Foreign Perspectives

The disco last night took it’s toll on several people although surprisingly everyone in our group was in by 9.10am.

The final session on plants was the session with by far the most scientific feel about it as we were using all kinds of different techniques and equipment with it. Very much the culmination to the week in every way.

What we were doing was comparing the response of chlorophyll to various types and levels of light. To do that we first had to obtain the chlorophyll which started life as spinach from the local Tesco. We converted this to a liquid by way of mixing with assorted liquids and centrifuging the mixtures. Measurements were taken via a colorimeter after exposing a number of poisoned samples to the various types and levels of light for up to 3 minutes. As usual with the plant experiments this one didn’t produce the perfect results that you might expect but we not only looked the part but felt like scientists for this one.

Lunch was a little complicated as my usual addition to the meal of a couple of bottles of water wasn’t a runner when I was off to the plane so instead sweeties for the kids needed to be used to reach the magical £7. We’d a somewhat hurried lunch as the final lecture was to start as soon as we’d all sat down in the lecture theatre (yeah, we could all have gone down the take-away route, but nobody thought of it!).

The wind-down lecture concentrated on the ECA for the course which was handed out to us at the end. As expected it’s a write-up of one of the experiments (I’m going for the differences in respiration rate of brain and skin from Wednesday morning) and one short question from each of the themes. Well, they are titled short but some of them look relatively long to me but I’ve done little more than glance at them so who knows. Some of them look a little scary at the moment but then a lot of TMA questions can look scary at first glance.

Quite why they don’t hand the ECA out in advance is something of a mystery. We all knew that there was going to be a research write-up plus three questions before this week. Similarly we knew that we’d have to choose one of the nine possible experiments or rather eight as there’s one that doesn’t really work as a write-up. Likewise we knew that there’d be a short question on each theme and, really, it wouldn’t matter for the week if you did know what they were (I’m not going to say though or I’ll get told off… again).

Unsurprisingly we didn’t use Practical Biology today so we’ve all been lugging it around all week for nothing. I don’t even think that it’ll be needed for the ECA either. More annoyingly, some people appear to have incurred excess baggage charges thanks to bringing it along (as would I had BMIBaby weighed the case).

Useful to know is that Lenton Cabs (0115 9 781 781) only charge students £19 for the airport run vs the £35 of the airport taxis (and, yes, they can pick up from the airport for the same charge). Oh well, something to bear in mind when I’m doing the level 3 residential next year.

On that level 3 residential, it would appear that the majority of people are doing both of them next year rather than splitting them between 2011 and 2012. The reasoning for most seems to be that since 2012 will be the final year there’ll be a combination of a winding down feel in 2012 and a very high chance of the courses filling up extremely early. In terms of recommended pre-requisites, SXR375 (the plants one) requires S204 so that’s OK for me in 2011 but SXR376 (the human disease one) requires S320 or S377 which I can’t do ’til 2012 so that’s the best year for the second residential for me.

As usual, post-residential I’m exhausted.

It was on to plants this morning which I know nothing about other than what was in the background reading material.

First off we were given an overall briefing on what we’ll be doing over the three sessions before we broke up into our two subgroups.

We were looking at how carbon fixing in plant leaves is affected by a range of conditions which we selected. We chose to look at the differences between the upper and lower surface of tobacco leaves and set about drilling 10 holes in a leaf for each of the two surfaces. Since we didn’t want carbon to sneak in the other side we’d to put a layer of vaseline on the filter paper we were using. Then it was off to the tutor so she could add the mixture to create our radioactive carbon dioxide.

Although it looked like it would be incredibly fiddly to do it worked out well and after tea we set about testing the various samples that we’d created by way of the Geiger counter. As always, the whole process took longer than I’d have expected at the off so it was quite a late lunch today.

With the statistics involved I thought at one point that we might need the big green book but we didn’t as all the necessary information was in the handouts. So I’ve been lugging it around for no reason at all.

After lunch we were joined up in one 24-strong group to do an experiment on the stomata of a plant. The reason why we were operating as a large group became very clear when the results were ready. They were all over the place with next to no consistency between groups. Basically an experiment that doesn’t work too well and the only total failure (so far) for the week.

