Foreign Perspectives

A few weeks back when I was at the Queen’s open day the course director for the molecular biology masters kindly offered to send me the course calendar and research topics. I finally got around to dropping him a line yesterday and received a really rapid reply which is encouraging in itself and the content just as much.

The first semester has six hours a week starting with Protein structure & function in the first month and moving on to Advanced molecular biology (Nucleic Acid Structure and Function) in the second. Alongside that is a couple of hours a week of  Foundations for research in the biosciences (including literature review). The second semester has three hours a week of Biotechnology (a certificate course linked with the MSc) and four of Bio-entrepreneurship and Advanced Skills. That doesn’t include lab time or the project but seems almost doable full-time alongside work. Naturally, there’d also be additional study time required in addition to that ie it’s not just 12 hours a week work.

The final semester is taken up entirely with the research project of which the topics cover quite a range with some sounding quite fascinating (eg “Characterisation of macromolecular biosignatures for life detection in hostile environments such as those on Mars”) and others a big yuck (eg “Recovery and recycling of phosphorus from waste”) but with a “something for everyone” feel about the list.

Now “all” I need to do is to a) get a decent mark from my final life sciences course and b) work out how to fit the masters in with real life.

The workload on S346 seems to be over the hump now with no more tutorials scheduled and only the end of module assessment (EMA) to be done.

For a change, the EMA is pretty much the same format as the normal assessments albeit with more, but shorter, questions. The nine questions cover pretty much all of the course in sequence so the first three questions are on the first, mainly biological, book, then there are several on the various chemical syntheses, one on retrosynthetic analysis and it finishes off with a question on a protein synthesis and one to get you to analyse a research paper.

The net effect of that is that some are more difficult than others. For me the first three biological questions and the research paper seem particularly easy so I’ve those completed. The fourth question seems to have been one that’s floored a number of people but, once the method is found, it seems relatively doable.

Easy doesn’t mean quick to do though. As usual for me, chemistry questions take me ages to do – for the EMA something like an hour or two seems about right for me.

Up until last week, the “improvements” to student funding had only affected Open University students in England but the changes arrive in Wales with courses starting from September 2014.

Although the “improvements” had resulted in parity with the full-time students in terms of being able to get student loans, what nobody pushing for this parity seems to have realised that few of the part-time students would be eligible for the funding as it was quite frequently their second qualification and moreover the cost of the courses would rocket when this change was introduced. Thus in England modules went from a typical £700 to £2500 and the concept of transitional arrangements came in to ensure that those who’d already started qualifications would be able to continue them on the same financial basis. Thus the jump in costs only applied to new students or those starting new qualifications.

Sadly, the new arrangements are now being applied in Wales so we can look forward to a substantial drop in Welsh OU students similar to the massive drop that’s already been seen in England.

Will Northern Ireland and Scotland follow the trend? Somehow, I can’t see the Scottish politicians doing likewise this year with the vote coming up but who knows about next  year or for Northern Ireland?

When I kicked off my planned degree with the OU back in 2009, the intention was to do a psychology degree. Snag was that with end in sight of the named science degrees, and me finding biology absolutely fascinating, I ended up taking a slight diversion into what’s shortly going to become my Life Sciences degree.

However, I’ve not forgotten about psychology. In fact, I’ve been a student member of the BPS since back in 2009 and have been going to various events over the years. This year is turning into something of a bumper crop of events with the taster of clinical psychology day a few weeks ago, the annual taster of psychology day today and several more events courtesy of the 55 year psychology anniversary that Queen’s are running this year.

My problem is that I find both biology and psychology fascinating and I don’t know what to do when the life sciences degree is completed later this year.

The clinical psychology event clearly shows that getting into professional psychology is almost certainly not an option so long term it would appear that psychology, whilst fascinating, is a dead-end for me. On the other hand, I’ve not had the opportunity to go to a similar event for biology so it could be that it would be a dead-end too. That said, at the moment, it looks like the path to more advanced biology is doable with, seemingly, no insurmountable obstacles to get into the masters and then doctoral programmes. Apparently, getting into a psychological doctoral programme is a major undertaking requiring the masters but also a whole heap of relevant experience (which you can get via volunteering) that would take some years all by itself.

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.