Science courses are not flat

By Annet Eva Zawedde

At this time of the year, UACE results are already out. The parents and students are anxious about the outcome of the university admissions under the government scholarship for the few courses still eligible for the scholarship.

With the high competition nowadays, there are many students with good results who fail to get the government scholarship. There is also a whole lot of courses that are not supported by that scholarship.

Therefore, private sponsorship is the norm these days. That aside, many science students, especially those who have not achieved the highest grades find it challenging to choose courses as some science courses are dubbed "flat courses". Based on my experience, I would like to say that there is no "flat course"!

The science courses offered at the various universities in Uganda are either associated with a profession or science without a direct link to any profession. Some of the courses associated with professions, have the highest university admission cutoff points for the fields related to Physics and Mathematics. But this does not hinder the numbers of student who opt for those fields of study.

Of course what is in the parents and students' mind is that when the students graduate, they will be able to find a white collar job somewhere in the professional world.  While some purely science courses have relatively lower cutoff points, but with the least numbers of students. I would like to encourage students to opt for science based courses without any prejudice, keeping in mind, that behind all the great technologies human kind appreciates, there are also years of scientific research without which the technologies would not exist.

Many science based courses are for example offered at Makerere University of which I am a graduate with a Bachelor of Science with Education degree (Bsc-Ed), majoring in Physics and minoring in Mathematics.

After I had been offered Bsc-Ed, my guardian then told me that success in life does not depend on the courses one does at university, but rather how well one does which ever course you are offered. I took these words to heart as I traversed the three undergraduate years. The professional part of my course would have driven me to be a secondary school teacher. Well I am a teacher, but at university level. Today, I am also a soon to graduate PhD-student in space science.

Studying a purely science course  and teaching at the university has made me see science and scientific research out of the box. Scientific research has a lot to do with not only the visible tangible technologies related to our day-to-day life experiences but also understanding the science that builds up or affects those great technologies.

The biggest already made technology we have to understand, preserve, conserve and utilize is our planet Earth.  However, It is quite challenging to "market" science to the young generation in order to inspire them to opt for science courses.

I was motivated into pursuing space science by my undergraduate project which was about "sudden ionospheric disturbances".

The ionosphere is the part of the Earth's atmosphere that is mainly composed of electrically charged particles. Satellite signals can be delayed when traversing through the ionosphere during disturbed periods. This has implications for technologies that use satellites like GPS technology, satellite surveillance, digital TV, mobile phones among others.

However, what happens in space not only affects our technology, but also our planet Earth which is our life line. In my PhD, I study the effects of a variable ionosphere upon the atmospheric constituents. Changing the amount of for example ozone in the atmosphere might have implications for sea surface temperatures. Any effects on Earth from space affect us all either directly or indirectly regardless of where we live.

Therefore, to understand how the Earth is coupled to space and the effects thereof  is one of the research areas of interest in space science and the main research topic at the Birkeland Centre for Space Science, University of Bergen, Norway which I am a member of. I have had the opportunity to see the night sky filled with dancing auroral features, a footprint of the active space, and I can assure you that science is no "flat course".

"Magnetospheric substorm at Andøya Rocket range - an analysis"

The writer is a PhD student at the Birkeland Centre for Space Science, Department of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen, Bergen Norway