Author Archives: Kenny Lin

Money Saving Strategies for Students

Posted on November 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

Students have a tough time enough financing their academic studies! In addition to personal and essential purchases, juggling finances with what little money one gets from student loans and part-time jobs becomes a nightmare. Here are some tips to save money and get the most value out of your money!

use cashback apps

There are a plethora of cashback apps out there; however, I will introduce you to those I believe are the most useful.

Rakuten

With every purchase you get a percentage (1-10%) cashback funded into your Rakuten account. All you have to do is enter your favorite online shopping site (SportChek, Nike, Adidas) via the Rakuten website or app and the cashback rewards are activated. I love this app because every 4 months they pay you via a cheque, Paypal transfer, or an Amazon gift card! You are able to physically get the cash, unlike other apps which only offer point exchanges for gift cards. In addition, you get a $30 welcome bonus on your first $30 purchase by using this referral link: https://www.rakuten.ca/referrer?referrerid=J2yivRBlsCU%3D&src=Link

KOHO

This is a prepaid visa card where you can fund via e-transfer from your bank. In addition, you get a cute physical card that they mail to you free of charge. It’s cashback isn’t amazing, but the welcome bonus and ability to directly transfer cashback rewards from your card to your bank account at anytime is why I recommend this card. Use this referral link to get $20 funded on your card once you make any amount purchase: https://web.koho.ca/referral/PVHZCIQS

Drop

This is a phone app that connects to your bank card so that you can get points on your purchases. You can exchange the points for gift cards. This is a useful app; however, my least favorite out of the three as you can only get gift cards and the cash out threshold is at $50 (you need to collect $50 worth of points to get a gift card). This is a great app if you are considering investing in cryptocurrency! Currently they offer 50 000 points ($50) if you open a Coinbase account and make any amount trade (and other crypto platforms, however I will only recommend Coinbase as they are reputable). You will be able to cash out on a gift card instantly!

Note that you are only able to use one cashback app at a time and that these apps will know when two apps are being used simultaneously (trust me I’ve tried). This being said, you can actually use Rakuten and KOHO at the same time as KOHO is technically a prepaid visa card. This means that with the welcome bonuses you can get essentially a $50 discount on your next purchase (enter the site through Rakuten and pay with KOHO at checkout).

Open Student bank accounts

For students, opening chequing and savings accounts are free! Remember to also apply for a credit card now (since you are likely of legal age now) to get additional cashbacks, points, or rewards! I really like the Crypto.com visa card because it is essentially a no-fee card that provides you perks like a free Spotify, Netflix, or Amazon Prime subscription and up to 8% cashback on purchases. I personally have cards with PC Financial, BMO, and TD because of their welcome bonuses and 4% cashback in the first few months when I applied.

learn how to invest

While putting your money in a savings account can be thought of the traditional way to earn free money, the interest rates offered are trivially low. Especially, if you are a student with not a lot of money in the bank to begin with. Personally, I invest in crypto and stake them. Not only do I earn money if my investments go up, I am also gaining passive income from staking (think of it as a high-interest savings account for crypto with interest rates typically ranging from 3-100% depending on the coin). This being the case, never invest in something you don’t understand. Always do your research and make an informed decision. If you are interested in crypto you can follow the links to some of the platforms I use:

NDAX: https://one.ndax.io/bfP8uu

Tailored to the Canadian market. You can easily deposit cash through e-transfer for free so it is easy to fund your account. You also have the ability to put up open limit orders so you don’t always have to purchase at market price.

https://accounts.binance.com/en/register?ref=128707333

One of the largest crypto platforms in the world which allows you to trade many different types of coins. Lots of utility and functions with low trading fees. Harder to fund your account as a Canadian.

always look for coupons

Especially if you are eating out at fast food restaurants or chain restaurants, check online for any promos or welcome bonuses. If you are ordering on delivery apps like Uber eats, only do so when you have those 30% off – 75% off coupons and order with a group to maximize discounts. When doing online shopping, along with cashback apps you can create an alternate email account to signup for newsletters and subscriptions to get those welcome coupons and future promotions without cluttering your main account.

