Mary Chey

This professor has taught: FIRE120, FIRE198, FIRE298, FIRE398, OURS199

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Mary Chey FIRE298 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 01/02/2026	Dr. Chey is the sweetest, most understanding professor you'll ever come across. She clearly cares for each student's success, and if you come to her with problems, she'll work with you to resolve them. I'll admit that she sometimes doesn't explain concepts at the depth needed for people without a strong biology foundation, but if you ask her about the parts you're confused about, she'll happily re-explain. I've never felt belittled, and she was always open to questions and suggestions for improvement. She does cold call, but she's pretty encouraging even if you get the answer wrong. She'll try to lead you into thinking of the correct answer instead of handing it to you. If you message her on Slack, she usually responds quickly. She's also often available in her office during lab hours, either for lab-related questions or other concerns. For both FIRE198 and FIRE298, you mainly work in teams of 3-4 students. FIRE198 is more focused on learning the background of our projects and practicing wet lab techniques. FIRE298 is when we actually started working on our research project. Both semesters have some simple assignments sprinkled throughout and end with a final assignment that summarizes what you've worked on that semester. Dr. Chey provides plenty of feedback on final assignments, like research proposals or final reports. Her feedback may seem overwhelming, but it helps a lot in finding weak spots in your understanding of the project. You also get a feel for the type of comprehensive writing that is expected in research settings. She gives you a preliminary grade that will seem pretty low, but that is to be expected for a student's first draft. Your final grade on these assignments will be 100%, but the preliminary grade just helps you see where you can improve. I actually appreciated the volume of feedback and the low preliminary grade since I knew that Dr. Chey read through my team's paper thoroughly and gave us clear ways to improve it. By the end, you will have a polished research product that you can present with confidence. The lab activities we completed during FIRE198 honestly could have been explained better, both to PRMs and students. However, since the Gene Silencing stream is new, Dr. Chey often asks for feedback on her assignments so she can improve them for future semesters. Most of these activities were completely doable, especially since PRMs were there to guide you through confusing parts. If there was anything confusing to the PRM, they could ask Dr. Chey, and she would note it down for future revisions. The journal articles were dense reads, requiring you to re-read them multiple times to understand. The journal articles were directly relevant to our work in the stream and were co-written by Dr. Chey. Due to this, Dr. Chey has an in-depth understanding of these articles. She will ask questions about them in lecture and try to guide you to the right answer using hints before explaining the most important points. I felt like this was good practice for understanding how to digest a journal article, especially if you want to work in research. This stream is a big time commitment. As a student, you are expected to be in lab around 6 hours a week, although this could be more or less depending on the week. Keep in mind that we are working with live animals, so our project timeline partially depends on the worms' lifecycle. Some weeks could be slow while we wait for the worms to grow up, while others we are rushing to genotype all of our worms before they starve. We don't do much coding with R or NetLogo; this stream is more focused on wet lab work. By the end of FIRE298, you will have plenty of practice with lysis, PCR, gel electrophoresis, and learning how to care for C. elegans. You also develop soft skills like communication, collaboration, critical thinking, adaptability, etc. As a PRM, your time commitment depends on the number of credits you take. I'd recommend signing up for 2 credits, or 3 credits if you have a lot of time in your schedule and love the project. I've signed up for 3 credits, which is a minimum of 10 hours in lab per week, but pretty much every PRM willingly stays in lab over the minimum amount. I've probably averaged around 14 hours a week in lab. Being a PRM is a worthwhile experience if you're interested in research. Not only do you further develop the same wet lab skills and soft skills you work on as a student, but you also improve your leadership abilities, learn about lab maintenance, and learn new wet lab techniques. You learn how to design primers for genotyping, make the HRT for CRISPR, and identify piRNA binding sites, among other things. You have fewer assignments than as a student, so you can focus on advancing your project and helping your students. You also have a closer relationship with Dr. Chey, and she helps ensure that your project is on track. Dr. Chey was always so helpful with troubleshooting our project and helping us brainstorm next steps. She really teaches you how to think like a scientist. Overall, I would highly recommend the Gene Silencing stream if you're interested in wet lab research. It's a good introduction to research and can help open up more research opportunities later on. Even beyond just wet lab or soft skills, you learn about the research process. Not every week shows progress, and that can be demoralizing. By working with your team and consulting Dr. Chey, you learn how to examine these obstacles from different angles to find a path forward. This stream was definitely the highlight of my undergrad experience.
Mary Chey FIRE120 Expecting an A Anonymous 12/18/2025	I had Dr. Chey for Fire120 and I thought it was a pretty good class. Sometimes it was a little confusing what she expected from the assignments but if you ask shes always willing to clarify and answer questions. Her grading was also really nice.
