Courses That Don't Suck

April 22, 2025

Here are some classes I found fun, even if they’re not everyone’s idea of a “good class.” While most of the Core and other courses are designed just to introduce the fundamentals of a subject, the ones below stood out for being especially engaging.

Bi 1 — The Great Ideas of Biology: Rob Phillips

I’ve actually never been enrolled in Bi 1, I just showed up to most of the lectures because it was very interesting to see what was up.

The best part of Bi 1 is that it is not a biology course at all.

In Bi 8 and Bi 9, you are basically learning how to eat the book, just like in AP Biology in high school. Sure, if you have made it to Caltech, you probably know how to eat a book, but as Ben Franklin (a recurring character within the class) said, “Eat not to dullness.”

Near the end of the course, the topics become slightly more intense, stepping into an introduction to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. However, they are presented in a way that is completely understandable for any frosh with no background knowledge.

Rob mentions that in an ideal Caltech, frosh-year core should just be playing around and exploring topics. What is the point in memorizing ten things per week that you will forget after the final, if you could deeply learn one thing every week and remember it forever?

Some people don’t enjoy Bi 1, perhaps because they have other things that they value more, but if you try to enjoy it, it’s actually quite interesting.

CS 179 — GPU Programming: Al Barr

… is kind of an insane class. Al Barr will give the lecture for about 15 minutes, and then go on some insane tangent and tell you all these insane things from the pre-USSR collapse world, such as:

A 300-year research plan to end global warming with GMO trees
Being David Kirk’s PhD advisor
Having a rare chronic illness which means he can only eat protein powder
Telling the Caltech Cosmic Cube team that it won’t be able to add floats

Then there will be 20 minutes left in class, so you might as well ask a question like, “Are you still eating the protein powder?” or “How has your illness changed your outlook on life?” And from that, you can learn quite a lot about living, but I guess the GPU programming part of the class has gone out the window.

As one TQFR from 2022-23 put it, “I went to the first three lectures and realized that material was never actually going to be taught in the lecture…” This person is correct that material is not taught in lecture, but considering that everyone skips every lecture, what difference does it make whether the material is taught in lecture? “If a tree falls in lecture and no one is at lecture, will it be on the final exam?” is the correct question to ask.

This term’s CS 101 is not to be confused with the other CS 101, Pedagogy in Computer Science.

So far, the class has been somewhat interesting, but certainly useful with the application of the Pandas Python library. If you don’t know anything about programming, “Pandas Python library” probably sounds really funny.

Jedi often brings snacks to class like Hello Panda, and the homework is relatively fun. Later on in the course, there will be some more technical data science ideas introduced, as well as some interaction with the ChatGPT API, which I’m really looking forward to.

CS 42 – Computer Science Education in K-14 Settings: Claire Ralph and Adam Wierman

In this class, you design your own short lesson for teaching elementary/middle schoolers some CS concept, and then apply it by going to a local school and teaching it.

I originally thought it would be more of a lecture-style setting with perhaps 30-60 minutes to teach a concept, but it’s more like a science fair where the students are walking around and will sit down for 5-10 minutes to do the activity.

In my group, we designed an activity where students learn to encode letters with beads to make the phrase shorter, and at the end, they get to make a bracelet. There were some flaws, like how time-consuming it is, but those are just small issues that can be ironed out.

Bi 1C — Biology Through the Algorithmic Lens: Lior Pachter

Unfortunately, this class is a lottery class in the winter term, but fortunately for me, I got in when the course first came out!

I think this glazer on TQFR put it quite well:

“Bi 1C is to the catalog what a deep cut is to an album, like ‘The Story of Us’ on Speak Now. If I could take it twice, I would!

If the faculty invented a 1-quarter course called Bio 2C, I would enroll in that course before I enroll in my hum, which would run out of seats faster than a Taylor Swift concert.

My favorite lesson was either the one about tiling a XXX with YYY or the one about AAA cycles and the BBB Graph.

I also liked the first lesson where we learned that ‘CCC are just DDD that went back in the water.’ I also enjoyed learning fun facts like how Person 1 and Person 2 co-taught a course at Caltech and Person 3 (likely) drew the first math graph. If you are curious what those hidden words are, you just need to take the class. The only problem with Bi 1C is that not everyone who wants to take it can.

The seats are limited because it’s presentation-based. I think a few more students could fit if the final project was more like a gallery/peer review and the midterm presentations continued through the second half of the term.”

There’s really nothing more to say after that, so you should probably take it.

PVA 62 — Drawing and Painting: Jim Barry

Drawing and painting were never really my strong suit, but I think I improved a lot in this course, which is offered every term.

In a talk by Kip Thorne where he was trying to sell his poetry and art book, he mentioned that the best course he took at Caltech was “Sketching for Engineers” or some variation of that, and that it’s very useful for scientists to know how to draw. I took that advice and signed up for Drawing and Painting because I’ve always felt bad about how I could only draw stick figures.

The strange thing about this class is that Mr. Barry will never tell you what to do and rarely gives you advice on what to do better unless you ask for it. He told me that lots of students come in expecting to do assignments like hammers looking for a nail, but he’s found that it’s better to have students learn to be creative and explore their own interests.

It’s a rare experience to be able to just stop thinking about problem sets for three hours straight in the middle of the week, and I was very surprised the first time I went to class. If you want to come to class, you don’t even need to enroll: just show up from 7-10 PM on any Tuesday or Wednesday.

(By the way, the nude model usually shows up around 8:30-9:00.)

What Really Matters?

In most situations, many students, including myself, are simply playing the GPA maximization game. It’s not bad to solve this optimization problem, since companies and grad schools seem to care a lot about whether you know how to hand in homework on time, but we do so at our own risk.

Good enough is better than perfect. Not every 0.33 step down in some class used in computing your mean cumulative GPA is worth losing sleep over.

If you are actually about to fail, then obviously don’t listen to me, but most of the time, when people say they are about to fail, they mean they are going to get a B.

Past some age, it just becomes too difficult to learn as fast as you did when you were younger. Every second spent maximizing your grade in the class you hate is a second not spent on learning interesting things.