Changes To My Study Programme

When I entered the university I had a mental image of the Medical School of the University of Chile, because I did a pre-university in that place and I loved it. Very spacious, full of classrooms and large spaces, green areas. What is expected to be a faculty. But it is a different reality in our faculty. Beginning because it is not prepared to receive even 40% of the students enrolled annually. Imagine that one day be 100%. Horrible.

The problem with the curriculum of my career, and apparently of the 4 careers present in the faculty, is that we do not have subjects from the beginning about our career until the third year, which demotivates a lot at first.

In my case, the two introductory subjects to the carreer were based on listening to the anecdotes of the year 1800 of the head of career and make reports on a topic x. If it were not for the Food Engineering Students' Center, we would not have had a visit to Carozzi so we could see exactly what a food engineer is doing.

Classrooms are poorly distributed and sometimes there is overcrowding in classes due to lack of space. Although sometimes we are 6 students in a room for 60 people, what kind of criteria is that?
We do not have a casino to have a proper lunch, we should not have to use the other faculties for something as basic and necessary as eating. The surfaces where you work in the lab are a shame. The food laboratories do not have basic implements such as juicer and before they didn'
t have microwaves either and the students had to supply them with the money from their pockets. Anyway…

The use of technology, for some subjects and for some teachers, is used quite well. Sometimes you learn more in this more didactic way than a 3-hour chair.

The teaching methods should improve. Personally I have had teachers who dedicate the whole class to read the power point presentation, something that can perfectly be done from home. I learn more on my own than when I go to classes. And I'm not the only one with the same problem. There are people in senior years who complain about the same thing.

Sorry not sorry :)

Summer Holidays

Most of my paternal family likes southern Chile more than the North, perhaps because they were raised in that part of the country. Although they were born in Santiago, they lived a humble life, similar to the one of field. In the summers they went by train to Los Angeles, where my great-grandfather lived. And back they brought fruits, vegetables and other things from there.

I guess that's why every time I'm asked where I'm going for the summer vacation, my answer is the South.

If I have to choose between traveling and staying at home, I prefer the second option. But it depends on many things, if someone can take care of my cats, where are we going to stay, who is going to go, if the university lets us have vacations or the semester lasts forever…  

But generally if it is to the south of Chile I accept immediately and I worry for the other things later.

This summer I would like to go Chiloé again, I love the rain, the calm, the people, the food… So I’m trying to convince my parents to go there.  Visit the places that we couldn’t see, go further than Chonchi.

But if I stay all the summer at home… Read the books I have kept waiting, finally watch that tv series, play videogames all day all night, sleep, go the museum, the theater or the cinema with my friends… Yeah, that’s good summer.

“Your calm mind is the ultimate weapon against your challenges. So relax.” Bryant McGill

Sugar addiction

Yes, sugar. I dare say that most agree that the world is much sweeter with sugar. The coffee of each morning tastes better, it fills us with energy in the soda of the midday, and accompanies the snacks that we like so much. Sugar is undoubtedly a part of our lives. But at the same time, it kills more people than weapons, and it triggers more and more alarms in health organizations in every corner of the world. While the tobacco informs each package of the consequences of its consumption with messages of the style "Smoking can kill" or "Smoking damages your health and that of those who surround you", sugar goes unnoticed in products that will deceive us with its flavor, attractive appearance and good marketing.

Constant and prolonged consumption can cause neurological and psychiatric problems in adulthood. People are consuming too much sugar. But consuming sugar makes our lives happy and there is a reason: different research claims that their long-term use would cause a reduction in dopamine, a neurotransmitter related to emotions and reward, so people would need to ingest more of it to keep their levels constant.

Do you think you can switch to artificial sweeteners and end the root problem? Think again ... One study found that artificial sweeteners like saccharin can produce effects similar to those obtained with cane sugar, highlighting the importance of reevaluating our relationship with sweetened food.

And that's not all ... Like other addictive drugs, abstinence from chronic sucrose exposure can result in an imbalance in dopamine levels and can be as difficult as completely ending consumption.

For my career this issue is important as we are in charge of the health of the general population, everyone needs to eat. That is why different campaigns have been carried out to reduce sugar, carbohydrates, salt and fats in foods that are marketed throughout the country.

Master's degree in Food Sciences

As I said in my previous blog, I plan to continue studying after university, specialize in the area of food safety and hygiene. For me, and surely for many other people, it is important that once a profession is obtained it is followed in a search process, feel the need to specialize in a greater depth than could be obtained through extension courses. By means of a postgraduate it is possible to accede to the last available knowledge in a certain area at world-wide level and to learn the advances of the discipline.

