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.

Thinking back on my first term at Queen Mary

I suppose this post was to be expected, at the end of the first term at uni: I am going to go through the main elements of these months and summarise my impressions on everything.

Biology course

Since I am in London to study, I should definitely start from my course. In general, I have to say I really like it, because it gives me a broad background in Biology and it helps patching up the holes in my Biology knowledge derived from not doing much Biology at school in the past. 

Evolution has been my absolute favourite module, both because of my lecturers and because of the topics we covered. Unfortunately we won’t have this subject in next term, but at least now I am even more sure that I want to go on with Evolutionary Biology next year when I can choose my modules!

Cell Biology is on the other side of the spectrum... I didn’t like it very much mainly because of the lecturers. I liked my first teacher at the beginning, but then he became mean to the class, and I never liked either of the other lecturers we had. The topics weren’t bad, but I am not into cell biology that much...

In the middle there is Molecular Biology :) Not as amazing as Evolution, but still very good. We had two great and interesting lecturers, who worked hard to keep us attentive on the lessons! Both of them were very funny as well and made us laugh every single time :P

My last module is Lab (Practical and Analytical Biology), which doesn’t rank anywhere because it’s too different from the other completely theoretical ones! At first I was scared I wouldn’t be any good at this, as I have never worked in a proper lab, but it turned out to be easier than I thought. It just took a few weeks to get used to and then I started doing my work with more enthusiasm and a lot more easily than at the beginning! It was fun to work together with my friends to solve some exercises that we can’t understand at first to then find out that they are not impossible. Lab turned out to be fun and I am enjoying a lot the opportunity of doing experiments first hand! 

Preparing to count blood cells in Lab

London, my new city

I hadn’t thought about it this way, yet, until a friend of mine mentioned in an email that I was sightseeing my “own city”. I had to do a double-take before realising she was talking about London, but she is right! London is my city now :) Though, I don’t feel like I really know London. I live in my safe bubble on campus, which feels like it has its own place not belonging to a city. I love it, I love it and I love it, I’d repeat it a hundred times, but it doesn’t feel like London that much. Of London, I know the touristic areas and some other parts that are near uni, but I can’t say I know it as my city. Well, I have lived there only three months, I have plenty of time to get to know it I suppose! 

Anyway, London is an amazing city, so busy and so original! I was scared by its being so huge, and I still am, but it’s also a place that gives you the opportunity to see things you can’t see anywhere else and do stuff you can only do in London! I have discovered new hobbies here, thanks to friends, but also thanks to the fact that I’m in London because I wouldn’t have been able to develop these passions anywhere else. The most important example right now is Musical Theatre :) I had no idea I would like it so much and being near the West End allows me to enjoy it a lot! Aside from actually seeing the musicals in this wonderful location, I also decided I am interested in trying musical theatre as a hobby... and that’s why I am going to start taking singing lessons in January, to get the basics I need to start a musical theatre course afterwards :)

Living on my own

There are aspects of it I like, others I don’t particularly enjoy, but in general it’s a great experience. It’s not that I didn’t like living at home, but being by myself helped me grow a lot, it helped me becoming more mature and learning quickly things that it would have taken me a lot longer to learn otherwise. I hate washing the dishes after meals, that’s the worst thing for me, but I don’t mind that much cleaning my room, doing the washing or cooking. I didn’t know that before, but I actually kind of enjoy doing these things for myself because they make me feel responsible and adult!

Of course this year is special, because I am living on campus, where I still have someone checking that I don’t mess up too badly. Residential Services do  cover the basics, they clean the communal areas, they take care of major issues and they pay bills for us taking them from our general rental fee. Next year will be another story, because next year will be when I have to move out of campus! Thankfully, I have met someone I want to move out with next year and I am not by myself in this, but it’s kind of scary to think about. From the end of the first week, I Have been thinking about next year and I have been talking about moving out, mainly with my flat mate and friend Isabela. The main topic we have in our mind when we think of next year is the house we will have to move to. We still haven’t found one, fairly enough since we haven’t done serious searching, but that’s not our biggest worry right now. At the moment we are still trying to work out who is going to be living in that house! We often have discussions on this, on the possibilities we have and the problems that might arise, and we end up looking at houses online pretty regularly, just to try and convince ourselves that we can make it! I am sure we can, but right now it is all very confusing and I am a bit scared of next year... moving out completely will be hard and  complications might come up often. I mean, this year we are in a safe bubble on campus, where we have cleaners for the shared areas, where our bills are included in the rent (therefore we have only one deadline to worry about), where everything is close by, where we have our own private and lockable rooms if we want to be alone. Next year it will all be different! Sharing a proper house will mean totally growing up, with no looking back because we will be officially facing all the aspects of living on our own. Sure, we won’t be working full time, we will still be students, but in a different way. We will have to be completely independent and rely on our abilities all the time, with pretty much only the help of our flat mates. [The last few lines of this were taken from a previous post]. All of this said, I am positive that it will all work out soon!

