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UoA A Comprehensive Overview of OLY1

POP 101 and 102 happen on Wednesdays at the Ghostamaki campus (seriously, such a ghost town, not even fake news, there are only three working lecture theatres because the uni doesn't want to spend the money on what has like a couple hundred students).

For example in first semester I had POP 101 lecture from 9-11 am, a POP 101 tutorial from 11.30-12.30 and a POP 111 tutorial from 1 pm to 2.30 pm, and in second semester we have POP 102 lecture from 10.00 am to 12 pm, then POP 102 tutorial f rom 12 pm to 1 pm.

POP 111 is on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday at City Scumpus from 12 pm to 1 pm.

The only papers with a morning/avo stream are CHEM 110, BIO 107 and MEDSCI 142 but none of them are compulsory for the BHSc AFAIK, maybe Medsci.

The Ghostamaki campus is closing at the end of 2018.
Why is it closing, not enough students? Where will all the Population health papers go, to City?
 

Kiwiology

MSO Lawyer
Why is it closing, not enough students? Where will all the Population health papers go, to City?

I think Tamaki is just universally unpopular with students and staff; like there's barely anybody there compared to city scumpus and is not cost-effective for the university to maintain plus the area of land they are sitting on is probably worth tens of millions of dollars; especially to some developer - they'll whack up an arseload of townhouses like Stonefields or something.

From what I understand the large area at the back of the medical school is being redeveloped to house Tamaki peeps between that and the med school proper.
 

heartley

Member
POP 101 and 102 happen on Wednesdays at the Ghostamaki campus (seriously, such a ghost town, not even fake news, there are only three working lecture theatres because the uni doesn't want to spend the money on what has like a couple hundred students).

For example in first semester I had POP 101 lecture from 9-11 am, a POP 101 tutorial from 11.30-12.30 and a POP 111 tutorial from 1 pm to 2.30 pm, and in second semester we have POP 102 lecture from 10.00 am to 12 pm, then POP 102 tutorial f rom 12 pm to 1 pm.

POP 111 is on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday at City Scumpus from 12 pm to 1 pm.

The only papers with a morning/avo stream are CHEM 110, BIO 107 and MEDSCI 142 but none of them are compulsory for the BHSc AFAIK, maybe Medsci.

The Ghostamaki campus is closing at the end of 2018.

Thanks for that. Med is my goal but if I don't get in I need a back up. Working in my community is more what I'm about so I reckon BHSc is the way I need to go after a year of hating Biochem.
 

Kiwiology

MSO Lawyer
Thanks for that. Med is my goal but if I don't get in I need a back up. Working in my community is more what I'm about so I reckon BHSc is the way I need to go after a year of hating Biochem.

The BHSc is a bloody brilliant non-clinical starting point degree; it can lead into basically anything and has a lot of postgrad options. Don't be put off by the appalling organisation of POP 101/102 and the absolutely rubbish assignments; the papers are quite interesting but 102 more than 101; only about the first half 0f 101 is really relevant, for somebody who knows nothing about the health sector I imagine some of the stuff in 101 would be quite foreign and extremely boring to learn - health economics for example.

If you ask me, 102 should be taught first then 101.
 

Kiwiology

MSO Lawyer
BHSc non-core semester 2 papers:

POPLHLTH 102: Health & Society

Basically module 2, 3 and 4 of POP 111 in more detail. The entire course(!) except for one or two lecturers is done by Dr Rob McNeil and he's such a cool guy, he'd be 45 at the absolute oldest and is the kind of bloke you want to have a beer and natter with. He is super passionate and quite funny, although his jokes are often a bit risque but that's not a bad thing. Essentially the entire problem with health inequity is the fault of neoliberalism and social psychology, there, you don't even have to take the paper now, you know everything! You will learn what is affectionally called the uterus model of health (biological, material/structural, cultural/behavioural, social selection and historical) and this is applied to a new topic every week and in the end it's all the fault of neoliberalism and social psychology. It can get a bit repetitive. Covers things like socioeconomic status and health, mental health, disability, obesity and some others. Tutorials are a joke so I barely went. Monique also coordinates this paper so from that perspective it's a total joke and very frustrating. Assessment is two essays (15% and 25%) and a 10% group presentation all of five minutes and a 50% exam. Exam this year was easy AF and they usually tell you one of the long answer topics. I barely studied for this paper and found it pretty much a breeze.

