Foreign Perspectives

I still remember the day over 30 years back when I first went into the Bookshop at Queen’s with my Dad and we came out with a pile of books for my courses that we could barely carry between us.

Back in those days it was the only proper bookshop in Belfast and it carried books on every subject that you could imagine. Not just on the topics taught at Queen’s either as it had a range of normal books that was far wider than you’d have seen in any other bookshop around at the time. So, over the years I called in now and again despite the difficulties in parking nearby and I don’t think I ever left without purchasing something that I’d been looking for nor without buying something that I hadn’t been looking for but saw by chance.

It was always the kind of bookshop that browsing around meant that you came across something of interest. That’s something that you don’t get online as you tend to be shepherded into books similar to those you’ve already bought – with the Bookshop at Queen’s you could come across something totally different to anything you’d bought before yet totally fascinating despite that. Thus, for example, I have the brilliant little book Learning the Law which, despite it being a subject that I’ll probably never learn, is quite fascinating and there are many equally engrossing books in my bookcase just like that.

But today I made what will almost certainly be my last couple of purchases as the bookshop will be closing its doors permanently on Saturday. Sadly, they’d already packed up the masses of academic books and it was a couple of typically diverse purchases that I ended up choosing: The Celts and Collins Easy Learning Greek. Would I ever have bought them on Amazon? Well, no, because they’d a) not have turned up on any searches that I’d have been likely to use and b) as they’re outside my normal reading, they’d not have turned up on my suggestions either.

What finished it off seemed to be a combination of factors. That difficulty in parking is a lot worse now than it was 30 years ago for a start and with a major chain bookshop beside the city carparks I’d say that the casual browser largely relocated. Internet purchases are rife these days, of course, but thanks to the demise of the Net Book Agreement there’s also extensive discount which is probably more of an issue. Strangely, the prices of books or, rather, of academic books are much the same now as they were 30 years back which is in itself something of a problem as the mark-up percentage means that they’re less profitable than they used to be. The availability of lecture notes online is probably not a major factor as even 30 years back the lecturers handed out copies of notes for many courses for what was the relatively small fee of £5 or so. What could be a big issue is that students just don’t have as much free cash as they did 30 years ago: not only did we not have student fees back then but we received a grant of around £1000 or so each year (more if you lived in a flat) thus buying books means borrowing from the Bank of Mum & Dad.

It’s sad to see the bookshop go but I do hope that when times are better that it will be possible for it to rise again.

With the upcoming change to OU financing in England, there are debates going on in pretty much every OU forum about the implications these days.

Most of that debate centres around the Transitional Arrangement (TA) period from 2012 through to 2017 that applies to existing students in England (the changes don’t apply to OU students elsewhere in the UK nor to those overseas nor to postgraduate students).

The basic idea is that existing students will continue to pay the current fees up until 2017. However, the OU students are a very diverse bunch and there are loads of exceptions to the norm.

What happens if you’re studying towards two or more degrees at once? In other universities that would be very unusual but in the OU it’s quite common. Thus, many physics students will be working towards a maths degree, many biology students towards a chemistry degree, etc. At present, the ruling seems to be that you will only be able to study towards one degree at a time but in a number of cases that will mean that students would need to switch degrees during the year. In my own case for example, whilst I am currently only doing life sciences courses, in October I will be doing a chemistry course that runs to June and starting a psychology course in February. Thus from February to June I will be studying for both chemistry and psychology degrees and indeed on my current plans I will be doing one course from each degree right through to 2016 or 2017.

What happens if you graduate in 2012 and want to do a second degree? No problem apparently, so long as you begin the second degree prior to August 2012 and even then a single 10 point course in the second degree is enough to qualify you for the transitional arrangements. If you’re intending to start uni in 2013 or 2014, you could take advantage of this by enrolling in a 10 point course in early 2012, with a minimum of one 10 point course per year until you start your main course.

