Student Essay

Students of the English class in physiology may prepare a Student Essay (SE) based on their results in Physiology I.  The final result of the Student essay is a wiki web page on the wikiwikiweb of the department. Students prepare the SE based on scientific papers under the guidance of the supervisors. The aim is to demonstrate the student' s ability to gather and appropriately combine scientific information from textbooks and the scientific literature.

Sign-up for the SE

  • Students should work on a topic in groups of three.
  • Students should sign up for SE topic in the login area of our web page: http://www.vetphysiol.hu/eng/y_login.php

IMPORTANT: 

The physiology department can only handle a limited number of groups, thus if necessary, groups will be ranked according to the following criteria (see below), and we will only provide opportunities for the first 8-10 groups. Approved students will be notified prior to the elective registration deadline and will be automatically registered to the neptune course.

Ranking criteria:

  • ONLY groups of 3 will be considered (groups containing 1-2 person will be deleted automatically)
  • Average physiology 1 result of the group
  • Physiology 1 result for the best student in the group
  • Time of registration

A signed project certificate (download) should personally be submitted to the supervisor. The supervisor should regularly informed about the progress. Without sufficient consultation, the SE will not be evaluated.

Preparing the Student Essay

Students should seek further scientific articles related to their topic. Information available on the Internet (other than scientific papers – in other words, information from unverified web pages) should only be used after stringent critical appraisal.

The SE should meet several requirements. It must be well structured. We strongly encourage students to point out how the topic is related to the physiology lectures. A separate chapter may summarize relevant knowledge coming from the lecture notes or any physiology textbook. The major part, of course, should be about the information gathered from scientific papers.

The reference list is an important part of the SE. Articles should be cited in the body text, showing where the actual idea or fact is coming from. The articles used should be listed in the Reference List section at the end of the SE.

The use of figures or tables in the SE is strongly recommended, however, due to copyright laws, please, contact the supervisor when inserting any figure of photo. The optimal length of the SE is 2500 words.

Copyright consideration 

Only SEs with no figure-related copyright problems will be accepted figures might come from

  • freely usable media files (e.g. from Wikimedia Commons)
  • original figures from someone else with the permission of the author or the copyright owner (permission should be presented)
  • figures prepared (re-drawn) by students

Formatting requirements 

  • Headings should be used to organize text
  • A table of contents should be inserted to the top
  • Citations should have the following format for one, two, or more authors as follows:
    (Schiller, 1987)
    (Schiller and Sandell, 1987)
    (Schiller et al, 1987)
    Schiller et al (1987) showed ...
  • The literature should be in alphabetic order in the following format:
    Schiller, P. H.; Sandell, J. H.; Maunsell, J. H. R. (1987): The Effect of Frontal Eye Field and Superior Colliculus Lesions on Saccadic Latencies in the Rhesus Monkey. Journal of Neurophysiology 57: (4) 1033-1036
  • Figures should be numbered and each should be referenced in the text.

Examples for Wiki codes: 

  • Inserting a table of contents:
    • <>
  • Inserting Figures with numbers:
    1. Upload picture at „attachement” menu

    2. Choose a name with proper extention (eg: image.png)

    3. use the following syntax (change the highlighted parts accorfingly:
      || {{attachment: image.png||width="600"}} ||

      ||'''Figure 1''' ''Title of figure'' ||

Evaluation

The department will rate the SE-s based on their added value. In case of SE, added value means the ability to digest a large amount of corresponding information followed by a relatively simple interpretation of the synthesized topic by rendering complicated facts understandable to a reader unfamiliar with the topic in question.

  • SE-s of unacceptable quality will not be rated further on.
  • Simple copying from review articles or textbooks will not be welcomed.
  • Students preparing high quality essays will receive the credit of the elecitve course, and will be exempted form the entrance test prior to the final exam.

Important deadlines

The deadline for the pre-registration is announced via email to the actual class of physio 2.

The other deadlines will be found in the elearning course of the elcetive (elearning.univet.hu).

Missing the deadlines results in exclusion. Regular consultation with the supervisor is required.

Essay topics

The essay topics are usually announced at least 1 week before the sign up in the personal login area of physiology.