I saw a lot of people saying on reddit that this class should not be considered a bird course. I would disagree with this statement. If you don't like writing short essays, I can see why you'd struggle with this class. But the essay topics are interesting, and the workload is so light that I think it is worth it.

Lecture attendance is mandatory; there are two lectures a week. Once a week, before Friday at 5 pm (I believe), you have to submit a "summary" of the two lectures. In this short sentence, you say one thing you found interesting about the lesson and one question you had (do this for each lecture). You will write 3 short essays (500 words max) about a topic of your choice from a list. The TAs grade hard, but if you put in the effort, you can easily get high 80s to 90s. The only annoying thing about these essays is that you must write annotated bibliographies (a paragraph about each source to prove you read the whole article). The final project is a research study you do with around 8 other students. Together, you write a 2500-word research paper that is 'original' to the scientific world. Th...read more

Dr. Richards is a fair, no-nonsense professor. But he still cares about his students and is completely open to answering any questions. He expects participation in class, but not in an iClicker way (he prefers class discussions). Usually, he brings in professors from other parts of the immunology field to teach classes, so Dr Richard will teach maybe 3 classes at most.

I think this class is a bird, but it depends on how much you like writing essays and doing research.

A pretty frustrating class. Lectures were given by guest lecturers where they spent one lecture providing some preliminary knowledge and the second just talking about their research, but the preliminary knowledge they gave was never enough to actually understand their research at all. The assignments were hard (four 300 word abstracts) and graded brutally by the TAs. I genuinely learned nothing from this class.

Dr. Richards didn't do a ton for this class, since the lectures were delivered by guest lecturers and the assignments were graded by TAs.

Skip this class, and if you want to learn immunology, take HTHSCI 3I03 in your 3rd year.