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CHEM 302: Atmospheric Environmental Chemistry

Posted on August 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

Want to learn about the different gases in the atmosphere and how they affect the earth? CHEM 302 is a Chemistry course that discusses reactions that describe environmental phenomena such as the ozone layer, pollution, and ozone holes.

format of the course

The format of the course is pretty standard. There were live lectures with quizzes, a midterm, and a final exam. Quizzes were fairly easy with unlimited attempts for each; however, you did not get to know the correct answers till after the submission deadline. Since I took this course virtually, both the midterm and final exam were quizzes on Canvas. The midterm was straightforward and easy, as the concepts of the first half of the course were not complex at all. The final exam was pretty difficult, due to the various reaction mechanisms that you had to memorize. To supplement your studying, there were practice problem sets (not for marks) that contained difficult problems slightly above exam difficulty.

gpa 🙂 or 🙁

This is 100% a GPA booster as a lot of the content is review from 1st year Chemistry. The averages for quizzes were high 90s and for the exams they were low to mid 80s. If you put in the work this is an easy A or A+, as the class average for when I took it was 83. You can also see from the grade distribution that most people achieved an A+.

CHEM 302 Grade Distribution. Credits: ubcgrades.com

verdict: to take or not to take

If you are in Chemistry and want a break in your schedule, I would definitely take this course. I had the advantage of being in Chemical Biology, thus a lot of the Chemistry concepts in this course were basically review from 1st and 2nd year. However, this course is entirely doable for life science majors, as the Chemistry concepts are super easy to follow.

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PHYS 101: Energy and Waves

Posted on August 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

An interactive and fun course to learn about introductory physics. PHYS 101 is all about how energy and waves work!

format of the course

The lecture portion of this course is quite interactive as it consists of many i-clicker questions, group worksheets, and cool demos. There is also a lab portion of the course where you get to work with a partner apply the things you’ve learnt in class. Besides the interesting lab experiments, there are also no lab reports; however there is a time-crunching lab exam. The labs were held once every two weeks along with alternating tutorials that were also held biweekly. In the tutorials we would work in small groups of 3-4 to solve a series of challenging problems and then “teach” how we solved it to the TAs.

There is only one midterm worth 10-15%  of your grade. Both the midterm and final exam are written as two-stage exams where you first write the exam individually and then write it in a group of your own choosing. The group phase was basically the exact same exam completed as a group. The great part is that if you do worse on the group phase it would not count towards your score.

gpa 🙂 or 🙁

It’s feasible to get a good grade in the course if you enjoy the course content and enjoy math overall (no Calculus needed). Some parts where marks are easily lost are in the labs as they are quite nitpicky with the marking and formatting of the notebooks and assignments. However, there are a lot of areas where marks are basically free (participation, tutorials) to make up for this fact. The exams are super fair in terms of content, however the MC portion can be stressful as getting one wrong could cost you 6% of your mark. The average when I took this course was 72. Attached is the grade distribution form 2017W term 2:

PHYS 101 Grade Distribution. Credits: ubcgrades.com

verdict: to take or not to take?

I would definitely take this course again! Being a student in life sciences doesn’t give me many opportunities to take physics-related courses. If you are in the same boat as me, this is a stress-free course to widen your scientific breadth!

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Meet Our New Writers!

Posted on July 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

We’re happy to announce the many new additions to our team! Please welcome the following new members as they share a bit about their passions and interests.

Chanelle Chow

Chanelle is graduating from UBC with a specialization in Biology. She is currently researching endophytic archaea and is working on the development of a non invasive bubble helmet ventilator system that can be used in healthcare settings. She has interests in photography, painting, and making drinks.  She also has 4 goldfish and a catfish!

