Hi,

This afternoon I've finished my first proper tutorial essay of the term, 24 hours ahead of its due date! We have to book tutorials this year using a web-based system and I made a last-minute decision on Saturday to book one for Wednesday, which meant writing the essay for Tuesday. Last year, writing an essay in a couple of days was normal because we often had several tutorials a week, but now essay-writing has become a bit more involved, with long reading lists and more thought and less copying out of textbooks. I spent most of the weekend essaying because , this being my first essay using lots of primary literature, I had no idea how long it would take. But thankfully it's done now so I can relax. Or start writing up some lecture notes if I'm feeling particularly virtuous.

I did get out a bit at the weekend - yesterday I helped at the creche at my church, which was great fun, and I also had a night of DVD watching on Saturday. This evening I went to a debate about designer babies at the Oxford Union, which was interesting and had some good speakers.

I've found a supervisor for y extended essay now, and I'm going to meet her on Friday. She has a weekly paediatric MRI meeting which will apparently be relevent to my essay, so I am going to join her there. I'm still popping into the lab to do some work on my embryology project every day or two, and hopefully some results will come out of it soon. Today I had a look at a chick embryo that I had marked with carbon last week and allowed to grow to a older stage than I will normally be using, just to check that the carbon stays in the tissues that I put it in. It was really interesting to see the development of the embryo and how much the marks had been rearranged as the tissues folded.

Tomorrow I've got a couple of lectures to go to (one which is part of my course and another that my tutor recommended as it looked relevent to my option) and another essay to start.

Byebye!