Course is designed to help pre-medicine students prepare for the MCAT. Foundational concepts from chemistry, biology, biochemistry, and psychology will be revisited using text, animations, and interactive elements with guidance from first-year medical students. Mastery of the material will require application of critical thinking skills to clinical medicine.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students: On a regularly scheduled basis, graduate students will reflect on a number of interactive elements included in the course, submit a brief video in which they summarize how well they understood the concept depicted in the interactive and if their level of understanding changed after working through the interactives, and submit a brief paper at the end of the course outlining new interactives that would help students master other concepts covered in the course.
Athena Title
Medical Concepts I
Non-Traditional Format
This course will be taught 95% or more online.
Prerequisite
(BIOL 1107 or BIOL 1107E or BIOL 2107H) and (BIOL 1108 or BIOL 2108H) and CHEM 1211-1211D and CHEM 1212-1212D and PHYS 1111-1111L and PHYS 1211-1211L
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall, spring and summer
Grading System
S/U (Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory)
Student learning Outcomes
Students will be able to explain the relationships between pressure, temperature, volume and moles, entropy and enthalpy, and reaction velocity and substrate concentration.
Students will be able to describe the general structure, names and abbreviations of the amino acids, and explain differences between polar, nonpolar, acidic, basic glucogenic, and ketogenic amino acids.
Students will be able to explain vital biochemical concepts such as acids and bases, redox reactions, the Henderson-Hasselbach equation, cellular synapses, and neurotransmitters.
Students will be able to discuss fundamental cellular processes such as glycolysis, oxidative phosphorylation, the Krebs cycle, DNA replication, and protein synthesis.
Students will be able to summarize laboratory techniques used in biochemistry such as gel electrophoresis, blotting, and PCR.
Students will be able to explain the anatomy and physiology associated with the cardiovascular, digestive, and respiratory systems.
Students will be able to recognize and describe the role that advanced diagnostics such as PET scans, MRI, EEG, and echocardiograms have in clinical medicine.
Students will be able to summarize psychological concepts such as emotion, memory, social interactions, conflict theory, discrimination vs prejudice, and role conflict vs strain.
Topical Outline
Chemistry I: Ideal gas, Boyle’s, Charles', and Gay-Lussac's laws; Acids, bases, buffers, Henderson-Hasselbach equation, and redox reactions
Chemistry II: Gibbs free energy, enthalpy, entropy, galvanic and electrolytic cells, titration curves, Km and vmax
Biology/biochemistry I: Types of amino acids, protein synthesis, glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, synapses and neurotransmitters
