Foreign Perspectives

Yesterday was the day that everyone had been told that registration for the summer schools in 2012 would open so lots of people got going early and received the confirmation of their registration.

Snag is that somebody opened up the registrations too early. The arrangements with the various host universities aren’t yet completed. So, they closed registrations around 10am.

You’d think that those who’d already registered would be OK, but apparently they’re going to cancel all those registrations and it’s back to the drawing board for the new opening date of August 31st. Quite why they couldn’t have just kept the existing registrations I don’t know. Financially, it’s going to complicate the lives of a number of people as OU refunds can take a number of weeks to come back and with August 31st being only three weeks off, they may not be received before the new registrations need to be paid for.

I’d been blissfully sailing along assuming that the 2012 OU courses would, at most, move to the non-subsidised European rate ie from around £700 for a 60 point course to around £1500. To have it move to £2500 is quite a shock albeit, so far, only for those studying in England.

The snag is that the end result could be little better for the rest of us as English students make up the bulk of the student population. No, we may not be paying quite so much but it could easily be the case the the OU will fold thanks to the combination of a massive drop out rate and a drastic slowing down of the pace at which degrees are done.

For existing students there are transitional arrangements which basically amount to you continuing to pay the same amount for courses up to 2017 in most cases. To maintain eligibility for those transitional arrangements you need to be taking at least one course per year towards your qualification. It’s best to check the small print if you’re doing anything other than a normal study pattern and there does appear to be scope to do multiple qualifications under the one banner so to speak (eg I should be able to manage both the Life Sciences and Psychology with a bit of care along the way). It may be prudent to mark your courses against an open degree as well as whatever you’re currently doing to keep your options open.

Sadly, it may be that this will mark the end of the OU. At present only 25% of their existing students are straight from A-levels and, apparently, a similar amount who don’t have a previous degree (and thereby eligible for student loans). Which leaves quite a lot of potential students who’d be looking at £1200 for even a 30 point course (vs £400 or so now). For that matter, would many people do a 10 pointer if it cost £400?

For me, it shouldn’t really matter short term as I’ll have finished the Life Sciences by 2014 and should be able to scrape home with the Psychology in 2017 after which, all being well, it’ll be on to the masters. It’s very sad though that in practical terms the OU will cease to be an option for many.

It generally takes a while to wind down after an OU summer school but this year I’ve a lot less time to do that than I usually have.

Top priority now is to complete an ECA which is due on Wednesday. I’ve most of it done but haven’t yet had a chance to finish the final section nor to check off a printed copy. For reasons which I don’t understand, I can generally pick out mistakes on a paper copy that don’t seem apparent onscreen.

After that, I must get back into the S204 reading which I’ve dropped a few weeks on. There’s the final chapter on plants and then I think it’s five chapters on animals. Then there’s the TMA5 coming up and I also need to get the experiment for TMA6 done. Oh, and there’s the SXR375 ECA to write too!

Very importantly, I’ve also to register for SXR376 and SXR344 tomorrow morning. Infectious disease (SXR376) is the final compulsory summer school for the Life Science degree and I’m hoping to get on the first run of it in July. Organic synthesis (SXR344) is effectively the chemistry counterpart of that and is a course that ordinarily I’d have done in a couple of years time as part of the normal sequence of chemistry/biochemistry courses that I’m doing but, sadly, next year is the final opportunity I have to do it. My plan is to do them back to back and thereby give myself a lot of time to write up the experiments. One problem with doing it is that SXR376 is in Nottingham and SXR344 is in York; I’m planning on doing the trek between them on the Friday afternoon and may need to go back that way at the end of the week.

One plus point is that I’ll only have a 30 point course running alongside the two residentials rather than having a 60 pointer and 10 pointer as I have this year. So, in principle, it should be an easier ride for me.

Oh, and there’s a fair amount of real-life things that need doing as well which’ll make for quite a busy week.

As usual, the final day was something of a winding down for the most part.

In the morning, everything got dumped into the case and, surprisingly, it closed without too much poking and prodding. Typically for the final day, the breakfast reached a new low but then, on the whole, that’s normal for Nottingham where the quality of the meals seems to drop as the week goes on.

We were down quite early as our group was first on (at 9.30). As usual, the quality of the presentations was high given that they were all quite rushed and some of the experiments raised a few points that one wouldn’t have expected from such relatively rushed experiments. Quite a number looked into things that sounded like they’d be rather interesting to follow up in some more detail. Sadly, that’s not going to happen as this is the final strand of the plants courses and there’s no “proper” level 3 course to follow up on points that were raised.

With a short break, all the presentations were completed before noon so it was a leisurely walk up the hill to Cripps for lunch for me. Most people managed to have lunch before departing this year and it was well after 1pm before I bade farewell to Cripps ’til next year. The taxi takes around 30 minutes to get to the airport so I’d loads of time there to look for some prezzies for the little guys although the selection wasn’t great. The adrenalin from the course tends to run out around teatime but, for a change, I wasn’t too bad on Saturday.

Starting off on the experiments was somewhat delayed whilst we waited for the water bath to heat up but with a bit of tightening up on the organisation, we managed to complete the planned experiments around noon.

That left the afternoon to finalise various calculations and get going on writing the presentation which we’d made a small start on this morning when we were waiting for various things to happen. As expected that took quite a lot of work to pull together. The first decent draft of it was ready to print before the lab closed at 5pm and we’d a chance to see how it looked in the lecture theatre. After tea we’d a proper run-through which added a few changes to our list but we should be pretty much ready to at the off tomorrow which is just as well since we’re on first.

No lectures this evening so lots of people were at a bit of a loose end. I had a wander round the grounds and came across what would have been almost the perfect tree for our experiments but at least it should look pretty good when added to the final slide and it’ll make for the great conclusion that we were looking for too.