Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Open University’ Category

With the change to FlyBE this year, it was well after 12 before I reached the Nottingham campus. There’s only the level 3 summer schools running this year so it was quiet the whole day.

Surprisingly the taxi was the same price as the last two years (Lenton on 0115 9 781 781 do the airport pickups for £19.50, just over half the price of the airport taxis; it’s best to arrange for them to collect you at the petrol station just outside the airport parking area as otherwise they charge for the airport parking.

Registration runs on ’til after 3pm with the introductory lecture in the biology building just after 4pm so I took the time to stock up on a few nibbles at the hospital shops (the campus shops are closed over the weekend).

It was a blue dot this year signifying that I’m in SXR376 rather than the green dot of the SXR375 people.

The introductory spiel from the admin people, learning advisor, OUSA and the course director was a joint one for both SXR375 and SXR376 kicking off just after 4pm and running on to almost 5pm. That was immediately followed by the course specific stuff in our respective laboratories. Just one lab for the course again this year as there are only about 30 of us but we’ve been split up into two groups to do the experiments over the next two days, which we’ll be doing in groups of three. For a change, we actually did some lab work this evening to get us back into the swing of pipetting.

In the room is a phone (free internal calls), wired internet connection (you need a cable for this which you can get (free) in the Cripps security office; the wifi varies from poor to non-existent in the rooms), desk, tea/coffee tray with kettle, sink, wardrobe, towels (with soap & shampoos) and a single bed. The shower-room and toilet is shared  by about half a dozen rooms. No Internet worth talking about this year as there’s some network problem that can’t be fixed until the computer people return on Monday.

Thanks to the excellent pre-exam briefings by the course team, this was one exam that didn’t seem to cause people anything like the level of anxiety that others have been known to do.

As noted in the earlier post, the chemistry exam follows a very similar pattern from one year to the next. Almost to the point of being identical in many respects. Thus, question 1 is always a box diagram question and, as the course team commented, just about everyone gets full marks for it. In fact, the majority of the short questions are very similar from one year to the next and, because they follow the order of the books, you can pretty much bank on, say, question 7 being on whatever question 7 was on last year. That’s not to say that they’re all doable as it’s a massive course and few people revise everything but it does mean that selective revision is quite effective.

That follows through largely for the longer questions too although as the years have gone on, there seems to be more of a tendency to have one question covering parts of one or two other related areas ie if you’re doing selective revision then you’ll not be on totally firm ground all of the time. Moreover, the second and third longer sections are less easy use focused revision with than in the first section (which I think is always a choice between kinetics, orbitals and retrosynthetic analysis). Or perhaps it’s just that I’m less keen on the section C  and Dquestions?

What I did find pleasantly surprising was that even on my pessimistic in-exam estimate, I was well clear of 40%. That’s not so much because the exam was easy but that the whole exam is broken up into what’s effectively a very long list of short questions, albeit with several grouped into topics (ie the long questions).

Just one more full day of revision to go and the exam will be upon me.

The chemistry course has been something of an interesting journey for me. It began just a week or so after the S204 (biology) exam so the first few weeks went in a bit of a blur as I recovered from that. The next few months ran alongside a full-time computer course which ate up a lot of the time that ordinarily would have been available for study and then it was on to the new job which ate up even more time. Not a good recipe for great performance on the course and the marks tracked the availability of time for the course pretty well ie not great after the first assignment. Funnily enough, now that I’ve had a fairly good run at the revision, I feel reasonably confident about the exam (the confidence could dissipate quite quickly on Tuesday morning though!).

I began the revision a few weeks ago based on the “bookmarks” and chapter summaries that the course team very helpfully pulled out. Together those run to 152 pages which is fairly comparable with the amount on S204 if you take into account the different font size. The information density is so high that it takes ages to read through and I wish I’d started a few weeks earlier as my target of a book’s worth per day made for a very hard slog at times.

Stage two was based around the past papers and two tutorials relating to those. Whilst in S204 there were chunks of the books classed as optional, in S205 the options are enshrined on the paper itself. As usual, the short questions are from the entire course but since it’s 8 from 12 you can effectively omit one or possibly two books and still do quite well. I find that in practice I’m able to pick 6 to 8 questions that I can do very well from each of the past papers which equates to around 25% to 30% of the overall marks for the paper ie in principle I should almost have passed just on the short questions.

