I've had a lot of questions about my second year program, and people have been very helpful. Wanted to pass on the helpfulness : ). You can PM also if you don't want to publicly post a question.

Cheers.

Well is Life Sciences I hard? If you study and concentrate would u able to do well at it ?
Also, is Mac Life science as cut throat and difficult as UT life sci?

Originally Posted by gggggg

Well is Life Sciences I hard? If you study and concentrate would u able to do well at it ?
Also, is Mac Life science as cut throat and difficult as UT life sci?

The only courses I found to be difficult were chemistry 1AA3 (read: chem part 2) and Physics 1B03 (read: physics part 1), with that said, difficult does not equate to low marks. I did well in them. They were only difficult because they weren't really a repeat of the high school curriculum for me. Chem Part 1 was a rehash of high school. Both biologies also had the majority of their concepts already covered in high school. Difficult, for me, merely means you'll have to study a lot. I found it to be a natural progression from high school to just study a lot more in university. There is going to be so much content on some tests that you'll simply realize that studying the day before won't cut it. If you're getting say mid 80s+ in high school, and assuming that you consider your school to be giving you the proper background knowledge etc. You'll find that your marks are very similar in university, if not higher.

All of the above is from experience in Mac, here's what I know about UofT from other people:
- hugeeee class sizes, like ridiculously big. Maybe even in the 1000s. For a core life sci course, I've never had more than 350 kids in the classroom at Mac. My biggest class was an elective, kinesiology, with 600-some kids.
- Online forums (like StudentAwards) will tell you its hard in comparison to other universities, my friends seem to be doing fine there however. Many people say they have the "root out the lower scoring kids" mentality at UofT, while I'm sure that this is probably not the case, I can confirm that they don't conduct themselves this way at Mac.
- notorious bell curving
- reputable university, arguably the best in Canada according to many University Ranking Journals.
- downtown toronto, sexy campus
- probably a little more multicultural than McMaster. With that said though, from personal experience, I've found McMaster to be wayyyyy more multicultural than Queen's, McGill, and maybe even Waterloo.

That was really helpful dumbconsumer.

I see that you're transferring into health sci, would I be safe to assume that you have plans for med/other health care related schools after you finish at mac?

Anyways, I will be entering my first year at Life Sci and I have plans for the above^. Do you recommend taking a physics course/did you take a physics course in your first year? If so, which one...? For math, did you take calculus?

Lastly, any vital study tips/advice for achieving success in first year?

Thanks in advance

Originally Posted by IBB9780

Lastly, any vital study tips/advice for achieving success in first year?

Thanks in advance

Effective time management skills. Just try and complete everything asap, this way you can go back to work later on and improve on it. Never leave work to the last minute.
Also, read over your work before you hand it in. If you catch a mistake afterwards, you'll feel like such a dunce.

Originally Posted by IBB9780

That was really helpful dumbconsumer.

I see that you're transferring into health sci, would I be safe to assume that you have plans for med/other health care related schools after you finish at mac?

Anyways, I will be entering my first year at Life Sci and I have plans for the above^. Do you recommend taking a physics course/did you take a physics course in your first year? If so, which one...? For math, did you take calculus?

Lastly, any vital study tips/advice for achieving success in first year?

Thanks in advance

Yep, I'm med school bound. I definitely plan on opening myself up to all health care careers, even research, but since late grade 11, I've been considering medical school, and I'd like to keep that momentum going lol.

I took a physics course, I took just one, Physics 1B03, there is a easier high-school equivalent physics called 1L03, there are issues with it though, it has no lab component (needed for some med schools) and almost all second year programs say that if you don't take physics 1b03 in first year, you'll have to take in second year, so why not take it in the first place. In 1B03, I struggled a bit, it took time to understand the concepts, many were new to me. With that said, I studied a lot for this course and managed a good mark (an 11), I'd say a 12 is even achievable. The labs in Physics 1B03 are really chill with nice TAs (except for the instructional assistant, who is intimidating, and eerily similar to einstein phenotypically), Physics lab will raise your marks. If you take this course, take it with professor Rheinstadter (personal opinion). the other professor, hughes, isn't bad at all, but her classes can be a bit dry and often make you uninterested.