People I’ve met, friends & acquaintances

I left this paragraph for the end of the post, even though it’s such an important part of my life in London! There are so many people I have met in these months, but I can only consider a few as friends. I have plenty of acquaintances and some nearly-friends in London, but those I actually consider friends are about 7 :) I was thinking of it the other day and I was listing them to myself: it’s a big number, to be fair, but this just shows that I am very lucky in meeting the right people for me!

Coincidences do happen. I have started believing so after all the experiences I’ve had so far, where I have found amazing people on my way :) But this time one of the coincidences is even bigger! The best friend I have made in England, the person with whom I share so many of my hobbies and I love spending time with the most happened to be living in my same flat! We are doing pretty much the same course, we live in front of each other and we have so much in common that sometimes I am still surprised... if I can’t call this the luckiest coincidence, I don’t know what would be!  I have been so lucky in meeting Isabela here and becoming friends with her and I am so glad I made that effort the first week to overcome shyness, because it made the rest of my stay at Queen Mary so so much better :) I can never get bored or lonely, because we spend so much time together, between movies to watch, cosplays to plan, stars to "stalk" online, chats or even doing our own things but still in the same room.

 

Again outside my course, and outside anything else for that matters, there is Maria Stella. We met by chance, because we both knew Tommaso (my flat mate, her ex-class mate), at the very beginning and we became friends so quickly! She is my Once Upon a Time partner, the third person in our little amazing trio of friends. We don’t have a course in common, we don’t share a flat, but being friends and hanging out together just came natural and is always so good :) 

 

Our trio

Last but not least among the people outside Biology, are my other flat mates! Tommaso, the other Italian in my flat, who is kind of a “little” brother to me (well, he is only a few months younger, but that’s the feeling). I wasn’t really happy about having another Italian in the flat at first, but Tommaso is lovely and I really enjoy spending time with him and talking about our days or just laughing about random stuff that comes up at the most random moments :) Melanie, with whom I have started spending more time lately and that I hope I’ll get to know better with time, after a beginning in which we rarely saw each other. Josh, whom I barely see... he is a ghost in our flat, he is nice and kind when he is around, but that happens so rarely that I am not sure I can say he is my friend! 

Isabela, Tommaso and I

Eventually, here I am to talk about my course friends! I didn’t leave them to the end because they are less important, but because I preferred separating the two categories. My little group is composed of five people, including me. Andrea, Laurana, Coral and Elena are my awesome friend from the course, with whom I spend all my lessons, I revise, do assignments, hang out for lunch... we started out only seeing each other in class, now we are doing some more together, we have been to the theatre, we went out for lunch several times including an a great and funny Christmas lunch (where Elena was missing). The group was born so quickly, in a matter of days during Freshers’ week! I met Andrea on the Tuesday, on the Wednesday I got to know Coral and Elena and finally on the Thursday also Laurana joined us :) Again, it all happened by chance, and I am so glad it did *_* Andrea is probably my closest friend among all of them, because we share the tutorial group and we have our routine-Friday when we work together on assignments and go for lunch! Laurana is one of the funniest people ever lol We have some musical taste in common, but that’s not the reason I like her so much: she is so lovely all the time and she makes me laugh too much :) Coral is the sweet and quiet girl in the group, I would say, but that doesn’t make her less of a friend to me and I actually really like spending time with her!! Lately I have seen Elena a lot less than I used to, because she spends some time with us and some with her other group (the Medical Engineering people, because that’s her specific course), but when she is with us she is so funny as well and she is sweet and friendly and she is the one who always manages to get us through thinking workshops because she is a good group leader :)

Elena, me, Coral, Andrea and Laurana after Lab

Laurana, Andrea and me at Costa for a hot drink

Xmas lunch (Coral, Lauran, me and Andrea)

Leftover bits and pieces...

