Hello everyone! Catherine here. I am back to tell you all about LIYSF day 4! On this day there was an optional visit to Stonehenge and Salisbury which I attended. We began our day with breakfast before getting to our bus and taking the two hour drive to Stonehenge. Let me introduce you all to some characters that will appear in my photos!
This little mushroom and croissant (to be named) are travelling with me before going home to Canada for my best friends. They even accompanied me on my bus ride!
Once we arrived we got on another short bus to the actual stones. I had an amazing time and couldn’t believe how large the stones were. We were told that Stonehenge was built approximately 5000 years ago and took about 1000 years to build. It’s believed the stones have been used for several different things by different groups including a way to tell the time of year, a way to track stars, or for religious practices. This was just incredible to think about, looking at the huge stones I really admired the understanding of mechanics you would have to have to be able to create something like this. We made sure to get lots of photos here!
I made some friends from Mexico on my visit and had an amazing time talking with them and taking photos!
We all talked about foods, drinks, and customs that are standard where we live. Even within the different parts of Mexico there is such variation. It was incredible to learn about their culture and be able to talk about mine as well. I even got to learn some words in Spanish!
Next we stopped in the town of Salisbury where we saw the Salisbury Cathedral and did some shopping in the town.
Then we started the long journey back to the Imperial College! We got a quick dinner and I met up with Manjot to go to the Debate evening hosted by Dr. Richard O’Kennedy. Dr. O’Kennedy was a participant at LIYSF in 1972 and has been involved in running LIYSF since then. From making 400 sandwiches a day to hosting debate evenings Dr. O’Kennedy is pivotal to LIYSF running. Dr. O’Kennedy began the debate evening by talking about what LIYSF means to him and why it is important. His specialty is applied biochemistry research which relates to the topic of the debate evening of medical applications and AI.
Dr. O’Kennedy began by discussing precision health. He stressed the importance of health care that is personalized to the individual. He also brought up how not every ethnicity and gender are represented equally in drug trials leading to part of the inequality in healthcare.
We then got into the topic for the debate. We were given a scenario of a patient with unknown symptoms who has undergone gene mapping in hopes of finding a cure. Dr. O’Kennedy stressed this was about our voices being heard and was only there to moderate our discussions. He added details gradually to the scene as we all discussed. I had an amazing time both participating and listening throughout the evening and thought it was an amazing event. At the end of the event Dr. O’Kennedy was presented with a gift from LIYSF for all his years of work for the forum. Manjot and I were able to get a photo with him before heading back to our dorm and going to bed after this extremely long but engaging day!
Stay tuned for Manjot’s recap of day 5 (some of our favorite lectures yet!)
Catherine <3