OH MY GOD this class was actual hell on earth. Never in my life have I experienced education as its worst until I took this class with Ryan Lannan (and I come from an underfunded and under-resourced high school environment). I'm currently retaking the class and doing SO much better with a different professor. This class was an ABSOLUTE SH*TSHOW. Lannan was extremely disorganized, rushed, unaware of anything going on, and a hot mess. He did not respond to emails quickly at all, wasn't understanding about issues, literally put us in positions that exposed us to covid, and was so bad at explaining concepts. He would often mess up during lecture and go back and do the whole thing and spend extra time that we didn't have going over things to re-clarify .. but he found a way to make it worse? The other class also had online tests and everything was really beneficial for them -- despite the tests being harder. The grading scale was kind of unfair as other professors have lower scores for an A. Everyone would always complain about this class and honestly justice should be served to the students who struggled, failed, felt unsatisfied, and wasted their time. He did give SUPER stingy extra credit opportunities and tests were not the hardest (were definitely not easy at all though) BUT he was kind of arrogant sometimes. TAs were pretty cool tho. But yeah, please avoid taking a class with this man at all costs.

Lannan was thrown into the course with two weeks warning. It was his first quarter teaching, and I thought he did an excellent job. I have had less prepared and less organized professors who have been teaching the course for years. Overall I really enjoyed having him as a professor and would take a class he is teaching again. Ryan truly cared about our success, which you would think would be something you could say about all professors, but I cannot say I can. He seemed to relate to us and empathize more, having finished his own PhD and school relatively recently. You could tell he wanted us to succeed, and his problem sets reflected the difficulty of his exams, which was extremely nice. There were weekly problem sets, and going to both his and the TA office hours was extremely helpful for working through them. This is the only class I have ever attended office hours for, and I highly recommend going because they made the class very manageable. His exams were very reasonable and did not throw any surprisingly terrible questions at us. They were also scaled up to match the average of the other 14C lecture for the exam we had a lower average for. There was also extra credit given for discussion attendance and a video project at the end. I think people were unfairly judgmental of him and too harsh all quarter… he did an amazing job and I felt I really understood the material more than in 14A and B. This class made me thing I liked chemistry (but I am being proven wrong in 14D), which just shows that Ryan is good at his job, especially given this was his first quarter.

I'm not sure if it's me personally, but I didn't like Lannan much. His slides were pretty good and the class structure was fair, but his lectures felt really jumpy and rushed towards the end of the year. He'd use an abbreviation once and assumed you knew it by heart after that (within the same slide). Typically, it would be fine until he would forget to introduce a protein's or enzyme's abbreviation while using other introduced abbreviations that were similar, making it extremely confusing.

On the topic of feeling unorganized, a lot of the homework deadlines would frequently get pushed back without notice to how far they got pushed back. He typically wouldn't make announcements about the new due date or post the homework on gradescope until 1-2 days before the new due date that he didn't disclose. Although checking gradescope is a student's responsibility, a courtesy reminder of homework due date extensions would've been nice, especially since they did not match the due dates on the front page of the homework or the syllabus.

Also, it's important to note that his homeworks cover the same content as his midterms/finals, but are not similar in depth, format, or expectations. The main way to study is looking at the practice midterms/finals he fortunately gives you. On the topic of midterms, be careful about submitting a regrade request which you'll be tempted to use. His rubric is incredibly strict on wording, meaning lots of students felt that they explained the concept correctly but didn't word it the right way (even if the reasoning and key words were correct). Because of this, he took points off for "bad" regrade requests and threatened to cancel all regrade requests if the number passed a certain threshold which is unreasonable in my opinion. In fact, I checked over with a TA on one of the questions and he agreed it was graded incorrectly but because of the threats he gave, I never ended up submitting the regrade request.

How the class works:
Every week there were Homework assignments where one question is graded for correction and the others are graded for completion. There were 3 quizzes, which are just pure memorization of biological pathways and their metabolites (easy points). 2 midterms and a Final. 2% extra credit.

My Thoughts:
Ryan was a decent professor for this class. You will see a lot of people complain about him, but really they should be directed towards the class itself. 153A is not meant to be an easy class, and it seriously takes a lot of studying to do well. Prof. Lannan can only do so much to make the class more approachable for students. Yes, he was disorganized at the start of the quarter (keep in mind, it's his first time teaching this class and he was told he was teaching this class a week or two before the quarter started). Towards the end of the quarter, Ryan definitely grew a lot as a professor, and he was way more organized with his lectures. Personally, all of the exams were fair if you studied for them, especially MT2 and the final exam.

