My fourth semester is well underway

To be more precise, in attempts to synthesise more effective derivatives of the drug Phenythoin, which is used to help patients suffering from epileptic seizures. The possibility to participate in such a project is provided to me by EUYSRA, a student society of which I am a member since the beginning of my university studies. I would therefore like to describe its activities shortly in this post.

EUYSRA, or Edinburgh University Young Scientific Researchers Association, is a student society whose goal is to bring together students interested in research across various scientific fields. A presentation from a member of the University’s academic staff is given every week, in which the presenter aims to introduce the students to their work, its results to-date, prospective goals and so on. It is worth mentioning that the presentations show the professors not as teachers (as most undergraduates view them), but as scientists, and they help us to form a picture of what their work looks like. Some of them are teeming with excitement when talking about their field, while the others’ frank confession that the work of a top academic consists mostly of paper-pushing and writing for money can cause a slight disillusion.

What is EUYSRA preoccupied with in the first place is undergraduate research. The society consists of eight departments: biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, informatics, medicine, mathematics and psychology. At the beginning of each semester, the individual departments hold meetings at which various research ideas are discussed. In this stage, the ideas are sort of ‘filtered’ – some turn out to be impossible to perform, too expensive, too time-consuming etc. For the rest of them, groups of usually 3 to 6 students are formed and careful planning and proposal writing begins. This requires a huge amount of teamwork – apart from tweaking the research procedure itself, it is necessary to find a member of the staff to supervise the project, make arrangements with the lab managers in order to secure a workplace, calculate the budget and so on. It is in this stage where it becomes truly apparent which members of the group are capable and willing to commit their time to the project – various personal changes in the group are therefore not rare. If everything is successful, the next step is submitting an application and a presentation in front of the EUYSRA committee and a professor in the relevant field. The goal of the presentation is to introduce the committee to the structure and aim of the project and answer any questions. After the presentation, funding is given to selected groups, which covers most or all of the research consumables costs.

The work may then begin. After the more or less tedious formalities described above, it is a great relief – everything is taken care of, and it is time to do what everyone signed up for. The work is of course performed exclusively by the students, who have to adhere to the assigned lab’s schedule as well as their own, the timescale of any project is therefore hardly predictable (it is common to work through both semesters). However, first results are being obtained in the process, on the basis of which the group can further improve their project – the students thus get to apply their own ideas once again, which ensures great motivation.

After the project is finished and the results analysed, it is time for their presentation. EUYSRA enables the students to do this in its annual research conference, where not only EUYSRA groups, but undergraduate researchers from the whole University are allowed to present their work. The door is also open to other universities – last year’s participants from, among others, University of St. Andrews and University of Dundee liked the idea of EUYSRA so much that they decided to form similar societies at their universities.

Although EUYSRA is only running since 2011, it is very successful. It has over 250 members who have executed dozens of projects to date and in 2014, it was voted the best student society in Scotland by the National Union of Students. Let us then wish it all the best and lots of curious researchers in the years to come.