Teaching with a vision

 Teaching with a vision

I mentioned in a recent post that I haven’t yet detected any great vision or philosophy behind the medical teaching in Cambridge. Today, I’d like to write about a place where I have actually experienced teaching with a vision: at the university where I did my undergraduate degree.

Ok, admittedly I did not go to a large state-funded university, but the small private University Fresenius (where I did a chemistry degree), but I don’t think it’s necessarily the source of funding that makes a difference here.

In Germany, the name Fresenius (for an article on the Chemist Carl Remigius Fresenius, see here) is associated with excellence in analytical chemistry. One strong point of studying at Fresenius Uni is still a strong background in analytical chemistry to this day. However, being named after the great founder of analytical chemistry does not mean that the university is resting on its laurels. A quick visit of the website reveals that the chemistry course has undergone several transformations since my graduation year, proof of ongoing improvements and adaptations in times of change. Already when I was a student, the curriculum had been refined over the years by constant feedback from industry, ensuring that it was up to date, but also that the graduates would be happily recruited and employed. Furthermore, I found the content of the course very well constructed, both in terms of what was taught and what content was omitted (that's also important!), as well as in terms of organisation. (To be completely honest, I sometimes wished at the time to learn particular topics in a bit more detail, such as quantum chemistry, but that still has not changed even today as a student in Cambridge. So it’s obviously more to do with my personal ideas than anything else). 

It seemed as if someone had sat down initially to really think about what knowledge makes a good chemist and then built up the curriculum from first principle, open to constant improvement. The key 

philosophy seemed to be the communication of what is the most comprehensive "working knowledge" of a chemist, and to really bring across these principles. One way in which this was achieved was the high amount of practical lab teaching, more than 50% of the time if I remember correctly. Apart from the obvious different disciplines of chemistry, the overall masterplan also includes the possibility to integrate minor studies in other subjects such as economics and languages, in order to develop a well rounded set of skills.
I think this overall strategy really brings home the content and still does not prevent anyone from indulging in more detailed studies, now able to fall on the fertile ground of a sound foundation of knowledge.

Germany is different to the UK in that there aren't (m)any elite universities with longstanding traditions (although there is a discussion if this should be changed), and there is a much more common-sense attitude towards the significance of school grades. As one example, there is no restriction on the A-level average of a student wanting to study Chemistry at Fresenius or anywhere else (apart from the fact that they don't fail, of course). However, I am convinced that every student going through the Fresenius system, no matter how academic or not, won't be able to help him/herself but to emerge with a sound knowledge of chemistry in the end. I think this steady output of good graduates is quite an achievement in the light of the generous admission policy and is certainly tribute to the educational philosophy. In Cambridge and Oxford on the other hand, where only the best A-level students of the country are admitted, I don't think it's as surprising that the graduates are excellent, because they were already excellent in the first place. Sometimes I even think they are excellent despite the teaching they have encountered, not because of it.

To sum up, as a result of an overall vision, I think that the people produced at Fresenius enter the professional world with a great foundation and working knowledge of Chemistry, perhaps not excessively familiar with the academic intricacies of the most advanced chemical topics, but well rounded and ready to be placed in any lab and start working. I don’t think this is the result of chance, but of a well thought through approach to produce exactly the type of person needed in the world of chemistry.

I definitely think that every university course on offer in an institution should at least aim to stand out in some way and give their students something special along the way, and Fresenius definitely shows that this can be done, even on a smaller budget and without relying exclusively on the best students in the country.

five months into med school...

Wow, it's been so long since I last posted something... I had even forgotten that my last entry was about leaving science... now I am already five months into med school!

It's been an intense period of many emotional states, and I thought I'd summarise them briefly. I have to admit, the first few months were hard...
Before I started, I had certain expectations / fears, some of which were met / not met / dealt with, so I can now comment on them retrospectively. Maybe it will help someone considering graduate medicine at a somewhat mature age (possibly even a scientist!) know what to expect… and not to waste any time with these things!