Edgar Daniel Fuller Altamirano

Edgar is a graduate from Concordia University with a specialization in Cell and Molecular Biology and is currently studying at UBC as an Integrated Sciences Major. Interests vary from protein-protein interactions and metabolic pathways to environmental health and safety and public health policies. In his free time he plays DnD and volunteers to play tag with kids. Also naps.

ethan Rajkumar

Ethan Rajkumar is a third year Chemistry student at UBC. He doesn’t know what to do yet but is potentially interested in grad school. During his spare time, he likes to make and edit videos, graphics, garden, mountain bike and do weird and interesting things. However, most of the time you’ll either see him looking at cute pictures of puppies or cooking (although we all seriously doubt that his food is good) ????.

Golzar Ejadi

Golzar is a recent graduate from the Faculty of Science at the University of British Columbia with a Double Major in Biology and Psychology. She is interested in various topics, but one of the main is how early life experiences shape us. In her free time, she volunteers with a global non-profit and practices her vocals!

quentin Michalchuk

Quentin Michalchuk is a fourth-year student in Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia.  He is currently in the Pharmacology Co-op program, where he is working as a Research Assistant in the Lockwood Lab at the BC Cancer Research Institute investigating novel therapeutics for lung cancer.  His undergraduate career-related interests include geriatric and pathology-related research, participation in clubs such as the Pharmacology and Cellular, Anatomical, and Physiological Sciences Student Association, and volunteering, playing chamber music at senior homes and as Treasurer of the Rotaract Club of Vancouver.  Personal interests include classical music, the outdoors, and hot chocolate and bubble tea.

rex chen

Rex graduated from the University of British Columbia with a BSc specializing in Chemistry. His interests are in materials chemistry with applications in renewable energy. He currently works as a Research Associate at NanoOne Materials Corp, working on High Voltage Spinels (HVS) with applications towards Li-ion batteries in electric vehicles and electronic devices. In his free time, Rex loves to ride his bike around Vancouver, watch obscure movies, and read “free” books on his Kindle because he thinks it’s economically feasible.

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CHEM 330: Advanced Organic Chemistry

Posted on July 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

A chance to further advance your 2nd year organic chemistry knowledge. CHEM 330 is a one of the hardest courses I’ve taken at UBC; however the nuanced content also made this an interesting organic chemistry course.

format of the course

There are lots of assessments in this course relative to your standard university course. When I took it, there were weekly problem sheets along with two huge problem sets that were all worth a substantial portion of your mark (they were quite challenging as well). Lectures were taught in a smaller lecture hall via chalk and blackboard. This means that you definitely couldn’t miss lecture as the notes would otherwise not be available online. There was also a midterm and final exam both composed of fill in the products/reagents, synthesis, and mechanism type questions. You also needed to memorize random trivia like the pKa of different organic compounds and certain bond energies.

The content was basically an extension of CHEM 213, in terms of looking at the reactions in more detail. A concept that I really enjoyed was the stereochemical control of nucleophilic addition to a carbonyl and how the stereochemistry of the alpha carbon could dictate how the nucleophile would attack the carbonyl carbon. In CHEM 213, this fact would have likely been glossed over, but in CHEM 330 we studied in-depth the mechanism behind this phenomenon.

gpa 🙂 or 🙁

This course is a massive GPA dropper and it is unclear whether there was scaling. I spent two courses worth of time studying for this course, as not only do you have to memorize a ton of reactions, you also have to learn how to use them together when faced with a synthesis problem or draw on your understanding of these reactions when confronted with a mechanism problem. I managed to get the 3rd highest midterm mark; however, this was around 91-93 which is appallingly low when the same mark in most courses wouldn’t be noteworthy of a top 3. For some reason, the professor let everyone know what the top 10 marks were, and these marks ranged all the way down to high 70s. The average for this course in 2019W was 72. The distribution is quite variable as this was a small class of 60.

