First lectures of the year!!!

Now, I know what you are thinking, it does seem rather far into the academic year for me to be having my first lecture. However, as I am now in my Masters year of the Interdisciplinary Science course the program runs very differently from what I have been use to for the last three years. My time this year is almost completely managed by me as we have very few scheduled sessions and all of our deadlines don’t arrive until the end of the academic year. It is a little scary but I am enjoying organising myself to such an extent… So far…

The two lectures were research lectures the first of which was put on by our IScience Society (which I am a part of) and involved an excellent talk from a Leicester PhD student, Stuart Phillips, who gave us a presentation on his area of cancer research. The second lecture was a public lecture organised by the department where we were lucky enough to have Professor Monica Grady of the Open University come to talk to use about Tissint; a meteorite from Mars, and what this means for our understanding of our Universe. It was an extremely informative and well presented lecture which I think all of our guests enjoyed. Our I-Science lectures are open to everyone so if you are interested in coming to a future one make sure to keep checking here for more details! 🙂 I really enjoyed both lectures and I am very thankful of our speakers that gave some of their time to talk to us.

Although I will only be attending a very small number of traditional lectures this year it is not as much of a shock to me as I think it would have been if I had taken a different undergraduate course. The IScience course itself is very different from a lot of other undergraduate courses in that there is a lot more focus on self learning. Unlike traditional lecture based courses, IScience sessions are much more interactive and most commonly comprise of discussions with academics, as well as peers, about the topics being studied rather than just passively having to soak up information that is being told to you. This makes for a really stimulating learning atmosphere and allows IScience students the skills to work in a way much more like professional researchers and academics. Due to this I am not really that use to learning from lectures anyway and so I feel I am in a pretty good place for how I need to work this year and after I graduate!