Greeting dear readers! I’m still alive, although apologies to the Student Bloggers Team for having gone AWOL in recent weeks. The end of term was hectic to say the least! I am currently back home, enjoying some quality time with the family before slogging it back to London to complete my final term at Imperial. It’s only mildly terrifying. So what am I up to with my holidays?
Well I spent Easter weekend in London as I’d signed up to teach Sunday school that week at church. It was super fun to teach the story of Jesus’s resurection to the children at church and we had a great time eating chocolate eggs, making pictures and talking about why the resurection is so exciting for us as Christians. I’d recommend this short video dispelling a few common myths and objections about the death and resurection of Jesus if you’re interested in learning a bit more about why Easter is so exciting!
After Easter weekend, I came home for a few days before heading off to Wales with my church. Every year we go to a conference called Word Alive, where thousands of people from all over the country come to hear Bible teaching, spend time together as church family, go to seminars that deal with different aspects of life and how to live as a Christian in different situations and just have a nice holiday near the beach. The weather was excellent for Wales (read as: chilly but there were no severe weather warnings this year!) and I had a lovely time with friends.
I’m now back at home for a couple of weeks and I’m about to start reading for my dissertation. I’m excited to get underway and move on to job applications and other fun adult things, but it’s also rather intimidating to know that I’m about to leave the cosy, oblivious bubble that is academia at Imperial. Stay tuned as I venture in to the adult world for the first time and try not to have too many mental breakdowns!
Nostalgia seems to be the key word of this year. I swear that only yesterday I was taking my seat in a giant, air-conditioning-lacking lecture theatre in the Sir Alexander Fleming building to have my first ever lecture at Imperial College. Then I remember that was nearly two and a half years ago and I cry a little inside remembering how quickly time flies, how many amazing times (and sad ones) I’ve had since then and also how I’m going to 21 soon which tips me definitively into the ‘twenties’ bracket. Man I feel old. Third year is more than half way done now and I’ve just begun the final course of the year. I love it already and I am so excited for the next few weeks! You can click on my tags on the right hand side to see what first and second year biology look like but what is third year all about and what am I getting up to at the moment?
I was looking for a cringey stock photo to add to this post but I thought I’d share the whole image search with you as it’s so funny. The woman bottom right staring at her plants in my fave.
You get free reign to study what you want to study
With third year comes great responsibility – picking all 3 lecture courses that you’ll study in autumn term and the first half of spring. You’ll make your choices towards the end of second year and there are many to pick from. There are no obligatory lecture courses (unless you do a literature based dissertation but I’ll get to that in a minute) so you can specialise a bit more this year. For budding ecologists, there’s an opportunity to do field work in South Africa, spending two weeks in the field doing fun ecology things like throwing quadrats and learning the names of insects (I didn’t go but everyone I know who did said it was amazing and they had some awesome experiences). If you’re more in to the ‘buzz topics’ there’s options to study stem cells, neuroscience and regeneration or if you love to code, model and do tricky maths then bioinformatics and epidemiology may be more your style. There’s something for everyone and it’s been great to study in depth topics that I’m really interested in this year.
You do your final year project
This takes up the last 4 weeks of spring term and the whole of summer term and there are literally over 300 choices for titles. You have to go through this list, picking 8 top choices and ranking them in order of preference. Some people will do lab projects, spending their time working under a supervisor to conduct experiments, gather data and then do a big write up. Others (me included) will do a literature project, still working with a supervisor but doing more independent research through scientific journals and eventually writing a big paper summarising what we’ve discovered. The diversity of projects is immense – you could end up measuring snails at London Zoo, using live imaging to see how plant roots cope with growing in small space or if you’re me, researching exactly how a mosquito’s immune system works to eliminate the malaria parasite from their system. If you do a literature project….
