Category: Posts

All non–archived posts, regardless of topic.

Writing Science, Block 3

28 February 2016 / Sinead

We’re already in the final block of another module- this year is going so quickly.
I’m kind of disappointed that Writing Science is over so quickly, as it’s been my favourite module and I’m enjoying working with everyone.

It certainly went out with style though.

Thursday started with us all getting our magazines back, and being able to see each other’s for the first time. Seeing what everyone else had developed was a good experience, especially the differences in style and audience. I found this one incredible- if it was a published magazine in a shop, I would have bought it.

We had already got our marks and feedback, so I already knew that we’d done well. But I was surprised by what happened next. Our lecturer opened with “I’m going to embarrass somebody now”, then was really complimentary about our magazine, saying that he’d worked on professional magazines that weren’t as good. According to him, I have a talent for design.

Mental Health, Common Sense, and the Unknown

28 January 2016 / Sinead

Everyone has a level of physical health which changes over time and as a result of circumstances.

A minority of people are at their peak of physical health, the healthiest they could possibly be.The majority of people are generally healthy: they don’t have to worry about their physical health as everything is working well enough to live their life.

Minor physical health issues such as colds or aches and pains, are common. They temporarily make life doable but more difficult. People with longer-term minor issues learn to adapt and accommodate around what is tougher for them- perhaps they can usually function at 95% of the generally healthy level .

Major physical health issues can make normal life very difficult, requiring someone to change how they live for a bit and often need a recovery time/ gradual return afterwards.

Then a small percentage of people have chronic, severe physical health issues that mean they either cannot function in a typical life at all, or they need to adapt almost everything about their life to live and function.

So, why did I just write that? Everything I’ve just said is common sense, and it doesn’t need saying.

But try it again, swapping physical for mental…

My Diagnosis (or lack of) Experience…

12 January 2016 / Sinead

I finally got a phonecall back from the CMS, but it wasn’t the phonecall I expected.

In the last appointment, C3 seemed like she understood what I meant and was happy to talk to her team about sorting out what I can do next. But the phonecall was a lot more negative.

Firstly, she said that she didn’t want to progress further as I only met some of the criteria and not others. Considering depersonalisation disorder (the closest thing I could see to my experiences, and what I wanted to focus on) is basically defined by experiencing depersonalisation that causes negative effects and isn’t caused by anything else – in other words, exactly what I experience, and what I tried to explain to her is probably the thing underlying everything else- I don’t really see how she could have reached that conclusion.

The Year of Gaming…

20 December 2015 / Sinead

Yesterday, Xbox sent out round-up emails with stats about our year in Xbox. Usually, I’m interested in that kind of thing, but reading these stats was uncomfortable.

I’m in the top 5% for amount played, at about 1500 hours in 2015. I honestly didn’t expect to be that high a percentile, more like 15/20%. That number annoys me- at least 1/3 of those hours happened as deliberate escapism or inertia. What could I have done with them instead?

The first argument I’m using to justify it is “I don’t play as much as my friends do”. This is kind of true as amongst my group I had the lowest hours, and some had double the hours I did. However, the gap between my time and theirs is smaller than I expect. I’ve been the last person online at night quite a lot, even on nights where I was intending to do something else.

My Diagnosis Experience, Part 5

16 December 2015 / Sinead

Yesterday, I finally had my appointment with C3.

Leading up to yesterday, I’ve been nervous about going back, more so than if I was seeing a stranger. The nerves are mostly from not knowing how she would interpret me, based on her unexpected assessment last time. Because all I remembered from before was the more negative parts, like the conversations I ended up confused by and L’s reaction to meeting her, I was expecting a bad experience. Instead she was friendly, and she remembered me to some extent; asking about church and uni.

Writing Science, Block 2- We got published!

28 November 2015 / Sinead

This weekend was the second block of Writing Science, and it was a challenging week (in a good way). The block was intense, and felt longer than 3 days as we were kept busy with loads of different tasks.

Thursday was the theory-focused day, as our main lecture was on framing science, while Friday was practical and focused on Magazine Anatomy. To learn about anatomy, we had to flatplan a magazine issue, which meant working out how to structure the issue, and what stories would be placed in what order to catch and keep people’s attention.

I liked the puzzle of planning out the route through the pages and deciding how many pages we would use to tell each story. That was a taste of how many decisions working in a field like this requires about almost every aspect. A lot of what we were talking about, like magazine structure and using a variety of features so people don’t get bored of one topic, will be useful for our group magazine projects too.

Public Engagement?

24 November 2015 / Sinead

In the first year of undergraduate uni, most of us knew what psychology was, and knew what we were studying. If we didn’t, why would we have signed up to study it? Then the further we got through uni, the less sure we were about what psychology actually was, and what we were studying.

Now, the exact same thing is happening with sci-comm. Does this apply to lots of other subjects? Do geographers or chemists start uni and then discover they have no idea what geography or chemistry is?

The cause of this confusion was spending the last week reading up on “public engagement with science”, as it’s the topic for our first exam. So far, the more I read, the more frustrated I get. Everything seems like an infinite loop of dependent ideas. For one thing, even defining it is hard; “public”, “engagement”, and even “science” don’t have one clear meaning. Another is that public engagement with science is supposed to be a rejection of the “deficit model”- the idea that the public were empty containers, ignorant of science, who would understand science if teachers poured in the facts.