The longer questions are divided up into three sections and you pick 1 from 3 in each of those sections. The first section seems the easiest with substitution/elimination and retrosynthetic analysis that seem fairly doable in each of the papers. The second section has kinetics and spectroscopy which generally seem quite doable alongside orbitals and bonding which don’t so a reasonable selection again. The final section seems the most difficult potentially with a VSEPR question that can be all over the place, a Born-Haber cycle that’s mostly doable and what could very much be a nightmare book 9 question. Still, hopefully with 25% in the bank from the short questions I won’t need a massive amount from the longer ones to achieve a pass.

I’m planning on going over my one page of notes tomorrow and perhaps to look in more detail at the crystals book and, of course, there’s the exam bag to be packed.

This year the bag will be a lot more packed than usual. There’s the normal pens, pencil, spare pen and pencil, ruler, calculator, spare calculator (yes, I know, paranoid), wine gums (I’m expecting a number of “wine gum moments” for this exam), Lucozade and passport (you need photo ID for the exam). To that are added the molecular model kit (although I’ve yet to see a question that required it) and the data book. Since I have them from the S204 exam, I’ll likely take along the coloured pencils and drawing kit: I’m sure that some day I’ll do an exam where I’ll use them.

As with the S204 exam, there’s no rest period afterwards as I’ve to get the CMAs for both the residentials done before the end of the month and get back into the SD329 reading as there’s an assignment for it due just after I get back from the residentials.

With starting the new job the week before Easter, this is my first week of work holidays in over eight years!

As we normally do, it was off to Portrush on Easter Monday. Usually, there’s a mass of traffic along the way, a traffic jam a mile or two long going into the town, pretty much nowhere to park, wall to wall crowds everywhere regardless of the weather and no money in the cash machines. This year the traffic seemed a bit light on the way up, there was no traffic jam at all, loads of parking spots even quite close into the town, hardly any crowds and money in the cash machines even in the late afternoon as we were leaving. We didn’t even have to queue in the café and there was next to no queuing in Barry’s either. Methinks that Portrush is going to have a tough time financially if they can’t fill up even on Easter Monday.

Ongoing throughout the holiday has been the assignment for SD329 a biology cum psychology course that runs through to October. Although it was very much a last minute thing, it was a much easier assignment than the chemistry one which I’ve been ruminating over for weeks. I wasn’t too keen on the breakdown of every section of every question into a specific word count but it did prompt me to write a little more on some questions than I otherwise would have done which, hopefully, will improve the marks. Anyway, it’s off so it’s just the final chemistry question to complete tomorrow.

I came across a neat site which converts any website into an Android application so I’ve put on four trial ones. They look fine on the ASUS tablet but I’ll need to rejig the style sheet a bit to tidy up their appearance on Android phones. I may need to get myself an Android phone to really try them out too. No downloads as yet but then they’ve only been on a couple of days.

The materials for the Infectious Disease course arrived yesterday. No big surprises there as I picked up a copy of the pre-course briefing last year. I’ll have to get going on reading it properly soon as I want to get that well underway before I need to start the chemistry revision and indeed the pre-course work for the chemistry summer school for that matter. Oh, and the two assignments that’ll fall due in the midst of that revision time too. It’s going to be a hectic time for me in May and June.

The last couple of months have proved to be a very hectic time indeed.

The web design course finished at the end of February and turned out to be far more helpful than I could have imagined. What it let me do was to implement a massive upgrade to the inns sites and alongside that to similarly improve the SEO. Both tasks are still ongoing but only because the initial upgrade made it a whole lot easier to implement subsequent improvements. That in turn has made it viable to really ramp up the promotion of the sites and we’re pulling in new additions pretty much as fast as we can cope with them.

Following on from that course there’s a placement with a web company. In my case, it turned out to be what was seemingly the perfect job for me, aside from the salary. Unfortunately in many ways a full-time job came up just a couple of weeks after I started there so I was off to that at the start of April. Not nearly such an inspiring job but the pay is welcome.

In between the two we managed to finally get around to our major moving exercise from France. Somehow our estimate of half a Luton van of stuff (which we took from the photos taken when we first arrived in France) was way off and not only did we have pretty much a full Luton van but also a very packed car and still need a final car-run to clear out what we had to leave behind.

The job is causing a major readjustment for us all. For John, it’s the first time in his life that Daddy hasn’t been around all day every day for him. James is nearly as bad as he was only two when we moved to France. It’s an adjustment for Wendy too as I’m not around to look after the kids. And for me, notably in the study time which just ain’t there which is going to make the next few months very difficult indeed as the study doesn’t drop down to part-time until September.

To easy us in a little, I’ve taken the Easter week off which, hopefully, will give me a chance to catch up on some things.