The choice is between this class and 105. From what I've heard, 105 moves very quickly, and having taken 102 and 103 I can't imagine covering even half the content in only one quarter. BIS102 goes more in-depth and in my opinion it covers essential topics better than a fast-paced overview would.

Basically the whole class was focused on proteins, techniques for analyzing them, and how they behave in cells. Covered a lot of lab techniques that will be repeated in other BIS10X classes and be useful if you do any sort of protein/genetics research.

Lecturing was alright. Hilt definitely knows his stuff, but he's more of an old-school teacher and doesn't spend any time on review. He makes his quizzes very hard and grades them very precisely. He wants you to explain things back to him on tests in very similar words as he explained it to you during class.

Must study and review content often, and always do the homework. Hilt asks questions on exams about specific examples he covered in lecture, so anything with a dedicated slide is fair game. He does frequently re-use questions from the practice midterms, so definitely worth it to do those.

This class is a required course for CBS majors so you can’t avoid it. Many of the topics introduced are foundational for other upper division courses, so do your best to understand the topics on this class.

The concepts were interesting, and they also introduced many common techniques you will need to understand, like SDS page gels. The topics are relevant to what students will likely be doing in labs and in future research, so this class is quite useful.

Hilt was overall a very good lecturer. He slides were easy to follow and there was good content, and I liked his lecturing style. But his tests were hard af. You will lose points if you do not write the exact word he is looking for. Avoid if possible, but getting a decent grade is still a possibility if you must take him. He also likes to scare students by saying things like how everyone will be crying after getting their midterm scores back.

If you end up with hilt, do the practice exams and homework. He is old and lazy, so he has a habit of reusing homework problems, sometimes word for word. The second midterm was also basically the practice problems with different numbers. He loves buffers so understand those very well.