Mary Chey FIRE398 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 12/16/2025	FIRE398 is someone who is a PRM and has likely been in the stream for awhile, so take it from me Dr. Chey is one of the best instructors I have ever had. Over the past two years working with her through 198 and 298 as well she has always had my best interest at heart and cared about my learning. I will say she makes it difficult to learn about the research content but honestly that was so important because it pushed me to be a better researcher. She will help you to learn content and genetics if you reach out to her and she will help you with questions and procedures. You definitely won’t just get the answer handed to you, but again that’s just what research and even life is. You are going to be pushed to reach deadlines and it is going to seem hard but I promise that you can accomplish it. Don’t expect this content to come easy and don’t expect to be given hand outs of information. Research is hard and this program helps people to get prepared for research, and I will confidently say that I am prepared to go into other research after having worked with Dr. Chey.
Mary Chey FIRE298 Anonymous 12/09/2025	If you're able to decide which FIRE stream to do, DON'T do gene silencing. It's a super interesting course but the professor is so terrible. This is the most unorganized class and by far one of the hardest (for no reason). Dr. Chey knows a lot about what she does, it's impressive, but she has absolutely no ability to teach. There are no rubrics and she expects everyone to understand what she's been studying for years. Save yourself the hardship.
Mary Chey FIRE198 Expecting an A+ Anonymous 06/25/2025	As a bio major, this stream was a really cool opportunity for me to get into a wet lab, and it helped me to get into another bio lab. Dr. Chey is a really sweet professor and can be very understanding. As someone with a disability, I also wouldn't call her ablist. She was understanding towards me, considering it's important to stick to a timeline when working with organisms. Her office was always open for questions, and I could have great conversations with her. At the same time, it's obvious that she's a researcher, not a teacher. We spent the first week of class talking about basic genetics, then all of the sudden got a ton of complex genetic information thrown at us. She didn't prepare us well for our projects, and gave us terrible grades when we didn't meet the expectations she never outlined. I wouldn't choose this stream if you're not interested in bio.
Mary Chey FIRE198 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/13/2025	This is honestly one of the most awful teachers/professors I've ever had. She knows all the content perfectly well, but she struggles to actually teach the content in a digestible manner, leaving the ENTIRE class confused on what we are doing at all times. The first few weeks of class feel utterly useless then tons of information is thrown at you at once and you're expected to already have a PHD in worms. It seems like she purposefully targets those who don't know the content, as she will cold call on you and god-forbid you have the wrong answer because she will literally wait until you guess the right one. The assignments are confusing and without the help of the TAs/PRMs (even all of them but one don't know what is going on or how to do anything in this horrendous lab) holding our hand our group would've been so lost. I joined this stream as a Computer Science major with promises of coding in R, but we literally have only done an introductory online course on it and NOTHING so far in the lab. If you wanted a good lab experience going into college or are attending the University of Maryland because of FIRE, don't go into the Gene Silencing Stream. TLDR: Don't ever take this horrendous professor.
Mary Chey FIRE198 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/13/2025	This is honestly one of the most awful teachers/professors I've ever had. She knows all the content perfectly well, but she struggles to actually teach the content in a digestible manner, leaving the ENTIRE class confused on what the fuck we are doing at all times. The first few weeks of class feel utterly useless then tons of information is thrown at you at once and you're expected to already have a PHD in worms. It seems like she purposefully targets those who don't know the content, as she will cold call on you and god-forbid you have the wrong answer because she will literally wait until you guess the right one. The assignments are confusing and without the help of the TAs/PRMs (even all of them but one don't know what is going on or how to do anything in this horrendous lab) holding our hand our group would've been so lost. I joined this stream as a Computer Science major with promises of coding in R, but we literally have only done an introductory online course on it and NOTHING so far in the lab. If you wanted a good lab experience going into college or are attending the University of Maryland because of FIRE, don't go into the Gene Silencing Stream.
Mary Chey FIRE198 Expecting an A- Anonymous 05/13/2025	This is honestly one of the most awful teachers/professors I've ever had. She knows all the content perfectly well, but she struggles to actually teach the content in a digestible manner, leaving the ENTIRE class confused on what the fuck we are doing at all times. The first few weeks of class feel utterly useless then tons of information is thrown at you at once and you're expected to already have a PHD in worms. It seems like she purposefully targets those who don't know the content, as she will cold call on you and god-forbid you have the wrong answer because she will literally wait until you guess the right one. The assignments are confusing and without the help of the TAs/PRMs (even all of them but one don't know what is going on or how to do anything in this horrendous lab) holding our hand our group would've been so lost. I joined this stream as a Computer Science major with promises of coding in R, but we literally have only done an introductory online course on it and NOTHING so far in the lab. If you wanted a good lab experience going into college or are attending the University of Maryland because of FIRE, don't go into the Gene Silencing Stream.
Mary Chey FIRE198 Anonymous 04/28/2025	Awful professor. She uses outdated material to teach R. Her slides are walls of texts that are physically painful to parse. She does not adequately prepare the class for the level of genetics concepts that she teaches, resulting in confusion. Class assignments often have frustratingly vague or outright unclear instructions. On top of all that, she's ableist.