disaster in the form of neck pain :-(

It seems the lecturers skipped a week and decided to give us our tests somewhat earlier than i would have thought,nevertheless we struggle forward as a team!Or so i thought, It seems an unfortunate bed related incident(or rather the getting out of the bed)lead to the pulling of a muscle in my neck that has rendered me near useless.This lead to a very long and painful Monday. As much as i hoped it would not hinder my work i fear it may have not helped in my physics lab exam and my presentation in c.i.t. I did as well as i possibly could with such a sore neck and i hope it was good enough...and i hope the candy canes idea helped :-)
As the pain is getting quite bad i decided why not look up more natualy ways to deal with it and came across this helpful site. I hope it helps you with your alements in this winter season :-)
http://health.discovery.com/

Let it snow let it snow let it snow :-)

The winter weather is slowly but surely making its way to cork and we've seen our first few speckles of snow on the cars,only,it has arrived at the wrong time all together!Just as all our tests begin,all our write ups reach their dead lines and all our projects near completion the snow begins to fall,blocking roads,closing schools and worst of all distracting my from studying!With a long week of tests ahead lets hope the snow waits just a week or two before blanketing ireland,because we all know study wont happen when theres a snow ball fight to be had :-)

Oh my god its christmas day!...kinda

From the buzz around campus you'd think that it was the last  day of the year, there's a  smile and and an anxious expectation from the vast majority of the students that i have had no choice in overhearing. from expected pints per hour (5-10) to whether or not a 'supernaggin!' was a suitable sink for your money instead of the despicable prices expected in bars for the day, todays events will be remembered. The cold snap that seems to have taken root here certainly seems timely and appropriate
Clonakilty was a success yesterday, but instead of a practical, another 2 hours of theory in lectures was administered by our buddy Joe. I think it is safe to say that interest in the subject matter disintegrated around 3 hours in, the longing for freedom palpable.
I missed over a week of college due to recent berevement, and the work is piling up around me, but with the incredible help offered to me by the people in the course around me i  feel like it will very much be possible to get it all done, without too much stress. I only hope that i can be of such help to them in the future.
no christmas drinking for me today

maybe next year

Presentation

Just spent some time in the computer room working on the Prezi with the team. I think our presentation is looking quite good. I love all the different aspects that each of the team has put in. I think the hardest part will be standing up in front of the room and actually presenting it but hey..that's what it's all about eh!
Our presentation is all about the memory and goes into different aspects of the memory and the brain, some ways to improve and maintain the memory and some fun games and trivia involving the memory. It's been good fun to do.
Can't believe that we are going in to the last few weeks of the semester now. I really think that the 4 years are going to FLY by. Need to get my butt in gear and study a bit harder...I've been a bit lazy of late.

Prezi is loacted at http://prezi.com/ if you want to make your own presentation...it's a handy auld tool!
This is our one...
http://prezi.com/f4wpy7-ztngw/copy-of-the-memory/

Sneaky study day

Today I took some time to recollect myself and try to catch up on lecture notes that seem to keep swamping in but not get looked over. I spent the entire day finding pictures of plants that need to be named in our practical botany exam and also learning tissues for our Anatomy practical exam. I thought I would have loads of time but the day seems to have passed so fast and I have just been sitting on the computer for so long that I think that my brain is melting.

I spent  a considerable amount of time trying to figure out Prezi yesterday for the presentation next week and have put up all the bits for my part. I think the hard part will be timing it right when each one of our groups information in uploaded. I may need to delegate some of the editing to the team as it is quite time consuming and we will all need to spend some time at it.

There's not too much left on the semester so I really need to get myself in gear, by the end of this week I want to have all my lab reports and botany project completed so all I need to do for the coming week is revise my notes.

These links were handy for Anatomy revision:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYKjMfJfatc&feature=related

Information about the Bridging Course available for Medicinal Herbalists..

As I mentioned we learned a lot from our interview with Ciaran the the 4th year Herbal Science student, (check out the link to see our interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0CPLGCztmQ) so I said I'd pass on the info for anyone in the year interested.

As I also mentioned in a previous blog (rant) about Medicinal Herbalism a two year Masters in Clinical Studies was envisioned to follow our course, leading to practitioner status, but due to EU regulations at present HETAC is not validating courses in complementary therapies and it depends what happens with their consultation process which should be finished next spring what will happen. However the Irish College of Phytotherapy has been set up to administer and run a a "Bridging Training Programme in Western Medical Herbalism" being run for Graduates and Students of the BSc (Hons) in Herbal Sciences at Cork Institute of Technology.

