Congratulations to Jessica Haglington National Bioscience and Overall Student Essay Winner 2005 The Centre for Bioscience is pleased to announce the winner of the student essay competition 2005; Jessica Haglington a 2nd year Biology student from the University of Exeter, who was awarded £150 for winning the Bioscience competition and a Toshiba laptop computer for winning the overall competition.   This year students had to answer the question:

"What makes the best learning experience for you?"

The student essay competition was open to all UK undergraduates studying for a degree in pure or applied biological sciences and was run by the Centre for Bioscience with the aim of highlighting good practice. Essays were expected to include the attributes as to what makes the best learning experience for a degree in a pure or applied biological science, provide perceptive observations and helpful ideas to bioscience teaching staff, be entertaining and interesting to read and to be well written in terms of structure, grammar and spelling.

Thirty-one entries were received, all of a high quality, of these seven were shortlisted from which one overall winner was chosen.  The winner was then entered into the Higher Education Academy's national competition, along with winning essays from other subject disciplines.

Jessica Haglington receiving her prize as overall winner of the Higher Education Academy's student essay competition. Further information about, and the other entries to, the national competition are available from the Higher Education Academy news page.

The essays were intended as a useful resource for bioscience academics. To highlight this Dr Chris Willmott has provided a commentary to highlight issues raised in the shortlisted entries, published in BEE-j (Bioscience Education Electronic journal) volume 5 as a short communication, "What makes the best learning experience?".

Thank you to all who submitted an essay for the competition, and congratulations to the winner, Jessica Haglington, and all the shortlisted entrants. The winning and shortlisted essays are available below to download in pdf format.

Winner:

• Jessica Haglington, 2nd year Biology student at the University of Exeter

Shortlisted:

• Gemma Cook, 2nd year Biological Sciences student at the University of Exeter
• Sara Haines, 2nd year Molecular Biology student at the University of Wales, Bangor
• Rebecca Nesbit, 3rd year Biology student at the University of Durham
• Nataly Petrou, 2nd year Environmental Science student at the University of Nottingham
• James Pring, 2nd year Biology student at the University of Exeter
• Symon Russell, 3rd year Biomedical Sciences student at London Metropolitan University

Essays were received from students at the following institutions:

The Student Essay Competition was run again in 2006, with students responding to the question "How does the experience of your course compare with any expectations you may have had?"