The UMBC Writing Intensive (WI) Program was established to provide an intensive writing experience in the discipline. The idea is to integrate writing into courses in all the majors across campus giving students the opportunity to use what they skills learned in freshman composition courses and gain an understanding of the forms of writing used in their major discipline.
Students who are subject to the General Education Program (GEP) requirements, those who first enrolled as an undergraduate in the Fall Semester 2007 or later, must fulfill the WI requirement.
The Biology WI program combines experience in the undergraduate laboratories with further experience in the departmental 400-level elective courses. The purpose of the program is to model writing a scientific research paper. In the undergraduate laboratories, students focus on writing to explain procedures, to describe data obtained and to explain the meaning of those data. In the 400-level electives, students practice writing reviews of scientific research from the primary research literature.
BIOL electives that have been approved by the UMBC Writing Board for WI status include:
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- BIOL 410 Modeling in the Life Sciences
- BIOL 414 Eukaryotic Genetics & Molecular Biology
- BIOL 420 Advanced Topics in Cell Biology
- BIOL 421 Topics in Molecular Genetics
- BIOL 425 Immunology
- BIOL 426 Approaches to Molecular Biology
- BIOL 443 Advanced Topics in Developmental Biology
- BIOL 445 Signal Transduction
- BIOL 451 Neurobiology
- BIOL 453 Physiological Basis of Behavior
- BIOL 454 Vision Science
- BIOL 456 Plant Molecular Biology
- BIOL 480 Animal Behavior
- BIOL 483 Evolution Genes to Genomes
For a complete and updated list of BIOL writing intensive courses, please see the Undergraduate Catalog.