Foreign Perspectives

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.

The week has really flown in and it’s hard to believe that there’s only a day and a half to go.

We collected our horse chestnut leaves this morning on the way down to the lab. First thing was to finalise the experimental plan that I’d knocked up last night. With that approved we set to work on comparing the photosynthesis of normal leaves with those infested with tree miner. That took a lot longer than expected as we had to do a full oxygen electrode run on the infested leaf and we needed to find out how much chlorophyll was in each leaf sample so we finished the afternoon with only one of the three planned replicates completed. Not a disaster but it means that we’ll need to spend a couple of hours tomorrow morning completing the experimental phase.

The final compulsory tutorial was on making presentations with the optional one going through various aspects of the end of course assessment.

In principle, we hope to complete the experiments by around 11am tomorrow which should leave us quite a while to write up the presentation. We’re first up on Friday morning which is a good thing in many ways as we don’t have to worry about seeing some fantastic idea from an earlier presentation and not being able to incorporate it into our own. It also makes for a rather relaxing end to the course for us.

The planned 1pm finish looks like it could be more like 11.30am though I may as well have lunch here rather than sitting an extra hour or more in the airport.

With everyone having had a go at the experiments on both sides of the lab there remained a number of things that various groups hadn’t had the time to do for one reason or another. So this morning was aimed at mopping up those gaps.

After an early lunch we set off on a tour of the Millennium and Walled gardens to give us a bit of inspiration for our own experiments. That left the afternoon for us to make a start on a design of an experiment of our own. For that we bounced ideas off other people with a view to building a small team to take on an experiment based on our ideas. We ended up with 10 separate teams which seems a little too many to me and is a number which will cause a spot of scheduling difficulty with the equipment tomorrow. We’ve to hand in a research proposal for our project tomorrow which gets a once-over by the tutor before we get going (it’s part of the final assessment too).

The evening lecture was a round-up of what we’d done over the last couple of days and how we might write it up for the end of course assessment. I’d thought that we’d be writing up one of the experiments as we did last year but in fact we’ve to run up a report covering all that was done over the last couple of days. More than that actually as we’ll need to include information about the work of some of the other groups too. Quite a lot to cover in 3000 words really.

The next day and a half is basically running our own experiment with Thursday afternoon intended to be devoted on preparing a presentation on it that we’ll make on Friday morning.