Course Reviews

The most accurate reviews of any course come from those who have attended it. We publish all our course reviews to give a fair and honest picture of how other analysts found the course, together with a picture of their applications and environment within which they worked. Please note that for security and privacy reasons, we do not publish analysts names, the institutions or their companies for which they work.

Reviews

Course: Basic Essentials of GC & GC-MS, Method Development & Troubleshooting GC & GC-MS

"The presenters were very helpful and really knew the topics – could give great inputs"

Overall ratings of the course
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Training Manual
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Course: Basic Essentials of GC & GC-MS, Method Development & Troubleshooting GC & GC-MS

"I got an idea about the GC-MS work in just a few days!"

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Quality of material presented
Training Manual
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Course: Basic Essentials of GC & GC-MS, Method Development & Troubleshooting GC & GC-MS

"Presentation and teaching was very good."

Overall ratings of the course
Quality of material presented
Training Manual
Knowledge of presenters
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Course: Basic Essentials of GC & GC-MS, Method Development & Troubleshooting GC & GC-MS

"Good overview of GC & GC-MS"

Overall ratings of the course
Quality of material presented
Training Manual
Knowledge of presenters
How would you recommend us

Course: Basic Essentials of GC & GC-MS, Method Development & Troubleshooting GC & GC-MS

"The course is very good"

Overall ratings of the course
Quality of material presented
Training Manual
Knowledge of presenters
How would you recommend us

"Highlights- the range of topics presented and the depth of information given was extremely good. In particular, the fundamental aspects to GC chromatography, which were presented on the first day. However, I would recommend that the fundamentals be presented in a less mathematical manner i.e more text and less maths."

"With this course you get a good overall view of the theory of GC and the different detectors. It was good for me and I can apply this knowledge in the lab. A few more clinical examples would be good."

"It was a good refreshment again because I did some courses before, some great troubleshooting helpful points. I think it was a good overall presentation with the most essential parts in it."

Course Reviews

We've taken all input from our delegates over the last 5 years towards developing the courses, venues and information provided. Here are some of the points raised by analysts that we have used to develop and improve the school’s program and how we can further support our analysts:

Special topic courses – Many analysts requested further courses on special topics such as SPME etc. We have introduced a whole combination of course packages as well as one day special topics into our 2011 programme onwards. These can be viewed under the search function on our home page.

Instrument operation courses – many of our course analysts expressed an interest to also learn about their instruments as well as techniques and approaches. Of course this presents many challenges as having a class with each analyst having a different instrument set up is not something that can be addressed on our Basic Essentials courses.

For this reason, we decided at the end of 2010 to introduce instrument operation courses in our 2011 programme moving forward. In such courses we focus on the instrument set up. This is also a class room based training course – but focussed on how to operate the instruments. The number of courses we offer on different instrument set ups will expand over the coming years. Analysts are able to combine the Basic Essentials courses with an instrument training package as one booked course.

Practical courses – another popular request was the availability of practical based courses. We've given this careful consideration and we feel that the best way to offer such a program, in terms of meeting analysts needs and in a cost effective manner, is to offer this on your own instrument set up in your own laboratory. In early 2011 we introduced practical on-site courses which can be tailored to your own needs – group size, number of days, selected components of course etc. It works best when there is a small group requiring training, e.g 4+ analysts. Any of our existing course modules can be applied to an onsite course. For onsite practical course enquires, please contact cgreen@amoebasciences.eu.

Information on venue & location – we try to send this out at least 3-4 weeks before a course starts. Usually we can give information on where the venue is. However, to ensure accuracy, until we know final numbers, it is sometimes not possible to indicate which room in a venue the training will be in until about a week or two beforehand. Sometimes we also need to change a venue for this reason too.

Venue locations – When we first started out 5 years ago, we utilised venues in city centres that we knew would be comfortable and easy to find, such as universities. Several analytical companies also offered us use of their facilities on a neutral territory basis. We generally avoided expensive hotels to keep course costs down. Over the years, we have now managed to find good well equipped, neutral facilities which we re-use every year across Europe and beyond. We no longer use analytical company training facilities unless they are agreeable in advance that no sales or marketing presentations will be given during the course. This is because on one (very exceptional) occasion, a short presentation was given at an inappropriate time during a course - without official permission, and whilst such information can benefit analysts in terms of knowledge, naturally it is not right that analysts are deemed to pay for such activities. Therefore we have taken steps that this will not happen again. Where we decide to use such facilities in future, we may permit a short tour of the labs or similar during a break, but the course will not be interrupted in any way.