Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Chemistry’ Category

It would appear that the tutors are getting a whole bunch of enquiries about retrosynthetic analysis as the number and length of the tutorials on that is mounting up at a time in the course when you’d expect fewer of them.

So, last week another two hour marathon followed by a (relatively) short 90 minute one on Monday though my own tutor is doing yet another one this Wednesday (at 9pm!!) and there’s another next week on the day that the final TMA is due so I suspect that numbers attending that will be rather small.

Funnily enough, I’m now into a section of the course which feels relatively easy after the slog that the last few months have been. That’s largely down to it being stuff that was covered very well in the residential in 2012 which not so many people doing the course now had the opportunity to go on. It just goes to show that the residentials really were worthwhile and it’s a shame that 2012 was their final year.

On other fronts, I’ve been I’ve been considering what to do over the coming year. At the moment, the best option seems to be to do Empires (A326) which would bring my points total up to around 280 and take me over 60 points at level 3 i.e. I would be able to claim an open degree that would use up all the points from my “miscellaneous interesting courses” degree. To make it all unique points, I’d likely add Planetary Science & the Search for Life (S283) in the following year or maybe the next depending on what I do after the Life Science degree.

For 2015/15 I’d really like to get going on the biology masters and I’ve been looking around for options on that front. So far, my favourite is the Molecular Biology degree at Queen’s but I’ve not worked out a way of fitting that in with work yet. Second choice is the Molecular Biology degree at Staffordshire which is distance learning but with two residentials. In third place is the Structural Molecular Biology degree at Birkbeck which is online only and that’s really putting me off it but otherwise it looks quite good.

The problems that I have with chemistry in general is that it takes me ages to do the TMAs and that I generally have no idea at all what kind of mark I’m going to get either.

It’s different for other subjects – in most cases my in-exam estimate of my mark is generally within about 5% of the actual mark. In the extreme cases for chemistry, the actual exam mark has been as much as 15% out (fortunately higher in both cases). But whether the actual result is higher or lower than the estimate, it’s a bit disturbing that there’s so much variation from my predictions.

The course seems to be getting a touch more intense as the finish line is approaching. That seems to be down to a combination of two things mainly: 1) the tutorials are getting longer and closer together and 2) the TMAs are larger than the earlier ones. Also increasing the intensity is that the tutorial relevant to the TMA is only a matter of days before the TMA is due which reduces the amount of time available to do them somewhat.

Overall, the course content is quite similar in concept to that of S377 in that it’s a seemingly endless list of methods that don’t have a whole lot of connection between them but which seem to be coming together as the end of the course approaches. Hopefully, my understanding will also come together as the finish line approaches too.

The tutorials for S346 seem to be getting longer and longer as the course progresses.

Thanks to what seems to have been an overly difficult second assignment, the tutorial last week started off with going over a number of concepts that should have been quite familiar to those on the course. Well, they would have been quite familiar but one of the previous courses finished almost two years ago and the other one was, for me, just as long ago. All, thanks, of course, to the Open University withdrawing courses rather quickly and people having to do their courses in often quite peculiar sequences.

Anyway, that meant that a tutorial that should have lasted about an hour had over an hour of “revision” followed by another hour and a half covering what it was intended to cover. The students attending became more and more quiet as the session went on and whether any of those watching live took any of the final chunk in seems debateable. Even watching the recording was a test of endurance and I needed to break it up into several sessions.

I suspect that’s meant that a much larger number than usual are asking for more time to complete the third assignment. Still, at least there’s only one more after this before the final one for the course.

Oh, and there’s what seems likely to be yet another marathon session this evening!

With the Open University changing the rules re their qualifications and dropping modules at a worrying rate, I find that my original plan of finishing off the life sciences degree this year then completing a chemistry degree aren’t really workable anymore.

The life sciences degree is fine as I’m on the final module (infectious disease) for that.

The chemistry option is a different matter as I’ve used most of the “chemistry” modules up in the life sciences degree and really only have ecology and an environmental module plus the final of the three proper chemistry modules available for that, none of which really fire me up. I was also planning on sweeping up all the remaining short modules that I’ve done over the years and which don’t fit in the new style qualifications.

However, it struck me the other day that I can pick up a non-honours degree instead which would let me use up all the short modules and basically bank all my modules for now, with the option of adding honours anytime up to 2019 if suitable modules turn up. To do that all I need is an additional 40 points which would be swept up by the planetary science module that I’ve been meaning to do and the final chemistry module which I wasn’t particularly intending to do.

The plus point of this is that it doesn’t affect the timetable for my possible masters as those modules run November to June and May to October so with the masters (if I go for it) starting in September/October there’d only be a month or so of an overlap with the chemistry module.

The first half of the Drug Design course was covering a lot of relatively familiar ground so I managed to get through that relatively quickly. It’s more of a slog at present as it’s going through endless chemistry methods with little apparent connection between them (much the same problem as with S377).

There’s one iCMA on the molecular modelling software which doesn’t count for the final mark and which is basically just there to give you a run through the features of the software. So far, each of the four TMAs seems quite light in terms of time required which is down to them being “fractional TMAs” ie overall they’re probably equivalent to three. The EMA is supposed to be more or less like just another TMA and isn’t released until three weeks before the course end date which is a bit of a nuisance as I’ll be in the midst of the infectious disease course by then.

Still, so far, so good.