Practicals, psychology lectures and Christmas!

For the first time this term we didn't have a 9 o'clock lecture today. At 10 I had an exercise physiology practical. One person in each group of four had to breathe into a big plastic bag called a Douglas bag while they stepped up and down onto a block at varying numbers of steps per minute. We measured the amount of air collected and analysed it in a machine that works out the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Then we plugged numbers into lots of equations to work out things like the energy expenditure and work rate.

Yesterday we had a less practical immunology practical. It was just looking down microscopes and drawing and answering questions on what we could see. The slides were of lymph nodes stained for different cell types with immunohistochemistry. We also had three lectures - one on antibodies, one on tumour viruses, and one on psychology.

The psychology lecture was the first in our Psychology for Medicine course. This is examined separately from the three main topic areas, which each have an essay and short notes exam. The equivalent of the Psychology course in the first year is Medical Sociology, which also has a series of lectures and an exam at the end. Yesterday's lecture was introductory and overviewed the history and subdivisions of psycholgy, with more detailed examples of how pscychology is applied to reading, the effect of media violence, and face recognition.

I started my last essay of the term today. Our work-load has kept me busy but has been light enough so that I could go away last weekend and not have an essay to write while I was off walking and playing team games in Shropshire. I have one tutorial left this week and two next week and then it's home for the holidays. Today I had Christmas dinner in hall with crackers and Christmas decorations. The medsoc (medical students' society) Christmas ball is coming up this weekend as well as the college carol service.