The following are notes written for a session I was asked to run with sixth form students about preparing for Med School interviews. I am quite sure there are lots of sensible suggestions that I have inadvertently omitted – please feel free to use the Comments facility to offer your additional advice.
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Your personal statement: You’ve [...]
Preparing for Med School interviews
Add something “sciencey” to improve your plausability
There are many reasons why I am grateful to have spent some of my summer reading Ben Goldacre’s excellent book Bad Science, including the fact that it brought to my attention a paper The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations. The article is an account of experiments conducted by Deena Weisberg and colleagues at Yale University, [...]
You know when you’ve been viper-ed
A tweet this morning from @jon_scott alerted me to the fact that sometime over the weekend, the University of Leicester has been visited by the PR machine for the Viper service. Paving slabs had been stencilled with the company’s logo and web address. Rather ingeniously, the marketeers have jet-washed the image rather than painting it [...]
Making the best of “Bad Science” (Review)
If you have not yet read Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Science, then I thoroughly recommend that you do. As readers of his regular Guardian column or his website will already know, Goldacre has embarked on a campaign to root out example of pseudoscience and shoddy science whereever they may be found.
All the usual villians are [...]
“Will this be in the test?”
Amongst the major science research journals, Science magazine has consistently been the most prominent in flying the flag for science education. I was very interested, therefore, in an Editorial by Carl Wieman in the September 4th 2009 issue of the magazine. In his piece Galvanising Science Departments, Wieman describes some fairly radical innovations in Science Education [...]
Educational Research: Reflections of Biopractitioners
The Higher Education Academy Centre for Bioscience Pedagogic Research in the Biosciences day conference brought together about thirty academics, for the most part Bioscience specialists, who have been involved to educational research. The day turned out to be highly informative and thought provoking. Some on the hoof reflections were collated via Twitter – click this [...]
To send is no guarantee of (meaningful) receipt
I was chastised recently (and rightly so) for failure to respond to an e-mail sent by a colleague. It did set me thinking, however, about a possible analogy between e-mail and teaching. This may be old hat, so apologies if I’ve reinvented the round thing with tyres.
People tend to make the assumption when an e-mail [...]
Helping students improve their referencing practice
Appropriate citation of source documents is a key element in all academic writing. As anyone involved in the teaching of undergraduates will know, however, suitable ways of organising reference lists, and conventions for highlighting within the new text the points at which the sources have been used, are not always intuitive.
Colleagues and students may therefore be interested [...]
DVD storage ideas – here’s one I prepared earlier
As someone who regularly uses off-air recordings of TV programmes in my teaching (see BioethicsBytes), I’ve generated quite a library of DVDs which have been knocking around for a while in a series of boxes. With storage of the discs being in need of a bit of rationalisation, I bought an allegedly purpose-designed CD/DVD unit from [...]
University of Leicester = University of the Year
The University of Leicester has been awarded the title University of the Year 2008 by the Times Higher.