CHEM 330 grade distribution. Credits: ubcgrades.com

verdict: to take or not to take

While I don’t regret taking this course it’s definitely not something I would want to take again. In a way, this course helped me discover that organic chemistry wasn’t for me. If you’re super interested in organic chemistry, this course will truly test the extent of your interest.

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Hydrogels as an Ophthalmic Drug Delivery System

Posted on July 10, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you’ve ever had some sort of eye surgery, you might have been prescribed an assortment of eyedrops with their own frequent dosing schedules. The reason for the frequent dosing is that topical drug delivery to the eye is quite difficult, and upon further evaluation this should make sense! The eye is a delicate structure that has many barriers to prevent the entry of foreign particles. Hydrogel technology has been heavily investigated as a sustained drug release vehicle, obviating the need for such frequent dosing.

barriers of the eye

Drug residence time delivered via eye drops can be cut short due to pre-corneal factors: tears, blinking, and drainage through the nasolacrimal duct. Some of you might have been told to pinch the bridge of your nose after administering eye drops, this is to block off the drug from draining through this duct into the nose. In addition, drug that does remain on the eye must penetrate through the thick multi-layered cornea to get to the deeper tissues of the eye. The conjunctiva at the surface of the eye is also highly vascularized, meaning the drug will also be absorbed into the bloodstream before penetrating through the eye.

Anatomy of the eye. Credits: American Academy of Ophthalmology

Drainage through the nasolacrimal duct and absorption through the highly vascularized conjunctiva may cause unwanted side effects, as the drug is being distributed to off-target tissues through the circulatory system. Ironically, drugs cannot be delivered via consumption or systemic injection as there are blood-ocular barriers (analogous to the blood-brain barrier) that prevent systemic distribution of drugs to ocular tissue.

hydrogels to the rescue!

Hydrogels are basically polymers (long chemical chains) composed 95% of water. The advantage of hydrogels is that they are viscous, meaning that they can stick onto the eye longer before being removed. They can also encapsulate drug molecules, and can release the desired drug at a certain rate, based on their initial preparation conditions. Currently, there are many types of hydrogels being investigated for there use in drug delivery. These can be broken down into synthetic polymers, which have the advantage of being easily tunable in mechanical properties and natural polymers, which have the advantage of being biocompatible to the eye. In-situ forming hydrogels have been an area of focus, as they can be administered as a liquid, but gels in response to a stimulus. For example a gel could be liquid at room temperature but turn into a gel at body temperature.

Despite being a potential solve to a long-standing problem, there is currently no FDA-approved hydrogel used in drug delivery. A lot more research in terms of in vitro, in vivo, and clinical studies are needed to evaluate the long-term efficacy and biocompatibility of these options. However, hydrogels have made their way into clinical use in other ophthalmic departments! An immediate one that comes to mind is the use of contact lenses which are practically just hydrogels. A lesser known use is in cataract surgery, where hydrogels have been used as ocular adhesives to seal any surgery-induced wounds.

References

Lynch, C.R.; Kondiah, P.P.D.; Choonara, Y.E.; du Toit, L.C.; Ally, N.; Pillay, V. Hydrogel Biomaterials for Application in Ocular Drug Delivery. Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol. 2020, 8, 228, doi:10.3389/fbioe.2020.00228.

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BIOL 140: Laboratory Investigations in Life Science

Posted on June 25, 2021 | Leave a comment

A course that directly teaches you about the scientific method and how to practice good science! BIOL 140 is a lab course that teaches you how to collect data, set up experiments, and do introductory statistics on cool organisms!

format of the course

I took the course 3-4 years ago, so the format might have changed; however, I suspect they kept it mostly the same. Classes are run like small tutorials that occur once a week for 3 hours. These classes were very interactive and quite interesting. We’re broken down into groups of 3-4 on the first day and assigned study organisms for the term (I got the beetle). Assignments in this course were all written: literature searches, worksheets, lab reports, and paper writing. They end-goal was to design an experiment regarding our organism and doing a final write-up on our findings. Personally, we looked at whether beetles prefer a wet or dry environment by looking at the duration of time they stayed in a particular environment.

