On March 6th, I flew back home to Seattle for a long awaiting family event. It was then that I found out that I wouldn’t be flying back to Berkeley because I had a fever and was directed into quarantine. That following Tuesday all classes went remote. As one would imagine, this quick adjustment caused chaos in the university and the rest of the world. However, Berkeley’s adjustment brought new aspects to my education that I wouldn’t get in my normal curriculum.
My biology lab class had the most drastic change. How are we supposed to engage in biological experiments and discoveries without being in a live setting? The Biology 1B faculty worked hard to figure out how to incorporate technology without losing the fundamental techniques and takeaways from our labs. This has led to the incorporation of coding and Jupyter notebook. As a biology and math major, coding is not something that is emphasized in my curriculum despite it being a very useful skill in those career fields.