Foreign Perspectives

I’m debating with myself what to do education-wise as from October next year at the moment. Yes, I know, it seems a long time off, but some of the things I’m looking at take a lot of preparation time.

What I’m doing this year is fine: first I’m finishing off my life sciences degree, then I’m going to top-up my other degree to the point where I’d be able to claim it. That means the Infectious Disease and Public Health course now, Childhood studies and child psychology next October and Chemical change and environmental applications May next year. After that, the second degree can be parked as it will have enough points to let me claim it but I don’t need to and can add to it later.

If I could find a way of funding it (and the family), I’d probably go for the Molecular Biology and Biotechnology masters full-time at Queen’s but, so far, the funding of the family has knocked that on the head. Other options in that line are possible part-time, or rather distance learning, such as the Structural Molecular Biology at Birkbeck but I’d really like to do the Queen’s one if I can. Related to that there’s the Medicinal Chemistry masters at the OU which is just over the fence from molecular biology though I’d like to have a look at the course texts before committing to that.

Option 2 is to carry on and complete the psychology degree which would take three or four years at a sensible pace.

What I’ve been doing for both the biology and psychology options in the meantime is to go along to all the free presentations that I can find. So far, that’s largely been in the psychology line as they seem to have heaps of essentially day schools as well as standalone lectures. The day schools are largely psychology careers events, each looking at a field in psychology. The clinical psychology one a few months back put me right off that as it would take at least 10 years full-time to get anywhere but the health psychology one this week seemed to offer the possibility of getting somewhere interesting in a much shorter time and with an interesting journey along the way too.

For the biology, there aren’t nearly so many around, basically because there aren’t so many biologists. That said, they run day trips on a biology theme every month or two locally and Queen’s do what are essentially molecular biology seminars now and again too. Molecular biology is a bit of a peculiar subject lying close to but different from medicinal chemistry so you can find talks being done by biology people, medical people and the cancer group who seem to lay in the middle.