Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Biology’ Category

In principle, this should be a relatively simple EMA as it’s essentially writing up the results of various experiments that we’ve already done and with the 3000 words spread over four basic experiments there’s not an awful lot to be written about each one.

I’ve spent the past couple of days making a start on it, first gathering together the notes from the various places, then typing up the list of references and finally getting going with the materials and methods section which is probably the easiest one to do. They were very keen on illustrations so I’ve added the first one already.

The results section is probably going to be the most time-consuming one to do as it’s where all the graphs, tables and most of the illustrations will end up. Actually writing it should be fine with around 200-300 words per experiment. I’m guessing at a couple of hours for it overall.

Next up should be the discussion which could be quite complicated although I seem to have quite a lot of notes about it so perhaps not. At the moment the hardest thing seems to be tying together the various strands of the experiment.

The introduction also looks like being quite difficult to do in that it needs to refer to biological principles, supporting articles and generally to set the background for the experiment.

Finally, there’s the abstract and title which would be a doddle but for the tight word count.

Yesterday was the day that everyone had been told that registration for the summer schools in 2012 would open so lots of people got going early and received the confirmation of their registration.

Snag is that somebody opened up the registrations too early. The arrangements with the various host universities aren’t yet completed. So, they closed registrations around 10am.

You’d think that those who’d already registered would be OK, but apparently they’re going to cancel all those registrations and it’s back to the drawing board for the new opening date of August 31st. Quite why they couldn’t have just kept the existing registrations I don’t know. Financially, it’s going to complicate the lives of a number of people as OU refunds can take a number of weeks to come back and with August 31st being only three weeks off, they may not be received before the new registrations need to be paid for.

It generally takes a while to wind down after an OU summer school but this year I’ve a lot less time to do that than I usually have.

Top priority now is to complete an ECA which is due on Wednesday. I’ve most of it done but haven’t yet had a chance to finish the final section nor to check off a printed copy. For reasons which I don’t understand, I can generally pick out mistakes on a paper copy that don’t seem apparent onscreen.

After that, I must get back into the S204 reading which I’ve dropped a few weeks on. There’s the final chapter on plants and then I think it’s five chapters on animals. Then there’s the TMA5 coming up and I also need to get the experiment for TMA6 done. Oh, and there’s the SXR375 ECA to write too!

Very importantly, I’ve also to register for SXR376 and SXR344 tomorrow morning. Infectious disease (SXR376) is the final compulsory summer school for the Life Science degree and I’m hoping to get on the first run of it in July. Organic synthesis (SXR344) is effectively the chemistry counterpart of that and is a course that ordinarily I’d have done in a couple of years time as part of the normal sequence of chemistry/biochemistry courses that I’m doing but, sadly, next year is the final opportunity I have to do it. My plan is to do them back to back and thereby give myself a lot of time to write up the experiments. One problem with doing it is that SXR376 is in Nottingham and SXR344 is in York; I’m planning on doing the trek between them on the Friday afternoon and may need to go back that way at the end of the week.

One plus point is that I’ll only have a 30 point course running alongside the two residentials rather than having a 60 pointer and 10 pointer as I have this year. So, in principle, it should be an easier ride for me.

Oh, and there’s a fair amount of real-life things that need doing as well which’ll make for quite a busy week.

As usual, the final day was something of a winding down for the most part.

In the morning, everything got dumped into the case and, surprisingly, it closed without too much poking and prodding. Typically for the final day, the breakfast reached a new low but then, on the whole, that’s normal for Nottingham where the quality of the meals seems to drop as the week goes on.

We were down quite early as our group was first on (at 9.30). As usual, the quality of the presentations was high given that they were all quite rushed and some of the experiments raised a few points that one wouldn’t have expected from such relatively rushed experiments. Quite a number looked into things that sounded like they’d be rather interesting to follow up in some more detail. Sadly, that’s not going to happen as this is the final strand of the plants courses and there’s no “proper” level 3 course to follow up on points that were raised.

With a short break, all the presentations were completed before noon so it was a leisurely walk up the hill to Cripps for lunch for me. Most people managed to have lunch before departing this year and it was well after 1pm before I bade farewell to Cripps ’til next year. The taxi takes around 30 minutes to get to the airport so I’d loads of time there to look for some prezzies for the little guys although the selection wasn’t great. The adrenalin from the course tends to run out around teatime but, for a change, I wasn’t too bad on Saturday.

Starting off on the experiments was somewhat delayed whilst we waited for the water bath to heat up but with a bit of tightening up on the organisation, we managed to complete the planned experiments around noon.

That left the afternoon to finalise various calculations and get going on writing the presentation which we’d made a small start on this morning when we were waiting for various things to happen. As expected that took quite a lot of work to pull together. The first decent draft of it was ready to print before the lab closed at 5pm and we’d a chance to see how it looked in the lecture theatre. After tea we’d a proper run-through which added a few changes to our list but we should be pretty much ready to at the off tomorrow which is just as well since we’re on first.

No lectures this evening so lots of people were at a bit of a loose end. I had a wander round the grounds and came across what would have been almost the perfect tree for our experiments but at least it should look pretty good when added to the final slide and it’ll make for the great conclusion that we were looking for too.