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Twice upon a time i did an acces work ... preparation for doing tcm (traditional chinese medicine) at middlesex university it was meant to be. i went to the university open day and was told by the professor that he would be happy with me, as a mature student, if i understood biology to a-level standard. i told him i wanted to further my study on a philosophical/theoretical level after i finished the degree work and he was fine with that. chinese medicine has a recorded history of at least 2500 years. originally the college had put me in the acces to humanities and social sciences. after i told them what had been told to me at the open day they decided i should be in access to science. it was way too much science for what i needed and asked if i could do some units from both access works. since that was perfectly acceptable for the degree i wanted to do i could not see the problem. but they found a problem and i was told by the head of humanities that i could not have my cake and eat it. the head of the science work sort of seemed to give in to the pressure from humanities and in my opinion wold not have been bothered by it too much. i quit the access work in the end ... find most academics a waste of time since. your opinion? ta picnic: i am gardener by trade and would grow than prescribe chinese herbal medicine to be honest. on the other hand i really like writing and would have liked to have found employment in trade publications. tcm is based on biomedical science. classical theory on the other hand isn't. to put it simlistic; they took the spirit out of acupuncture and called it tcm. the professor at uni was classically trained and there is some respect still for those that prefer the classic theory over tcm. he understood that my wish to get the degree and build on that was because my wanting to understand how the classical theory really interprets things to work. thylawyer: i had no prob with the anatomy (i already have an a-level botany from years ago), i had no prob with the chemistry. but i did find it confusing to be taught endocrinology before they had explained covalent bonding properly. endocinology was in the first term and basic chemistry was in second term. i know more of tcm i care to know. like i said. the took spirit out of classical theory and called it tcm. but i am not too big to know that tcm is a nice foundation to build on if i really want to delve in the classics further. the degree work would have included mandarin chinese. not that that would have gotten me anywhere with all the untranslated classical texts but i might have learnt some proper pronounciation. as one gets older it gets harder to learn another language. and i should know since english is my third :-) i will look into analog sometime ... but i usually end up in semantics ...

Hi, very interesting and intriguing question. i hold an ma in english and bsc in zoology, but i m not very an ambassador of higher education. uk he system isn't perfect to say the least. tutors are mostly research oriented but they're asked to take endless lectures, set papers, mark exams and do all possible admin tasks leaving them with a frustrated mind and less and less time for their research passions. as a students i have seen the irritation boiled down to us. now about your access course, if i am not wrong its meant to prepare students for degree level coursework. i think both humanities and science help prepare the students in a different way. humanities equip you with a communication and wider interpretive skills while science gives analytic and logical skills. a medicine student would require both an ability to interpret,study , communicate(humanities) and also logically analyse a patient's situation. but i am not surprised by the duel between humanities and science department. i have seen a shakespearean study tutor flashing swords to a modernism guy. academic rivalry is here to study, considering how bureaucratic and silly our academic structure is.