We are very excited to meet you! With this announcement, we would like to provide you with some crucial information about course registration and academic issues. Also, we will have a general meeting by the end of October on your undergraduate studies. Please follow the announcements of the Department and make sure you attend the meeting.

ACADEMIC ADVISORS

Each student is assigned an academic advisor. Please find the name of your advisor on the METU Student Portal. Feel free to approach your advisor with any questions or problems during office hours. You can find the office hour info of the academic staff usually at their office doors.

REGISTRATION PERIOD

Before the beginning of each semester, you need to register for the courses that you will be attending, which is done via https://register.metu.edu.tr/ during the Registration Days (see the academic calendar). You need to make sure that all courses that you will attend are selected.

You need to register for your courses first and approve them. Then your advisor will approve registered courses online. The approvals should finish BEFORE THE REGISTRATION PERIOD ENDS. If not, your status will appear as "unapproved," and you will not appear on class lists.

In the first year, you will only take Must courses. Usually, those are automatically included on your registration page. Still, you need to check and approve them!

ADD/DROP PERIOD

After the first week of each semester, there is an Add/Drop period (please check the academic calendar) when students can add new courses and drop those previously chosen. Again the latest changes should be approved by the advisor. Beware that if approval is missing after the Add/Drop period, you cannot take the course.

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES

To complete undergraduate education, you need to successfully pass all Must courses and a certain number of elective courses. Please read the general information about the Biology Undergraduate Program (BIO) and the Molecular Biology and Genetics Undergraduate Program (GENE) on their respective pages.

BIO students are expected to complete 11 technical and 2 non-technical elective courses.

GENE students are expected to complete 9 technical and 2 non-technical elective courses.

Please beware that you need to compile a certain number of ECTS credits from your courses to be able to graduate from the Department. Please find relevant information here: https://oidb.metu.edu.tr/en/course-credit-system. To learn the ECTS of the courses, you can visit the course information pages.

ELECTIVE COURSES

Regarding the technical elective courses, you should successfully complete these between your 2nd and 4th years. Among them, BIO students need to select AT LEAST 4, and GENE students need to select AT LEAST 3 from our own Department (BIO or GENE courses). The rest can be selected from Math and Science Departments, Engineering Faculty, or Institutes such as Informatics or Marine Sciences.

Fourth-year students may be eligible (GPA>3.5) to take graduate courses if the instructor provides consent (you need to communicate with the instructor in advance).

Non-technical electives can be the courses offered by the Arts-related departments of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (e.g., Sociology or Psychology) and non-science departments.

STUDENT AFFAIRS SECRETARY

You may ask for help with course-specific registration and technical issues from the department student secretary Ms. Emine İlgi (E-Mail: ilgi...metu...edu...tr), whose office is on the first floor (No: 117). For computer system-related issues, Ms. İlgi may also refer you to the central Öğrenci İşleri Sekreterliği (next to the university president's office).

DEPARTMENT EMAILS

Updates related to academic rules (e.g., the definition of technical electives) are announced by the Department Head by email. All students should closely follow e-mails from the Department to prevent graduation problems and other issues.

REPEATING COURSES

It is common for students to fail and repeat courses, but this creates many difficulties for the student in later periods.

First, although service courses offered by the Departments of Mathematics, Chemistry, and Physics are usually offered during summer schools, BIO and GENE courses are rarely -if ever- offered in the summer. Hence, students failing BIO or GENE courses end up with irregular schedules, which make academic life significantly hard for them due to course overlaps. Therefore, we recommend that all students focus on passing their courses in the initial round.

Retaking courses outside the standard curriculum is strongly discouraged. Dropping or withdrawing from a must course will create other problems in the following semesters due to increased course burden and very likely conflicts with your new courses. You must try to do your best to perform in each class. Otherwise, there is no guarantee that you can retake the class or perform better this time with your increasing course burden in later semesters.

We wish you all the best!

— Department of Biological Sciences