Congratulations to Sue Willis student essay winner 2006   The Centre for Bioscience is pleased to annouce the winner of the student essay competition 2006:  Sue Willis a 3rd year Coastal Marine Biology student from the University of Hull, Scarborough Campus, who wins £250 for her essay.  This year students had to answer the question:

How does the experience of your course compare with any expectations you may have had?

The Student Essay Competition, open to all UK higher education students studying a pure or applied biological science, was run by the Centre for Bioscience with the aim of identifying what students had expected of their course, the factors that led to those expectations, if, and how, their experiences were different from their expectations. It was hoped that the essays would also give a variety of individual accounts of the experience of learning bioscience and examples of good and/or innovative teaching, learning and assessment methods.

Twenty-nine entries were received, all of a very high quality, of these ten were shortlisted from which one overall winner and two runner-up essays were chosen.

The essays were intended as a useful resource for bioscience academics. To highlight this a commentary to highlight issues raised in the shortlisted entries was published in volume 18 of the Bioscience Bulletin.

Thank you to all who submitted an essay and congratulations to the winner, Sue Willis, the runners-up, Sepideh Bazazi and Sian McCarthy and all the shortlisted entrants. The winning, runner-up and shortlisted essays are available below to download in pdf format.

Winner

• Sue Willis, 3rd year Coastal Marine Biology student at the University of Hull, Scarborough Campus

Runners-up

• Sepideh Bazazi, 3rd year Biological Sciences student at the University of Oxford
• Sian McCarthy, 3rd year Physiology student at the University of Glasgow

Shortlisted

• Claire Brown, 3rd year Life Sciences student at the Open University
• James Chen, 2nd year Zoology student at Cardiff University
• Rachel Lee, 2nd year Biochemistry and Biological Chemistry student at the University of Nottingham
• Trevor Liberson, 3rd year Biosciences student at Canterbury Christ Church University
• Beatrice Lowe, 2nd year Biology student at the University of Manchester
• Aneeqa Meedin , 2nd year Neuroscience student at the University of Sheffield
• Philip Palmer, 3rd year Life Sciences student at the Open University

Essays were received from students at the following institutions:

This was the second annual essay competition, the first asked students "Studying for a degree in a pure or applied biological science? What makes the best learning experience for you?"