HLTHPSYC 122: Health Psychology

This paper gave me nightmares, honestly, it was almost worse than Medsci. Absolutely nothing about this paper is interesting save for a couple of lecturers; seriously out of 24 lectures like 2 or 3 were mildly interesting. Heaps of rote learning the most absolutely tedious boring details of stuff I can't even remember because of motivated forgetting. The amount of rote learning makes this paper really not very enjoyable, and the 8 am lectures before Medsci are even worse and the tutorials mostly being at Ghostamaki at 8.30 am or running until 5.00 pm! Our tutor was some uninterested Masters student who just didn't care and just rote read off slides and was like 99% mentally checked out which didn't help either but we got through it pretty quick! They don't publish tutorial materials on Canvas so you have to turn up. The MST is 20% and is 80 MCQ after the break, some of the questions were pretty weird but you can just BS your way through most of it - I BS'd like 80% of the answers and got an A-! The behavioural modification assignment is a bit BS, some people I know did really super well and others who had very similar quality assignments did quite a bit worse so who knows. The exam is 28 MCQ and 72 points of MAQ worth 9 marks each and you choose 8 of them. This year they were easy AF but previous years have been quite bad from the old exams. Exam is 60%.

Hopefully anybody doing BHSc in 2018 won't have to go to Ghostamaki campus which will be so much better. Ghostamaki campus is a joke; nobody likes it and it's a pain for most people to get to who can't get the bus from City scumpus and the sooner it gets turned into townhouses the better!
 

lemmylime

Lurker
General Study and Test Taking Tips

Two of the most important skills to help you get good marks will be effective studying and effective test-taking. With the jump in content from high school, you need to become effective at study to learn everything to the level required for A-range grades. Ultimately however, the majority of your grade for each paper will come down to your performance in the tests and exams – it is very disappointing to learn content well but end up with a lower mark than you hoped for due to mistakes during the test. I will give some insight into how I studied during the year and my approach to the tests, and will also give some other possible things you can do. However, be aware that what worked for me will not necessarily work for you. It is important that you try out some different techniques early on and come up with an approach which is most effective for you. Although the jump in content can initially seem intimidating, these are only first year papers and as a result they are designed to be manageable for students fresh out of high school. If you start the year strongly and improve on your study techniques as you go, you will find you manage to adjust quickly.

Disclaimer 2: these approaches worked well for me, but it is certainly not a flawless approach by any means. I hope it helps to give you some ideas that will help you to develop an approach which works well for you, but I would not recommend copying it exactly.

My Study Approach

Before the year started I came up with a study schedule for myself. I put in the lectures and labs, and then planned the other hours during which I would study. I initially planned for 11 hours of study each weekday, 5 hours of study on Sunday and a day off on Saturday. I was good at sticking to this in the first two weeks, but I ended up realising that this was more time than was necessary. As a result, I started to get a bit slacker a few weeks in and put a bit less time into study. I found it was good to overestimate the amount of time required initially, as this helped me to get ahead on the readings and took a lot of the stress out of the first few weeks. I decided that there wasn’t a point in putting in extra time for the sake of it. It can be easy to feel guilty for taking too many breaks in first year, but it is really important to take some time off to relax and get away from study. It can be difficult to strike the balance between putting in enough time to do well, while also taking time off to keep your spirits up and avoid burning out. When tests/exams were coming up I would put in some more time in order to make sure I studied as much as I needed to, but it was still possible to take plenty of breaks and avoid burning out.

In my day-to-day approach, I found it helpful to have a quick (15-30 minute) pre-read of the slides/course guide the night before each core paper lecture. This gave me an idea of the general content of the lecture, and helped me to identify potentially challenging topics. BIOSCI 107 lectures had more content, so my pre-read tended to be longer for this paper than for CHEM and POPLHLTH. I didn’t pre-read for the non-core lectures, as I didn’t want to take away too much time from the more important core papers. If there were any particularly challenging topics, I would often spend a bit of extra time going over these to try and get a better understanding before the lecture. In the lectures, I avoided copying down notes from the slides, as these are provided online and I knew I would be going back over them anyway. Instead, I would listen to what the lecturer was saying and would note down any interesting or useful additional explanations which helped to clarify the content on the slides. Most people take their course guides with them and fill it out as they go. I personally found it more useful to take my computer and type out my notes, as I am far quicker at typing than I am at writing, which allowed me to take more notes.

