Modules & Lecturers

Hello,

The first post about this semester is going to be about my modules and my lecturers, seen as I am in London for university first of all. Although all my modules are officially yearly, I still had several news in this term!

EVOLUTION & ECOLOGY

Last term we did the evolutionary part of this module and then it ended... unfortunately. This term we started Ecology, and for as much as I like it I don’t actually love it nearly as much as I liked Evolution. The lecturer is the same as the one I had  for the second half of Evolution and I like his way of lecturing! He is pretty nice as a person as well, even though he shouts at us every single time the lecture is due to start. 

CELL BIOLOGY & PHYSIOLOGY

Physiology is not my favourite thing, but at least for the first few weeks of term it was the lecture I was always looking forward to. I had this wonderfully amazing lecturer, Dr Rachel O’Callaghan, who has so much enthusiasm for what she teaches. She talks very very quickly, which should make me confused but it never did as I simply felt like I couldn’t get distracted and was very enthusiastic all the time while listening to her. She is that good, yes! She taught us about how the body works, some functions, regulatory systems, etc... before she was substituted for a few weeks. The two lecturers who came in her place were really boring (so much that one has been named “Boring guy” by my group), and one fo them I barely know what he looks like because I missed one of his lectures and for the rest of it he didn’t leave much of an impression on me. But form this week we are getting Ms O’Callaghan back and I am so happy about that, I am actually looking forward to lectures!!

MOLECULAR BIOLOGY

I never hated this module before, now I do, but not because of the contents... it’s because of my lecturers there. My main lecturer is a professor that I really can’t stand, because he is mean and rude! The first lecture I thought he was funny in a weird way, as in “his jokes were strange but funny” kind of way, then he just started getting a annoying and mean. The breakthrough came during a Lab session when I was sick and he was mean to me and i never really forgave him for that... now I can’t really concentrate on his lectures and really dread going to Molecular. The second lecturer is Boring Guy sooooo... Also, the fact that this module is not on the main campus but in Whitechapel, and therefore I have to commute (right, about 10 minutes lol), doesn’t help... The main topic of this semester has been proteins and amino acids, which I actually find interesting!

PRACTICAL & ANALYTICAL BIOLOGY

Lab this term has been pretty interesting! For the first two weeks we worked on protein purification and for as difficult as it might have been at first I found that very nice to learn. I really enjoyed those experiments! The only flaw was that the mean lecturer ran this Labs so I wasn’t impressed with that at all... thank goodness we have demonstrators who help us and we don’t have to talk to him much!

We also had another Thinking Workshop, during which we had to answer three different tasks and then choose one to hand in as usual. This term our group only has four components (Elena isn’t with us anymore, which I will explain in a later post), so we needed a fifth person to join in for the workshop: this woman, Anna, who I have noticed lots of times because she must be around 30 or so, joined us and we worked pretty well all together. well, kind, of. We do chat a lot, and she was a bit left out, poor woman... but at least we finished the tasks properly!

The last Lab session was partly good and partly bad. Bad because for the first half we had to handle worms... living worms. And test their reflexes! Andrea and I were all but happy about that and we were a pair, so had a hard time getting to the end of the experiment... Coral and Laurana, on the other hand, were very happy of working with worms xD it was hilarious because our worm was on the floor at the beginning of the session, for some mysterious reason, and our demonstrator was scared of it so we had to call another demonstrator to pick it up for us as none of us wanted to get too close to it lol And then our worm was probably traumatised by being on the floor and didn’t react at all to stimuli... so we had to get another one, who was over-reactive :( We were laughing a lot, but Andrea and I had goose bumps most of the time!

The second half of the experiment was about human reflexes, so it was much better and it was soooo much fun, dropping and catching (or trying to) a ruler while testing our reaction time.
Oh yeah, I didn’t mention it but this Lab was also lovely because we had Ms O’Callaghan as our supervisor instead of the mean lecturer, so we all were a lot more relaxed and happy!

TUTORIAL

I have had three tutorial meetings and a one-to-one session with my tutor. During the communal meetings we had to deliver presentations about scientific articles (e.g. one about Batesian mimicry), discuss sourcing and referencing and the essays that we had to hand it after the Christmas holiday. I got A for my essay, by the way! The title was “Structure and function in Biology through a range of examples” and I talked about ribosomes, oocytes and the heart – I wanted to show how structure-function relationships are important at every level of organisation, from organelles to full-sized and fundamental organs.

In my one-to-one meeting I simply had a chat with my tutor about my impressions on university, how I had found it returning after the holiday and then... it turned into a friendly chat about his little daughter (I saw a picture and asked about her) and about Australia, our common ground and love.