That being said, this class is far from perfect. My biggest gripe with this class is how much content it tried to cover, and how little we were actually tested on. For all of the exams, Lannan would give us a study guide, but those study guides were just bullet points of every detail in the class. He did this for both midterms, and for the final he gave us a study guide which essentially had every detail from weeks 7-10 along with the very helpful message of "look at MT1 and MT2 study guides." When it came to final, we were barely tested on 3/4 of the material covered in class, and it was frustrating to see all the work I put in while studying just go to waste. Also, the exams would usually ask vague questions like "What process is this very similiar to?", and I felt like those were extremely general given how specific biochemistry is. You either know exactly what he is asking about, or you don't. This is very unfair to students because it doesn't actually test their knowledge, you are just testing if they can read your mind about what you are trying to vaguely ask. Sucks that this class is MTWF because it can easily feel overwhelming in this class.

My advice:
DO NOT get behind on lectures. Once you fall in the loop of "Oh, I'll watch it later" , it's virtually impossible to catch up with all of the material.

Focus on the study guides he gives you. They aren't really all that helpful bc they aren't specific about what exactly will be tested, but it helped me streamline my studying

Review HWs. Some of the questions on the exams will be reminiscent of these.

This class is by no means an easy class. Anyone that says otherwise is lying to you. However, it is definitely doable with Ryan. I don't think he is the problem.

Lannan is a pretty good lecturer. His slides are clear and his tests definitely reflect his lectures/homework. We were the guinea pigs since it was his first quarter but now that he has material made, I'm sure the future classes will have a better experience. He definitely cares about students learning biochem. I will say the only negative thing about the course was the logistics and how late we were given material, classes were very rushed with little time for questions, TA's made mistakes on grading, etc. But Lannan definitely took our criticism and became a way better instructor throughout the quarter.

I think the negative reviews for Lannan are so unwarranted. I think every professor for this class would be harder than Lannan and way less generous. He was concerned with student learning and his slides were very good considering it was his first time teaching the class. The homework helped me personally and the quizzes were necessary to memorize the content. The class is just memorization so it’s not that hard as long as you put in the work. Overall good professor would take it with him again any day.

A lot of people wrote mean reviews about Dr. Lannan, but I think a lot of people were unfairly judging him just because they did not do well. Honestly, biochem is known to be a class based upon memorization, so a lot of the people that were complaining weren't taking that into account. Although Dr. Lannan was a bit disorganized at first, his lectures got better and better throughout the quarter. Overall, I did feel like I learned a lot and that Dr. Lannan was a pretty good professor to take 153A with.

Lannan's interest in biochemistry shows and I actually did learn quite a bit from his class. However, there are many things in the course that need to be addressed.

Lannan needs to be much more concise in lecture. If he was more concise with his explanations, this would prevent him from constantly going overtime and would allow him to answer some student questions. He also mumbles a lot at the end of his sentences and makes an extreme amount of typos in his slides. I highly suggest he review his slides before publishing them. Furthermore, I’m in lecture 1 and many times he has told lecture 1 students that he explained concepts better in lecture 2, so to go watch the recording of lecture 2. He just needs to prepare his lectures in advance. I would also prefer him to post assignments and study guides with adequate time for students prepare. He also doesn't react well to the grading mistakes he and his TA's make. I was lucky enough to get my regrade requests in before he made the process more complicated. He also did give out extra credit. In the end, he curved the class, which was a relief. But there was a lot of unnecessary confusion and stress from the logistics of the course.

The tests were fair and the averages were decently high, but so many of us had to sell our souls to get there. I understand that it was Lannan's first time teaching this class so future classes probably won't have as many of the same issues with him providing resources late (if he provided them at all) and constantly contradicting himself. Do not take this class if you want a life and/or you are bad at memorizing. You have to know every single word he speaks in every single lecture (slides alone aren't enough to get an A unless you're reallyyyy good at bs-ing). I did well and actually liked the material, but I spent so many nights crying from stress and frustration and also had to miss some events I really wanted to go to. His ego and pettiness was also annoying

A lot of these reviews on BruinWalk are on the opposite sides of the spectrum. But in my opinion, I thought he was a really good prof. In the beginning it was definitely rough but it was his first time teaching this course so I'd cut him some slack. He did a whole 180 around the midpoint of the quarter and his lectures became much more engaging and had a lot less mistakes than the beginning. Some issues is that the slides sometimes had mistakes and that we would go overtime really often. I was in lecture 2 so I think the complaints that lecture 1 had about him is definitely fair. Hope he gets to keep teaching this class in the future since he shown a lot of improvements in his teaching style!