After lectures, I would spend some time integrating notes from the lecture slides, course guide and my notes from the lecture into a single document on my computer. I would make a heading for each of the learning objectives for the lecture, and write down all of the important points for each objective in my own words – I would often screenshot and paste in diagrams from the lecture slides/Google which helped to clarify the points. I find that I learn best when I combine written explanations and diagrams and take the time to link the explanation to the pictures, but other people will have different approaches which work for them. If there were any concepts I struggled with, I would make sure I looked through the textbook, Google or Piazza to make sure I understood it before moving on.

Most of the courses use Piazza as an online forum for the class, where people can ask and answer questions anonymously. Lecturers and tutors from the paper will also often use Piazza to help students with the more difficult topics. I cannot recommend using Piazza enough. I found Piazza to be very effective study, as other students tend to ask questions about the hardest concepts in the course. I found it helpful to test myself to see if I could answer the question, and if I didn’t I would do further study in order to figure out the answer and then answer the question in my own words using my new understanding. There were countless times where using Piazza helped me to identify things I hadn’t quite understood properly without even realising, and this ended up being extremely helpful for me to gain a better grasp on the content. If I didn’t feel like committing to a proper study session, I would often go on Piazza and answer a few questions instead. This would almost always end up being helpful for learning a new aspect of a topic, or reinforcing concepts that I already knew.

As well as pre-reading and revising lectures, it is important to keep refreshing your memory on previous units. I would often spend some time quickly reading over my notes for old lectures to make sure I kept up with the content. I found this to be very important for tests, as it meant that when a test was coming up the study process took less time as there was less material to re-learn.

When it comes to learning content, memorising without understanding tends to be an ineffective approach to study. We remember material far better when we can link it in to a conceptual foundation. I found that when I took the time to understand why things happen the way that they do, or the reason why certain structures have the features that they do, I could remember the material far better. This is especially important for BIOSCI 107 and MEDSCI 142 – there is just too much content to learn by memorisation alone. The lecturers will often give extra insight beyond the lecture slides as to the underlying reasons for things, so this is why it is really helpful to listen to what they are saying and note down the extra points. I also found that the Mastering A&P textbook was quite helpful for this, as it often gives additional explanations which help you to build that underlying conceptual foundation. It can seem counter-intuitive to learn content beyond the scope of the course, and you will certainly want to not spend so much time doing it that you burn out or don’t sufficiently cover the important material. However it really did help me to build good conceptual foundations that helped me to remember the content of the paper better in a shorter period of time.

In some cases however, there isn’t really time to build the necessary conceptual foundation to link the content with. The major example of this is the Cells and Tissues unit in BIOSCI 107. There just isn’t enough time to fully grasp the functions of all the organs and hence the reasons why they are made up of certain tissues. In some cases it will make a lot of sense to you why a certain tissue type is found in a certain organ, especially if you have studied biology before. In others however, you will just need to memorise that X tissue is found in Y organ. The key is to minimise the amount of content that needs to be learned this way, as it will make your study far more effective. For the cases where it doesn’t work, I personally found flashcards to be really helpful for memorisation – I had a 20 minute bus trip to uni, so I used this time to go over my flashcards and rote learn the minority of content which I couldn’t effectively link into a conceptual framework.

When the tests were coming up, I would often begin my study by putting down all the learning objectives on a document, and filling them in as best as possible from memory. I would then compare this to my previously made documents which had my integrated notes from the slides, lectures, course guide and textbook. This would highlight the material that I had forgotten or incorrectly understood. After this I would then focus most of my study time on these topics. This was far more efficient than simply going over all of the material again, and allowed me to spend more time revising the content that I struggled with the most. After I felt confident with the material, I would then use the past papers as practice in order to further identify anything I needed to work on or learn better.