Since you can finish a degree in 2012 and then carry on, it’s bringing the issue of credit transfer to the fore for those who have an existing degree from elsewhere. Using that, a considerable number of people can graduate a year or two earlier than they were planning on and  I’ll be looking into that in more detail myself reasonably soon with a view to possibly completing a chemistry degree in 2014 alongside the biology one as it would appear that doing one course a year in advance of my current plans would make that possible. What it also means is sitting down and planning in some detail the course options between now and 2017 as it’s gotten very complicated.

One thing that it will also do is to make the postgraduate degrees more attractive. Financing for them is also being reviewed but it’s expected that the course fees won’t increase as much so it’s quite likely that they will be cheaper to do under the new arrangements than the undergraduate degrees will be. That doesn’t affect me directly as my plan had me starting the masters sometime between 2014 and 2017 anyway but it has meant that I’ve started looking at options for it much earlier than I would ordinarily have done.

That’s t reaction of a lot of people when faced with a longish assignment but usually they’re not so bad once you get started into them. From my point of view, I reckon that if I was able to write a 3000 word assignment in Spanish then one in English must be doable.

The key is to plan it out at the outset and then proceed to tick off the sections as you work through your plan. That way it doesn’t seem nearly so large as a straight 3000 words would be.

Anyway, at the moment I’m plugging away with the EMA for the summer school. The results section is taking ages to do as that involves pulling together a number of charts, tables and illustrations that were collected during the week. Moreover, we need to include work from other groups which we didn’t get a chance to look at directly during the week: that’ll be the hardest part I think as it’s always much easier to write about your own work.

Alongside that I need to get the experiment done and written up for the main biology course. I looked over that on Friday and have to collect a couple more items before I can start on that but hopefully will have made some progress during the course of the week. Doing two assignments in parallel is quite hard going but all being well I’ll have made a decent amount of progress on both by this time next week.

By chance we saw a promo for an event during June for the local branch of the Young Archaeologists Club which I took the little guys along to.

That was one based around mosaics which kicked off with a short talk to put them into context before we all got going on constructing our very own mosaic. All the meetings are two hours long which was a little bit short to get the mosaics done so we were rushing a little towards the end but even so have two very nice ones sitting in the house now.

With that behind them they were all fired up to join and go along to the monthly meetings. Between one thing and another we didn’t quite manage to get signed up yet but the next meeting was yesterday at Belvoir Park. Slightly iffy weather meant that the decision to go wasn’t taken ’til under an hour before for us but I’m glad we went. That two hours disappears surprisingly quickly when you’re walking round even a small number of sites so with the remains of a country house, a motte, an ice house and a graveyard in terms of built archaeology and the oldest oak tree in Ireland plus a redwood to consider the event was over very quickly indeed. Interestingly though the little guys have remembered a number of the facts presented along the way so it was a surprisingly good means of education.

We’ve finally managed to get the forms to join so will be getting those off during the week as they’re still dead keen on it. Whether they would think that they’ve an interest in archaeology per se is debatable but they’re enjoying the outings and learning a bit along the way too.

In principle, this should be a relatively simple EMA as it’s essentially writing up the results of various experiments that we’ve already done and with the 3000 words spread over four basic experiments there’s not an awful lot to be written about each one.

I’ve spent the past couple of days making a start on it, first gathering together the notes from the various places, then typing up the list of references and finally getting going with the materials and methods section which is probably the easiest one to do. They were very keen on illustrations so I’ve added the first one already.

The results section is probably going to be the most time-consuming one to do as it’s where all the graphs, tables and most of the illustrations will end up. Actually writing it should be fine with around 200-300 words per experiment. I’m guessing at a couple of hours for it overall.

Next up should be the discussion which could be quite complicated although I seem to have quite a lot of notes about it so perhaps not. At the moment the hardest thing seems to be tying together the various strands of the experiment.

The introduction also looks like being quite difficult to do in that it needs to refer to biological principles, supporting articles and generally to set the background for the experiment.

Finally, there’s the abstract and title which would be a doddle but for the tight word count.