mm be careful with this one

I have mixed feeling about this module. On the one hand, I ended up doing very well and I learnt a lot from it too. On the other, I've never had to deal with so much bullshit in my life.

There are essentially three parts to this module: 1) business content lectures given by Sara Collins aimed at providing you with the background required to complete... 2) a business proposal that is submitted as a report. 3) There is also a series of external lecturers who come in and talk about their experience working as biotechnology entrepreneurs. Let's go through them bit by bit.

1. These are an absolute waste of time. Sara permanently looked like she'd rather be anywhere in the world than talking to you, the slides are years old and still incomplete (one slide was titled the four basic strategies and proceded to list THREE things) and ultimately do not prepare you for completing the business proposal. You will leave each weekly two hour session wondering what it was you were supposed to learn there.
2. This is what you will spend your life in semester one trying to finish. Most in my class were between 50-60 pages long. I barely slept in the week it was handed in. It is a huge task and you've likely never attempted anything like it before and as I just said, the content lectures do precious little to change that. If you want to learn the theory, do MN30076, which as it turns out is a suggested prerequisite for this module, but, in a cruel twist of fate, BB40078 is in semester one and MN30076 is in semester 2, so unless you are a post-graduate student that also happened to do their undergraduate at Bath AND chose to do the business strategy module, you're fucked. And to top it all off, it's only worth 20% of the module.
3. The quality of the external speakers varied dramatically. Some were very good and clearly took you through the process of taking an idea through to a fully-fledged company, some were literally just a two hour hardcore organic chemistry lecture. The idea in the past has been that the exam has been based off of one of these lectures, but they changed it this year at the last minute to include the content lectures provided by Sara Collins. The exam is only an hour long and you have to answer two questions (although I really hope they change this back in future, it used to be just one) and is worth 50% of the module. (The remaining 30% comes from your initial proposal submitted three weeks into the semester (10%) and your final pitch (20%).) Oh, and one thing that is eminently obvious from all of these companies is that even a decade or more after inception, they often haven't even marketed a product, let alone become profitable. That's just the reality of the biotech industry. This is juxtaposed quite nicely by the demand placed on us, mindless bioscience undergrads, to develop a watertight business proposal for a novel and feasible idea in the space of nine weeks.

As I said, I did come out of this module having learned a great deal about the biotechnology industry, the kinds of problems you must consider when starting a company and working in a group of people I didn't know well on a project I found really hard. But the structure and design of the module, or lack thereof, makes the whole experience really difficult, way more difficult than it should be, in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, I am glad I did it and I think it is a very valuable module that we're lucky to have access to, but I just want you to be aware of what you're getting into.

I really hope this module gets revamped for the future because I think it could be something really special and unique about Bath's bioscience courses, but at the moment, it's something only a mother could truly love.