Blog 10: Finito

Blog 10: Finito

We’re here, we’re finally here, the last bioprocessing class. As happy as I am to be nearly finished the module, I can’t celebrate too early as the all important teaching class was still to get through. I was very apprehensive before I started this class as I always get very nervous before presentations and was afraid I’d let the two lads down by messing the whole thing up somehow. However they both reassured me that they were also nervous and that we’re all in the same boat.

We started the class by listening to the most of the other groups classes as we were on second last. They were all very good and informative and in my opinion and I was able to take something informative from all of them. What I also found interesting was looking at the pharmaceuticals perspective and how they approached the project. I mentioned this earlier in a previous blog when we gave our mini presentaions about what we were going to do our processes on, but now that they are explaining their processes more in depth and actually teaching us about it I’m very impressed looking at it with more of a food background.

Our class went fairly well in my opinion. We all had our separate parts to teach and we felt that we protrayed them effectively. We even had a small class interactive game at the end that allowed the others to get involved by naming off the parts of a bioreactor. We also gave stickers of our logo out to anyone who got the answers right. I did slightly mess up the labelling but we’ll put that down to nerves. We also went over our ten minute limit of teaching that cost us a few marks. Overall we got 68%. It was disappointing not to get at least 70% when we were so close but Barry gave us back the grading sheet so we could look at what we can improve on in the future.

Lastly, what I’m going to talk about is my overall tranisition from from the start of this module to the end. Barry asked us at the in the very first module to write down our hopes, fears and expectations of this class. For hope, I wrote, “a strong grade.” I haven’t got a final result yet but I feel that this is still attainable. For fear, I wrote, “That I’ll get lost in the class and not know what’s going on.” I don’t think this ever happened except for the class that I missed, I was a little confused looking over the notes on my own that day. The reason why I didn’t get lost was because I feel Barry took the class at a nice pace and allowed us to learn ourselves with the use of the memo system. Lastly, what I expected from this module was, “To have a fair knowledge of bioprocessing when the module ends.” I think this is true, my knowledge now is vastly better than when I began and I believe that this knowledge could be important to be in the future if I ever go into this line of work.

Now, as I write my last blog, I’d like to thank all my followers for sticking with me during the semester and I hope that ye took something  beneficial from these blogs.

Bye for now,

Sean.

Blog 9: Last Lecture

Blog 9: Last Lecture

The last lecture of bioprocessing has come and overall I must admit that I learnt a lot and just about managed to grasp what bioprocessing is all about, but I’ll get into that later in the blog. The teaching class is now only a week away and I’m slightly nervous about it as I’m usually not a fan of presentaions and this teaching class is very similar.

During our last lecture, Barry thought us all about the downstream purification process. What this was about is the technique on how to purify your product to the highest quality possible. As thought-provaking as this was to try and apply it to our kefir water process, we don’t really need to and It’s probably best not to fix something if it’s not broken.

At the end of the class Barry gave us the grading rubic for the teaching class next week. I believe what the aim was of giving us this rubic was to use it as a tool to build a good foundation for our presentation. In order to have a good teaching class we decided to meet a lot more this week to try and nail down the perfect class. We split the workload up to make time management most effective and efficient. As we finished off the presentaion and went through our individual sections to teach the class, we realised how much we have learnt from the start of the semester from knowing very, very little about bioprocessing to educating our classmates on it.

As I mentioned at the start of the blog, the last lecture is now over and I went from knowing practically nothing, to teaching a class next week. Over the weeks Barry thought us class by class the stages that we need to develop our bioprocessing process. For me he used relevent information and didn’t overload us with jargon that we wouldn’t understand and cause us to lose interest. The self learning method that he uses from the memo’s and assesments was also very helpful as well in my opinion as it didn’t feel like work as we were learning. Having applied this learning experience to our teaching class presentaion I now feel we can give an informative, helpful, enjoyable class to our peers and Barry. Hopefully it will go well.

I hope you manage to catch my last blog next week,

That’s all for now,

Sean.

Blog 8: Are We There Yet?

Blog 8: Are We There Yet?

We’re nearly done. Lectures are about to finish up soon and our eportfolio is looking more and more like a website. We began this lecture by talking about downstream processing and in particular, filtration. Filtration is relevant to our process as we have to filter off the kefir grains from the water towards the end of the process. Ours is a fairly basic filtration method as all we need is some sort of grid to catch the kefir grains and allow the water to pass through. It is important that the grains are kept as they are reusable so something sive-like might be ideal.

