When you are first considering your project, you will need to work out what you want to study, and from there work out a title. At this stage working out exactly what you are going to investigate and how you are going to to do so can be quite daunting, so here are some things to consider.

1. What is it you are interested in?

What are you wanting to investigate in your study? This could be anything, from how blind fly mutants react to mazes, to the effect that alcohol has on nematode worms. Think of something that you are interested in finding out the answer. 

Check out some past project titles here, to see the breadth of what is possible!

2. What is possible to do in the time you have?

This is an important consideration when planning a project. Even if you have the best project idea ever, it’s never going to happen if you don’t have the time to do it in. This means you need to be realistic about what is possible in the laboratory time you have allocated to you. If you don’t know how much time you get, you need to find out, as this will affect what it is possible to investigate. 

Peter Symonds Sixth Form students, on average, get 10 hours of time in the lab for their project experiments.

3. Working out what is possible to do with the equipment you have

This is an important consideration, as it will give you an idea of possible ideas you can test.

Have a look at the common equipment and mutants you may be able to use in Step 2.

 

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