Anatomy Information for Second Level Students & Teachers

• Information For Teachers

Information for Second Level Students

Hi. We presume that you are thinking of coming to NUI Galway and are surfing the website to see what degree courses and subject choices are available. The purpose of this page is to tell you a little about anatomy and the anatomy department.

About anatomy

Anatomy is the study of the structure of organisms. At NUI Galway, just as in other institutions, anatomy is principally taken to mean the structure of the human body, while the zoology department deals with other animals and the botany department deals with plants.

While our department does focus on the structure of the human body, in our research we sometimes study animal structure and relate it to human structure. Some of our research is in the new area of tissue engineering, a discipline in which scientists, clinicians and engineers working together, attempt to grow tissues and organs in the lab that could later be used for transplant purposes.

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Degree programmes

Our department teaches students in the faculties of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and Health Sciences. If you plan to study medicine, nursing, biomedical engineering, occupational therapy or speech and language therapy you will have to take courses given by the anatomy department. Information on these degree programmes can be found at the websites of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and Faculty of Engineering.

If you are interested in studying for a Science degree or Biomedical Science degree, you will have the option of taking anatomy as a subject in your second and subsequent years. Information on these degree programmes can be found at the webpages for Biomedical Science and Undenominated Science.

Traditionally, the study of human anatomy was restricted to medical students. However, as you can see from above, our department teaches students in a wide variety of disciplines in addition to medicine. Indeed we are the first university in Ireland to afford students outside of medicine the opportunity to study anatomy, and the first to offer a complete anatomy programme to honours degree level.

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The ’Backdoor’

We are often asked if studying anatomy as a science degree is a ’backdoor’ into medicine or physiotherapy. Broadly the answer to this question is no. However, science students who have taken anatomy with physiology and/or biochemistry to degree level have gone on to study medicine, physiotherapy, and veterinary medicine at graduate level. In general this requires moving to the UK. RCSI does offer graduate programmes in both medicine and physiotherapy but admission is highly competitive and fees are expensive. So while it is possible to go on to further study in these areas, it is by no means guaranteed and you would have to be prepared to spend at least four extra years in college and a lot of money to pursue this route.

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Employment

We are also frequently asked "what job can I get if I study anatomy?" To answer this question honestly we would have to say that we do not see ourselves as being in the business of training students for jobs. We are in the business of educating people for life. In fact, there are few, if any jobs (outside of medicine and allied health disciplines) that require you to study anatomy. Having said that, anatomy as a discipline is very useful to have if you are interested in a career in any of the biomedical industries, and to some degree the pharmaceutical industry. In fact, the biggest asset you have in seeking a job after graduation is the quality of your degree, rather than the specific subject you have studied for your degree. NUI, Galway produces top quality graduates, and we have the lowest graduate unemployment rate of all the universities in Ireland.

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Postgraduate study

Most of our students go on to postgraduate study, as do many students from other departments in the science faculty. Nowadays, if you are seeking a career as a scientist it is almost expected that you will have a postgraduate qualification, whether that is a diploma in a skills related area, or a taught masters degree such as the M.Sc. in Neuropharmacology or the M.Sc. in Biomedical Science , or a research based M.Sc. or Ph.D. degree. Again, admission to postgraduate programmes of study is more dependent on the quality of your degree than the specific subject, although clearly it would be unlikely that a person with an excellent degree in astrophysics would pursue a Ph.D. in anatomy (unless we discover aliens in which case this will be a very popular option indeed!).

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More about anatomy

As mentioned before, as anatomists we are primarily concerned with the study of the structure of the human body, and with the relation of structure to function. We study structure on all scales, from the subcellular to the study of the macroscopic (gross) features of humans. In our research we attempt to elucidate previously unknown aspects of structure and function, often with the aim of understanding what goes wrong in disease, and hopefully suggest ways how disease might be prevented or cured. Although the study of anatomy as a formal discipline has existed for thousands of years, there still remains much that is unknown of human structure, especially at the cellular and subcellular levels. As newer instrumentation becomes available we are able to elucidate more and more of these fine structural details. In our department we possess, or have easy access to, many sophisticated microscopes that enable us to see and record structural details of individual cells and tissues. We also have the capability to grow cells and simple tissues in the lab and examine their behaviour both visually and at the molecular level using biochemical techniques. Our department has particular interests in two growing areas of research, namely, stem cell biology and tissue engineering.

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