UC Davis First-Year Seminar program offers wide variety of classes.

From romance to cheddar cheese to zombies, the UC Davis First-Year Seminar program has it all. Students can choose from up to 200 seminars each year, with topics ranging from Japanese art to Davis culture to earthquakes to the NFL. Each seminar has an enrollment of up to 19 students and is led by UC Davis faculty.

Zombies

Taught by English and economics professor Sean McDonnell, Zombies is a seminar that studies the culture, history and values behind an array of zombie films, such as “White Zombie” and “Night of the Living Dead.” Each week, the class focuses on a different film to discuss its connection with various topics such as consciousness, societal stability, gender, race and humanity.

“After the first week, […] the students really take over [the discussion],” McDonnell said. “They [come] up with stuff that I [have] never heard of or thought of before.”

The class is driven by student participation and requires students to complete short readings and writings about the weekly film in preparation for the discussion. Students also engage in film criticism and theory, and learn to look at popular culture through an intellectual perspective.

Experimental Magic

Another available seminar topic is the art of magic. Co-instructed by psychology professor Eve Isham and magician Rick Hill, the seminar is a hybrid class focusing on both cognitive psychology and magic. The class encourages students who are interested in magic to investigate the scientific process involved in the art. Experimental Magic focuses on a variety of concepts, including close-up magic, which involves card tricks and similar magic tricks for smaller audiences.

“When you’re doing close up magic, you’re really relying on hard work to get you [the desired effect],” Isham said. “It’s definitely something that [you] could […] appreciate once you learn what it’s all about.”

The class covers experimental designs and demonstrations of tricks, some of which are taught to students over the course of the quarter.

What Makes Airplanes Fly?

Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Mohamed Hafez teaches one seminar each quarter: How Satellites Work in Fall Quarter, Rocket Science in Winter Quarter and What Makes Airplanes Fly? in Spring Quarter. All classes cover the science of aerodynamic engineering using both remote- and robot-controlled models.

“The idea is to introduce to the students — in an informal setting — the concepts of flight,” Hafez said.

Students do not need any specific background to take the class. While some are interested in aerospace engineering, others are simply curious. According to Hafez, the course explores both science and communication skills through presentations, discussions and group projects in which students collaborate to make models.

Psychology of Love

Love might be blind, but not according to science. The Psychology of Love is a class designed to look into a field of social psychology that studies close relationships, particularly in the romantic sector. This quarter, psychology professor Cynthia Pickett dove into her first ever freshman seminar, bringing a class she has taught at the graduate level into the hands of first-year students. The seminar covers the topics of initial attraction, dating and break-ups through non-reading assignments like logging onto OkCupid.com and comparing dating profiles.

“What’s interesting is we all have our own intuitions on how love works because we all have our own relationships and we’ve seen people in relationships,” Pickett said. “The goal of the class is to compare students’ intuitions with what the science is.”

Life After Cheddar

Say cheese! Life After Cheddar is a freshman seminar dedicated completely to the anthropology linked with the food that was never meant to be produced in the first place: cheese. The class is taught by a professor in the Department of Food Science and Technology, Moshe Rosenberg, who has been studying the popular dairy product for over 40 years. A combination of a discussion about cheeses from around the world and a project on European cheese tourism makes for a unique curriculum.

“I believe that there is no pardon to cheese in food, as it is a fascinating and multidisciplinary topic,” Rosenberg said. “And it is really tasty.”

Special bonus for students: cheese tasting is included.

Cultural Offerings in Davis

Exploring digitized Davis through the Davis LocalWiki page, investigating cafe culture at Mishka’s cafe or speaking to the offices of local city council members are all things that students in the Cultural Offerings in Davis freshman seminar might experience this spring. The two-unit class is taught by professor Andy Jones, UC Davis’ poet laureate and chair of the City of Davis’ Cultural Arts and Entertainment Committee.

