Embryology (for BIOSCI107)
You haven’t been a biomed student until you have freaked out over this block of lectures and its laboratory!
Lectures
The lectures were lots of fun! Fabiana (the lecturer) turns it into a colouring-in session and she is absolutely adorable! She colours and annotates the courseguide, so if (like me) you don’t normally lug it to lectures, you do need to for her block. I would recommend bringing colouring pencils rather than highlighters, as the highlighters go through the paper and mess up the next page.
It feels like she talks and colours so much faster than you can keep up with, so just do a little patch of colour in the area she has coloured in, and when you go home, you can finish colouring in the whole picture as you know what goes where. This will give you more time to listen to what she is actually saying and means your notes will be way neater by the end of it. It is a good idea to just listen to her lectures at double speed once they are uploaded, just to double check you didn’t miss what she was saying whilst trying to copy her colouring in!
When we came to the end of the lecture series, I was overwhelmed and pretty confused about the lecture content because I felt like I didn’t know how everything fitted together. It really felt like she had jumped around the timeline a lot, and I couldn’t seem to work out what happened before what. I desperately wanted to put it into a nice timeline, but didn’t know where to start…until I found thisvideo on JTT’s website.
Follow this link and once you are on the page, scroll down to the section that say BIOSCI 107. Watch the video titled: “Total Review of Embryology”. The video is only an hour long, and puts everything into a general timeline. Once I had this, I was able to put my notes into order on my laptop and I made a giant poster of this timeline. Learning how everything fits together REALLY helped my understand the topic and lead to me getting full marks.
THE Lab
I say THE lab because I feel like it’s the only lab that people coming into biomed know about, as everyone seems to talk about it.
I managed to get full marks on this lab, and I think it was because I did a little bit of extra prep.
I went and bought the modelling clay that is used in the lab. It is a heat-curable compound that is called “Du-kit”. I think I found some at Warehouse Stationery, but have a look online first. On the weekend before my lab, I set some time aside, and worked through the entire lab. Basically, I made a practice embryo. It was actually really fun and I had no time pressure or stress attached to it. It made me feel heaps better going into the lab, and I put him in the oven and kept him for that week so that I could read through the lab again whilst looking at my embryo and seeing what I could do better.
Whilst I was proud of my first attempt, there were definitely things I could have done better. The heart was a little small, and that red blood vessel you see there, is going to COMPLETELY the wrong place! I don’t even know how I did that. The head is probably a bit too small and skinny as well, but that is not too major. But, I made all these mistakes while I was relaxed and had no time pressure. Imagine trying to do this for the first time whilst stressed and under time pressure?!
The lab was still super stressful. I went in relaxed, but the tutor told me that the head was too small, but my problem was, I didn’t actually have enough clay to make it bigger. She made me start over again, even though it was half an hour in. This meant I was behind the whole entire time. It was also super humid in the room, which made the clay really hard to work with. If I hadn’t done the practice, I don’t think I would have been able to catch-up as I did. It was great to have an idea in my head of where I was going next and how best to get it done.
When the tutor started playing the Final Countdown, I was still trying to catch up, but I finished with seconds to spare! When I looked down at my creation, I honestly thought it was worse than my original practice one and I was quite down about it. I think it was the stress talking.
However, once I got it back the next lab, and took it home to compare with Fred, George (the new embryo) actually was better! Lesson: don’t beat yourself up for something you do under stress, because you are probably seeing it for worse than it is!
Hope you come to enjoy the block as much as I did!
