Hello again everyone!

I hope you’re all well and are enjoying the beginnings of winter or the beginnings of summer, depending on where you are in the world!

I am currently three weeks into my final year here at Surrey, and I have to say, the workload of this year is definitely more than last year. But what else can you expect from third year at university 😂.

We’ve been tasked with selecting a list of 8 potential dissertation topics that each person would like to undertake and in a few days, I should find out what my dissertation topic will be. As I’m in the biosciences, many of the dissertations pertained to lab experiments and/or entail some form of lab work. Other forms of dissertations that were available were grant proposals, meta-analyses and systematic reviews, data analysis and computational/in silico.

Most of the dissertations that I included on my preference list were solely lab-based dissertations, which quite honestly scares me a bit. I’ve never had to conduct a full experiment in the lab before on my own, and I feel like I’ve essentially thrown myself into the deep end a bit. But, I have faith that my supervisor, whoever they may be, will provide me with enough guidance and help to get me through it.

Aside from the dissertation, third year has thus far been much better than second year. We’re back to face-to-face lectures and frequently have seminars and tutorials for our lectures. Societies and groups have been able to host in person activities and the campus is so much more lively than it was last year. It’s like a breath of fresh air was brought to campus and I’m sure everyone is enjoying it.

It’s been great to be able to sit in a lecture hall and actually see the lecturer in front of you, rather than through a computer screen. It feels like my university experience has been restarted and it quite honestly has boosted my motivation to do well in my last year. I think motivation is exactly what I needed and what I’ll need for this year, as it’s already started off with a bang and there’s so much work to finish already.

In many of my modules, the lecturers have opted for group based work and although I normally never liked this, it’s exciting this year since we didn’t have very many opportunities to work in groups in the last two years. You get to interact with people in your lectures that you might never have spoken to before and you get to grow as an individual as you have to interact with a lot of people and you have to take a lot of people’s opinions into consideration.

That’s all from me this week 😁

I hope you all are enjoying your week thus far and will continue to enjoy it!