Sarah O'Connor is a second year
undergraduate studying Natural Sciences at university. Here are her
views:
Last year I took part in the Student Associate Scheme, which
involved spending three weeks working in a local secondary school
as a teaching assistant. During this time I took a lesson in which
the students did a practical, extracting DNA from a kiwi. At the
end my supervisor told me that the lesson was great apart from the
fact that I hadn't told the students what they should see if they
had done the procedure correctly. I was stunned ? surely science is
about trying something and seeing what happens, not about following
a list of instructions until you get the result you were told you
were going to get an hour ago?
I always enjoyed science lessons at school because I wanted to
understand why the world was the way it was and how things worked.
I was often, however, frustrated that the focus seemed to be on
memorising information rather than thinking about why it should be
true or how people went about working such things out. Questions
were frequently met with ?you'll cover that next year? or ?you'll
have to look it up? and practicals were regimented and dull. If I
wrote something in a test that was true and relevant but not in the
syllabus I did not get credit because my answer ?wasn't in the mark
scheme?. The icing on the cake was that at the start of every year
I seemed to hear ?sorry, what we taught you last year wasn't
actually true ? this is how x system really works?. When was I
going to learn about the world as it was in real life? Or at least
be made aware of what I wasn't being told?
With all this in mind I am not even remotely surprised that most
students find science at school boring, repetitive and inaccessible
and finish school with very little understanding of what science
actually is (never mind remembering any of the hundreds of facts
they had to be able to regurgitate for exams at the end of every
year..).
Studying Natural Sciences at Cambridge could not have been more
different. Suddenly I was encouraged to ask ?why? at all
opportunities and taught how to go about considering the answers to
my own questions. In the practicals as students we were given
suggestions as to interesting ideas to explore but largely left to
our own devices ? if we became interested in something that we
observed we were encouraged to follow that up rather than continue
through a list of instructions mindlessly.
The other thing that I really noticed when I came to university was
that science was no longer about biology-chemistry-physics ? there
was a greater general acknowledgement that these all fed into each
other and the interfaces between different areas of science were
explored. I feel that this is a huge advantage of studying the
Natural Science tripos rather than a single science elsewhere.
Similarly, I found the fact that we study four broad subjects in
first year (maths and three experimental sciences) really helpful,
both in allowing students to see what science is about at
university before committing to one area of it and in giving a
broad scientific education, which increases appreciation for the
ways in which different areas of science interface and is also
helpful when a student does specialise ? I will be reading
Pathology in my final year and I definitely feel that my
understanding of the subject has been enhanced by my study of
chemistry, pharmacology, physiology and cell biology.
If you are considering applying to read Natural Sciences or to
study a scientific subject anywhere the best advice that I can give
you is to read around your subject widely and extensively. This
will help you to develop areas of interest, give you a better idea
of what you might want to study and give you something to write
about on your personal statement (always a bonus). Reading books
from authors as diverse as Jared Diamond, Stephen Hawking, Richard
Dawkins, Brian Greene, Roger Penrose, Richard Feynman and Peter
Wothers gave me a good idea what to expect at university as well as
broadening my horizons ? I never intended to study physics or maths
but reading about them certainly taught me a great deal. I also
enjoyed reading about the lives of some of these and other
scientists (especially Feynman and Erd?s) in their
(auto)biographies, which were frequently just as fascinating as
their work. There are also frequently lectures or exhibitions on
around the country, which are cheap or free and well worth
attending ? try your local university or the Royal Society if you
live in London. There are also thousands of lectures and
demonstrations available on the internet.