First of all, I was looking forward to learning a lot more about biology and physiology. Being a chemist by training who then became a molecular biophysicist, I had never received an introduction to these topics on a university level. One positive aspect of med school would be to receive this, which would certainly make me a better scientist (If then for any reason med school should not be for me, the outcome would still be somewhat successful).
Starting to study biology and physiology, I realised quickly: There is so much to know – I want to know everything – there is not enough time!
After eleven years in science, I got used to knowing my area of research in great detail. Suddenly I knew next to nothing about things, and it was obviously impossible to get to the same level of expertise on everything in such a short amount of time. I found myself spending a lot of time investigating details, because I was simply not used to covering things on a seemingly superficial level (also why should I have to do that? I really wanted to know!!!). Knowing how much detail there is to everything, I felt faced with an insurmountable amount of knowledge to absorb. The speed with which we were introduced to things did not help either: biochemistry students would learn about a particular topic in a whole year’s lecture series, and we would race through it in less than ten lectures and still be expected to know a lot more than the basics.
I realised that there was a gradient of satisfaction regarding the amount of information absorbed and how much education people had received before: People straight from A-level seemed happiest, but the more people had studied, i.e. undergrad, master's, PhD, post-doc, the more they knew how much there is to know, therefore much they didn’t know, and that caused some degree of dissatisfaction. Given my position in that spectrum, I became pretty frustrated, too!

Another thing I was SOO looking forward to was to be taught again... to sit in a lecture theatre with some kind of expert passing his/her pearls of wisdom onto me. That would be a welcome change to sitting google-ing or pub-med-ing things on my own (which sometimes felt like re-inventing the wheel)!
How wrong I was!!! It is absolutely not the case that someone delivers any information to you on a golden plate… How sad! Even though there are lectures, they are far from ideal. Thank god I know how to google stuff! I was very surprised that there was little attempt made to bring people to the same level at the start of a lecture, how badly structured most lectures were, and how it felt over and over again like someone had just emptied a huge bucket of undigested information over your head! In cases where I already knew the subject being taught, I was surprised how convoluted the topic was presented, how simple things were made to look much more complex than they actually were. Sometimes I knew that crucial pieces of information were missing in order to understand what was being said.
All these problems mean that the students have to spend the great majority of their time picking up the pieces of information and organising them, bringing them into some format that can be understood and then learnt for exams. Again it felt like re-inventing the wheel! With up to 30 hours of coursework every week, there just isn't enough time to do write proper notes on everything… This was another source of great frustration.

Finally, I was worried that I would find it hard to learn things by heart, something that I had not done in years. Also, I knew that most people on my course would be a lot younger than me (I was 30 when I started), and I was worried what this would be like.
This expectation turned out to be true. At the beginning of the course, I felt like I was slower than the other students, in particular the 18 year-olds, who seemed to have a much better memory. Thankfully, this situation changed, and after a lot of studying over Christmas, my mind is now much closer to the way it used to be during my undergrad. What a relief! Even though I am still waiting to reach full capacity again (I hope this is possible!), I am now more confident that I will be able to memorise enough in order to pass the exams. And I have a major advantage: I know what I want to retain for my future career, what I might need, because I have already had the experience of studying and working a job.
Regarding the age difference: I am the 4th oldest out of nearly 300 people! I am even older than most of the graduate medics, who average around 24. I thought telling people my age would not be a problem, but I realised that they do look at me differently because of it. Well, there is nothing I can do about it, so I don't worry any more! ;-)

A few final remarks on something I had not seen coming:
Students in Cambridge are not the most respected of all people. There is this preconceived idea that we are lazy, stupid, and have lots of free time to wait around. Even people who did a medical degree themselves seem to think that. For that reason we are sometimes not dealt with professionally. There are double standards everywhere! Also, there are a lot of fragile egos in charge of students, who would rather put you down than admitting they don’t know the answer to a question. So far, I have not found a way to successfully deal with a person like this and it can be quite demotivating.
Thankfully, many of my graduate peers find this frustrating as well. One of them put this very nicely: we have all had successful careers before, therefore the opportunity cost of us being here is very high. Hence the higher expectations. But the only way is to keep calm and carry on. Always good advice!