As for recommending physics...that's a tough call. It really depends on how you judge your physics skills to be. If you take physics in the summer, many med schools will accept the credits but won't count the marks in your final GPA, so that may be a route to take. If you're planning on taking the physics in the main year though, it is probably recommended as a first year course. Why? because many med schools give greater weight to later years of university, and if physics is going to bring your mark down, then might as well put it in the year that will count the least.

I took Math 1LS3 (calculus for life science), it was easyyyyyyy. The whole year is easy and the exam is slightly less easy. This is my personal take on it though, there might be kids who struggled and class averages were always in the 70's so, it likely isn't an easy course on average. I know I had a much nicer professor (Dr. Lovric), and there was another professor who made the course much more difficult than I experienced it, so if you see Lovric, go for it. There is a regular math, Math 1A03, harder than 1LS3 but still doable. Math 1A03 is a prereq to many future courses that are math based, Math 1LS3 will NOT fulfill those prerequisites usually. However, Math 1LS3 is a viable med school Math, as well as a viable math for many second year programs, so I went with the easier option because math wasn't my strongest point coming into university. Math 1LS3 was likely my highest mark in first year. Also, Math 1LS3 is NOT high school math, so yea, just in case that confusion existed.

Vital Study Tips? Figure out your study style I guess, and figure it out quick, I had a different one for each course. For Bio, it often helped me to make definition/concept lists, by the time we got to ecology, I found my study style now worked best by actually reading the textbook. For Chemistry, I figured out that I work best when I'm doing hordes of practice questions while listening to music. For Physics, I would redo the assignments. You get the point. Every course will be different. Don't forget to have some form of social life, being bored because you've been studying for 10 days is more time-wasting than going out with friends once in a while and focusing on your studies in the other times.

Wow long response, I'm sure it's full of typos, excuse me lol.

that was actually really helpful

Originally Posted by Deegs14

Effective time management skills. Just try and complete everything asap, this way you can go back to work later on and improve on it. Never leave work to the last minute.
Also, read over your work before you hand it in. If you catch a mistake afterwards, you'll feel like such a dunce.

good advice, but I wonder if this is more applicable to B.A (arts) programs where more of the course mark depends on assignments rather than tests.

Completely agree on the time management though, have your day planned out to a tee unless you want to mindlessly study hard and get burnt out, trust me it sucks

Any idea on the Female to Male Ratio ?

What courses did you take/what electives do you recommend?

Originally Posted by Icecream

Any idea on the Female to Male Ratio ?

I never really felt that one gender outnumbered the other, many men and many women in the program. If I had to make a guess based on my memory, I'd say there are more women than men.

Originally Posted by Icecream

Any idea on the Female to Male Ratio ?

I agree with dumbconsumer. There isn't really a huge difference between females or males, but in general, there tends to be more females. Maybe 55% females to 45% males or something. I haven't seen any official ratios or anything though.

Originally Posted by philkolb31

What courses did you take/what electives do you recommend?

I'm going to copy/paste what I wrote in a personal message to another user who asked a similar question:

"I took: BIO 1A03, BIO 1M03, CHEM 1A03, CHEM 1AA3, PSYCH 1X03, PSYCH 1XX3, PHYSICS 1B03, MATH 1LS3, KINESIOL 1Y03, HLTHAGE 1AA3

I sorta regret my two "electives" kinesiology and health/aging, for very different reasons. First of all, even though they aren't mandatory, I don't consider math, physics, and psych to be electives as they are necessary prereqs for a lot of second year programs.

