*dusts off blog*

Hello! Yes, I am still alive. I have now finished my exams and just have to write the rest of the lab report for my summer project – more on that after I demonstrate my feelings towards the exams via the medium of emoticons (because if I write any more I may get the urge to curl up in a box for a while).

Maths

Mechanics and Relativity

Problem Solving

Vibrations and Waves, Structure of Matter and Quantum Physics

Electricity and Magnetism

Maths Analysis

Next year, interpretive dance.

Now, moving on to the summer project! All first year physicists (except the Physics with Musical Performance lot) do a project in the summer term and present it at the Physics Open Days. My partner Isabella (with whom I also watched Lord of the Rings and Star Wars – my nerd card now stands less of a chance of being revoked) and I did a project entitled “Chaos and Stability in the Solar System” – we used computer languages C and C++ to simulate the motion of an asteroid and look for chaos. Computing projects are less popular, both as choices and on the open days, so we were able to do a large chunk of our lab reports during the open days. I didn’t get a chance to see the experimental projects upstairs, but heard they were very exciting! Though not as exciting as creating the solar system in your computer of course

This Tuesday is a Global Day of Solidarity for Troy Davis, who has been on death row in Georgia, USA, for 18 years. On the 23rd he will be having an evidentiary hearing and here at Imperial we will be helping to create a photo petition in his support, so please come along to the JCR between 12 and 2 to “lend your face for justice”! There’s a vigil going on from 5pm to 7pm outside the American Embassy too, so go along to that too if you have the time to spare!

This coming week, in addition to Tuesday’s events, I will be staying in London – I could have gone home, but why would you want to if you could have a free week here?  I will be going to a couple of concerts (Scissor Sisters and They Might Be Giants – thank you, I know my taste in music is terrible), and if anyone has any other ideas about cool things to do let me know.

I will be out of the country for half of July (at the EuroScience Open Forum in Turin, then at CERN for a week because of my EUCYS prize), but this summer I will definitely be writing “The Imperial Fresher’s Guide to the Galaxy”. If there’s anything you would like me to cover (I’ll do things like academics, social, financial, etc.), let me know! Having seen the 2011 prospectus, perhaps I should have done it sooner, but hopefully you will all still find it useful.

Finally, if you’re currently (or going to be) an Imperial physicist and you’re interested in writing or editing, please join the group I have created for Schrödinger’s Cat, the department newspaper I hope to start, and contribute ideas or sign up for things.  I did an interview with Simon Singh a few weeks ago that will hopefully go online and in the first issue.

I can’t think of anything else, and I’ve procrastinated from writing my lab report for too long. See you on the other side!

I sure know how to use the power of the English language to entice readers to my blog (*looks sadly at blog title*). On another note, it’s slightly worrying how often I decide that blogging is a good alternative to sleep.

Not much has changed since my last post, though I do feel better now – mostly because I’ve just finished a three day-long stint of extreme (well, by my current standards anyway) productivity. Unfortunately this hasn’t translated into a decent amount of revision, but hopefully once I’ve got all the dumb things I gotta do out of the way I can set up camp in the library. Which, perversely, I can’t wait for.

I’ve not much to say, really. Perhaps because my brain’s all worn out from actually doing something for a change. Anyway, I would love it if you the readers would let me know what you want me to write about. I keep promising and promising to do stuff, so please feel free to hurl abuse at me for depriving you of my sparkling wit and sage advice. Ahem.

Well, I’ve had a fairly eventful few days!

ICSF AGM OMGWTFBBQ
Thursday was the Sci Fi Society’s Annual General Meeting, where new committee members are elected, the year is reviewed and the constitution discussed. I stood for the position of Fanzine Editor and was surprisingly elected! It was just a relief really not to be beaten by Miranda the Dalek, who stood for every election (as RON – Re-Open Nominations).

Felix
I wrote an article about the Amnesty society’s involvement in Fair Trade Fortnight and it got into Felix! You can see it in last week’s edition, in the Clubs and Societies section.

Astronauts
On Friday I was lucky enough to attend an event where the speakers were Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan.

Yeah. That Neil Armstrong. That Jim Lovell. That Gene Cernan.

When I say lucky I mean lucky – first I gave my ticket to a friend so she could go instead, then when I was taking her there I headed towards the wrong place on the tube, then got off at the right stop by sheer fluke, then got directed to Burlington House (where the Royal Society of Chemistry, Royal Astronomical Society and a few others are) instead of the Royal Society by two people, then got the right directions off a nice man with an iPhone, then thought I had got us lost and got upset, then happened upon the right place, then managed to get a seat outside, watching the live feed!

I took notes, and I will probably write something lengthier if people want to read it. I think the experience summed up best in my friend’s insistence that it couldn’t have been real. I wish I could have stayed longer to mingle, but it was so crowded you could barely move, so we bid a hasty escape to freedom and Nandos.

Saturday
My friend stayed the night and on Saturday we went round the Science Museum – I think my favourite section (besides the gift shop) is Exploring Space, and all the history of medicine bits (despite them making me feel a bit woozy). Cosmos and Culture was disappointing though. In the evening I managed to cook for her (and she is still alive!)

Ready Steady Cook
My hall, Fisher, ran a Ready Steady Cook competition – we were given twelve ingredients, plus a mystery ingredient, and could make whatever we liked! My team made the following:

• Starter: Butternut squash soup with honey roasted pumpkin seeds
• Main: Spaghetti Carbonara
• Dessert: Chocolate surprise! (dubious chocolate cake that ended up turning rock solid, plus melted white chocolate and a random raspberry on the top)

We won Most Original! Last night we used part of our prize to make cocktails, which eventually degenerated into smoothies (which is what usually happens if you put me, fruit and a hand blender together).

