Dawn's blog

So, so busy at the moment, hence the slight lull in posts.

Although if you were to ask any of my friends, they will immediately tell  you I can’t really be busy – that I don’t even take a proper course. In fact, another of the student bloggers even had something to say about my course! As Ken so beautifully put it, – “Environmental geosciences (WTF is that!!!)”

So this blog entry is a brilliant opportunity to do 2 things.

 1 .Explains to any potential Imperial students what environmental geoscience is, and why you should take it!

 2. Annoy the people I live with by putting my subject in a blog post

Just because my department is one of the few that do have reading weeks, I constantly have abused hurled at me about how my course is part time and mining isn’t a real subject. So I just thought I’d explain what environmental geoscience is, and point out that although I belong to the royal school of mines and own a hard hat – I AM NOT A MINER!!

My department is part of what is called the Royal School of Mines. Thats just historical, Imperial does not offer ‘mining’ as a subject area!!! There are 2 departments within the Royal School of Mines – Materials, and Earth Science and Engineering. Obviously ESE is the better of the two. ( If you want the whole history, just look  at Wikipedia. Explains it far better than I could).

Within ESE there are several different undergraduate degrees. We all start off with mainly the same modules and diverge from then on – until 4th year where we pretty much all do our own combination. So my degree is called environmental geoscience. It doesn’t mean it’s just about climate change and global warming (although that does come into it) – it’s just geology with bit more of a global environmental focus – i.e. looks at the worlds oceans, geohazards and stuff like that.

I chose to study this because I’m definitely more interested in earth science that is a bit more ‘happening’ – let’s face it, you aren’t ever going to see a new arrangement of continents in your lifetime. Plus, you can’t see what’s happening in the Earth’s core, but I can see the polluted River Thames flowing through London…

The best thing about my department is how flexible all the modules are – so if you realise there is something you want to specialise in, you are given every oppurtunity to, at the same time as taking the core modules to ensure you know enough about the general subject area.

So in summary, environmental geoscience is actually a proper degree at Imperial – even if no-one has heard of it. In Freshers week I actually got asked by one concerned 3rd year if I was at the right Union, or if I’d just got a bit lost from another university in London!

PS To my friends – I reckon the real reason you all take the mick about me for  my reading weeks is just because you want some too!

PPS Even though I haven’t actually had a reading week yet this term but chemistry have!

Thanks for reading – if you have any questions about my course/department/anything else, feel free to ask!