We were told at the end of the first class that we wouldn’t have a class next week because there would be presentations in Grangegorman taking place and Barry had to attend. He highly recommended us to attend as well as they would be beneficial to our thesis presentaions next Janurary as well as if we got choosen to participate in these presentations next year.

In the second class that Friday, Barry gave us a sheet containing TWO memo’s, yeah, I know, what a slave driver (we did have two weeks to complete these though). The first of these memo’s asked us to review a piece of literature on a product that is similar to ours. We thought that this would be difficult as we couldn’t find any kefir water products when we did our research at first. The second memo told us to put three slides together on training instructions for the employees. The second part of that memo was to try and find three products that are similar to ours that are already patented or on the market. Again this could pose as tricky given the uniqueness of our product but I suppose that’s half the fun of it.

Shane, Aidan and myself relaised after this class that the end of the module is approaching and that we need more group meetings to make sure that we get all the work finished and to the highest standard as possible. We then decided to meet twice a week so that when we end this module we can say that we did work to the best of our ability.

I hope you tune in for my penultimate blog next week,

Bye for now,

Sean.

Blog 7: Review Week

Blog 7: Review Week

This week I had a week off from college as you can probably gather from the title of this blog. My thesis is desk based so I decided to stay at home down the country for the week as I don’t have to attend any labs. I took most of this week to get an upper hand on my thesis and to be honest not a lot of bioprocessing was done.  However the teaching class was now on the horizon and I knew there was a bit of preperation I could be doing for that during the review week.

I discussed with Aidan and Shane on our little Wattsapp group that maybe doing a slideshow to teach the class would be more helpful than using our website as the website still wasn’t finished and the slideshow would pick out the exact elements that we wanted to teach to the class rather than rooting for them on the day of the class on the website and going over our 10 minute limit. We all thought about this and agreed that this would be the best way to teach the class.  

Again, like the infograph, we believed that the best way to go about doing this presentaion would my keeping the crowd interested and to have as little writing as possible on the slides. Pictures on the slides and us, the teachers, expalining them would be the best way to keep the crowd interested. At the end of the presentaion we decided that having an educational game about bioprocessing would be a good way to finish off the class. We can then give out little gimmicks as prizes. We haven’t yet decided what type of game would be best but we can decide on that closer to the time.

With my time off this week, it allowed me to reflect on what the bioprocessing class is all about. It’s primarily there to develop our knowledge on bioprocessing, but it does this in a way that you educate yourself by doing a bulk of the work on your own and with your group members without really realising it, by completing the memos and meeting up with your group each week to develop the process that we’re working on. None of this feels like boring college work and you would nearly, not quite, but nearly enjoy doing it.

That’s, all for today,

See you next week, hopefully,

Sean.

Blog 6: Shape

Blog 6: Shape

Following on from last week, we took Barry’s advice on board and reduced the amount of text from our website and tried to make it more visually friendly by adding more pictures, video’s, infographs and so on. We understood that the demand for kefir water is very niched and that if we want to entice others to stay on our website that we would have to make it appealing to them. The website is now starting to look more and more like an actual website and less like a word document with a load of information just thrown onto a blank page. Shape was starting to take place if you like.

We were informed in this class that that for next week we would have to develop an infograph. This sounded fairly daunting at the time but Barry reassured us by giving us templates and examples to follow and in my opinion they were very helpful. During the week we met up to design this infograph of our process. We decided to not use one of the templates that Barry suggested and create ours from scratch as we thought that this would look like we put more effort into it and didn’t just copy and paste images and pieces of information and plaster them into the stages.

The designing of the inforgraph took us a fair few hours but it was worth it in the end as we feel we got our process and facts across using both visual aids and relevant information. We also felt that the fact we drew up our own template that it wouldn’t look similar to anyone else’s and was bound to stand out.

Overall I felt that the infograph was a very good idea as we have done endless amount of reports, presentaions and posters in our three and a bit years of college and the infograph was something new that maybe we can possibly incorporate into our thesis or our thesis presentation.

Within this weeks memo, we were asked to  discuss what cell line was needed to produce our product on a small scale. Ours was very straight forward as it was simply a kefir water grain. There was also no alternatives excluding kefir milk grains but we made the decision at the start of the semester that we were using the water over the milk for the lactose intolerance purposes.

This week was really full on but the understanding that I gained will more than likely be essential to me as a learner because I’m still not yet 100% confident on the full understaning of bioprocessing but hopefully as the weeks prgress it will all fall into place and I will grasp a better perspective of the module.

See you next week,

Sean.