Foreign Perspectives

The week has really flown in and it’s hard to believe that there’s only a day and a half to go.

We collected our horse chestnut leaves this morning on the way down to the lab. First thing was to finalise the experimental plan that I’d knocked up last night. With that approved we set to work on comparing the photosynthesis of normal leaves with those infested with tree miner. That took a lot longer than expected as we had to do a full oxygen electrode run on the infested leaf and we needed to find out how much chlorophyll was in each leaf sample so we finished the afternoon with only one of the three planned replicates completed. Not a disaster but it means that we’ll need to spend a couple of hours tomorrow morning completing the experimental phase.

The final compulsory tutorial was on making presentations with the optional one going through various aspects of the end of course assessment.

In principle, we hope to complete the experiments by around 11am tomorrow which should leave us quite a while to write up the presentation. We’re first up on Friday morning which is a good thing in many ways as we don’t have to worry about seeing some fantastic idea from an earlier presentation and not being able to incorporate it into our own. It also makes for a rather relaxing end to the course for us.

The planned 1pm finish looks like it could be more like 11.30am though I may as well have lunch here rather than sitting an extra hour or more in the airport.