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Originally Posted by -Ish-
Can anyone in the BioPharm program comment on the difficulty of doing the TRIPSE and whether the 3hr allotted time was sufficient to complete all the work. Also, is there any other information regarding TRIPSE that would be beneficial to know?
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Hey Ish,
I am assuming your professor is Dr.Rangachari. Though I have not taken the course, I took first year cell bio with Dr.Rangachari and was required to write two TRIPSEs.
In terms of difficulty, I personally found the TRIPSEs really challenging. They were my lowest mark in first year . They are challenging because they don't REALLY test your knowledge of content - though you will certainly be required to know your content - they will moreso test your ability to extract pertinent information from a written passage, diagram, dataset or any other form of information and then apply what you know to rationalize the information. Usually, the problem will be puzzling in some way and there won't be an obvious answer.
The TRIPSE consists of three components:
1) Observations of the problem
2) Hypothesis generation/experimentation
3) Re-evaluation upon receiving new information
My advice is to spend a lot of time reading the problem over and over. Make sure you know exactly what you need to "hypothesize" about. When I wrote the TRIPSE, we had a problem on anxiety & beta-blockers. The problem essentially wanted us to hypothesize about why beta-blockers might effect people's anxiety differentially, given certain controls (i.e. age, sex, occupation). You would need to generate two hypotheses, select the strongest one and generate an experiment to test it. You would then hand this part of the TRIPSE in and receive an article on which the paper was based. For us, the differences in individual response to the beta-blocker was related to polymorphisms in the beta-adrenergic receptor. Most people didn't get this as the answer, but that's fine, as long as your hypotheses were sound. There isn't really a right answer here...only a set of correct answers.
Anyway....hope this helped. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.