Since I seem to be in the habit of writing nigh on 1000 word Blog posts every few weeks, I thought I’d chop this one up into friendly chunks for you to enjoy at your leisure. This is part 1 of 2. Read part 2 here.

DAY OF ANGER, DAY OF TERROR! Are words that I currently know the (rough) Latin translation of rather well*. And that’s not because I’ve been getting spooked at Catholic Mass. (I can already hear the “obvious joke” groans).

Choir

It’s nearly concert time again with Imperial College Choir and Verdi’s Requiem is filling my mind with its thunderous crescendos and poignant quiet moments. A musical friend of mine once affectionately described playing in the orchestra for Verdi’s Requiem as ”Quiet, quiet, quiet, then… LOUD NOISES.” It’s rather more beautiful and captivating than that might suggest, but I must admit that the chap in who’s memory it was composed must have lead one heck of a dramatic life if Verdi was trying to give an accurate reflection!

I keep forgetting to take pictures of the things I do, so please forgive this one not showing you a lot. Shiny though!

I really love singing all this classical music in the choir. Perhaps the novelty will wear off at some point, but I do find it extraordinary that ordinary me gets to be a part of such extraordinary music. It’s quite a privilage. Anyway, enough gushing.

This time of year all the clubs and societies have AGMs. These involve finding out how the club is doing, the Very Serious Business of electing committee members (to the delight of vote counters everywhere, the union insists on a second preference voting system for all elections) and plenty of mild banter. I managed to persuade the other members of the choir I liked it so much that they elected me Vice-Chairperson for next year. Apparently “I don’t know about you, but I love choir!” is a winning line.

My new job started today, as I went to help sort out the choirs enormous (and fascinating) collection of music, some of which was quite old when the choir began in the 1950s… One person noted that the whole thing would have taken a lot less time if we hadn’t stopped all the time to practice singing the pieces.

Cheeky plug, since we need people to come and see us perform to keep the Choir afloat:

Imperial College Choir’s performance (with orchestra) of Verdi’s Requiem is at 19:30 on Saturday the 17th of March at Holy Trinity Church, Sloan Square. Tickets can be bought from Choir members, here, by calling 0207 594 9354, on the door (less cheap) or in the Sherfield Lobby on Wednesday and Thursday Lunchtime. Selling points: Great music, great choir (who have put in lots of effort), great venue, it has me in it, and Verdi’s Requiem is awesome.

Now back to the serious business of discussing my life…

Judo

Judo is as painful and invigorating as ever. The whole club is focussed on the looming inter-university BUCS competition, success at which decides much of the funding for the club. I’ll spare you a Reuben Rant on how unfair the funding system for clubs appears to be (it’s based on the number of points gained at certain qualifying competitions. Except not everyone can get points, and different sports are elligible for different numbers of competitions and points. Grrr…).

To the detriment of my big toe, which took a nasty strain when being swept from under me a few weeks ago, everyone is training extremely hard. I thinks it says something that even though every session causes me to limp off in pain at the moment, I still absolutely love it. (Whether it “says something” about my mental well-being or the sport of Judo, I have yet to decide.)

Oh, and former Olympic and World Champion Maki Tsukada has been popping in to train with us. Pictures soon.

Read part 2 here.

*I’m not sure quite how good the translation in our copy of the music is, but it’s definitely along the lines of “WRATH!” and “TERROR!”.

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!

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