You get the opportunity to do a short science communication course
Since the literature projects take a slightly shorter time to complete due to the fact that we’re not in the lab gathering data before we can start writing, we take a four week science communication course before the Easter break. This includes talks from various professionals in the industry, from videographers to teachers to the chief executive of the Science Media Centre! We also do some science writing, blogging, podcast-making, book groups, basically all kinds of different things to introduce us to the concept of science communication and to get a feel for what we enjoy. It’s only been a week but I honestly cannot commend this course highly enough, I love it so much and it’s really affirmed for me what I want to go in to in the future.
You have to find something to do next year
Word of advice: don’t ask anyone in their final year what their plans are for next year. Some will tell you about the banking job of the PhD they’ve already been offered but most will cry a little, stare blankly at you or run in to the distance. It’s a stressful time of year for those of us who are moving on to new places, still waiting to hear about graduate schemes or waiting to interview for postgraduate studies, but moving on is inevitable and so I’ll end this post by wishing the best of luck to all my fellow biologists. We’re nearly there, and I hope the remainder of year 3 is amazing for you.
Wow has it really been over a month since I last blogged?! I am now back at Imperial after a long Easter holiday and it’s lovely to be back in London after such a long time away. The trees are in blossom, the skies are blue, the grass is green and no one can judge me for buying ice cream on a (very) regular basis given how lovely the weather is.
I spent the first week of the holiday in Prestatyn, North Wales, at a five day Christian conference. It was great to spend some chill time with friends and go to some interesting seminars about how Christianity relates practically to different areas of life. We spent quite a lot of time on the amazing, giant beach, some of us even dipping our toes in to the Irish sea
The beach just went on forever
The evening meetings took place in a massive marquee but unfortunately we were only able to use it for the first couple of nights due to the extreme wind and rain! When I went to this conference last year the weather was sublime but this year there were severe weather warnings for the area we were staying in, the wind was absolutely brutal and it rained persistently. After the first night of extreme weather, many of the smaller marquees on the site we were staying on were damaged and declared unsafe for the seminars the next day, we were warned to stay inside our accommodation and it was all very scary! Luckily I survived, we had a fantastic week and I went home feeling refreshed and ready to tackle all the work I had over the holidays.
My feet remained safely inside my wellies and rightly so, I was informed by the other person in this picture that the water was freezing!
The second year biologists have all been hard at work over the break writing our tutored dissertations. The TD is a 4000 word mini dissertation which is written in the style of a scientific review (a paper which looks at lots research that has been done on a certain topic and collates it in to a concise article). We were given a choice of about 40 different topics and then asked to submit 6 choices in order of preference. The topics ranged from the ecological (How should we expect the earth’s vegetation to be responding to climate change?) to the cellular (The role of ion channels in plant development) so there was a lot to choose from no matter what your interest is. I was gunning for malaria vaccinations as my topic but, alas, it’s usually a very popular choice so I didn’t get it. I got my 4th choice which I was initially not too happy with but it ended up being really interesting!
My dissertation was about how plant pathogens mimic plant molecules and compounds to trick the plant and promote their own virulence. It’s very interesting and very clever! Plants and the pathogens that infect them are often engaged in coevolutionary arms races, meaning that the plant is evolving mechanisms to overcome infection at almost the same rate as the pathogens are evolving mechanisms to overcome plant defense systems. The result is pathogens that have very sophisticated methods of colonising the plant for their own gain. For example, one type of bacteria produces the hormone coronatine. Coronatine causes the stomata to open (openings in the leaf which allow gas exchange to occur) so that the bacteria can easily enter the plant. It also interacts with signalling pathways inside the plant to weaken plant defenses and divert resources away from attacking the infecting bacteria. Pretty clever right?
The TD has now been submitted which I couldn’t be happier about! Although it was interesting to write, I can’t say it was all that fun to spend literally the entire break at my desk writing it. College life is still busy as ever but hopefully things will slow down a little now I don’t have the threat of the TD deadline hanging over me! The next deadline is French coursework, revision is, of course, ongoing and today I start my final course of the year – immunology. I’m finding the prospect of getting back in to a working routine quite daunting but I love immunology so I’m very much looking forward to getting stuck in to my new course!
I hope everyone had a great Easter holiday and has returned to uni or college feeling ready to face the new challenges that this term will bring!