However, despite all these frustrations, I am truly enjoying this degree. Everything is so interesting! I have already found that I look at the literature with a much wider perspective, and I am sure this will be useful when I come back to science one day!

the new building of the oxford biochemistry department

(picture taken from here)

in 2008, the biochemistry department of oxford got a new building: a flashy £47 million construction highly praised and recently decorated with at least one architectural award. it is supposed to attract excellent researchers from all over the world, and inspire ground-breaking research among the workers with its open-plan design...

is this really true? here is the opinion of an oxford biochemistry post-doc:

the first thing i'd like to say: of course it's nice to work in a new building rather than an old one. old research buildings are often as ugly from the outside as they are from the inside, with labs cluttered with old equipment that's either broken or that people have forgotten how to use, and with office-shelves filled with previous workers' abandoned belongings collecting the dust of decades. our old building was exactly like this, absolutely not pretty to look at, with stained carpets, dirty windows and spiderwebs (sometimes even huge spiders). but i have to say, it was alright to work there. everything important was under one roof, labs and offices close together, bathrooms in close range, kettles, microwaves, sinks and water fountains in the offices and even a common room to get a bit further away from your desk. it was adequate for the work that we had to do. not beautiful, but practical.

now we work in "new biochemistry", which is not ugly in the least. it is an L-shaped building of 6 levels, two underground and 4 above, with a huge sky-lit atrium in the centre breaking through all floors. the different levels are connected through the main staircase which crosses the atrium, with the flights of stairs arranged irregularly, a bit like the revolving staircase of hogwart's school of witchcraft. through the atrium flies a flock of plastic birds on glass-fibre strings, semi-disturbing because some of them are siamese twins or look as if shot in mid-air, but still kind of nice to look at. around the atrium, the office spaces or "write-up areas" form little niches, filled each with six rows of a total of 24 desks and two rows of cupboards flanking them. here and there you find a PI (i.e. principal investigator's) office or admin areas. the labs are located on the outer side of the building, with all-glass fronts so that people walking past can watch us work or so that the workers can see some daylight. the outside of the building is decorated with coloured glass panels projecting out of the window-glass front. the inner side of the L is decorated with rorschach test pictures, i.e. ink stains whose interpretation gives information about the observer's psyche. (they could also be slices of animal brains or images of vulvas... i wonder what that says about my psyche! by the way, out of all these possibilities, the latter probably has the most to do with biochemistry....)

when i first set foot into the new building, i thought: how are we supposed to concentrate with our offices in the atrium? and how are we going to manage to work at such tiny desks?
unfortunately, these initial concerns were justified. it's so hard to concentrate!! we hear the lab phones of every single floor ringing through the atrium, including people's mobile phones (which also causes envy towards those who actually have reception). because we are cramped in so closely, we hear pretty much every word spoken in our write-up area. plus that of other people in the atrium! when people really need to concentrate on writing, reading or thinking, then it's not surprising that the atmosphere can get pretty tense.
even if it was completely silent in the atrium, the small size of the desks already makes working difficult. the desks are so small that you can't easily place your laptop and your labbook on the same desktop. i solved that problem by buying an imac, but even with the keyboard i struggle to place everything on the table. the desks are also so narrow that two people cannot easily sit next to each other in front of one computer, which is necessary when you show someone your data. the second person has to invade into the neighbour's deskspace, which can get annoying for them. there are not enough chairs either, so the extra person either has to stand up or take someone else's chair... you see the problem? depending on how stressed people are on any given day, people start arguing. we've really argued a lot more since we moved.

i once discussed the lack of space with our head of department. he simply replied: when you have to write a paper, you work form home anyway...
i'd say £47 million well spent!

of course there are many other things to talk about apart from the offices: the labs, the cafe, the artwork presented in the building, the general access to the building, other offices, communal areas... i think i'll mention those another day!

finally i just want to say that after a few months in the new building, the visual appeal of some of its features kind of grows on you. but this still does not compensate for the simple lack of practicality.

we often get groups of official visitors in new biochemistry (one time even the prime minister), who are shown around the atrium and lab areas. they admire the architecture and get an impression of how science works nowadays. sometimes the guests even take pictures of us at our desks from the staircases. working in this building every day, you start to feel like an extra in this presentation.
one major purpose of this new building must have been to project a certain image of science to the outside world. that has certainly worked. but getting on with your research kind of ended up in the background...

ps: related articles about new biochemistry and similar building trends in science you can find here, here and here.