Foreign Perspectives

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.

The breakfast was a pretty basic two sausages, egg and tomato with a selection of cereals plus tea/coffee/chocolate, juices and toast which is fine for a residential as you just end up putting on weight with the big meals.

The morning went in pipetting samples of plasma to determine the glucose levels. With 42 samples to work through that took quite a while and then we’d to measure the glucose levels and plot the results. All that took us up to lunch time and seemed mainly designed to get us used to working in a laboratory.

Lunch was in the staff canteen and had quite a wide selection. The £7 voucher was enough to pay for a main meal, dessert and two drinks which worked out at pretty good value.

After lunch it was into a new laboratory and we went through a range of tests for blood pressure and pulse rate which took an awful lot longer to do than we’d expected. No white coats this time as there weren’t any chemicals involved.

The evening sessions are to be looking at what we did earlier in the day and what we’ll be doing tomorrow (which is split between the first and second themes).

After a bit of an early start for the plane, I got to the Nottingham campus just after 11.30am to find a queue of people already there registering for the summer school.

As I’m here so early there’s nothing much to do for a while. Registration continues on to 3.30pm but towards the end it must be mainly for stragglers as the introductory lecture starts then and it’s about half an hour walk from the halls to the medical centre where the lecture is being held.

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).

They’ve divided us up into three groups for the three themes of the summer school. I’ll be starting with the regulation and control theme tomorrow so will be attending the briefing on that at 4.20pm this afternoon. There’s a break after that before dinner at 6pm but then it’s back for a couple of lectures running form 7.15pm through to 8.45pm.

The shops on campus are closed over the weekend so for stocking up on nibbles I’ll have to take a walk into town (about 30 mins each way).

In the room is a phone (free internal calls), wired internet connection (you need a cable for this which you can get (free) in the Cripps security office; the wifi is quite poor in the room), desk, tea/coffee tray with kettle, sink, wardrobe, towels (with soap & shampoos) and a single bed. The shower-room and toilet is shared  by about half a dozen rooms.

Not so long ago you were encouraged to put as much as you could into checked luggage so that the passenger area of the plane wasn’t cluttered with a whole heap of a little (often a lot) too large carry-on luggage.

Of course, it’s completely different now and they want you to do without checked luggage altogether if you can. Despite their normally over the top approach to charging even Ryanair has raised the carry-on allowances to a notional 10kg  (Ryanair say “It should weigh no more than 10kg”). In practical terms, so long as you go for online check-in, there really isn’t a limit so long as you can actually carry it onto the plane and so long as it’s not too far off the 55x40x20 size.

Even the liquid limits don’t seem overly severe so long as you don’t try to bring drinks. Normal sized tubes of toothpaste might look big but they’re no more than the 100ml limit. You can even bring on drinks so long as you buy them after you’ve passed through security thus avoiding the ridiculous prices on the plane (though don’t be drinking too much on Ryanair as it’s £1 for the toilet).

Laughably these days you’re still not allowed to take “magnetised materials” on-board although that’s a rule that has been totally impractical to enforce since credit cards came on the scene not to mention the magnetic stripe on many tickets. I wonder when it’ll occur to IATA to revise this?

What is a real pain is getting everything into the one bag. As you read this I’ll be struggling to get a weeks worth of clothes plus assorted items for my OU summer school into a bag: white coat, big lump of a course book, computer, etc. I’m sure that there’s room for a “how to pack a carry-on bag” course!

Well, perhaps not all of them but by the sound of it the food in Nottingham University is absolutely dreadful. So bad in fact, that people who have been there before are planning on either doing their own cooking or living on sandwiches and whatnot sold by one of the shops in the students union.

However, there is another option which is the staff canteen, at least at lunchtime. In the evenings it sounds very much like DIY is the way to go so I’ll be doing a little stocking up on Saturday afternoon before the course starts (there’s not a whole lot of time to do that once it gets underway).

Oh well, at least the view from the halls of residence is quite good.