Currently there are many masters in this area. I recently found a website (Masterstudies) that allows you to compare different masters programs throughout the world. I've found 66 results in Food Sciences, of these, 18 in Food Safety. All of them are full-time and face-to-face classes, although they have the possibility of taking the course online or part-time. It is quite flexible. What I liked most of all is that you can see even the courses that are done in other countries. Studying abroad is a real plus in our society.

One of the courses that is repeated the most is the Master's Degree in Management of Safety and Food Quality. The focus of the program is on new and emerging issues in the field of food safety, focusing on the evolution of analytical approaches to monitoring and regulating food safety, authenticity and safety.

We need a greater focus on improving all this because of the recent incidents of major food security breakdowns in both developed and developing countries as they have had a major impact on people's livelihoods, their commercial viability and supply of food in general.

My future job

Since I was young a dirty kitchen makes me sick. I hate it. Do the people really know how bad a dirty kitchen is? It is a time bomb full with poison. All I heard in an unclean kitchen is tic tac tic tac. I don’t know how the people that have or work in a restaurant don’t clean properly the kitchen. They have hundreds of lives in their hands! Or when they serve expire food and think “It’s not that bad” Excuse me… what?

When I choose the career that I’m studying I was thinking in the job that I’ll have in the future. I want to work checking those restaurants make them pay. Just kidding. But I really want to work in something about hygiene and health of food. Even study a major or something in that. Because I want to be an expert in this topic.

Or do research in a laboratory to improve food hygiene. Although I love being in the laboratory, I can’t stand being in a closed place for long. Although I could work a while in a laboratory, I really enjoy seeing reactions when combining compounds. But again, I do not like to be long in one place, and even more so if it is closed.

I have never found out if the work of a food inspector is well paid, but it is not something that really worries me. When there is a passion for something, and you are good at what you do, the rewards come with time.

My hobbies

Since I was little I wanted to have collections of something, anything. Because I saw on TV that people were very passionate when collecting and had much fun in it. In cartoons people had collections of stamps and letters from baseball players, and they seemed to know a lot or be very important. When I grew up I realized that you could have a collection of whatever you like: letters, rocks, insects, feathers, leaves, sand, books, video games, action figures, movies in any format, toys ... but unfortunately I never had one. At the moment I have a small collection of metal caps of bottles, whenever I find one in good condition I keep it to put it in a plastic glass of Starbucks on my desk, yes, very elegant. Some are from drinks and others from well known beer brands, but others are from craft beer and only have one color so it is not possible to differentiate them. But I like them. A hobby I would never have is to collect things that are alive. It goes against all my principles. I have been vegetarian since I have memory, and I'm strict about it since a month ago.

Another hobby I had at some time, and still have sporadically, is to place leaves of trees and flowers between the pages of books. I do not know if it is considered as a hobby but I consider it as one. My mother had this hobby when she was young and it was she who inherited that custom. One of my aunts usually brings me books that one of her friends has in her house and she does not use, this friend studied to be a science teacher so she has books that I currently use to study when my aunt brings them. The point is that the books are old and between the pages there are always leaves, flowers, messages in small papers, even bus tickets. It is a custom that seems very beautiful because it keeps important memories for the person and later when reading that book can remember important moments tied to what was saved between the pages.


The hobby I have now is read. It started several years ago, eight years to be exact. I always liked to read but the afiction of doing it for pleasure began with a book that at that time was very popular.. I bought it non-original in San Diego and came back the next weekend to buy the remaining ones and order the one they did not have. Reading helped me improve my spelling, writing and reading comprehension. I have many books on my desk, most of them I have already read but I have others that I still have to read. My whole family knows I'm a library rat. Even my parents give me books for Christmas. It is the only gift I ask.

"When I hear that a man has the habit of reading, I am predisposed to think well of him" Nicolás de Avellaneda.

The mysteries of the heart

This is a difficult topic, talk about an organ of our body, ironies of the life, have difficult when we talk about our bodies. I can't choose brain so I will talk about the heart instead.

The heart is a muscular organ about the size of your closed fist that functions as the body’s circulatory pump. It takes in deoxygenated blood through the veins and delivers it to the lungs for oxygenation before pumping it into the various arteries (which provide oxygen and nutrients to body tissues by transporting the blood throughout the body). 

But we already know about this. Don't we? So, let's talk about something that we don't learn in the classrooms or in most of the textbooks.

Did you know that in fetal development, the heart forms and starts beating before the brain begins to develop? This could explain why sometimes we "think" with our heart and not with our brains. The heart have more experience than the brain. I'm just saying. Oh! And a mother’s brainwaves can synchronize to her baby’s heartbeats even when they are a few feet apart.

Emotions are another mystery... Positive emotions create physiological benefits in our bodies and can increase the brain’s ability to make good decisions. Negative emotions can create nervous system chaos, but positive emotions do the opposite. Your heart emits an electromagnetic field that changes according to your emotions, so others can pick up the quality of your emotions through the electromagnetic energy radiating from your heart and this magnetic field can be measured several feet away from the body.