• I became a Student Ambassador and now I have the opportunity of sharing with future students my experience at Queen Mary. Lovely job, isn’t it? I don’t need to fake any enthusiasm, because it’s all real, I get to tell my story to people who want to hear it and are looking up to me to know what their university life will be like. It’s a lot of responsibility, to be fair, but I’m up to it, because I owe so much to those Ambassadors who convinced me to choose Queen Mary last year!

• Theatre has become an important and wonderful part of my life, surprisingly! I never particularly liked theatre, but musicals changed it all :) So far I have only seen two (Wicked and Les Miserables), and I am about to repeat one of them in a month and a bit, but I know songs from various musicals and I already have a list of what I am going to see next! Moreover, as I mentioned above, from January I will be spending my Tuesday nights at City Academy, attending a singing course (level 1, of course – I am most definitely a beginner!) with Isabela. The idea is that if I get some vocal basics, then I can move on to musical theatre next year – as a hobby of course :)
• Societies – When it was the time of the Freshers’ fair at the very beginning, I signed up to something like 6 societies because they all sounded awesome... I still think they are great, but I haven’t been attending many events :( Sometimes I simply forgot to, some others I gave up because I was tired or didn’t feel like it... In the end I have been to a pizza/quiz night with the Biology society, a pub meeting with the Equality society, the MCM Comic Con with the Anime society, an introductory meeting with the science magazine (I have also carried out an interview, but it hasn’t been published yet) and an exhibition with the photography society. I have met a few people throughout the societies, but I didn’t really keep in touch with many. Though, the one I have talked to the most is Fenn from the photography society, who is a third year student in Zoology, therefore she told me so much about my future years! I also enjoyed being with the people from the anime society at the MCM but I haven’t seen any of them since then...
   

Last week of first term - part 1

Hello,

Today I am going to write about the last week of my first term as a university student. It has been a very light week on term of academic work, but full of outside-uni activities :)

ALERT - long post, because there are lots of pictures!

Sunday 7/12: when I woke up in the morning, I went on Skype and spoke to my Australian host mum, Rebecca, for about an hour. I always enjoy these Skype chats because the make me feel closer to Australia and the people I have left there! 

The rest of the day was quite restful, because I blogged for a while, then Isabela and I went to Westfield Shopping Centre to so that she could buy Melanie’s present for our not-so-secret Santa (there were only three people participating, so it was easy to work out who had who). We went to the Disney store and she bought a soft Olaf for her, then we stumbled upon some cuuuuute Wall-e mugs that we HAD to buy lol Loooook, aren’t they too cute to be left in the store??

 

 

Monday 8/12: I woke up at around 8.50am, despite being a Monday. There was no point in going to my Evolution lecture since it was going to be only a Q&A for people who had questions to ask. I didn’t have any, as I understood pretty well everything that we have been taught this term in this module! I spent the rest of the day revising for the afternoon, when I would have my last exam: a Lab test, working on my own on different experiments that we had tried in the past weeks.

At 2pm it was time for the exam and I was kind of nervous, despite knowing that I had done all I could to prepare and that I was ready to repeat the experiments. When I received the exam paper, I felt better. I looked through it and I found it doable.

• I started by doing a blood-dilution exercise, that required me to count the blood cells after having put the diluted blood in a haemocytometer. At first, I thought I had too fee cells in my haemocytometer, since we were asked to count at least 100 cells, but then the demonstrator told me that it was right, because some of us had solutions with very low concentrations. I counted about 45 cells in the whole haemocytometer, instead of 100 in a few squares, and then went on with my calculations of volume and concentration in the diluted and the undiluted sample.
• The next exercise was the usual observation of blood cells in the microscope, after adjusting the scale bars, and drawing of red blood cells and a white blood cell. In the previous Lab session I had learnt how to do so properly, including nucleus for the white blood cell, so it was fine. I also had to measure the cells I was observing by comparing the stage micrometer and the eyepiece graticule I was provided with, then I had to calculate the magnification of my drawing.
• The remaining pages were not practical exercise, but applications of what I had learnt. I had to do some molarity calculations and sketch a serial dilution of three steps, to reach a specific number of cell colonies through a to-be-calculated dilution factor.

