So, it’s the holidays! Yay! I can relax for a few weeks!

…

Or not.

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Definitely not.

I came home, back to my village just outside Lincoln, last Friday evening and since then I’ve not done very much besides going to a comedy show, going to a concert (going by car to Manchester in a blizzard was worth it for the sight of Neil Tennant in a cape), spending time with my friends and procrastinating before finally actually doing some seminar-related work and revising and apologising to the nice people at the Young Scientists Journal for being a failure as a human being. I have thus used up my entire relaxing-over-Christmas quota in the first four days of the holiday and must repent for my sins from now on by becoming heavily acquainted with Messrs. Young and Freedman and Ms. Boas. It could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

My first term at Imperial was mental. Completely mental. I think it’s characterised by the fact I kept signing up for things and didn’t expect them to come to fruition, BUT DAMMIT THEY DID. Case in point: student blogging! I was convinced to sign up by my best friend (she has also been responsible for keeping me sane this past term and I am eternally grateful to her for listening to me moan and not blocking me on Gmail </shoutout>) and didn’t think they’d let me do it. Ah well, it’s been fun writing here, even though my posts have been sporadic and not particularly good!

The last week I was in London I had four social events in five days (a Christmas party and three Christmas meals), after which I had the overwhelming desire to get into a cupboard and rock gently for several days. I’ve finished the term on a low first average, which isn’t especially encouraging, but at least I have quite a bit of time left to rectify my fail. Now I have to get onto doing my part of a group presentation, writing a lab report and revision six things: Functions, Linear Algebra, Mechanics, Complex Analysis, Relativity and “stuff that I might get asked at the University Challenge interview in February”.

Here’s a list of posts I’ve got planned:

• My Christmas list
• My New Year’s resolutions
• A typical week in the life of an Imperial first year physicist (at last!)
• A piece on scientific ethics, particularly in relation to funding (i’m being deliberately vague)

Putting my plans on the interwebs means I have to follow through with them! What could possibly go wrong?

Finally, I wish you a merry Christmas (or a happy holiday if you don’t celebrate Christmas) and a happy new year! Thanks very much for reading my blog/humoring me.

P.S. I MADE THE REPORTER BLOGSPOT OMGWTFBBQ (I was having a bad day and it cheered me up for a couple of hours, so thank you to the editor for including me )

The area in and around Soho combines three of my favourite things: bookshops, Chinese food and rainbows. I’d love to have a photo collage here, but it was a horrible rainy day so any pictures would have just been rubbish! The fact I’m writing this for you indicates that I got out of Soho in the end, and just so you know, nothing untoward happened. I got lost looking for a restaurant, then I ate Chinese food, looked in bookshops and bought a bowler hat.

Oh, and I almost wandered down a street with lots of neon signs.

…

I’m not going to be allowed out on my own again, am I?

If you’re ever in the area, I recommend eating at Hing Loon on Lisle Street. I went there when I went on the Sci Fi bookcrawl on Hallowe’en (as well as on Saturday) and they have a £4.50 for two courses deal! Most importantly, the food is tasty and eating there gives me a chance to practise my mad chopstick skills (I’m sure the other diners thought me an uncoordinated idiot, but at least I didn’t drop one of them this time). After lunch I went and bought a few Christmas presents and was accosted in the street near Forbidden Planet by a very nice lady from a temple who recommended that I do some yoga and visit their vegetarian restaurant.

The rest of the weekend was given over to problem sheets – checking the ones that I had answers for and finishing some of them. I also wrote a bit of a story – yes, even now that NaNoWriMo has finished. I must be mad.

Recipes (with photos!) will come next term, when I need to cook again – I currently have enough meals prepared to last me until the end of term (I am both lazy and horrifyingly organised when it comes to cooking). We’ll be cooking Christmas dinner in our kitchen this weekend though!

First of all, congratulations to Imperial’s University Challenge team for their pwnage of St Hugh’s Oxford on Monday night! I was answering along as I watched it on iPlayer (I couldn’t make the showing in the Union because I was ill).

I said I’d do a “week in the life of an Imperial physics fresher” thing, but it’s been a bit of a funny week – as I mentioned I was ill on Monday and one of our lecturers is in Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire, I presume) this week so we have fewer lectures and classworks than normal. So, I’m writing this instead!

This blog post was inspired by a few things:

1. A post on Maciej’s blog
2. A conversation in which the British and American university systems were mentioned
3. Getting rubbish marks back on a problem sheet and my lab continuous assessment (remember kids, don’t just write down results and errors in your lab book – you have to explain them a bit too, even though it may strike you as slightly pointless because it’s already in the lab script that you’ve stapled right next to the results. It’s all good practice for later on and you’ll get more marks. Having used a lab book while working at the University of Sheffield last summer I really should know better)
4. The fact that this time last year I was applying to university and now I’m seeing UCAS candidates wandering around the department looking lost and answering questions from prospective applicants (of course, this is reminding me of my own traumatic experience with university admissions; in a nutshell, I received my rejection letter from Oxford on Christmas Eve and was originally told I was rejected from Imperial, only to be told three days later there had been a mistake. Also, I completely messed up every interview I did, even the ones that were just “informal chats”. So completely it isn’t even funny)
5. Getting a spot on the 2010-2011 University Challenge team, because of/despite the fact I answered a question about the Spice Girls correctly

I’m really not cut out for physics. I don’t know if there’s a version of dyslexia that means you struggle with physics problem solving and knowing what to put in your lab book, but if there is I have a particularly severe case of it. I always think about what it would be like if I’d done what I said I’d do if Imperial rejected me: take a year out and reapply for maths. I can do maths, at least. I got a Merit in my AEA maths and no grade in my AEA physics (oh yeah, you bet I asked to do two extra exams just for fun). Still, what attracted me to physics was the fact that the fact I have to put in much more effort so it ought to be more satisfying; also, the fact that physics is mathematics with purpose (ooh, burn).

I do the Physics with Study in Europe course, and despite my complaining I enjoy it a lot; however, I wish I had the chance to get an even broader education (like in the American system), rather than studying one or at most two subjects in depth. This is one reason I’m so happy to be on the University Challenge team, besides the possibility of getting to meet Jeremy Paxman – the chance to learn all sorts of things that have nothing to do with physics!

Maybe my disillusionment is just a response to the huge difference between physics at A-Level and degree level. Potential freshers beware of this, but if you’re willing to put the work in you should do well. Later today I’ll be doing extra lab work. I love doing labs, but again they’re so different to practicals at school. It’s nothing to do with my lab partner, but I would much rather work on my own, and having different people telling you different ways to keep a good lab book is pretty frustrating.

You know what else is infuriating? Coming top in the class in the only two tests that don’t matter. Firstly, the maths diagnostic test, which was basically to check we hadn’t forgotten everything from A-Level maths over the summer. Secondly, the Thinking Skills Assessment that the College are trialling for admissions; only about half our 236-strong class took it, though, so it’s not that much of an achievement.

I promise I’ll do some recipes soon.

Also, in case you were wondering, I won NaNoWriMo! 50,036 words in 30 days… most of them completely terrible.