The approach I took to study ended up working really well for me, and was certainly the biggest factor in how I managed to achieve good marks in OLY1. Having already completed a degree before starting biomed, I had plenty of time to figure out what works for me, which certainly helped to make the year a bit less daunting. I urge you not to just copy my approach, as it will not work for everyone. I mainly wanted to highlight some of the techniques which can be helpful to help you come up with some ideas to try with your own study. I recommend making it a priority early in the year to not just learn the content, but also how to better learn content throughout the rest of the year.

Approach to tests

Most your grade in the papers comes down to how well you do in the tests/exams. As a result, it is really important to minimise the number of marks you lose due to your test-taking strategies. Some of the major downfalls that people may face will be excessive nervousness, running out of time, and making silly mistakes that could be avoided. I feel that this was another area where my previous study helped me. I had done plenty of university tests beforehand which, although unrelated in content to biomed, certainly helped me with my approach to the tests.

One of the major downfalls that people may face comes down to time management. You have a limited amount of time to answer the questions, which means you need to avoid spending too much time on questions. As mentioned above, the chemistry in-course tests are the ones where this is most critical. It is important to keep an eye on the time during tests – you shouldn’t be checking every minute, but after each page of questions or so, having a quick glance to make sure you are on track is a good idea. If you notice that you are falling behind early in the test, you still have time to adjust your approach and speed up slightly. People will often agonise over certain questions, which can really eat into your time. Taking an extra 5 minutes on one question at the expense of having to rush five other questions will really impact on your marks. It is better to make a note of the questions you struggled with and come back to them later if you have time, as this will help you to avoid losing easy marks later in the test.

Doing practice tests in exam conditions is important for being as prepared as possible for the tests. This will not only give you an idea of whether you will struggle for time in the tests, but it will also give you a feel for some of the mistakes you might make under time pressure. Again, this was particularly important for the chemistry in-course tests. Doing the practice tests helped me to identify some common mistakes I might make, and I was able to avoid most of them in the actual test and get good marks. Making sure you take the time to read the question completely and understand it is also important for avoiding silly mistakes. If you have the time at the end of the test, go back through as much of it as possible and check to see if you misunderstood any of the questions. This may also jog your memory and help you to answer some of the questions that you were struggling with.

Finally, keeping calm is extremely important. You are always going to be nervous for these tests – there is no denying that they have high stakes. However, you need to do as much as you can to avoid getting overly anxious, as this can negatively impact on your performance. One way to avoid excess fear is to make sure you do plenty of study and prepare as well as you can. If you have been acing the practice tests and are confident in your understanding of all the content, this will certainly help you to feel calmer in the actual test. It is also important not to let yourself burn out. I would start studying early and aim to get to the point where I felt ready for the test the night before the test day. This way, I could take the time to relax on the day, while doing some extra study to do as well as possible. On test days I would spend most of the day studying at uni, but I would make sure to take some breaks and go and treat myself to some nice food or something to help keep my spirits up. I also made sure to take a relaxing break of decent length before the test so I wouldn’t be too tired. Once you start the test, it can be easy to get stressed out when there are questions that you don’t know. It is important to remember that you don’t need to ace every test to get into med, or even to get an A+ in the paper. If you notice yourself getting stressed, take a minute or so to take some deep breaths and close your eyes, and then get back to the test and make sure you get all the questions that you know, and give the harder questions your best shot.


Would you be able to send me a copy of lecture slides or notes from biomed if you dont mind as I am taking it next year and just want to familiarise myself with the content thanks!
 

Anonymosu

Lurker
Would you be able to send me a copy of lecture slides or notes from biomed if you dont mind as I am taking it next year and just want to familiarise myself with the content thanks!
Hi!!
If you receive any such notes could please also forward it to me thanks!!
 

