I think you all can guess what I am referring to.

The X word.

We finally received our exam schedules, after weeks of general headless chicken running around. I’m the sort of person who timetables everything, so a concrete schedule for the exams is very helpful in terms of planning. Still, turns out that all my heavy reading exams are in same week – not sure how I’ll deal with that.

On a lighter note, I got a new mobile phone! It’s a BlackBerry Curve, and its slick and white. I liked my old Sony Ericsson flip phone (once upon a time those things were all the rage), but I guess its time for a change. The biggest shock for me is that I can actually text properly. With my old phone I used to txt lyk dis cos it was fster, n 2 save space, but now I can type full words! And the best thing is my thumb doesn’t spasm anymore…

Connecting to the Imperial Wi-Fi was a bit of a pain, but with the help of Tanya, Andrew and Anas’ Blog it all worked out

The other fun thing was that the WSET We.Are.Science Photo Exhibition launch took place today! If you’ve been to the Imperial Homepage, you will have seen some of the awesome entries we got. This big event was professionally organized by Ivy and Mithila, and of course Aiman (they are WSET committee members). I think my favourite photos were:

1. Women scientific leaders – Don’t worry this is not a feminist thing lol. I just thought the model was amazing and full of attitude (and a lab coat).

2. Drawing a bat wing – A brown and white photo depicting team work. Only the hands are featured.

3. I love electrochemistry! – A very fun and cute picture.

4. The pigeon – Wait, what? Yes, apparently someone submitted a stunningly professional photo of a pigeon. Not sure what that is supposed to signify, but it was very fat and fluffy. Hmm.

Which one is your favourite? Don’t forget to vote! The ballot is located in the Business School all week.

That’s all for now!

One World Week is old stuff now, but my friend Aiman found this video that I hadn’t seen before floating around the imperial website:

http://www2.imperial.ac.uk/imedia/videos/view/566/one-world-week/search:one%20world%20week

It’s me and a few other students who organized One World Week giving their opinions about it. Must say I look very Indian with my plait and the ‘dot-on-the-forehead’ (we call it ‘kum-kum’).

On the subject of me, my WSET portrait is also now in City Hall! This will be its new home until the 19 of March. Let me elucidate a little: Last year’s WSET ’100 Visions 100 Women’ portrait project was wildly successful. So this year the organizer Ellin decided to take things a step further and promote the project on a city-wide level, a truly commendable achievement.

I haven’t gone to see the portraits yet, but hopefully I will soon. It feels amazing that people and tourists from all over London can visit them! One of the goals of this portrait series is to inspire the next generation of students (not just girls) to follow the SET path. It would be fantastic if these portraits even persuaded someone to consider engineering as a future career when they normally wouldn’t have.

Anyway; I could go on about this (as I am the Vice-President of WSET), but I think I have tackled this topic enough in my EI lecture and ‘the way here’ page (*shameless plug-in* links to the right).

In all my enthusiasm about WSET events, I seem to be forgetting that I’m also president of ICSEDS (Imperial College Students for the Exploration and Development of Space). Recently I have begun to feel that I’m ignoring this club. I have made the classic rookie mistake of joining/being in charge of way too many societies. So I’m beginning to worry a little, but not nearly as much as I am worrying about our Design, Make and Test project…

…I think I mentioned in a very early post that I am part of the Imperial Racing Green team. A group of students get together to make a zero emissions car that will race at Silverstone. While this project will be extremely rewarding when we watch our finished product race next year, the process of getting there is really strenuous. Our designs must not only be compatible with the rest of the groups (i.e. our team, the Drivetrain team needs to make sure our stuff doesn’t interfere with suspension and vehicle packaging for example), it also needs to perform well. I remember spending countless nights worrying that our design would not come together…Luckily our designs are now complete, but we only have 5 weeks to manufacture everything! Which may seem like plenty, but when we were kids, 5 minutes sounded like a lot too.

The blue shoes? That’s just a random thing I thought up to make the title rhyme. How about my blue shirt instead?

Portraits hanging in City Hall

This has been an interesting week. I want it to end, and at the same time I want it to continue forever…(kinda like quantum mechanics).

Firstly, I was ecstatic to be selected at the university level for the exchange to California! So much is going to change next year, and I am really looking forward to it. Summer is going to be hectic in a good way. My summer holiday will also get ruthlessly cut as term begins end-August…

The euphoria died down when I realized that by the day after I had to prepare an inspirational speech for the Engineering Impact lecture.

This month’s EI lecture focused on student-led engineering projects. Imperial strongly encourages these projects through the EnVision department, who are really supportive and always keen to help. They asked if I wanted to talk to the first years on behalf on Women in SET, describing our activities and so on. I took the chance – when else can someone like me talk in front of hundreds of students? And besides, people like Jonathon Porrit and Lord Darzi have given these lectures in the past. This would also be the ideal way to find out how a lecturer feels! I had the task of making the presentation enthusiastic, inspirational and full of energy – the last thing I wanted was my audience to fall asleep, or even worse, whisper. I hope I managed that.

Although I did do something pretty embarrassing.

I was describing the disparity in numbers between girls and boys doing engineering. I then went on to say “This difference is a huge problem, one that concerns everyone, the guys as well”.

For some reason everyone starts laughing at this – you know the annoying way that guys giggle at the stupidest things? I was a little unnerved by this, still I persevered, proclaiming, “But it’s true!”

Only after it was over Alison (tutor for student-led projects) told me what had happened. Apparently the whole room had twisted my noble words, thinking I had meant that there weren’t enough girls for the guys… That made me giggle afterwards too, especially considering how serious my tone had been while saying that!

Then I went home and had ready-made microwavable pasta

The next day I went into uni and checked my outlook as usual. A strange e-mail entitled ‘A Winrar is You’ was lurking in my inbox. Initially I thought it was spam, but it turned out I had won a copy of Dragon Age: Origins! Yeah, that does sound like junk mail right? But I actually did remember entering that cometition – it was run by Felix. Even funnier was that the answer to the MCQ was written in the same paragraph (i.e. “The answer is B”). I have read some rave reviews about the game, so I’m looking forward to it. But first I will have to procure an Xbox 360…

On the weekend a good friend of mine came over from Warwick. We have known each other since the days I used to snatch building blocks from her chubby little fingers, so I was really happy to see her again. I showed her around London – where else to go than Trocadero? – and we met an interesting person.

He's a big soft toy

He snuck up from behind us quite slowly, but that was probably because of his/her huge head. Still, it shocked me and I let out a half-scream-half-’eee’. Nupura called it a ‘squeem’. The mascot then stopped slowly and lowered his hands – I could tell that inside the person had a dejected, sad face. I couldn’t see the person’s expression and yet I had felt really really bad about hurting his/her feelings. That’s why I asked the mascot to take a picture with us.

After that it was straight back to Racing Green and the Literature Research Project. LRP is basically a 30 paged essay we have to write in Mech Eng. More about all that later, but basically I just wish the holidays were here…