Foreign Perspectives

The morning started with a bit of a delay whilst we waited for the tissue samples to be prepared and brought round but after that it was a fairly intensive session through to noon. Everyone was doing a different experiment which we’d devised in the final session last night which made for something of a whirlwind of activity. I’d say this was the most interesting session so far as we weren’t following directions but rather working through our very own experiment.

As an experiment I thought that I’d get exactly the same meal as yesterday to see if the total came to the same. It did so it would appear that everyones’ initial impression that the cashiers were making up the prices on the spot is unfounded.

The reason for the manic session on posters on Monday evening became clear after lunch. On Monday we were given a really bad write-up of an experiment which we (in groups of 2 to 6) had to convert into a fairly sensible scientific poster over the course of an hour or so. That session gave us loads of ideas from what others had done in the time which we were to put to use this afternoon. At the start we all thought that an hour would be more than enough to prepare the poster but it took almost everyone the full two hours to get it completed and even then there was all kinds of compromises.

I was finished relatively early and so managed to get over to the small shopping centre in the Portland Building. The Students’ Union shop there is basically a small supermarket but had the Nottingham University teddy bear that I’d been looking for. As well as that there’s Boots (almost exclusively a chemist branch), a hairdresser, fairly large bookshop and food court (that’s closed outside of term-time though). The shops close at 5.30pm so stocking up at them would have been doable if I’d known where they were. Still, no harm done there for me though I gather that some people have been regular customers over the last few days.

After dinner in Cripps we’d to trek back down to the “poster room” in the main hospital to fill in a reflection form on how our own poster stacked up against the others. On the whole I think that our group seemed to do a more scientific style of poster in comparison to the other two groups where the tendency seemed to lean towards a more populist approach to design. I also ran across the tutor blogging about this course.

With an early finish (8pm) I managed to get into the resources centre to have a glance at some of the course texts for things that I’ll be doing over the next year or two. Both S204 and S320 seemed remarkably readable with a number of familiar diagrams as I flicked through the pages which is reassuring.

It’s looking pretty much certain that we won’t be using that big lump of a book which they tell you that you have to bring along. To be fair that’s partly because I read through the recommended reading sections in the course guide but even if I hadn’t I’d not have missed it (apart from the weight that is). Supposedly we’ll need it for the ECA but I’d not be surprised if we didn’t.