Maria1287

Member
BHSc non-core semester 2 papers:

POPLHLTH 102: Health & Society

Basically module 2, 3 and 4 of POP 111 in more detail. The entire course(!) except for one or two lecturers is done by Dr Rob McNeil and he's such a cool guy, he'd be 45 at the absolute oldest and is the kind of bloke you want to have a beer and natter with. He is super passionate and quite funny, although his jokes are often a bit risque but that's not a bad thing. Essentially the entire problem with health inequity is the fault of neoliberalism and social psychology, there, you don't even have to take the paper now, you know everything! You will learn what is affectionally called the uterus model of health (biological, material/structural, cultural/behavioural, social selection and historical) and this is applied to a new topic every week and in the end it's all the fault of neoliberalism and social psychology. It can get a bit repetitive. Covers things like socioeconomic status and health, mental health, disability, obesity and some others. Tutorials are a joke so I barely went. Monique also coordinates this paper so from that perspective it's a total joke and very frustrating. Assessment is two essays (15% and 25%) and a 10% group presentation all of five minutes and a 50% exam. Exam this year was easy AF and they usually tell you one of the long answer topics. I barely studied for this paper and found it pretty much a breeze.

HLTHPSYC 122: Health Psychology

This paper gave me nightmares, honestly, it was almost worse than Medsci. Absolutely nothing about this paper is interesting save for a couple of lecturers; seriously out of 24 lectures like 2 or 3 were mildly interesting. Heaps of rote learning the most absolutely tedious boring details of stuff I can't even remember because of motivated forgetting. The amount of rote learning makes this paper really not very enjoyable, and the 8 am lectures before Medsci are even worse and the tutorials mostly being at Ghostamaki at 8.30 am or running until 5.00 pm! Our tutor was some uninterested Masters student who just didn't care and just rote read off slides and was like 99% mentally checked out which didn't help either but we got through it pretty quick! They don't publish tutorial materials on Canvas so you have to turn up. The MST is 20% and is 80 MCQ after the break, some of the questions were pretty weird but you can just BS your way through most of it - I BS'd like 80% of the answers and got an A-! The behavioural modification assignment is a bit BS, some people I know did really super well and others who had very similar quality assignments did quite a bit worse so who knows. The exam is 28 MCQ and 72 points of MAQ worth 9 marks each and you choose 8 of them. This year they were easy AF but previous years have been quite bad from the old exams. Exam is 60%.

Hopefully anybody doing BHSc in 2018 won't have to go to Ghostamaki campus which will be so much better. Ghostamaki campus is a joke; nobody likes it and it's a pain for most people to get to who can't get the bus from City scumpus and the sooner it gets turned into townhouses the better!

I know I'm two years late to this, but anybody reading about BHSc don't lose hope/interest in these non-core papers based off one opinion. Contrastingly, I really enjoyed Health Psych. Whilst I will agree that big chunks particularly of tutorials at Tamaki (which isn't in use as of 2020) was kind of useless, i personally found the course to be super interesting, and worth being at campus at 8am for - perhaps because largely the paper is about development and I have young nephews who i could relate a lot of the content to. Studying for this paper right after medsci was a nightmare, but the paper itself was pretty easy up until the final exam which was still only moderately difficult, and the content was pretty easy to remember because it was pretty interesting/common sense imo.
 

Maria1287

Member
Similar to above, with POPLHLTH 102, maybe it's just because the paper is in the second semester when everything is way more relaxed and because I feel like I'm slightly more academically geared towards humanities than rote science learning, I also quite enjoyed this paper. I will concur that it was very easy for the most part, but Rob was an absolute weapon and I thoroughly enjoyed attending his lectures, even if it was a mighty trek to get to Tamaki. Tutorials were a blatant waste of time, but were reconfigured this year so that you spent most of them working on the group assignment which was very simple. You got marks for attending though so skipping wasn't something I was very keen on doing. Overall, if you are genuinely interested in medicine for the social justice reasons, and the idea of righting inequities, this paper will be something that you will draw on probably for the rest of your career. Although it's not a core paper, I would consider taking it more seriously than the average person because the info you learn is, imo at least, very valuable info for the rest of your professional life - whether that ends up being in med or not.
 

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User1234

Member
First time poster - currently trying to nervously prepare for this year (Im doing health science) and i was wondering if there was a required textbook for CHEM110? or one anyone could recommend? :)
 

User1234

Member
Might be a silly question but... Would anyone recommend doing the POPHLTH 102 weekly readings? it seems like a lot of time to spend on a non-core paper.
 

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