding (namely data science or some parts of bioinformatics) are a big boon. Even if you're gunning for med school (and let's just face it, it's incredibly hard to even get in for people with great stats and the majority may not get in immediately or at all), having literacy in these fields can give you more options for what kind of research you want to do as you gather extra-curriculars while also serving as a good fallback in case med school does not work out. Even fields like ecology can use a lot of coding and modelling, not that I even like ecology lmao (I despise it). I can just give an example relevant to me of why statistics and coding is fun for me: analyzing high throughput proteomics or genomics data.

Just felt like sharing here, thought it was hilarious. Person who made this originally is labelled in the video.

https://reddit.com/link/1thgren/video/q1soiv6k322h1/player

https://preview.redd.it/fyzk9w9al21h1.png?width=987&format=png&auto=webp&s=690cdfb4175b2e100a0644fa96174e7fed5f33c1

This is what I must be on to find ts enjoyable.

Can't say I don't enjoy this, I learned Tukey-Kramer in CQMS210 and now I'm doing other things.

CMTH480 truly a course for a nutjob like me.

I'm tired but I feel so free, this is sooooo much better than how last sem was for me. I'm finally at the stage where I'm learning whatever tf I want.

https://i.redd.it/0of4djmsit0h1.gif

I knew I'd love this class. Test 1 went so beautifully. No ecology riddles nonsense too.

It feels like that time I took the BLG800 final exam with Fillingham and I remembered thinking that was the kindest final exam I've ever taken in my life. I feel pretty similar here.

No regrets.

https://reddit.com/link/1t9mdzt/video/wraqht3y9e0h1/player

If anyone is interested, the original paper is this. For some reason PubMed has always decided to crap out with Captchas and redirects for me lately, just like how BLAST has progressively gotten worse and laggier ever since funding changes happened. If you can't access the paper immediately, what is working for me is to copy paste this link into the search bar and then searching for the article:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3565511/

Here's the citation just to make this easier:

Suárez-Rodríguez M, López-Rull I, Garcia CM. Incorporation of cigarette butts into nests reduces nest ectoparasite load in urban birds: new ingredients for an old recipe? Biol Lett. 2012 Dec 5;9(1):20120931. doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0931. PMID: 23221874; PMCID: PMC3565511.

While this is interesting, when I saw this video I had terrible flashbacks of those ecology tests and that final exam. I instantaneously thought was this video was some diabolical apparent competition question at first 😭

I'm just wondering if in light of recent news, any other biology major is considering taking the condensed version. I'm still considering doing the original winter class since doing the equivalent of 3 AJ-BCH361-makeup-final-exam style tests in the span of 1.5 months really doesn't do it for me. For context, BCH463 is 2 midterms and 1 final exam.

If the prof is significantly better than Dustin Little (or Dustin Little is teaching it regardless) then I may consider it, since Dustin Little is already considered to be a really good teacher. BCH463 is just a really hard info-heavy biochem no matter how you slice it.

If Marshall is teaching the summer version, honest to god I'd rather just avoid it. I know people glaze Marshall too, but his testing style just really makes me prefer having traditional in-person tests.

I have just been thinking (late at night now) that this was the most unpleasant class I've ever taken. I'm still glad to have gotten this done. Lmk if you want my notes for this class so you don't have to waste time taking them next year. I've made deep ones on the entire course (as I was doing it). I can put it in a drive and send it to you, I don't want anyone else to feel the same feelings I did ever again in taking this class so let me know if you want them.

Just a pro-tip, use clankers if u suck at application like me. You need to be able to rationalize out of the box scenarios. Only way to get past that is to somehow understand the material deeper.

I'm so glad I never I gotta do ecology or any course with this same prof ever again. To bio majors who wanna take an environmental biology core electives, just go do a core elective with other env bio profs like Melles or McCarthy, they actually have healthy grade distributions. Don't subject yourself to Behavioural Ecology, even if you think the teaching is good the evaluation schemes or TAs will kill you inside.

That's my piece. Melles teaches population biology and the field trip course for field study and McCarthy teaches Ecotoxicology and Limnology which are still branches of or related to ecology. So you don't need to take things with the so-called pedagogy prof. People still do way better with Melles or McCarthy and I imagine there are no ecology riddles in these classes.

Anyway, I'm on to more dumb fun math shit ima embark on and love and no more ecology.

Biomed and biology have gotten huge revamps, but I'm just curious what other changes are coming. Are they actually gonna assign a competent prof to BCH361?

I love statistics and this is a random nuance I want to get some clarification on, because I like thinking of random stuff sometimes to more thoroughly understand things. In terms of residuals patterns in the title, I'm referring to residual plots (and I ran out of characters in the title, so I meant to say "residuals would show a parabolic pattern when plotted against corresponding x-values from the original data set"). In my mind, such a situation described in the title should mean that the Durbin-Watson statistic should be less than 2 (indicating positive autocorrelation), but I don't know if there'd be any interesting edge cases like the one described in this post's title, and no Googling comes up with a properly clarifying answer for me.

https://preview.redd.it/3p5icg4lm5yg1.png?width=1153&format=png&auto=webp&s=e9b16bc150787d95977d80bb7a7b1b6446368491

What kinda sick genius would come up with this?

Best of luck to you business students next year.

https://preview.redd.it/h5qzvttoc0yg1.png?width=1508&format=png&auto=webp&s=c4c696a1bf1c4076e1aafddd0997133d6dc7f5c1

The truth is I've been in contact with the prof of CMTH480 for the past while, and I got straight confirmation an hour ago that there's no more tug o' war or anything like that. CMTH480 is actually fully confirmed to be running. No more "x amount of people need to enroll bs." I'm honestly, honestly really glad this time, and I feel so fucking happy. I'm also liking the course evaluation scheme (only 3 non-cumulative tests, and other things Iryna Manzhos is well-known for if anyone's taken CMTH380 with her before). The entire course has already been posted to D2L (all the lecture content and so forth), and if anyone is interested in any aspect about it you can feel free to DM me and inquire about how the course might be like. By math standards, it seems as if it'll be light and I get to learn and indulge in some upper level stats content. This, plus some other thematically relevant extra-curriculars and projects I have going for me this spring-summer, means this is going to be my most fun (academically) break ever. Especially since I'm still going to be productive on things I deeply care about.

Thank you to everyone who's enrolled.