Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Biology’ Category

Signals & Perception was a really interesting course but, for me, it wasn’t as satisfying as it might have been as I ended up having to slot it in between a whole lot of other stuff which made it feel like a number of separate courses as it was very much a stop-go experience for me courtesy of me ending up with a little too many separate courses during the year.

It wasn’t meant to be that way but starting a new job in April was something that I’d not allowed for and in particular I’d not allowed for it roughly equating to another 60 point course. Net effect was that April to October was a bit of a nightmare time-wise for everything (not counting real life either!). Thankfully, the exam yesterday marks the end of that period and I notionally have a week off before the next course starts and it’s only a 20 pointer too.

Although an overly busy time, it’s been a really interesting roller-coaster of a year. Last October saw me starting S205, the main chemistry course, with a short autism course (SK124) kicking in a month later. SD329 weighed in in February and was going fine ’til the job offer came through in March. Early June disappeared in preparation for the S205 exam and the second half of June went with the pre-course assignments for the biology (SXR376) and chemistry (SXR344) summer schools which took place in the first couple of weeks of July. Coming back from them, it was straight into the assignment for SD329 before spending most of August on the assignments for the summer schools. In September it was catch-up with SD329 and then the final assignment for it before diving into revision for the exam. Not a recommended approach but, passes permitting, it means that I’m over the hump of the degree and have only two 30 point courses and a 10 pointer to complete it by 2014.

I was a bit brain-dead last night but managed to have a first proper look at what’s coming up in the Metals & Life (S347) course. First glance, it appeared like a lot of reading but it’s about 60 pages over three weeks, not the one week that I’d thought initially. Also, it seems to be run like a biology course which dives into some chemistry along the way so, hopefully, not too bad. I’m not overly keen on having the exam at the end of April though as that’ll be a couple of months into S377 which has a bit of a reputation of being very difficult.

Not to be forgotten is some preparatory reading for S377 which needs done between now and Christmas. That’s around 250 pages from S204 which we didn’t need to cover during S204 itself but which is required reading for S377.

I thought that the SD329 exam wasn’t too bad. With interdisciplinary courses, there’s what appears to be a totally frightening amount of information of differing types to go over and starting the revision is scary. Once I got well into it, things seemed to come together though and I ended up with 5 or 6 quite good answers out of the 8 short questions and only one pretty poor one. For the longer questions I think I’ve two fairly good ones and one reasonable out of the three. More than enough to pass I think but the overall result could be anywhere from 50 to 70 as I was dreadful at estimating my assignment marks during the course.

It’s been a bit hectic over the past few weeks as I reach the finishing line with SD329.

The final TMA didn’t turn out to be so bad in the end although I don’t think that having a TMA completion date less than two weeks before the exam was a particularly good idea.

I started the revision a few weeks ago but with the TMA needing done too,  there wasn’t much more than the revision preparation actually done over the time. I started the revision properly during the week and, so far, it doesn’t seem too bad on the first proper run through.

The course itself was as fascinating as billed. It’s an interdisciplinary course and the mix of biology, chemistry, physics and psychology changed quite markedly between the various components of the course. For instance, with vision there was quite a lot of physics, with proprioception the emphasis was more psychological, taste & small were mainly chemical and overall there was a lot of biology.

Our final tutorial is later this morning which also seems rather late for an exam tutorial as there’s now little  more than a week before the exam but with the due date of the final TMA being earlier in the week, I guess the final tutorial couldn’t have been much earlier.

Started way back in the early 1970s, the OU science summer schools have been a fixture of life for generations of students. The preparatory materials arrived shortly after Easter with the usual flurry of activity working through the preparatory material, watching the associated videos and organising the transport to and from the school.

Sadly, that’s all finished now. The final science summer schools finished in August and tomorrow the assignments for the schools are due in Milton Keynes.

Although there was quite a bit of work for me to do the assignments for the two summer schools this year, I’m missing it already. For the biology school, I really got a handle on what we’d been doing in Nottingham as I worked through the assignment and was suitably impressed by what we’d done during the week. With the chemistry school, there didn’t seem to even be a minute to sit down and think about what we were doing during the week but I’m really impressed to have made a few drops of the female sugarbeet moth pheromone all by myself (you don’t work in a group in the chemistry school): not a lot you might think but it would take a whole lot of moths a long time to make even that much.

Next up for me is going to be S347 Metals & Life which starts a week after the psychology exam in October.

With several groups working well into the evening yesterday, the conclusions team was probably not the best team to be on.

Some last minute discussions on our immunocytochemistry presentation resulted in a few updates to what we said but, for a change, no last minute changes to the text of the presentation itself. Unlike last year, we all had at least some knowledge of the various topics being presented which made for a more interesting feel to the morning I think. Once they were completed, we even had some feedback on how well we’d done or rather on some improvements that we might make for the next time.

And then it was time to go our separate ways.

It took a little longer than expected to reach the train station but I’d still got loads of time to wait around. The first class ticket was definitely worthwhile and the meal broke up the journey quite nicely. As it turned out, it was just as well that I took it as there was nothing open on campus by the time I arrived.

Although, at first glance there seem to be cafés and restaurants everywhere on the York campus, outside term-time the opening hours are rather limited. On Friday night there’s only one open and it closes at 7pm. The supermarket in the market square is open Monday to Friday 9am to 5.30pm with the little shop beside it only open from 9am to 2pm Saturday and 9am to 1pm Sunday.

In principle, the remaining lab work looked like it would only take an hour or so but in practice the final washes and particularly getting the slides mounted took ages and we didn’t complete our photography of them until lunchtime.

That in turn meant that we were running rather later than expected in starting the preparation of our presentation for tomorrow. So late that we have one final image to be inserted and we’ve not yet had a full run-through. Mind you, we are the penultimate presentation so we may have time to polish it up a little more before we’re on (although probably not if last year is any guide).

Anyway, that’s the lab work done for this course and we’ve only to do our 10 minute presentation tomorrow before we all go our separate ways. Well, not quite all as a fairly large number of people seem to be doing two residentials this year.

It’s off to see about reading up on my section of the presentation now (short, but with lots of potential for questions).