We know nothing.

The Best Holiday I've Had

When I was a child my family didn't travel too much. But we could go somewhere just for the afternoon because my father had to travel sometimes, so my mom and I were going with him. I remember going to the beach, running away from the waves, building sand's castles... the things we do when we go to the beach. 

Salto del Laja, Biobío, Chile

But we never went to the south of Chile. And some years ago we beginning to travel by our own, not just because my dad has to travel. We use the summer holidays to travel to Los Ángeles, especially to Salto del Laja. One of the main waterfalls in the country. 

We camped on the river bank, just one hundred meters from there, in private enclosure. I remember we could hear the littles frogs and crickets in the night. I will never forget the day that we found a little green frog in one of our bags! I took it with my bare hands and that was one of the most beautiful (and funny) moments of my life... have an animal so tiny and fragile (cold and wet) in my hands. My little brother and I hunted crickets every time and liberated them just a moment after that.

We stayed a week and enjoyed all the days. Our timetable was like: wake up early, eat breakfast, go somewhere near, have lunch there and coming back to the camp, swim in the river until the sun fall, eat dinner, stay near the campfire and go to sleep. 

That's what I call a good way to spend the time. 

I love the south of my country, very green and alive.

A country I would like to visit

Here we go again, mates. A new level of English and therefore another challenge. This will be the last one so we will have to do our best. In this opportunity, we have to talk about a country that we would like to visit, and I really want to visit England. I like the weather. Just kidding. It's not just because of the weather, is the culture, the people, the history, the language... I really like everything of that.

I do a little research in class about the difference between England, Great Britain and United Kingdom. Did you know that is not the same? I didn’t. England is a country that is part of Great Britain and this is part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and all of this is part of British Isles. Phew! It’s more complicated than we think.

And there is more, much more, that we don’t know about. I don't know if I could say that they have more history than Chile, but it looks like.

I would like to visit the Tower Bridge, the Big Ben, the London Eye and go every inch of England! Drink tea in a tea room with the rain outside of the window. See the Christmas light twinkling in the West End. And more...



All of this meanwhile I study or work in something relative to my career: Food Engineering. I don't know what, but it's a good beginning, isn't?

Only time will tell...

A SUBJECT I'VE ENJOYED STUDYING THIS SEMESTER

I have six subjects this semester and just two of them I really enjoy it, oral and written communication and English III. But, in this time, I will write about the first one.

This subject was implemented with the objective that students acquire tools that allow them to develop their communicative skills in the field of Food Engineering, mainly in the planning, organization, production and dissemination of scientific and professional knowledge under different types of texts (Oral, written and multimodal), with the purpose of communicating a specific message to different types of audiences and in different contexts.

The subject consists of two parts, the first was pure theory about textual language (papers, texts of popularization, etc.) and I did not enjoy it at any time, I do not consider that I have poor reading comprehension, at least not a very bad one, so I did not think I needed to do that.

However, when we went to the second part of the course I enjoyed every part of it. It is about oral communication and was given by the teacher of theater. We learn oral communication techniques (modulation, voice imposition, gesture, etc.) in simulated activities of: job interview, oral presentations, etc.

I am not a very assertive person when it comes to communicating with others, so it helped me to be able to understand a little more how I can relate to others without dying in the attempt

A CAREER-RELATED WEBSITE THAT I ENJOY VISITING

A website related to my career would be that of APSAL (Asociación Profesionales de Salud y Alimentos). APASAL Is an institution created to stimulate the exchange of knowledge among all the professionals of the food chain with their health peers in the areas of common interest.

It is formed by professionals from all areas involved in the process of healthy eating: Technologists, Chemists, Biochemists, Engineers, Agronomists, Physicians and others capable of contributing to the knowledge of food. They have very interesting post about almost everything about food, like energy drinks, stevia, light products, healthy treats and others.

They have an institutional section where we can read about the organization of APSAL, goals and vision, different commissions and committees of it, and other stuffs like that. Others sections are about APSAL awards, the logo, events and faqs.

I visit this website once a week because I really like the information that they publish. Probably posting this type of information is something that anyone can do, but the fact that it does a professional gives it more credibility, at times.

FAVOURITE BOOK

I have read many books in my time as reader, so choose just one book is difficult. But there is one book that i read every year at least two times. "The Knight in Rusty Armor" is a novel by the American writer Robert Fisher writen in 1987. This a book that you can read many times in your life and everytime that you read it you learn something different.


