Midnight snowball fight anyone?

It’s been a busy few weeks since my last post. Two weeks ago I fulfilled a lifelong ambition to visit the Royal Albert Hall by going to see Cirque du Soleil (a very impressive show and fantastic seats for just £25 thanks to some haggling by a a friend) as a halls of residence trip. Last week I organised my own trip with fellow hall senior Aysha, taking over 20 students to The Comedy Store to see a hilarious improvisation show. And last week it snowed twice, triggering much childlike glee. (See photos below the rant)

As previously mentioned: we have deckchairs!

Holbein and Willis Jackson (HWJ) Halls of Residence have also started their yearly ritual of showing every Six Nations Rugby game on the projector in the common room, complete with deck chairs, free beers and snacks for all. There are some things I will definitely miss when I eventually leave HWJ.

In choir, Verdi’s magnificent Requiem is coming along nicely, and I’m thoroughly looking forward to a weekend away in Cambridge with fellow choristers for banter and rehearsing in 2 weeks time.

Oh, and memes have taken over facebook.

In the interests of balance, it’s also that time of the year when I’ve started to get a little jaded with physics work…

Reuben Rant

Feel free to skip the below (I’ve helpfully indicated where it ends, and added some editorial balance afterwards), it’s more therapeutic for me to feel like I’m feeding back to the department than anything else.

The physics department here is overall pretty good and we are clearly being taught to a high standard. In terms of work, they have piled it on: Extra work for labs has taken the usual exorbitant amount of time: there’s masses of data analysis to be done, things to be written up, and then at the end of the four week experiment, a mere 2 days to finish all analysis and write a four page report. Much as I appreciate that working to tight deadlines is an important skill to master, having to stay up until 7am to get a report done is a little over the top… but perhaps I’m too much of a perfectionist, 2-3am seems to be more the norm.

There has also been a big assessed problem sheet to work on (taking up much of a weeks worth of spare time set aside for working), and each lecture course (of which there are currently 4 running) provides 1 or 2 problem sheets to do each week. Then there are lectures and things to go to as well of course… I have friends that do nothing extracurricular, and even they are struggling to keep up, but we are all learning.

This is all well and good, I know from last year that all work can be caught up with once the Easter holidays start and there is much more free time to study. The problem is that academic tutors (one of mine in particular) seem to be blissfully ignorant to this, and consistently complain that we don’t do enough of the problem sheets, on top of the extra work that they set us to do anyway…  Of course, I understand why they press us. There are a huge number of people that simply do not do enough work, and will not endeavour to catch up. These are the people that barely pass their exams, or commonly find they have to retake. It’s just disheartening to have a tutor getting frustrated with me for not doing enough work, when I know that I do all the work I can.

End Rant – Positivity Below

And that’s enough of all that. I should remind the reader that I hold Imperial in high regard overall (as stated previously) and this is just a niggle. If the above were to become a serious problem, I know that I could go and talk to my personal tutor and he would do whatever he could to help (my personal tutor is really nice), or use one of the many other channels there are of feeding back to the department (which I might just do). To give an example of feedback in action: Last term, half the year had one day fewer to get the lab reports done and our excellent year reps managed to get us an extra day to make it fair.

Most of the time I don’t use this blog to complain, which should indicate to you that most of the time I’m fairly happy. Time for some pictures of snow!

Read the rest of this entry »

I was very nearly on the BBC News at 6 Oclock today.

There are some moments where it becomes clear just how lucky I am to be studying at somewhere like imperial. If you’ve been keeping up with the news you might have heard that there was a big announcement from the Large Hadron Collider (one must keep the d and r in the correct order…) about the Higgs Boson*.

All day people around the physics department could be heard discussing the possible news. This was helped by an email sent around to all physics undergraduates:

“FOR YOUR INFORMATION:

My friend Tim doing his best "This is very interesting" face for the BBC.

The BBC are filming the Higgs Boson update between 1 and 3pm today, Lecture Theatre 3, so pop along if you are interested.”

A live stream of the announcement (it turned out to be more of a lecture) was to be shown and the BBC would watch our interested smiling faces taking in the wonderful discoveries.

The hall was packed.

There were a few technical hitches at the beginning as the video kept stopping. It became apparent that this was CERN’s fault, as someone announced that “Fermilab are having the same problem” – seemingly keeping in instant message contact with their US colleagues.

Eventually a person with a skype feed came down and plugged in their laptop, letting the eager crowd take in what was going on.

Unfortunately the sound quality meant we couldn’t really tell what was being said, but the slides gave us enough information to work out that the ATLAS experiment had nearly discovered the Higgs Boson (with 2σ – that’s 95.4% – certainty that it wasn’t just statistical fluke).

Klaus looking like he's not paying any attention to proceedings (he was apparently following what was going on with his laptop) - as seen on TV.

Satisfied that we had been sufficiently filmed and that ATLAS had done a pretty good job, we left before the second half of the announcement (from the other experiment looking for the Higgs – CMS – it’s results turned out to be pretty similar) to go be manly and hit the gym. Unfortunately the BBC elected to use footage from after we had left, hence not quite being on the news. My friend Klaus could be seen however; staring at his laptop, clearly in a world of his own.

Still, the excited atmosphere (there were plenty of high energy physicist who work on the experiments present) was great to be part of and the announcements interesting. Only at Imperial eh?

Ah, what a big a geek this all makes me, but why not? I’m studying physics, I might as well embrace it. One of the lovely things about being here is that if you want to be geeky about something, you can, and others will probably join in. And if you don’t, almost everyone is pretty nice and most defy stereotypes about social interaction ability.

Other news:

In other news, the Hall’s Cold War themed Christmas party will be getting in the way of me finishing an essay (due friday) this evening, I’m singing in the Imperial College carol concert on Wednesday and I am no longer ill. I’m Thoroughly looking forward to going back home on Saturday to see all the lovely people there.

Reuben rant:

*I really wish that the media would stop calling it the “God particle” without any proper clarification. It’s a name that has the potential to suggest to the uninitiated that this Particle Physics theory has something to do with God and religion.  As ever in physics, it has nothing to do with either. The name “The God Particle” might be seen as a bit of a joke among physicists, but anything that has the potential to add to the false perception of divisions between physics and religion does nothing to aid the public understanding of Science.

Now, back to that essay I’m meant to be writing.

- Reuben