Foreign Perspectives

With registration not starting ’til 2pm, I’d a very slow start to the morning and even managed to make a small start on the SXR376 ECA which I’m hoping to get working on a little bit during the week.

Breakfast is a properly professional affair here and Nottingham isn’t anywhere close to being in the same league for catering generally if today is anything to go by. The accommodation is equally a massive improvement with ensuite rooms and what seems like fairly new furniture too.

The first lecture wasn’t until 4.30pm and was split between the general introductory stuff, a broad overview of the week and a first look at the labs that we’ll be working in. Typically for chemistry, there seemed to be an awful lot of glassware and loads of bottles of reagents.

Dinner was a world away from Nottingham’s effort. We were even told that the chef would like us to be down at 6pm so that his food would be at its best! Maybe it’s more that he’d like to get away early but the impression is that he actually meant what he said, definitely a nice change.

The evening lecture at 7.30pm ran, very briefly, over the assessment before moving on to more detail about what we’ll actually be doing. We won’t get the ECA until August 2nd which I’m not too keen on as I like to have a look at what I’m aiming for so I’ll see if I can have a chat to some people who’ve done chemistry schools before to get at least a feel for it.

The second section of the lecture took a massive lurch into serious chemistry and it was only towards the end of it that I started to get my brain into “chemistry mode”. We’d to volunteer to take on board one of three reactions (stabilised Wittig, non-stabilised Wittig and HWE) with the 20-odd teams of two looking into a different reaction under each group.

Aside from not getting the ECA until well after we’ve left, the other differences from the biology schools that I’ve noticed so far are that the lab coats are supplied here whilst the lab notebooks aren’t so I’ve to acquire two of them tomorrow morning.