Beatrice Downing compares her experience with her expectations

I had certain expectations when I started my degree. Reading straight biology (or ‘bilge’), I had come to terms with the existence of certain irrefutable truths: I would be crippled by hours in the lab bent over petri dishes; I would be pitied as a failed medic; I would spend days cutting up small furry animals under the supervision of socially-inept demonstrators with terrible grammar; I would, finally, become one of the better spellers in my cohort.

Everybody had told me that a degree course was very different from a school qualification, but it was astonishing to discover that they actually meant it. Lectures weren’t lessons and I was in some denial about the nature of ‘pracs’. After all, how could they possibly justify keeping one in the lab for an entire day?

Surreptitious pleasure

Yet, somehow, I discovered how to learn from lectures, and three-hour stints breathing in laboratorial aromas subtly moved from unbearably constraining to addictive. With the development of technique came the stab of pride on surveying a perfectly labelled dilution series. Slowly we gained surreptitious pleasure: an accurate Miles and Misra plate became a thing of extraordinary beauty, together we shared the innocent joy of correctly calibrating our first microscopes. With the observing of the fragile rolling Volvox indoctrination was complete, and the subsequent six-hour practicals were rewarding rather than horrific. 

People and power

Though the research standards at the University of Manchester had been foremost in my mind when I’d applied, to actually meet professional scientists was sobering. Naively, it had never clicked that these people are conducting the research, writing the papers: papers that through the months became not only approachable, not only readable but interesting. The scientists themselves were not (necessarily) peculiar and pale from time spent inhaling in labs, but inspiring. True, few academics could use the audio-visual equipment – some struggled even with the over-head projector – but the lectures’ content became ever more stimulating with the thrill of reaching the fringes of established knowledge.

Suddenly freed from the shackles of a government curriculum, we could indulge in hours upon a single specialism. We even had power: by filling in questionnaires every semester (that an army of specially-bred mice must have been trained to collate) we influenced the course development. Just as the frontiers of science are ever-expanding, so the units were ever-changing; unnerving to a student familiar only with school uniformity. 
 
Social skills

A deciding factor in reading biology was the job diversity available at the end of three years spent studying the living and the dead, the organic and the inorganic. I had been assured at an introductory talk that statistically, as life science graduates, we would be second in employability only to history graduates.

Quite why history graduates are so coveted remains a mystery but, as a biologist, I quickly discovered that my degree demanded more than simply plating Micrococcus luteus. I did not expect to have to write a dissertation in my second year that required me to find, study and critically analyse 50 relevant scientific papers. I did not expect to have to perform oral presentations every semester or sum up the latest stem cell research in a newspaper article. Through planning practical experiments, I learnt time management and teamwork; there is a lot more to the new form of science degree in development of social skills than is at first apparent. 

And after

So, did the statistics hold any truth for me? True, I’ve sauntered into science job fairs only to leave cowed by the apparent dearth of opportunities for anyone lacking an engineering degree. I have been spurned by conglomerates and public services alike, but never have I felt for an instant that I spent three years (and several thousand pounds) on a useless degree.

When I consider my degree, I feel satisfied; others would say smug. A worthwhile degree would be enough, but I found unexpected benefits. I realise that, besides having found myself in the company of like-minded sloth-enthusiasts (of the family Bradypodidae) – I have worked with the professors and researchers of tomorrow. All at once the limits of proven wisdom are reached and mere undergraduates are presented, as adults, with conflicting theories that my generation will play a part in defining. Huge leaps in conventional knowledge will be continued by the girl who always sits on the left in lectures, or the boy across the bench in Microbiology practicals – and I am a part of that. Now that was unexpected; that is exciting.
 
Beatrice Downing fledgling science writer, is currently working in the Faculty of Life Sciences in the University of Manchester