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grad school courses - how much background do you need?


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The grad courses I took were much easier than my undergrad.

 

You have to understand that in grad school a few things are different. One is that they professors understand research is your full-time job, thus they aren't going to make the course so unreasonable/time consuming to deter you from that. Second, since a B (or maybe it's B-, someone correct me!) is considered a pass in grad school, all the grades are scaled upwards to reflect that. What may have been a C in undergrad would be a B now.

 

The material is easier too, but that might just be the classes I took. Everyone in my class got an A and came from extremely varied backgrounds, some of which had never seen the material before.

 

You'll be fine! =)

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Dreamer: Get MATLAB. It is heaven. :)

 

agreed x 10^6!!! and I also agree with the post above mine :P The grad school courses I took were really good at explaining stats...I took an UG stats course but they built the grad school course around those with no stats whatsoever.

If your PI knows you dont have stats, you'll be fine! see if they can help you out at the starting stages of analysis or get another person in your lab to help (post doc, etc)

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I started taking molecular biology/genetics courses really late in my UG, and I was definitely less prepared than most of my grad school classmates in MedGen, but I still managed to pull off a 90 average (and was above average in most of my classes). A little bit of extra work in grad school goes sooooo much farther than it ever would in UG.

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My grad courses varied from ridiculously hard to ridiculously easy, but that was kind of a different situation than you're in so don't be worried because I said some of them were ridiculously hard. I was an observational astronomer having to take insanely mathematical classes that I didn't always have the math background for. The classes I did have the background for and that didn't involve math were fine.

 

But I think contacting the professors is actually a really good idea. And I think auditing those stats classes should be enough background. I only ever read a book about stats and the stuff you need to do data analysis is pretty basic.

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I worked for two years before starting grad school in a fairly fast-moving field, so I was a little behind knowledge-wise when I started. I still managed to get an average in the high 80s though, which was about average. Grad school is full of people with all sorts of different backgrounds, so they don't expect everyone to have the same knowledge base.

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