Hello All,

Firstly, I must apologise for my absence from the blogosphere. In my last few posts I touched on the fact that I’ve been developing a few iPhone apps and that they have been an efficacious replacement for the pallet of Red Bulls stored in my cupboard. Needless to say, while my progress towards lectures, tutorials, blogging, socialising, sleeping, etc have been impeded, the health of my main app is significantly more robust, in comparison. Stay tuned for more info on that.

I will be enforcing a break from the severely smothered girlfriend that is Xcode and attempt to reignite my student life at Imperial. Recently I did another tour guiding job in my department, where I take a group of prospective students round campus and to their entrance interviews, answering any questions they might have along the way. This got me thinking about the popular questions people ask and e-mail to me, because of my capacity as a media junkie. The most common questions are usually to do with the cost of university, in particular: accommodation.

University is very very expensive, and any effort to increase the number of “very’s” I use typically leads to an even more expensive series of riots in England. This cost is doubly so for us Imperial students, since most of the buildings we have to spend are time in are roughly the same value as a 23 year old Facebook CEO. The two things that you have a lot of control over monetary-wise are accommodation and having at job while studying.

Accommodation I don’t want to spend too much time writing about, since I’m quite stubborn when it comes to my viewpoint. It’s essential. Being at Willis Jackson (my old hall of residence) changed me for the better in so many ways, and without it I would still effectively be a kid going to school every morning. The people you meet and the brand new dynamics of communal and semi-independent living are the only ways I can imagine preparing someone for the real world.

The main thing I wanted to talk about was getting a job at uni. There are many people who are able to successfully balance a part-time job, their studies and a social life. It’s not easy, but if you are hard working and driven enough, you can certainly do it. The key to that method is finding the right job. Restaurant staff, telephone call centers, and the Imperial Union are three great places that spring to mind, mainly because of the flexibility of their hours. However, it’s vital that I repetitively mention that this option is for incredibly hard working people. I maintain that I am one of the laziest and most unqualified students in this fine institution, and thus, spent my first two years fully focused on not getting kicked out.

There are other reasonably nice ways of making money, that don’t require too much of your time, should you be like me. Occasionally you hear about focus groups and research projects for students that want your opinions, input or fluids for some study. While these aren’t incredibly reliable in how often they are available, it’s nice to subsidise some of the more embarrassing nights out at Metric.

As of my third year I also have an official part-time job as the campus rep for Apple. It’s an incredible role to have and it’s certainly a job I enjoy, since I’ve been doing it free-of-charge for some time, with my position as a level 4 Apple fan-boy. However, I can’t deny that it initially impacted my timetable in a big way. While I could never have risked that in my first two years, at this stage (and especially after my internship) juggling with an extra ball is something that you get into quickly, without posing too much of a risk to the others. Campus rep jobs are great things to have, since they involve a regular paycheck at incredibly flexible hours and the majority of the workload is done by e-mail.

Also note, that while you may not be able to get a job during term-time, in your three summer months, you can get and internship. Obviously, having the words “Imperial College” on your CV certainly helps your chances along, when looking for something profitable.

University and the life we lead here can be expensive and overwhelming in many ways. The key is to look at it as an investment, and a very profitable one at that, if you are willing to make an effort of it. Money is an inevitable issue for a lot of people, and I do think apprenticeships are the unappreciated solution to any person with that problem. However, if you must take the leap and delve into University life, remember that there are always ways to pay off your student loan a tad early, whether it’s job-hunting or late nights writing the next killer iPhone app. Never let funding be a reason for woe, you have plenty of course content for that.

Thanks for reading,

Chris xx

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

I’ve picked up a number of, what a younger Chris would call, bad habits since my time in the working world. Last year, I was typical: scattering problem sheets and lecture notes on the floor, dealing with them based on which one is most visible when I’m feeling productive; entrusting the general knowledge of my coursemates to maintain my timetable; and, of course, being completely unaware of coursework until the deadline is within the conceivable future.