For interests sake, we set this up by filling a petri dish half with dry soil and half with wet soil. We then put the beetle at the boundary where the two soils met, and allowed 30 seconds to pass to reduce its stress levels. We then measured for 2 minutes for how long the beetle stayed at each location. We then tabulated these results, ran some statistical analyses, and then wrote up a report and presentation.

In the latter half of the course, we went to a nearby forest to learn how to identify different plant species and how to sample parts of the forest.

GPA 🙂 or 🙁

This course is not that stressful, but the marking for the written assignments and presentations are quite harsh. I remember they gave us a sample written assignment to mark on our own, and the actual mark that the sample assignment was scored was much lower than the mark my peers and I assigned. This being said, the final exam was ridiculously easy (I suspect on purpose), and the averages aren’t that bad in the end. Due to COVID-19 the latest averages are heavily inflated, thus I will provide an older distribution from when classes were in-person. The average was 77 in 2019w term 1.

BIOL 140 Grade Distribution. Credits: ubcgrades.com

Verdict? to take or not to take

I would take this course if you are planning on going into a life-science major as this is a prerequisite for most of them. Otherwise, this is a lot of work for a 2 credit course, and you will be exposed to a more in-depth learning of the scientific method in whatever major you choose later on.

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BIOL 364: Comparative Cardiovascular, Respiratory and Osmoregulatory Physiology

Posted on June 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

An interesting course about the various physiological systems from a comparative point of view. BIOL 364 covers the fundamentals of the cardiovascular, respiratory, and osmoregulatory system and temperature regulation.

format of the course

BIOL 364 consists of live recorded lectures and recorded office hours! Piazza and the Zoom chat are also helpful avenues when communicating with the teaching team as they are pretty thorough with answering the questions. The mark weighting consists of two midterms and a final exam. All the questions on the exams were open-ended essay questions. Midterms were 3 questions (400-800 words each, 50 minutes) and finals were 6 questions (400-800 words each, 2.5 hours).

Unfortunately, there was much grief over the exam format as historically the exams used to be completely multiple choice. However the open format was to curb cheating as invigilation is difficult over zoom. People’s main gripe was with the subjective marking in a science course, which given the exam style is hard to minimize. I suspect things will go back to multiple choice when in-person classes begins as they are easier on the students and TAs.

GPA 🙂 or 🙁

When you’re taking the course it will feel like a GPA dropper because of the incredibly time-crunched midterms. However, with new weighting schemes implemented (dropping the worst midterm if you do well on the final exam) and the final exam being much generous in terms of time, the class average ended up being quite high and in line with the historical averages. The class average was 79.

BIOL 364 GRADE DISTRIBUTION. Credits: ubcgrades.com

verdict? to take or not to take

If you’re really against subjective marking and dreading getting your mark back after every exam due to not knowing how you did, I would not take this course. If you want an interesting course on physiology that isn’t incredibly in depth, I would take this course. Physiology enthusiasts should consider taking CAPS 301 which is a year-long course covering mammalian physiology.

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Content Suggestions? Please Comment Below

Posted on June 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

If you have any suggestions on what you would like to see in the blog please drop a comment below! This could be suggestions from the type of course reviews you want to see, more university tips, etc.

– The Undergraduate Scientist Team

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Looking for New Additions to the Team!

Posted on June 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

Hello everyone! We’re looking for UBC Science students to join our blogging team. Our blog is designed to highlight the interesting life of an undergraduate science student! There’s content from student interviews to course reviews, as well as tips and tricks to university life. We occasionally feature fascinating research as well. If you’re interested in being involved in some recreational blog writing then these positions are for you.

If you’re interested feel free to fill out a form: https://forms.gle/SZt7LptLEkGiywwW7

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