The Knight, an egocentric man, who fails to understand and value in depth what he has, is carelessly neglected with the things and people around him, like his family: Juliet, his wife, and Christopher, his son. In this way it is gradually enclosed within its armor, until it ceases to glow and oxidizes; When he realizes, he can no longer take it away. Prisoner of himself, he embarks on a journey through three different castles through the "path of truth", partially guided by Merlin, the great and wise teacher of King Arthur. In this journey he realizes many things that he had never noticed, he reflects, and so he gradually becomes a better person.

"When you learn to accept instead of expect, you'll have fewer disappointment"

 "Human beings were given two feet so that they would not have to stay in one place, but if they would stand still more often to accept and appreciate instead of running around to grab, they would truly understand ambition from the heart"

A PHOTOGRAPH I LIKE

These photos were taken by me in 24th October two years ago. That day we went with my family to Concón. It is a Chilean city and commune in Valparaíso Province, Valparaíso Region. It is a major tourist center known for its beaches, beachside resorts and night life. We went just to see the sunset, it was one of my favorites days in life.

I like these photos because i can remember a beautiful moment. With my brother, we played on the shore of the beach, making some sands castle, chasing the waves and runing from them. We end up all soaked and cold so we went to drink coffee and eat empanadas a few steps from the beach. At the moment of the sunset, the shore was full of couples and families taking photos. And among them, my family and I, enjoying the moment.

The best way to end a day.

FAVOURITE MOVIE

I have always been very familiar with series and movies, of all types and styles. So, choose just one is very difficult. But one of them I watch it almost every year at least two times:

Howl's Moving Castle.

The story it's a fantasy equivalent version of World War I, a young girl by the name of Sophie works as a hatter and deals with massive insecurity problems. After an encounter with the wizard Howl, she attracts the attention of the Witch of the Waste, who lays a curse on Sophie, abruptly making her physically 90 years old. Though rather accepting of her new age, which Sophie finds to fit her personality better, she still sets out to find Howl and break the spell.

I love this movie. Like all films from the Ghibli studios, or some others movies like that. And is not just because of the director, is because this movie leave a life teaching. In Howl's Moving Castle, for example, is how a war can be a so idiotic form of reach an agreement, or how leaders in wars sit on their comfortable thrones inside a secure palace of the massacre that is taking place right across the door.

MY FAVOURITE PIECE OF TECHNOLOGY

It's very difficult to me choose just one technology, because i really like almost all type of technology. But i think that one of them is my favorite. The computers. In this days the computers do almost everything, even make calls.

My first computer was a very old one and it was already used by another person. I just used to make draws in "Paint" and play games that Windows brings integrated. A few years ago i had my first laptop. It's the one I have right now. I use it to study, play videogames that i buy, watch series or movies, chat with my friends and a lot of more things.

I use it every day, and almost every weekend i chat by webcam with a friends who are in another countries. So it's very important to me have a laptop or a computer. The cellphone make many things that the laptop do but it's no the same. I think i could have just cellphone and no computer, but it could be more uncomfortable than it looks.

WHY DID I CHOOSE THIS CAREER?

Well, when i was young be a psychologist was my dream. That was my idea for a year. Then i wanted to be a vet, but later i realised that to be a vet i had to practice and study with real animals, and i didn't like that. I love animals and bugs but it makes me nervous when they are in pain.

Then i wanted to be research in laboratories because i love science and laboratories. So I applied to the carreer Pharmaceutical Chemistry at University of Chile two years after i finished school. But it doesn't fullfilled me and i tried with Food Engineering at the same university.

And then i saw the light. That was what i wanted to be! A Food Engineering! Because it have things that really makes me happy: Science, food, research, laboratories, food... Besides, i really enjoy to be at university. Well, when I don't want to burn it so I don't have to take the exams. But i guess it is normal.

I want to work on something that has to do with food hygiene. Like the people that close restaurants when it have problem with plagues, bad food handling and stuff like that.

WHO AM I?

This is my first blog post, so i will write a little bit about me. My name is Blue Ortega Ulloa, i was born in Santiago of Chile, mid-year 1994. It was wednesday and my family says that that day rained a lot. My mother says that i was a quiet baby, i guess it's because my birth was a few weeks later than usual. I lived with my grandparents, parents, aunts and cousin until i was like 6 years old or something like that. Then my parents and i moved many times over the years until we stayed where i currently live in Quilicura. It was very difficult make friends because i changed schools many times, in fact i still have problems for it. I'm currently studying Food Engineering at the University of Chile since last year. A carreer that i really enjoy and it makes me happy.

My room has more books than clothes my closet. I buy them everytime i can. My literary preferences are more inclined to books with knights, wizards and dragons. I read The Inheritance Cycle, Harry Potter, Half Bad, A Song of Ice and Fire, and many others. I don't like much the non-fiction books, so I have many of the other types of books. If i'm not reading, i'm playing videogames in my computer, watching tv series or annoying my cats.