Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences
School hosts placement student
Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:58:00 GMT
The School recently hosted a placement student, Catherine Hodges, who is a Year 12 student from Oaklands Sixth Form, Waterlooville. Here's what she had to say:
For a while now, I have been considering pursuing chemistry, biochemistry or some other sort of science degree at university, but I haven’t been totally sure about it. I wanted to get a feel for what it would be like studying science at university, so I decided to come to Portsmouth Universityfor a week to try it out.
At the beginning of my first day I was slightly apprehensive, but was greeted by much welcome and soon made to feel at home. I got to experience a variety of different practical experiments and use equipment that I hadn’t come across before, for example on the second day when I joined in with a class making tablets. It was really interesting looking at all the different stages and using the different machinery, like the cube mixer and granulator. It was so exciting when the finished tablets slid out of the machine; it was a really great experience and definitely a lot more interesting than our chemistry experiments at school!
I got a chance to try out molecular modelling with the help of some of the 4th year project students, and talk to them about their time at the university and what they were working on. I also made paracetamol, and using different techniques, analysed its purity, which was again a really interesting experience as I had never really done anything of the sort before. All the staff and students were very helpful, and I greatly enjoyed my time at the university. Meeting the project students and those in the classes I attended in my one week, I got an idea of what a chemistry or pharmacology degree would be like, which definitely increased my interest in continuing on my studies to do a science degree in the future.