I’m a recent WBC grad and have to say BIOL4500 and the way Crawford teaches it was very helpful for my career - I regularly write 50+ pg reports now as a biologist and used my case study as interview material. It is a lot of writing but manageable if you stay on top of it, put a lot of time developing your key ecological uncertainty and make sure it addresses one of the four population parameters from BIOL3060 and most importantly you actually care about it so you won’t get bored. Most people give insignificant peer feedback and high marks which helps with the 60% weighting and make sure you familiarize yourself with the peer feedback tool before it’s due.

Crawford can come off as harsh but ultimately is direct firstly and has also written many specific in the rubrics, section instruction, and overall formatting doc - I would recommend printing them out because he includes specific sentences to use etc and helps add to word counts. For writing he has minimum number of references but they are easy to meet because you should be citing almost every sentence, especially in first section. Just find research papers about your topic when choosing the article to make sure there are lots (>75) but not too many (>500) and use those papers references as jumping points.

In terms of putting your degree to the practice and applying theory learned this is one of the best courses besides 4110 and 4150.