Katy Higginson, Level 5 BSc (Hons) Medical Biology

“What stands out most about this course is that we’re not your average set of university students,” says Level 5 BSc (Hons) Medical Biology student, Katy Higginson. “We’re all from different backgrounds; some are mature students, some have children.”

Katy is a mum of three who previously worked as a marketing consultant.

She was inspired to change career paths during lockdown after seeing the impact the NHS had on getting the nation through such a difficult time.

The IoT course at Burnley College had everything she was looking for. “It’s an opportunity to do something that I’ve wanted to do,” Katy says. “It’s an opportunity to do it at a local level, as well.”

One of her sons is still of high school age, and the flexibility of the course fits around her family commitments. “If I’ve missed a session, I can come in on another day and catch up,” she says. “There’s a lot more support here.”

Katy praised the equipment at the Biohazard Level 2 suite of laboratories at Burnley College for providing students with: “More scope to do a lot more with our dissertations.”

The Level 2 biohazard lab at Burnley College currently hosts:

• Fridges to prepare the plates, containing blood agar.
• A bacterial incubator and a CO2 incubator to grow cultures in a stable environment
• A qPCR (quantitative polymer chain reaction) machine, which allows duplication of DNA samples for experiments and researchers to quantify the data for analysis.
• A microcentrifuge, for tissue engineering.
• A spectrophotometer, to measures photons.
• A sensitive balance, which can measure micrograms.
• An inverted microscope, and a suite of microscopes which measures four times the magnitude.
• A fluorescence microscope to measure
• An autoclave to sterilise equipment
• Biosafety cabinets