Progress

Himself has just left for a business trip, so I'm going to try to really catch up on study this weekend. I haven't left myself much room to manoeuvre with the second part of Topics in Health Sciences - Understanding Cancers - finishing up in June, and Elements of Forensic Science and Inside Nuclear Energy just starting. The deadline for the last two is October, but I'll try to get them done well before that. Oh, and Introductory Human Physiology on Coursera is proving to be a lot of work, but fascinating. Makes me look forward to the OU level 2 biology courses.

Looking back (ah, hindsight!) what I should have done is taken Introducing Health Sciences - that together with Topics in Health Sciences would have given me the Certificate in Health Sciences. And I definitely enjoyed some of the Short Science modules more than others - having heard good things about Introducing Health Sciences (30 credits), I would probably have gladly done that instead of Plants and People, Understanding Human Nutrition and Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis (10 credits each).

I could go back and do Introducing Health Sciences, but it's about £1,000 to do it in Switzerland even on the transitional fee structure, it's being withdrawn in 2015 and if I want to make progress on level 2 I don't really have the time for it before then...

Which brings me to the next question. Under the transitional arrangements, I have until the end of 2019 to complete my BSc Open Studies. (I thought about trying to convert to a science BSc but I think that would involve changing too much at this stage.) That's plenty of time, but do I try to do all of level 2 in one year and same for level 3?

The level 2 courses I want to take all start at the same time this October, and one of them is going to be hard (The Molecular World, a whopping 60 credits of chemistry) although I'm hoping the other two won't be as difficult as I already have some background knowledge (Cell Biology and Human Biology, 30 credits each).

The level 3 courses are a bit more spread out, but all between May 2014 (overlapping with the three level 2 courses!) and October 2015. So it would be better for my sanity to space them out, doing each level in two years instead of one, but I'm not sure I want to wait until 2017 to get the BSc.

I'll keep my eyes open for new courses, but at the moment these are the ones I'm most interested in. And that is the key - some of the courses I struggled with were ones that I thought I'd be interested in but just wasn't (I'm looking at you, Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis). Nothing wrong with the course, but if I don't have that little spark going for the subject then it just feels like work. (All of this is unavoidable if you're still in school, but you feel rather embarrassed about it as a mature student choosing and paying for your own courses). But this is all new, so I can't expect everything to go perfectly. There are a lot of things I would change if I could go back to me in secondary school, frightened by drawings of benzene rings.