A lot of very cool opportunities arise from being a blogger. Last year I was interviewed for an America magazine on education, had one of my photos used on the cover of a Danish book and became the poster-boy for the EEE department.

My last blog post was a quick update while I was killing time before badminton. I was thinking about how I’ve changed in my approached to work and then linked it back to my internship and the things I learnt there. I didn’t look over it nearly enough and I don’t think it was as amusing as what I could have produced, had I more time. Nevertheless, this quick post led to me standing in front of around 50 students in a big lecture theatre, talking about my experience at Apple.

To put it quickly, the lovely people in the Undergraduate office in my department read the blog post and thought that my words about internships might interest other students. Subsequently, those words appeared on the careers area of my departmental website. There also happened to be an internship talk soon, in which the aforementioned lovely people spoke to interested students about applications, CVs and all the tools necessary to land a profitable summer. Natural next step was to ask me to talk.

I know to a lot of you, this won’t seem particularly significant. Presenting in front of tens or even hundred of people is something that a lot of intelligent Imperial students are very good at. Dazzling the crowd with their majestic linguistic adroitness and phlegmatic vocals (yes, a thesaurus was used). I am not one of those people. In a small crowd I can hold my own, but I find that when presented with 19 people or more (hereby known as Chris’ constant), I tend to go silent. If forced into a situation where I am required to speak, my legs and hands begin to be driven at their resonant frequency and my eyes widen enough to permanently alter the width of my nose. In summary: “I get crazy nervous”.

This talk would only be five minutes and would effectively be me reciting the same thing I’ve told everyone I know, indirectly know and made eye contact with in the past 3 weeks, since working for Apple; so I really had no reason to be nervous. Even so, a small part of me always assumes the worst, so the idea of wetting myself, swearing and then running off crying mid-speech was, in my mind, becoming more feasible by the minute.

Fortunately it went really well. While I still adopted all the fidgeting and “rabbit in headlights” eyes I am accustomed to, I don’t think too many people noticed. Beginning the speech with: “Hi I’m Chris and I spent my summer working for a small fruit company called Apple” really did grab their attention and got me off to a good start.

It’s going to take a while to get me to relax when doing big talks, but it’s something I really need to get used to and is certainly something that anyone can achieve with practice. Plus, with all the things I am taking on this year, practice is certainly one thing I can certainly expect to get. As for the foul mouth and urination, they’re just risks I’ll have to take, one talk at a time.

Thanks for reading,

Chris xx

A while back, one of my friends from the Chocolate Society was desperately bored and decided to join me in my Signals and Systems lecture. Unsurprisingly, she discovered a new level boredom, one which all leading scientists are still trying to quantify (as, thus far, it defies all known laws of time, conservation of energy and neurone activity in the brain). Today I returned the favour by coming in an hour early and attending a biology lecture. So the next instalment of the “On Location” series comes to you from inside a biology lecture hall.

Fortunately for me, it was a fairly easy one on redox reactions. I hadn’t had the prerequisites of A Level biology and chemistry, but I was still able to keep up with the general direction of the lecture. Dr. Steven Cook talked about Oxidation (loss of electrons) and Reduction (gain of electrons) and gave a few examples of when that happens using colour images and big diagrams of complicated molecules, but nothing so challenging that a layman like myself couldn’t follow along. Not once did I have to resort to my usual means of lecture-procrastination, my iPad Mini. The general atmosphere was far more relaxed than my usual, even the lighting had a cheerful disposition and the hour drifted it’s way through time unimpeded. I also had a wide smile every-time the word voltage was mentioned, as effectively, redox reactions are what happens in old-style batteries. It was also very nice to be in a lecture which had a fairly even spread of ethnicities and more than 10 females (as 2nd year ISE consists of 20 people, all with fully functional Y chromosomes).

What I took away from the lecture is that Biology is far nicer than anything we experience in the EEE department. That’s not to say I will continue this blog next year as a Bio student; I definitely find ISE more manageable and enjoyable. But I will be so bold as to say that we have a much harder route to our degrees!!

I want to start asking more questions in my blog posts, just to spice up the comments sections a little bit. I may also start bribing you all and offer a packet of skittles to whoever gives me the most hilarious answer

What do you think is the hardest subject at Imperial?

Thanks for Reading,

Chris xx

Hello Again,

This is going to be a horrible week. I wanted to do a fair amount of blogging, as the buzz of getting this page is still alive and thriving. Unfortunately, my course has decided I’ve been getting far too much sleep lately and coursework after coursework after coursework has been piled onto my plate. This means I will not get any free-time whatsoever this week and thus, I am sitting in the back of a Digital Electronics lecture on my laptop

Even though this was not at all planned, it links on quite nicely to a series of David Attenborough style “observational blogs” I plan to do when I have the availability or the ignorance to do so. I want to go round to each department’s recreational areas and blog about what I see. The chances are, each visit will be a lot of people hunched over computers glaring at a mathematical equations, but I’m still hopeful for a bit of eaves-dropping and gossip. This is partially because I want to explore more of the college. When we were all given the job of “Imperial Student Bloggers” we were told to explain what it was like being, working, living at Imperial. However, I honestly couldn’t tell you anything more than my old halls, the Electronics Department and the Union. The reality is, most of us stick to our own groups; the only people I spend my time with were my fellow ISE colleagues and my hall mates.

Two weeks ago, I went to a Chocolate Society event (and am now a member). As well as the sugar-rush and very interesting conversation, I had a great time on the balcony of the 8th floor of Blackett. I was completely unaware of amazing places like this around Imperial. The balcony there is huge, as big as some lecture rooms, and boasts a brilliant view of the Royal Albert hall. I want to find more places like this, and let you know the beauty of the campus.

Right, must be off. Tomorrow (Wednesday, blog edited and published shortly after. It went great!!!) I have a rehearsal for a 10-min presentation I have to give for a scholarship application next week. It’s entitled “My greatest achievement to date and why”, so effectively it’s two minutes of content, eight mins of waffle to try and impress important people with money and job opportunities. Not looking forward to it at all!!

Thanks for Reading,

Chris xx