I finished the exam within 1h15, whereas we were allowed between 2h and 2h30. Because it took me so short, I am scared I messed something up or misinterpreted some of the instructions... I hope not, though! After 2 hours, those of us who had finished were allowed out and Coral, Andrea, Laurana and I stayed outside the building chatting for a while, before heading home veeery relieved!

Around 6pm, I went to Maria Stella’s place to watch the second last episode of “Once Upon a Time” before the midseason finale (and the three-months long break...). It was a very emotional episode, with the “Frozen” storyline nearing its end :( When we finished watching “Once Upon a Time”, I made pasta for me and Maria Stella, who went back to studying for her midsessional exams, so we had dinner together and with one of her flat mates.

During the evening, I tried to convince Isabela to start making our “music videos”, but we postponed to the next day after a while! Anyway, we planned what we would do and e came up with some “artistic” ideas for some of the songs. In the end, we picked six songs to do: our three Wicked duets “What is this feeling?”, “For good” and “Defying gravity” (though we will be doing Elphaba’s main part together, otherwise she, as Glinda, wouldn’t be saying much); “On my own” from Les Miserables; “For the first time in forever (reprise)” from Frozen (me as Anna, Isabela as Elsa). 

Then, for the first time in a while, I went to sleep around midnight! I was still sleeping in “my new room” (Isabela’s), but she was watching some videos and I fell asleep as soon as I went to bed :)

Tuesday 9/12: I got up at 10am, after a much-needed long night of sleep, and I went to meet Sophia from the photography society soon after. I had to give her back the money she had lent me to buy a tube ticket to go the photography exhibition! We chatted for a while, then I had to rush to the SBCS (School of Biological and Chemical Sciences) reception to hand in a form with my personal details  to be entered int he QM payroll as a student ambassador. Though, I found the reception closed, so I had to give up and scan the form to email it in the evening!

After lunch, I went to out with Isabela and we spent a lot of time walking around the centre! We went to Oxford Street, where we looked at the beautiful Christmas decorations around the street and in the shop windows :)

A gorgeous window at Selfridges (isn't the moon incredible??)

Another window at Selfridges

 

 

Then we went in random shops trying on Christmas gadgets, without buying any because we are on a budget :P

 

 

However, our trip to the centre had a purpose: we had to go to Primark to buy Maria Stella’s Christmas present, a onesie with gingerbread men all over it! We also bought some fairylights for our kitchen *-* Done with the present, we went to the Disney store, since we were there... the Disney store Oxford Street is A M A Z I N G!! It’s huge and it has a section for every princess and for a lot of other Disney cartoons, like Tinkerbell :) 

Around 6.30pm we went to Stratford, where we went to the cinema to watch... *drum roll* “Hunger Games – Mocking jay part 1”!!!!! I had been waiting to go and see it at the cinema since it had been released and I was so worried I would have to wait for the dvd, instead I managed to see it on the big screen! The cinema seats were really great, as we had no one sitting beside us and we used two seats each (the armrests could be lifted) :) 

We arrived home around 10.30pm, we set up the fairylights around out kitchen, which finally looks very Christmassy *-* We used the Halloween ghost-lights (shorter than any of the others) for Melanie’s cupboard, since it’s a single one, and the three new sets for the boys cupboards, ours and the freezer!

 

Before going to bed, then, we actually started our music videos. To be clear, they are just recordings of us singing the songs we sing all the time, to have them saved :) Let’s say it’s like when we play karaoke with Maria Stella and we video ourselves, with the difference that on these songs we have a lot of practice and we know them pretty much by heart hahaha It was too funny, because it took us ages to do a proper video in which both our voices and that of the originals singers would come out (with some emotions, since the first “On my own” trial came out totally emotionless on our side)... and then we found out my camera had cut our faces out of the video :P So in over an hour we managed to make the Frozen and Les Miserables videos (the ones for which we are not using any props), both coming out with head cut!