Likewise in school it was a bit of a "lifeless recitation of names".

The good thing though in biology as opposed to physics and chemistry is knowledge is advancing quickly - since I went to college in the 1980s physics and chem are much the same but all sorts of new stuff has been figured out in biology and it's rapidly moving forward on things like how does the dna sequence turn into a given body design, how did life start, how do you make covid in a lab, is there likely to be bacterial life on Mars and so on. An interesting thing I learnt recently is bacteria may have partly shaped/made the continents. The idea, roughly, is they live deep in the crust and kind of rot it so part collapses into the magma.