“Most of the social energy is on campus and there are great opportunities on campus,” Jones said. “But I think there is a missed opportunity as well if students don’t go investigate what the city itself offers.”

This class encourages students to go beyond the classroom by venturing out and observing the local and quaint culture of Davis.

Written by Allie Tsuji and Austin Carroll – features@theaggie.org

UC Davis DNA Sequencing Facility provides services for researchers.

When researchers in Davis need DNA analyzed, they need not go far. UC Davis’ College of Biological Sciences has its very own UC DNA Sequencing Facility to get the job done.

“[The facility] facilitates the researchers’ work here and [tries] to give them a local place that they can drop off and get results back for DNA sequencing as fast as possible,” said Sheryl Bernauer, the manager of the UC DNA Sequencing Facility Lab.

According to its website, the facility is committed to providing quality sequencing and service to all UC campus research facilities.

“We try to really make their quality the best and make sure we also give them feedback because some of them have not done this before,” Bernauer said. “If we see something that they can improve, we actually include notes with all of their reactions and results.”

Shelley Williams, a UC DNA Sequencing Facility research associate, believes that customer service is what makes them stand out from other sequencing facilities.

“We really try to go the extra mile for people and a lot of sequencing companies won’t do that,” Williams said. “You give them money, they sequence your DNA and give you back your results. We troubleshoot, we have 20-plus years of experience in troubleshooting and that’s what sets us apart from other companies.”

The facility offers two different types of services: DNA sequencing and fragment analysis. Fragment analysis is seen more commonly in forensics, in which bands are analyzed to predict the size of the DNA.

According to Bernauer, the facility does not run into many problems; however, many do not understand the time and patience it takes to sequence DNA. It usually takes one business day for DNA to be sequenced and returned, but sometimes customers have different preconceived notions.

“There [are] always different sorts of expectations that people have,” Bernauer said. “They think we can turn stuff around in one afternoon but that doesn’t happen.”

The facility always makes sure that their product turns out as good as possible. When people offer very strong or very weak DNA, it can unbalance the reaction that takes place during the procedure. An equilibrium allows for the longest read possible.

“There are certain organisms that are more challenging to sequence than others by nature of the content of their DNA,” Williams said. “There [are] a bunch of different things that could attribute to something being difficult to sequence. We get so many different types of DNA, and not only that, but we get different researchers doing different protocols on prepping their DNA.”

Therefore, Williams said that they have no control of what comes through their doors.

“The challenge is to make as much as we can — with our hundreds of customers — work the best we can,” Williams said. “We do a really good job at that; that’s why we have so many customers that keep coming back to us.”

The facility is self-supporting, meaning that the business that customers bring in pays for everything, including salaries. The facility also employs students and interns as lab assistants. Typically, students are hired as sophomores and stay at the facility until they graduate. This long-term position allows for the development of close relationships amongst the students themselves.

“We kind of adopt them; they know they can drop in anytime,” Bernauer said. “They sometimes use this place as a study place if they need to get away and have a quiet place. And almost always, it’s kind of synergistic in how they get these other good habits, good studying and hints and tips from other students as well during their career here.”

Fourth-year genetics and genomics major and senior lab assistant Janel Merkel has been a lab assistant since the summer after her first year at UC Davis. She considers the facility her “home base.”

“It’s my rock,” Merkel said. “As everything changes throughout these four years, this has always been my place, my people.”

What Merkel enjoys most about working at the facility is the ability to work with DNA and to truly understand what the sequencing means.

“Just knowing that DNA is suspended in a tiny little drop of water and putting it in a tiny well on a plate and we’re going to sequence it and out comes this amazing genetic data,” Merkel said. “It has really helped me with my science communication skills.”

For over three decades, the UC DNA Sequencing Facility’s business has been going strong due to the quality of their DNA sequencing and customer service, and it hopes to continue serving the community for years to come.

Written by: Jacqueline Chu – features@theaggie.org