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Demands of the Timetable...

Hi,

I'm a mature student (43) currently studying Access to HE (Biology, Maths, English) in college. I want to go on to Uni next year to read Zoology (1st Choice, Newcastle).

Can anyone give me an insight into the structure and attendance demands of a typical Uni timetable? I'm just trying to plan ahead to resolve any conflicts with my other commitments (work, children etc.) Fortunately I work from home and can be quite flexible with my hours but it's quite hard to get info/example timetables until you are already at Uni. The information seems to be jealously guarded!

I guess my ideal answer would be for a 1st year Zoology student from Newcastle Uni to get back to me on this, but any information would be welcome.

Thanks in advance!

Reply 1

purple-girl

I can't speak for Newcastle but at Durham in 1st year you'll have around 12 lectures a week and on average 1 3-hour lab a week, occasionally 2, sometimes none. You also have tutorials, 4 a term I think.

The lectures could be at any time here, the timetable runs 9-1 on Wednesdays and 9-6 other weekdays. As the timetable stands you'll either have labs on Tuesdays or Fridays with a mixture of morning and afternoon labs so you probably wouldn't have any lectures on these 2 days but they could be at any time on Monday, Thursday or Wednesday mornings. In terms of set work I only remember getting lab reports from Biology which generally had a deadline of 2 weeks after the lab.

Having said all this the structure at Durham's completely changing but I can't see it changing enough to affect what I've said above. I know this is for Durham but I can imagine Newcastle being fairly similar in terms of hours.