Foreign Perspectives

With the end of primary school just over a week off, you’d think that things would be winding down but, if anything, they’ve been picking up the pace lately.

The P7 project is finally complete bar a couple of small spelling corrections so that’ll be out of the way tomorrow. It’s taken up quite a bit of time over the last few weeks as James has gotten fired up with a number of aspects of it. He wrote the text (just over 4000 words!) but I’d to gather together the photos to illustrate it which was fine for most of them but a few took quite a bit of time to track down. We printed it all out for the first time yesterday and it looks really good.

Alongside that, in school he’s getting ready for the school play which is Friday week. That’s supposed to be quite a big production so it’s keeping them quite busy during the day.

The P7 pupils are having their visits to their new schools at the moment. Priory (one of our fall-back choices) had theirs a few days ago and seems to have created a good impression on those that went along. We’re off to James’ new school next Monday evening.

The other little guy managed to spill custard over his hand on Monday and has had to be taken to the nurse every day to get the dressing changed. He’s also supposed to be getting ready for his part in the other school play so had to go to school today as otherwise he’d not get to do that.

The presentation on Cancer Research: Advancing Patient Care was a quite fascinating overview of the kind of things that Queen’s get up to in the area of cancer research and treatment.

You might have expected that it would have become quickly very apparent that the various speakers came from different outfits within the university but in fact it wasn’t clear at all. Their work is so intertwined that the speaker from the School of Pharmacy could easily have been thought of as from the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology and for that matter the clinical talk could easily have fallen into the realm of the research talks.

As they pointed out, that’s just how it should be. Cancer isn’t defeated yet and so patient treatment is driven by the research done in the centre and in related centres of expertise in the university. Related centres even includes the physics and engineering departments as they provide input into the design of the various scanners and radiation therapy devices.

The line blurs even between the university, the hospital and the health trust with each needing to work closely with the others. It was good to see that InvestNI was putting money into a project that not only should help the local economy but which will also help those who need cancer treatments.

Much as I’d prefer not to be needing their help, it is reassuring that they pull together so many experts for every case coming along at their joint meeting. Actually, it was quite a surprise to see just how many people would be there to discuss possible treatments for each case that comes to them. I know that some people would feel a bit intiminated by having so many people discussing their medical condition but, given the stage of cancer treatment, it seemed like a very practical way to ensure that each patient gets the most appropriate treatment. It was also good to see that in the Q&A at the end that it seemed very much that any of them could have answered any of the questions ie they have a good knowledge of each others fields.

I’m debating with myself what to do education-wise as from October next year at the moment. Yes, I know, it seems a long time off, but some of the things I’m looking at take a lot of preparation time.

What I’m doing this year is fine: first I’m finishing off my life sciences degree, then I’m going to top-up my other degree to the point where I’d be able to claim it. That means the Infectious Disease and Public Health course now, Childhood studies and child psychology next October and Chemical change and environmental applications May next year. After that, the second degree can be parked as it will have enough points to let me claim it but I don’t need to and can add to it later.

If I could find a way of funding it (and the family), I’d probably go for the Molecular Biology and Biotechnology masters full-time at Queen’s but, so far, the funding of the family has knocked that on the head. Other options in that line are possible part-time, or rather distance learning, such as the Structural Molecular Biology at Birkbeck but I’d really like to do the Queen’s one if I can. Related to that there’s the Medicinal Chemistry masters at the OU which is just over the fence from molecular biology though I’d like to have a look at the course texts before committing to that.

Option 2 is to carry on and complete the psychology degree which would take three or four years at a sensible pace.

What I’ve been doing for both the biology and psychology options in the meantime is to go along to all the free presentations that I can find. So far, that’s largely been in the psychology line as they seem to have heaps of essentially day schools as well as standalone lectures. The day schools are largely psychology careers events, each looking at a field in psychology. The clinical psychology one a few months back put me right off that as it would take at least 10 years full-time to get anywhere but the health psychology one this week seemed to offer the possibility of getting somewhere interesting in a much shorter time and with an interesting journey along the way too.

For the biology, there aren’t nearly so many around, basically because there aren’t so many biologists. That said, they run day trips on a biology theme every month or two locally and Queen’s do what are essentially molecular biology seminars now and again too. Molecular biology is a bit of a peculiar subject lying close to but different from medicinal chemistry so you can find talks being done by biology people, medical people and the cancer group who seem to lay in the middle.

James is starting to really get into the project now and has run up getting on for 2000 words on it so far which is almost as much as Wendy or I would be writing for one of our university assignments!

The original split into the four seasons with four or five themes running through each seems to be working out quite well. Having living in a hotel lets him write about how different family life was there compared to life here (he’s had loads to write there). Making a film has let him tell all the different stages in the preparation of the film they made (which has brought back a lot of memories). He’s only just started on the school in France sections but they’re letting him highlight the differences in schooling. French customs is a bit of a mixture where he’s been able to highlight differences and similarities that you might not expect. Finally, Around the area is there to let him say something about the things he’s seen when we’ve been out and about.

We added in the first selection of photos yesterday and it’s starting to look rather well.

Or is it post-primary, grammar or high school? Officially it’s post-primary but that’s only because secondary got a really bad name over the years so the former secondary schools are now called high schools whilst the former high schools didn’t like to be lumped in with them and therefore rebranded themselves as grammar schools.

Anyway, he’s in the final few weeks of primary school now and we’re gearing up to his next school. We’d thought that we were over the hump of the paperwork with the transfer test behind us and school preferences in, but there’s a fair bit of paperwork to complete for his new school already.

The next year will be “interesting” for him with a change from a small handful of subjects to around a dozen different ones and exams for the majority of them next May. The school is quite a lot larger than his primary school and it’s an all-boys school too which’ll make quite a difference I suspect.

A big plus point is that it’s the school that we all felt at home in during our visits there so all being well that feeling will see him through the initial stress beginning at the end of August. He only needs to find his tutor’s classroom as the first year classes go around in groups so some of them should know where to go or at least they’ll be easier to find if they all get lost.