Catching up
If I had one word of advice for prospective freshers it would be this: don’t miss a lecture unless absolutely necessary. (That and don’t buy fabric softener instead of detergent like I did. But more the lecture thing.) However, in the past couple of days I’ve managed to get through half of my E&M course, so hopefully by the end of this term I’ll have caught up on all my work!

The second Big Bang Fair was last week too – I was hoping to go as a judge, but couldn’t, and anyway had a good reason not to go just for fun (besides the cost of train tickets: see above). It made me feel all nostalgic about my science fair attending days!

And now to bed.

This evening has been a very University Challenge-y one.

1) The 2010 team, of which I am one fifth, practised answering questions and took it in turns to be Paxman. Answers ranged from “integration [snort indicating how incredibly simple that question was]” to “Eminem”. A well-timed mobile ringtone (sounding suspiciously like a gong) made the session all the more authentic.

2) We went to the (packed) Union bar to watch Imperial play Edinburgh in the first of two quarterfinals for Imperial. The match was going brilliantly – accompanied by cheers, boos and chants of “HEALY! HEALY!” – when, a minute before the end, disaster! The picture disappeared, to be replaced by a notice informing us that no signal was being received! I can only assume, unless Edinburgh managed to answer a shed-load of questions in the last minute, that Imperial triumphed – in which case, congratulations to them.

In other news, I’m considering changing back to the Theoretical Physics course for which I originally applied. This is because hearing my own attempts at speaking German is starting to get painful.

I have a test tomorrow and ought to be revising. You can tell this because I’m blogging.

I got back to London on Saturday afternoon – I tell you, there’s nothing like carrying a big suitcase to remind you that you live on the third floor. I spent the rest of Saturday finishing off a lab report because I don’t have access to a decent enough office suite at home (plus the annoying “problem with doing things” that I’ve had recently). I no longer care about experimentally verifying the thin lens formula or assessing image quality through the use of a three bar chart. There. I said it.

I got recognised in Sainsbury’s yesterday by someone who reads this blog. It made my day. I’ve never felt more like a rock star in my life. (Okay, so it doesn’t quite count because I already half knew the person, but STILL. \m/)

I had a German lesson and computing labs today. I still can’t string a sentence together in German (or English, but that’s beside the point), but hopefully that will change soon. Computing labs were fun – I like computing, since there aren’t really any opportunities to completely ruin everything through clumsiness and there’s no way dodgy equipment can be blamed for your results being useless. Unfortunately when we were asked if any of us had programming experience and I put my hand up the lecturer didn’t notice, so my demonstrator might be under the impression that I’m quicker to catch on than I actually am…

Right. I can’t put revision off any longer. I’m sure I could give it a good go, of course.

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

…

Or not.

…

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.

…I’d remember to blog every once in a while.

So, I’ve now been here at Imperial for eight weeks.

*rubs eyes*

THAT’S RIGHT. EIGHT WEEKS.

I believe Alan Bean’s expression in this photo sums up my mental state at the moment.

D: (courtesy of NASA)

Really, I think the key here is getting back into the swing of being really well organised. I should put that on my to-do list. Now, where did I leave it…

At the end of last week, us first years finished with two of our lecture courses: Linear Algebra and Functions. If anyone who’s thinking of applying is reading this, I should explain them a little. Linear Algebra is all about matrices and vectors and things, and Functions is pretty much a review of A-Level Maths and Further Maths with a little extra stuff chucked in for good measure. It’s all good. Hopefully, young wannabe fresher, you too will get cool lecturers who tell jokes about chemists and make bets with the class over whether an equation is linear or not.

I spent most of the past weekend working on a lab report for an experiment for measuring the speed of light. I’ve been informed that I will learn at least five different ways to measure the speed of light while I am here. Joy upon joys. It’s not that bad, honest, even if you’re as clumsy as me and everything goes completely wrong (believe me, there have been plenty of times where I’ve cursed my past self for not choosing maths). Word of warning: don’t leave the lab report to the last minute. Sleepy labs because most people stayed up late and/or got up early to frantically finish their reports = rubbish.

Once I’d done the report it was straight back to work on the 500 word topical review I had to write for tomorrow’s seminar (it’s about whether neutrinos could be a candidate for dark matter), as well as an essay for German entitled “Ein unvergesslicher Tag” (“an unforgettable day”). Of course, there have also been problem sheets to do, plus the sword of Damocles that is NaNoWriMo. This Monday and Wednesday were also lost to University Challenge tryouts and a talk at the Human Rights Action Centre on the case of Troy Davis respectively. I also spent my Wednesday afternoon at my Pimlico Connection placement, where I (among other things) got badly beaten at Connect Four by kids half my age. This weekend I will try not to spend all my time practising playing it.

Hello, interwebs.

I ought to have posted sooner – I see a lot of my fellow bloggers have – but the grand opening of Imperial’s 2009-10 Student Blogs has happened in the busiest week I’ve had so far:

1. I went up to Lincoln yesterday to talk at the regional Nuffield Celebration Evening – couldn’t work on the train there because I was so nervous, and couldn’t work on the way back because it was very late at night
2. I had to come back to halls this morning because I doubted my ability to get through the afternoon’s lectures without dying, thus missing this evening’s “Human Spaceflight: Science or Spectacle?” talk and the ICSF Musical Extravaganza
3. I’m on week two of NaNoWriMo and have officially hit a brick wall
4. I have the Amnesty Student Conference this weekend (I have not yet succumbed to the infamous Imperial apathy)

Add this to doing work, since it would be good if I didn’t fail completely. Ah well – at least I’ll have a lot to blog about!

Since we’re now in week six (WEEK SIX?!) of term, my next few entries will talk about what I’ve got up to so far. It’s been awfully exciting. Look forward to it.