Matty: Happy Christmas!! :D hope you're enjoying the festivities
Ella: Thanks Matty!! Merry Christmas to you too ;) How are you??? :D
Matty: I'm good thank you just sleepy haha :) how about you?
Matty: How's things going with studying
Ella: Oh dear :P What have you been up to? ;) I'm not that sleepy, even though I did get to bed late :P
Ella: Uni's hard work (no changes there), but I really like my subjects this semester - on of my subjects is Microbiology (so all on bacteria), another is on the Biochemical Pathways to Metabolic Illnesses (basically diabetes and obesity) - so, pretty cool stuff :D
Ella: WHat about you? Are you having fun?
Matty: Sounds interesting I've gotta say. Particularly the bacteria stuff! I've been on a walk today so quite tired from that. And I'm enjoying uni yeah! Very very busy. Starting dissertation stuff soon and had a lot of work for essays
Ella: Did you take any photos whilst on your walk? :D So... what does your dissertation stuff look like? Are you in any Uni groups?
Matty: Got some yeah :) posted one to Facebook. Mine is looking like geography and politics related. Not sure about uni groups? What's your dissertation on if you have to do one?
Ella: We don't really have dissertations... at the end of my third year I'll be writing my degree, so that will be like a slightly longer lab report :) Geography and politics - hmmm... that's  a pretty wide topic, I mean, you could talk about Global warming etc. right?
Matty: Aah ok. So the long report is a big part of your degree and counts a lot towards it?
Matty: And it's very wide the topic. Can talk about that yes, can also do social and cultural stuff too in there
Ella: Yeah, basically my grades and my report make up my degree :) Social and cultural stuff... like what?
Matty: Aaah cool :D I have exams too which make mine up haha. Lucky you
Matty: And stuff like social separation and classes and how everything plays into each other and culture is like heritage and what matters to different people
Ella: I meant grades from exams, so I don't know if I'm really that lucky :P That's actually really interesting! So how do you prepare for this? Do you get to interview people?
Matty: Oh right haha. And I have to do loads of reading and prepare some fieldwork. And I likely will have to inerview people yeah. What kind of things do you do in the lab?
Ella: Depends on your field of study - I'm doing Embriology, so I basically conduct experiments on mouse oocytes that should hopefully give some decent results. But other people can grow bacteria on petri dishes if they're doing Microbiology, or study particular fragments of DNA if they're doing Genetics
Ella: It really depends on what you're studying - Biology has a pretty large spectrum, afterall :)
Ella and Matty are both busy with the workload at university. Ella is studying biology and enjoys it very much. Matty is into geography and politics.