The important thing about this course is the quality of training and that it enables you to join a professional organisation and practice. The Irish Register of Herbalists has agreed to accept those who successfully finish the training. Also, the National Institute of Medical Herbalists and the College of Practitioners of Phytotherapy have said that they will also accept applications of graduates, once they have suitable references.

The training programme consists of three elements:
Lecture/ Seminar blocks. These can be attended by students in the 3rd and 4th year of their degree programme as well as graduates.
This allows students to get the credits for this part of the training. Such students would be able to be signed off for those credits and to carry out the second and third elements either during college breaks or upon graduation. The lecture blocks will be held out of term time to enable such students to attend without detracting from their degree.
(Lecture blocks will also be open to herbal practitioners as CPD; this means that students gain additional exposure to practising herbalists during their training).

Self directed study following a carefully designed study plan to guide students through this element of learning. This will be assessed by continuous assessment consisting of a study portfolio and some long essays. It is felt that, by this stage of training, multiple examinations are not needed as a form of the assessment. Assessments will be designed to allow the student to display the ability to synthesise together the different strands of their learning to formulate a diagnosis and treatment plan. Students will be expected to include relevant elements of their undergraduate training such as nutrition, pathophysiology, materia medica etc with the information delivered in the lecture blocks.

Students in 3rd and 4th year of BSc in Herbal Science should note that the self-directed study element may be postponed to be completed out of semester time or after graduation; such students just need to notify the Course administrator of their intention to do so and indicate the time frame that they intend to follow.

I'll also set up a meeting with Nikki Darrell who is one of the course co-ordinators in the new year if anyone has questions.

I hope this is of some interest to the class :)

Another week on, another weak one

these early starts and late night lab reports are enough to make one daze vacantly at a lifeless blog textbox for upwards of an hour with but the hint of progress.
Our presentation for CIT will be about memory, it's function, how to improve it and for my end of things, the future of memory. I will be writing on how i think that within our lifetime we will see an ever-increasing symbiosis with technology, where it will be possible to store in virtual memory important information for longer than the biological user may be able to commit said information to long term memory. It may be said of us, the user, that it is our abilty to cross reference and make informed guesses on multiple different aspects, taking into account a  huge amount of instantly accessable memories in our own brains. my side of the project will be to explore the possibility of similarly large, and larger amounts of easily cross-referencable material, and the searchability of this data to be made easier and faster year on year. It is easily protracted that at some stage, according to moores law, that this sort of mass data reference becomes the stuff of daily use. Already you will hardly go a day without access to the entirity of the internets resources, with recent near-ubiquitious technology, eg the iphone and using 3g and 4g networks, it is prudent to expect that more and more of our heavy text files and refernce books be easily perused whenever, wherever, with all the speed and efficiency of just havin an auld think about it.

Praise photosynthesis!!

After weeks of confusion and dismay as to how i would learn so many plant names by this christmas,we finally meet a topic i know and love,Photosynthesis!There was nothing i loved more in the leaving cert than good old photosynthesis and Krebs cycle and all that jazz.The only reason i like it so much is because it took up so much of my time in 5th year trying to get that damn cycle into my head that it will never ever be able to escape!So as you can probably tell it turned out to be a good botany class today,especially the lovely conversation in the greenhouse about the goings on on Wistera Lane with the desperate housewives..it seems i have missed a great deal and must immeadiatly start back watching it:-)

Interview

I'm so glad that I accosted this particular Fourth Year Herbal Scientist in the street and "made" him agree to do the interview for our newsletter...this issue released today by the way! Ciaran was a fountain of knowledge and advice about our degree, what we might do after the degree and the different options that are available for work experience and post graduates. (You may think...whoa get through your test on Tuesday before you start worrying about your post-grad love but I'm a Sagittarius so I need to plan the future just to get through today! ;))
Maybe we should all just leave the Herb Science course and become Movie makers though...Jess had her Directorial Debut,  Peter was Executive Producer, Tom was the Anchor-man and I was Camera-woman and Key-Grip (I just looked that up 'cause I always see it on the credits of films..it means the chief stagehand or technician...yep..that was me!)
The link to the interview will be posted here shortly after some editing...stay tuned....