For some reason plant experiments take even longer so we didn’t get away ’til after 5pm this evening which doesn’t bode well for tomorrow when I really have to get away on time.

The morning started with a bit of a delay whilst we waited for the tissue samples to be prepared and brought round but after that it was a fairly intensive session through to noon. Everyone was doing a different experiment which we’d devised in the final session last night which made for something of a whirlwind of activity. I’d say this was the most interesting session so far as we weren’t following directions but rather working through our very own experiment.

As an experiment I thought that I’d get exactly the same meal as yesterday to see if the total came to the same. It did so it would appear that everyones’ initial impression that the cashiers were making up the prices on the spot is unfounded.

The reason for the manic session on posters on Monday evening became clear after lunch. On Monday we were given a really bad write-up of an experiment which we (in groups of 2 to 6) had to convert into a fairly sensible scientific poster over the course of an hour or so. That session gave us loads of ideas from what others had done in the time which we were to put to use this afternoon. At the start we all thought that an hour would be more than enough to prepare the poster but it took almost everyone the full two hours to get it completed and even then there was all kinds of compromises.

I was finished relatively early and so managed to get over to the small shopping centre in the Portland Building. The Students’ Union shop there is basically a small supermarket but had the Nottingham University teddy bear that I’d been looking for. As well as that there’s Boots (almost exclusively a chemist branch), a hairdresser, fairly large bookshop and food court (that’s closed outside of term-time though). The shops close at 5.30pm so stocking up at them would have been doable if I’d known where they were. Still, no harm done there for me though I gather that some people have been regular customers over the last few days.

After dinner in Cripps we’d to trek back down to the “poster room” in the main hospital to fill in a reflection form on how our own poster stacked up against the others. On the whole I think that our group seemed to do a more scientific style of poster in comparison to the other two groups where the tendency seemed to lean towards a more populist approach to design. I also ran across the tutor blogging about this course.

With an early finish (8pm) I managed to get into the resources centre to have a glance at some of the course texts for things that I’ll be doing over the next year or two. Both S204 and S320 seemed remarkably readable with a number of familiar diagrams as I flicked through the pages which is reassuring.

It’s looking pretty much certain that we won’t be using that big lump of a book which they tell you that you have to bring along. To be fair that’s partly because I read through the recommended reading sections in the course guide but even if I hadn’t I’d not have missed it (apart from the weight that is). Supposedly we’ll need it for the ECA but I’d not be surprised if we didn’t.

We’re on to a much less talkative theme tutor now which means that we don’t end up talking for ages but as he’s pretty much at the other end of the extreme we need to ask questions more often.

The morning session was based around the tobacco moth and we were split up to cover quite a number of different investigations. Most of us were looking into the conductivity of different sections of the gut, others where looking at electronmicrographs of it and a couple of us were investigating the pH. Quite an interesting theme overall and one that added to lab experience in a big way. In the afternoon it was on to consider the respiration of liver which was very much a hands on affair.

For the first time today we really needed to consider properly the health & safety aspects as we were working with a range of poisons and proper hypodermic syringes too which obviously ain’t a good combination considering that a couple of the experiments used cyanide.

Tomorrow is a split day with the morning in the lab on the final energy session whilst the afternoon will be the poster exhibition.

Nearly forgot: I managed to get a gold star for hitting the £7 for lunch!

Monday makes quite a difference in the life of the medical school and rather than having the place largely to ourselves we’d to queue at tea-breaks and lunch.

Respiration was the final theme 1 topic and  we spent the morning in experiments with Douglas bags, oxygen and carbon dioxide measurement devices. Quite an intensive morning of experiments all-round.

That finished the experimentation phase of theme 1 and the afternoon went in preparing and making a presentation on one of the three experiments that we’d done over the three sessions.

This evening sees the first of the briefings on theme 2 (energy) and another on the poster session that we’ll be doing at the end of that theme. For the poster session we were split up into groups of 2-6 and given a bad write-up of an experiment which we’d to tidy up and produce a poster for. Quite a manic session and a bit much for most people at that time of night.