Hello,
As two parallel courses are over now (yeeey!), it is time to give you some background about what we have done within the courses Environmental Risk Management and Assessment (5 credits) and Research Methods (10 credits). I will start with Environmental Risk Management and Assessment first and in the next article I will cover Research Methods. First of all, I have to mention that this semester was really challenging, and we had plenty of things to do every week. Previous semester, we had only 15 credit courses that means only one course at a time and now we had two parallel courses which was challenging to meet all deadlines.
Environmental Risk Management and Assessment
This is a course for 5 credits only, however, it felt like 15 credits anyway! Even though we did not have so many lectures or seminars within the course, we had to work on assignments and individual projects, which were really time-consuming. Within this course we had to reflect upon articles related to environmental management system, environmental decision-making processes or for example to sustainable reporting and write three analytical assignments in total. These usually take a lot of time to write as you have to read articles and highlight important things and add your own opinions and views. In the second part of the course, we had to choose our own topic for a project. It had to be relevant to the subject, however, we could choose whatever we are interested in, which is always nice and it is easier to write about something you like. Those projects could be done individually or in pairs and of course, we had to give presentation and be opponent to a given project and give a constructive feedback. The length of the project was set to be between 2500 – 5000, which is not that long but in case you realise that it is only 5 credits course and for the other course you have a lot of things to do, too, then it feels like a really long project 😀
Although we read several interesting articles, the most I have learnt is from my project, as I spent plenty of time with that. To sum up, it was challenging for 5 credits, however, I have learnt valuable things so that in the end, it was worth it.
Next time, I will write about Research Methods course which was even more time-consuming and challenging.
Have a nice day, Denisa