Foreign Perspectives

Last year in a fit of enthusiasm I managed to sign up for both my first ever biology course and its sort-of associated residential.

As expected, the human biology course was both heavy going parts and thoroughly interesting right through. Having said that, it’s with some trepidation that I approach the revision for the upcoming exam in June: there’s a LOT of revision to be done in what seems to be an awfully short amount of time.

However, it’s now into the initial stages of the sort-of associated residential. I say sort-of because it’s associated with three separate courses (S204, SK277 and SD226) of which I’ve only done one so far and had intended to be in the midst of another one as I write this though I’ll not be doing it for another year or perhaps two on the current plans. The net effect of that is that I need to go over more of the background material than is ideal but, so far, that seems remarkably doable as has all of the biology so far.

Slightly unusually, the website is open before the paper versions of the documents have arrived which has let me get an initial look at them. There’s not really that much: the usual course-team letter, the introductory booklet and a course guide which also contains the background science required of the course. That last one is so comprehensive that I’d say it would be possible to come to this course without having done any of the three related biology courses though obviously you’d need to work that much harder if you did that.

Assessment-wise, it seems easy enough from this vantage point with the usual attendance requirement, marks on two mid-week presentations and a short (1000 word) write-up after the course which collectively seem very doable at this point. Total time required is supposed to be 10 hours going over the preparatory information, the week itself and about 10 hours doing the write-up following the course.

Because of the mix of associated courses, there’s a corresponding mix of experiments to be done over the week. They’re split into three separate themes: regulation and control (aimed at the human biology people), energy (aimed more generally at animals I think but I’ve not read that yet) and plants and carbon dioxide (obviously aimed at plants). All look to be very interesting at this point and that’s a view that seems to be reflected in all the course comments from previous students.

The only problem is that this course plus the human biology one are too darned interesting! That’s created a real dilemma for me in that I was originally intending to be doing a physics degree and, so far, I’m finding the biology both fascinating (much more so than the physics at this point) and a whole lot more doable than I had ever imagined it would be. That fascinating+doable combo has me thinking that perhaps I should jump ship and do the biology degree now. Snag is that with the withdrawal of the named science degrees by the OU, a choice to do that at this point basically rules out the possibility of doing a physics degree later on (though the courses would potentially remain available).