New subject: Football season starts

13 May 2008


      Dear all,
Raili raised some important points. My take on these are:
1) we have to get feedback from all courses, many of them are now missing
I agree with this completely, so many feedbacks did not get to the staff
this year
2) there are a lot of criticism about the order of courses Biomolecules and
Biokemian menetelmät I, which suggest that Biokemian menetelmät I should be
the first, and Biomolecules after that.
I disagree with this very strongly. Methods I cannot be before Biomolecules
for the simple reason that in Biomolecules students find out what is the
structure of DNA, what is a protein, how does transcription, translation etc
occur. Without these basic facts most of Methods I is meaningless - what can
you say about SDS-PAGE or agarose-gel or PCR when you don't know anything
about the molecules? Methods I was never the 1st course, it was the 1st
practical course.
In an ideal world there would be some overlap between Biomolecules and
Methods I i.e. they would run in part in parallel. This is effectively
impossible due to timetabling constraints. The first year students do so
much chemistry that there is not time for 2 biochemistry courses in parallel
in the autumn term. Also we have to consider timetabling for biology and
chemistry students who do these two courses. I have the autumn timetable in
front of me to see what we can do to rearrange Biomolecules (it needs to be
more compact), but it is difficult to do even this. Unless we bring
Chemistry or Cell Biology (for 1st years) teaching in house we cannot run
Biomolecules and Methods I in parallel. We cannot expand the teaching load
at the moment, much as I would like to bring Cell Biology in house.
We should also contextualise what is meant by a "lot of critisism" about the
order of the two courses......
Another major timetabling discussion is Microbiology. This is clearly not
the equivalent of the other 2nd year courses, but there is no room for it in
the 1st year and the other second year courses must go in the order
Molecular Bioogy I - Protein Chemistry I / English for Biochemists II -
Methods II. Combined with the teaching from other departments this leaves
the only place for Microbiology to be where it is now. The better solution
in my view for microbiology would be to have a course taught specifically
for our students and not shaired with Process Engineeering, whose students
know much less biochemistry are this point. Again we cannot expand the
teaching load at the moment.
the third major timetabling issue is the lack of practical classes in the
3rd year. As discussed at feedback day in part this arose due to no
practicals on the Cell Communication courses this year. However the major
reason is that it was planned this way so that students could have the
maximum flexibility for choosing their optional courses from other
departments. With few practical classes and the large amount of self study
in the BSc thesis we thought that students could have the flexibility to
really do what they really wanted to do. We could balance the number of
practicals between the years, but this would mean a serious loss of
timetable flexibility in the 3rd year. Please could 3rd year students respon
on this issue.
3) Finns should teach in Finnish, not in English and
4) English teching is OK, if it is supportive, not pressing too much
I disagree with this for three reasons:
i) English is the working language of Science. If you cannot communicate
effectively in English you cannot succeed in science. Sad but true. In the
old system the students had nothing in English until the 3rd year, by which
point they had forgotten all of their high school English. The standard of
English of our new system students is far better than are old system
students and while teh 1st year is tougher I think it really helps them in
subsequent years of the degree and of their future careers. We need courses
taught in English from the 1st year and even with the number of non-Finnish
staff we do not have enough native English speaking staff - in fact we have
1 in total, me.
ii) All of the text books and most of the material available on the web are
in English. This makes learning the basics in English easier than learning
them in Finnish; you don't understand something the lecturer said you have a
huge number of choices to find out the information in whatever format suits
you best. Students come in not knowing the biochemistry words, but they
don't know them in Finnish either. Another comment to contextualise allm of
this I have had comments from Finnish students that it is difficult to write
exams on certain finnish-taught courses in Finnish because all the material
available is in English and hence in the exam they are having to translate
from English to Finnish in the exam.
iii) If Finns teach in English then they set a good example to the Finnish
students - look it is possible to talk in English about biochemistry even if
you are not a native English speaker. If only foreigners talk in English who
is the example for Finnish students?
Again to contextualise this, the complaints from students came on
Biomolecules about Tuomo and essentially (in the written forms that came
past me) came from 2 students who were complaining mainly about 1 word he
mispronounced. Finally on biomolecules we also have foreign students and so
it has to be taught in English.
The benefits to the students far outweigh the costs.
What we do need is the English I course we originally designed and were
promised and not the course we currently have that a large part of it is
irrevelant to Biochemistry. Yet again I will have a meeting with Kielikeskus
representatives about this.
5) There are a lot of things we can try, in order to prevent students flow
to Medical campus
-we should give concrete examples of working jobs to biochemists (as done
earlier!), research is one choise but not the only one
-we have to describe research projects going on in the department, and give
the decription every year
-tell to the student that science is fun, and tell them that we (most of us)
are living normal life, having children,  having other activities etc, not
being workaholics!
Again to contextulalise this. This loss of students to the medical campus is
virtually entirely in the 1st year. So we would need to do all of this
effort to keep them in the first year at which point most of the research we
do would be meaningless to the students. We already have presentations about
research in Oulu to the 3rd year students (much earlier than we used to have
them) and we have already agreed that these should be expanded next year to
try to ensure all groups in the department present. We also have other
features as part of that course e.g. public understanding of science etc
that cover some of the other points. Unless I am missing something we
present more things earlier on than ever before. An old system student said
on the feedback day that they did not really understand what biochemistry
was about until the Pro Gradu project. I hope that all of our new system
students know this far earlier on.
We should also acknowledge that if somebody wants to go to medical school,
they will go to medical school (if they get in - good luck to everyone
taking the exams in a couple of weeks) no matter what we say about
biochemistry.
The problem is (according to multiple students comments each year for the
last 3 years) our new first year is much better training to get into medical
school than our old first year - so paradoxically by getting better we lose
more students.
Where we can try to cut down the loses is elsewhere, but again we should
encourage not discourage 3rd years students to do MSc courses elsewhere if
they better fit their future career choices, and at least several of the
other losses from the system have not been losses to other
departments/universities but a loss from the university to the "real world".
What we need to do is ADVERTISE in schools. too many 1st years tell me that
they did not know what biochemistry was when they applied. The BSc thesis on
public understanding of science includes options to go to a school but
nobody did it this year. Some staff already do a lot towards public
understanding of science, others do less and as an example just look how
difficult it was for Sakari to get volunteers to help with science day.
On the final point science is fun, but according to nearly everyone who is
asked to succeed in academic research it is hard work and something else has
to be sacrificed. One recent article said that to suceed in modern science
you could have only one of the following: a family, a major hobby, or going
out and socializing regularly with friends. But to be good at ANYTHING you
have to work at it, to sacrifice other things. It is also harder now than in
the past to succeed in academic science (see attached recent article to get
really depressed). We should not lie to our students, but nor should we
treat it as something depressing. Why are we here doing the jobs we are
doing if we could earn at least twice as much for far less work with the
skills we have? There must be something? There is - the passion and the fun
of finding things out, understanding how things work and knowing the impact
that this can have on society through, in the case of biochemistry graduates
who do research, understanding disease states and finding novel treatments
or improvements to existing treatments.
Anyway it is 5 o'clock so I am off home to have fun with my children until
they good to bed.
Best wishes,
Lloyd

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