BIOM30001: Frontiers in Biomedicine

Literature Searching and Bioinformatics Assignment (7.5%)
In-tute debate (5%)
Pre-practical quiz (3%)
Online MST quiz (10%)
Graphical Analysis Assignment (10%)
Peer Marking (2.5%)
Respiratory Assignment (12%)
End of semester LAQ exam (50%)

As many of you know, I hated this subject the whole semester. I am pretty sure 95% of the biomed cohort would agree with me. I think someone said this before, but if you can survive this subject then you damn well have earnt your degree already, because you will be very frustrated, lost and you will give up even learning some parts of the course entirely.

OK, so this subject is very different from M2M. In this subject, you're meant to get a tour of new, exciting, cutting-edge fields of biomedicine. Personally, I don't think the fields seemed very cutting-edge to me, apart from stem cells and tissue engineering. You learn about metabolic syndrome (which is probably the best taught and takes up 1/3 of the course), stem cells/tissue engineering, lung diseases, neuropathic pain and drug dependence. In addition you get some random lectures thrown in completely out of nowhere (because it seems as if they don't know where to fit them) - these include lectures on vaccination, sleep, metabolomics, microbiota and, pharmaeconomics. If you're willing to take the risk because you're too frustrated to learn, you can skip some of these random lectures entirely and pray you won't need to answer it on the exam.

Consistently, throughout the semester, we felt that the lectures were very disjointed and just haphazardly organised. Frequently, each lecture is presented by someone new, which comes with a lot of problems. A lot of the time, it was not clear what the aim of the lecture was, we did not know what we were supposed to actually learn from the lecture, and sometimes different lecturers would present inconsistent information. It felt as if the lecturers didn't communicate between themselves too. There was no linear, cohesive narrative like there was in M2M - the order of the lectures was pretty much just spaghetti.

In the lectures, be prepared for lecturers to throw in random tidbits of information without really elaborating on them, you are just expected to understand. Never heard of short hairpin RNAs? Well, I'm just going to throw it in there and hope you understand how they can be used therapeutically. This trend was such a big annoyance in the pain lectures, where you would be told vague details about random parts of the brain, which came across as completely gibberish to non-neuro students. I guess whether you enjoy a particular lecture or not depends on your field of study - for tissue engineering, you need to think like an engineer and consider stress, strain, also the profiles of the materials you use, or if you're more economically inclined, you might enjoy learning pharmaeconomics (I still have no idea what that lecture was about and gave up learning it after skimming through the first time). But for me, and a large part of the cohort, a lot of the lectures weren't interesting.

When you're studying, you're not expected to intensely rote-learn a huge amount of detail like you do in M2M. In Frontiers, you zoom out from the science and cover social, political, and epidemiological factors as well. It is pretty macro. It's not that bad but it is hard to know what you need to actually remember, and you'll find yourself asking yourself hmm that looks irrelevant but should I bother learning it anyway? You will get a good idea of what you sorta need to take out from each lecture when you get to practise exams though.

OK, onto assignments! These have hardly anything to do with your actual lectures, adding to the frustation. You are going to hear the words “graduate attributes” numerous times until it is drilled into your head. I think it is important to learn how to find resources by yourself and to learn how to peer-assess etc. But it would have been really nice if the content of the assignments were actually relevant to our lectures. Also, you do not get useful feedback for each assignment. Almost everybody in my tute got the same “well done!” on a criteria sheet that was handed back to us - no other comments, even though some of us certainly did not do very well. You will be constantly yoloing your assignments without knowing which areas you can improve on.

In the first bioinformatics assignment, you have to use PubMed and other resources to learn about FLPD and its genetic basis. You practise writing in scientific language, and you also practise writing to a layman. You then have a debate in one of your tutes where you have to present arguments for and against the creation of an Australian Biobank, 6 mins per side.

You also have a practical on the effects of Atenolol on the cardiorespiratory system. The pre-practical requires you to watch a recorded lecture on BP, and you need to actually read your prac book. In the prac, you get someone on a bike, record parameters like HR, BP and FEV1.0, then drug them and observe the effects. It is pretty boring. Then, after everyone in the cohort has had an opportunity to do the practical, you have to do a graphical assignment where you describe and interpret the results. This graphical assignment is actually marked by your peers, and your final mark you get will be the average of each marker. You get a free 2.5% for doing the marking. The median is quite high, 85% for the graphical assignment, but again you are not given constructive feedback. You will not know why someone has given you 1/10 for a perfectly fine answer, but deal with it. Finally, you also have a respiratory assignment where you have to compare the results of the cohort with that obtained from the UK biobank. Sometimes the wording of this assignment is ambiguious, sometimes you cannot really compare the data and have to do your own magical shenanigans to try make it comparable. You also have to write how uPAR is involved in respiratory disease, so PubMed is needed again.

The online MST at around week 7 or so is quite easy, you should get 100% as long as you have your lecture slides open. You have a few days to do it, it is NOT timed, and you can backtrack on your answers.

Your tutes aren't always particularly helpful. They never deal with lecture content, they are always about introducing you to the next assignments. When there is a tute, you should go, because the tutor may drop some hints about how you should format your paper, write figure legends, etc. When you don't have a tutorial (which is for most of the semester), self-directed revision questions are uploaded on the LMS. But because there was no tutor, literally nobody would go.

Finally, the exam. It is all full of LAQs, but it is good as some of the questions tend to get recycled from previous years and you can predict what topics are most likely to pop up. Metabolic syndrome, the practical, smoking/COPD, pain and stem cells will definitely appear, so definitely do not neglect these lectures. For others, just gamble. I gave up learning the drug dependency and metabolomics lectures (it appeared my exam but luckily I was able to leave them). You have to answer 6 out of 9 questions - some questions you are forced to do, for others you can pick. The questions are quite open-ended sometimes and I felt they were a little bit ambiguous, so I just spewed random word vomit and just hoped for the best, I'm not exactly sure what they kinda wanted for some questions. And we also got a question on pain affect/motivation despite having never heard about it before - yup, totally expected from something like Frontiers. Aim to write around a page and a half for each 10 mark question. Study for the exam by going throug the past exam questions and answering the relevant ones (helps to create a google doc so you can discuss answers with other people)

In my opinion, this is probably the worst core subject in biomed. I love biomedicine, but there were so many minor and major annoyances in this subject that just built up into a frothing mess of frustration. The disorganised lectures, the non-existent constructive feedback, not knowing what you were meant to know - there are so many complaints that the students have consistently voiced to the coordinators, but nothing has changed. Here's hoping that something does, or that the whole subject is replaced by M2M 2.0 or something. It feels as if they are trying to squeeze as many random areas in biomedicine into one subject as they can, but it doesn't feel as if lectures complement each other.

This subject is going to make you apathetic, it is going to desensitise you to how bad biomed can be. You are going to feel as dull as this:



TL;DR This subject is terrible and you have no choice but to endure it.

Yes, with screen capture.

Too many that I cannot be bothered listing all of them (let's just say: A LOT)

Past exams released from 2010-2013.

2 out of 5

They sell a Frontiers in Biomedicine synopsis at Co-op which you won't use for anything else apart from your respiratory practical. Mainly has outlines of each lecture, otherwise pretty useless.

3x lectures per week. 4x tutorials per semester (otherwise spent as self-directed group revision). 1x 4hr practical per semester.

Semester 2, 2015

H1 (89)