Ok, for the two I mentioned. Kinesiology was a lot of fun, really, amazing labs with some nice TA (I dissected a sheep brain, a pig foot, an eye, worked with a human cadaver) and since I'm interested in medicine, the whole anatomy/physiology bit was really relevant. The problem for me with this course was that well, it was hard lol. Up until the exam I had a 90+ going, but that was only 45% of the course, I felt the 55% exam was difficult and it brought my mark down a bit. There was so much memory work for this course, and I had its exam sandwiched between my chem and bio exams (literally, chem on monday, this on tuesday, bio on wednesday ouch), so it wasn't the most pleasant situation. Next year, a year of anatomy/physio is mandatory for me haha, I'm hoping this course helps me out in the coming courses and allows me to hopefully do well in them. I'd like to note that many people did well in this course too, so this is more of a personal anecdote than the average opinion.

The Health and Aging course was called Introduction to Health Studies, I wanted an easy course to offset my heavy schedule and this again, looked relevant to medicine as well. It was not. We discussed a lot of stuff I found to be boring and pointless. Hard to do well in a course when you hate it, trust me. I also took this class in theWinter, it was located all the way across campus at 9:30 in the morning. I sleep pretty late, so you can imagine how stupid it felt to wake up each morning, suit up for the cold, and walk a good 10-15 minutes just to attend this class. In terms of difficulty though, it was not hard, no final exam, tests are non-cumulative so you can basically forget everything you learned after a test ends (not suggested, but you know what I mean), you'll only lose marks in a specific component of this course, the essays and stuff that are marked by the TAs."

the following is stuff i just added, not copy/pasted:

In terms of other electives, many people who found MATH 1LS3 to be easy and liked math, continued on to take MATH 1LT3, it's follow-up course, it wasn't that bad from what I hear. There are two economics courses everyone takes, microeconomics is supposedly easy but boring, macroeconomics is supposedly not the easiest but interesting. Pick your poison. You could take english if you wanted, like English 1A03 or something, but they are intensive courses that require essay writing and reading and so forth. There's Astronomy 1F03, some people find the physics/math involved to be hard, but I hear it's a really cool course with telescope/planetarium components. I don't know too much about any of the arts or languages. There is a stickied thread on macinsiders called "easy electives" or something like that you should maybe take a look at. Remember that you're paying for these courses though (a lot of $$$) and you're here to learn something you find interesting, so easy for the sake of easy rarely works out to be an enjoyable experience. Also, be sure to read course reviews on this site, they helped me quite a bit.

Originally Posted by dumbconsumer

I took Math 1LS3 (calculus for life science), it was easyyyyyyy. The whole year is easy and the exam is slightly less easy. This is my personal take on it though, there might be kids who struggled and class averages were always in the 70's so, it likely isn't an easy course on average. I know I had a much nicer professor (Dr. Lovric), and there was another professor who made the course much more difficult than I experienced it, so if you see Lovric, go for it. There is a regular math, Math 1A03, harder than 1LS3 but still doable. Math 1A03 is a prereq to many future courses that are math based, Math 1LS3 will NOT fulfill those prerequisites usually. However, Math 1LS3 is a viable med school Math, as well as a viable math for many second year programs, so I went with the easier option because math wasn't my strongest point coming into university. Math 1LS3 was likely my highest mark in first year. Also, Math 1LS3 is NOT high school math, so yea, just in case that confusion existed.

Well as long as you get a B- in LS3 you can get into AA3 or you can get into LT3 and still take the same courses as you would've if you took A03/AA3.

Also ditto getting Dr. Lovric. <3

Originally Posted by philkolb31

What courses did you take/what electives do you recommend?

You can take pretty much any elective. A lot of first-year Life Scis take Microecon or Macroecon, or both. However, most people end up taking them because they're "easy." But really, it depends on how interested you are in the subject. Also, you could look into Kin 1Y03/1YY3. They're difficult to get into and require a decent amount of effort, but the material is super interesting, maybe even my favourite first-year classes. You could also look into Hth Age 1AA3 and 1BB3. I've only taken 1BB3, but found it to be straightforward and a nice break from Science courses. I also found it really interesting (look up the review for more info). As you can tell, there's really no limits to what electives you can take as long as you have the pre-requisites. Oh and having an interest in the subject also really helps! Also, look into the course reviews if you want more feedback

I second the opinions about Math 1LS3, but for Life Scis it's not really an elective. Dr Lovric was really good and the course wasn't exactly difficult.