All that has changed and I’m now disgustingly organised. My life is dictated by iCal – colourful blocks representing the kind of event and when I am to attend it. Automagically synced to some online server, so no matter how technologically absent I find myself, I always know what’s on my trusty calendar. My Mail client is filled with several accounts, all active and for a different purpose, each one with its unique signature, whether it’s “3rd Year Rep”, “Apple Campus Rep – Imperial” or simply “Chris xx”. I have become a businessman and the colourful converses on my feet are the only things keeping me from going insane.

At this point, I reflect on the two paragraphs I have written and try to come up with a point to the story. Is there any need to put this up on the blog? In this case, probably not, since it appears to be the foul ranting of an old(ish) man. But dig deeper and you can see it’s me talking about the value of an internship.

Prior to my time at Apple, I would consider myself a brain with no direction. A good, tangible mind that could absorb maths, decode programming languages and spontaneously combust at the slight glimpse of Medicine. I’m at Imperial, so I knew I was smart, I just didn’t have confidence to back that up.

At Apple, I faced deadlines, presentations and spontaneous meetings with various places in the world. I experienced real life pressure which would have made the old Chris wilt and hide. But the constant internal desire to impress and succeed pushed me to be more creative, energetic and malleable than I’ve ever been before. I now approach everything with a slight level of professionalism and a new-found burst of confidence, which is really making itself useful at a time when I’m juggling: coursework, ISE events, societies after iPods, EESoc events and all the other stuff posted on iCal.

First year will change your social life so quickly and so definitively, you will emerge a better, more independent person. A proper internship will change your professional perspective and show you the light that you’ve spent your entire educational history racing towards. No matter how big and how insurmountable anything I do from this point on seems to be: I know, it will never be as petrifying as a presentation to Steve.

Thanks for reading,

Chris xx

You’ll notice my usual routine when it comes to writing about internships is to tell you what I’ve applied to, tell you about how excited/scared/unqualified/suddenly constipated (eliminate as required) I’ve become about the interview and then to carry on, not mentioning the result. This is because it’s exactly how companies like to go about their internship applications. If you do not get the position, they don’t communicate with you at all and hope that you go away and never bug them again. This is not one of those moments, as I do have some feedback from an internship application.

Like all Imperial students will eventually do, I was wasting a bit of time in the Central Library. I had a job on campus that day since it was the departmental open day. My job was to show people round the department and try not to scare them all away from the course onto easier things (*cough cough* Biology). I had two “sessions” as it were, one at noon and one later in the afternoon, so that left me with three hours to kill with my laptop.

Being in the library is quite fun when you have nothing to work towards. Very few people had exams so it wasn’t as congested as usual and the air conditioner was set to perfect, to contrast to the rather intense atmosphere the sun had cast across Queen’s lawn. I was doing the usual: Twitter, Facebook and writing for the blog when suddenly my phone rings to an unknown landline number. It was a lovely woman by the name of Debbie calling from Apple’s human resources department asking if it was a good time to talk. For future reference, if you work at Apple, whether it’s as an Engineer or a Cleaner, it’s ALWAYS a good time to talk. I listened intently to the phone as she told me I had been accepted to work at Apple for their summer internship program.

At this point, I would love to tell you I was dignified and walked out of the library, my head high with a proud radiance in my gait. Unfortunately, I believe I went speechless, then uncomfortably loud, then proceeded to leave the library by means of backflips, skips and any other unnatural motion my body could muster. I was so utterly astonished that I would be working for the company I’ve adored, loved, embraced and, quite frankly, worshipped for the past few years.

This was, by far, my proudest moment. For the next three months I will be developing a proper Apple application for the iPhone and iPad platforms. People often ask me what taking a course like ISE can get you in future, and from now on, I will say exactly this.

Thanks for reading,

Chris xx