It's all about the process

1.       Entry blog 18 September 2015: 1^st bioprocessing class

We’ve all been there. The first class of the semester after spending three whole months indoors, spending most of your time doing mostly nothing but think about all the things you can do since you have all this time, only to end up procrastinating on the last week of the summer holidays doing all the things on your summer to-do list. Anyway, I digress.

Well, my very first lecture back from summer holidays, and my first lecture to undertake as a final year student, is bioprocessing. I really had no idea what to expect. It didn’t seem daunting, it didn’t seem scary, or exciting; it was just a class that I chose to do. The very first task that we had to do was write down our hopes, fears and expectations. I thought that this was a clever thing to do as I saw how you can relate to what you wrote down later on in the module. However, I found myself unable to write anything during the class. This wasn’t unusual as I usually don’t come up with these things in around 30 seconds; I like to really think about things, break it down and analyse all the different components, which was what I did when I got home that day. I had never really thought about what I expected to achieve out of this module, or for any module in fact. I never really had expectations for this module, apart from I guess, it being minimally intrusive to my thesis work, as it is a continuous assessment. I didn’t really have any fears or worries, I liked biology and biotechnology, I was sure of that, so I didn’t see bioprocessing to be of any particular problem.

The other thing that we did during this class was play games. The games involved the participation of everyone in the class, which I thought, and as it was explained to us, sets up what this bioprocessing module is going to be about; group learning. I found this concept very exciting as I know I will be able to utilise and showcase my particular set of skills better this way, allowing me to really dive deep into the bioprocessing world, learning as much as I can in these next 10 weeks.