Richard's blog

Beginning this year, In the Electrical and Electronic Engineering department, third year students can opt to undertake a six month placement in a sufficiently technical role as part of their degree. This component will be examined by a report, log book, presentation and manager’s report at the end of the placement. To give an example of the companies people are working for – Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Amadeus, ARM, Cambridge Consultants, Fujitsu, Detica and Cisco. Alternatively, students can opt to do an Industry-Led Group Project in the Summer Term.

On Tuesday 2^nd April 2013, I started my six-month placement. I’m working in Technology at an Investment Bank (I shall withhold the name here for a multitude of reasons), I’ve never worked in a Financial Institution before so this shall be an interesting experience which I shall attempt to document here.

I’m working in the Emerging Markets, Exotics and Hybrids team as a developer. This first week, has been filled with learning, I’ve spent a lot of time learning C# and some Windows APIs, and learning about some proprietary query languages.

This week I am looking forward to two days of Financial and Business Training, which will be useful to give me an overview of the business area I’m in and the whole financial ecosystem.

In addition to starting work, this weekend was rather busy. The weather finally got over 5 Celsius – which meant it was Barbecue time  in our garden! On Saturday I met up with my cousin and went to the British Museum to see the Pompeii and Herculaneum Exhibition which was really interesting. I also realised on my arrival that the Museum is home to the Rosetta Stone – the tablet which held the key to decrypting Egyptian Hieroglyphs.  After the exhibition we spent about 5 hours wandering around London and came across the remnants of a huge pillow fight in Trafalgar square!

This week, with all the commuting I’m doing, I’ve managed to get back into reading. So I have two book recommendations for you. One: Paper Towns by John Green and Two: The Fault in our Stars By John Green. (They are page turners so once you start you’ll struggle to put them down)

Last term, due to a heavy course load my course mates and I spent many hours in our computing laboratories. On the penultimate Friday evening and Saturday of term I decided to take some photos of the lab, to show the number of people working throughout the day.

The photos start with the final moments of Friday night, submitting a piece of VHDL coursework, after a 15hour day finishing it off, at least 18 minutes early!

Here’s my highly caffeinated VHDL nest

Thus at midnight we left the department – just escaping being locked in by the security guard!

On Saturday morning I returned to college around 10am (a little late) to the signals lab and Level 5 computing lab -

This photo is from around 11am – showing the slow increase in people…

and again at 13:00pm

Then, getting a little hungry we decided to treat ourselves to some sushi as we’d been subsisting on college food for the past 4 weeks.

The labs really started to fill up after lunchtime on Saturday

Progressing on later into the evening, around 8pm…

Final shot of the level 5 lab, around 11pm – lots of “part-timers” have left already!

23:40 in the signals lab – groups still working hard late into the night!

Midnight – just before the department is locked up for the night – finally it’s home time!

This was a relatively typical weekend towards the end of this rather hectic term! There are just two coursework deadlines left right now, Advanced Signal Processing and Instrumentation – good luck to the students still finishing those courses!

• President: David Goldsmith
• DP Clubs & Societies: Yasmin Edwards
• DP Education: Jonathan London
• DP Finance & Services: Kieron Creagh
• DP Welfare: Marissa Lewis
• Felix Editor: Joseph Letts

Out of my 6 predictions for these positions I made before the votes opened, 4 were correct!

I initially thought the DPCS votes would be really close, however when looking at the data we can see that won in the end by a margin of 600 votes.

Felix editor was an extremely close call with Will Prince losing by just 26votes at the end.

Apologies for not finishing up the union voting statistics this month – unfortunately my late nights doing coursework got in the way – I’ll post the results here in a few days time when I have a chance.

So today was the last day of term (well technically it was yesterday by an hour or so but still) .

The end of this term has been extremely hectic to say the least. I’ve done three courses with 100% coursework and then a course with 15% coursework; and an exam which happened today. For the past 2 months I’ve spent everyday in college (bizzarely aside from Thursday where I spent it in the Charing Cross Hospital Library revising) – and have done many 60-80 hour weeks. However it’s been worth it – I’ve learnt lots, and realised that I can do a lot more hours in a week than I previously imagined.

A lot of the work this term has been pair work, so I must thank my project partners Tom Parker (with whom I still need finish up a final RTDSP report with), Bianca Furtuna my VHDL RAM block partner and finally Yong Wen – the master of all things DSD.

In addition I must also thank the VHDL wizard for his wizardry this term.

Here are the voting stats from last night – they’re quite late – sorry. I didn’t get back home till late. After our departments annual EERevue and Bar Night in metric!

We have a 9.5% increase on yesterday, which is a huge increase on yesterdays increase of 6%, and the previous day’s increase of 4%!

Interesting factoid about the  years of study section. As you can see, there are nearly double the number of first years compare to second years – this is because all 1 year MSc students count as 1st year students, which throws the numbers off a little bit! So actually more first years have filled it out in total than the rest of the year groups. But they get pulled down by the post graduate percentages.

The scientists have finally over taken Medicine!

We are now 13th overall – not bad considering we have 3 days to go!

The sabbatical officers still haven’t all voted…!

HEY STATS FANS!

We are now 60 hours into this year Imperial College Union Elections. It’s time to check on the voting turnout again!

We can see that we’ve smashed my predicted turn out of 20% for today, which means we’re beginning to catch up on last years voting turnout. We’re now just 12 hours behind last years turnout. Perhaps we can beat last years turnout!

Turnout has increased by 5 %,7%, 6%, 6% and  7% for years 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5+ respectively since yesterday. This means the second years have increased their lead on third year by 1% on last night… (GET VOTING THIRD YEARS WE CAN’T LOSE)

Male and Female voters are still neck and neck this evening with only 1.4% separating the guys from the girls!

Sciences have increased their lead by 1% today – the engineers are catching up! Medicine has also decreased their lead by 1% on the scientists…

As you can see we’ve smashed my voting predictions – and are now at 22%, which means the only other London University ahead of us is SOAS.

Apparently yesterday I cutoff the School of Medicine and it’s 41% turn out. (Sorry Medics… It was an accident). Life Sciences are the only department within sight of Medicine with 35% turnout so far. One notable poor Undergrad turnout is Materials with only 10% of the department voting, considering this time last year they had a 35% turnout, this just goes to show what having a presidential and DPCS candidate from the department did for turnout… One would assume that with two ICSMU president candidates and one ICU president candidate (and one BioMed) coming from the school of medicine is the reason they have a 10% higher turnout this year. (Last year there was only one ICSMU presidential candidate).

ICSMU President Prediction – Steve Tran. As I can’t vote in this election this is a rather unscientific choice, but Steve seems to have slightly better qualifications for this role and I’ve seen significantly more campaigning from him (he has a hilarious campaign video).

Vote Here!

So it’s Sunday 10th March – and we’ve just passsed the 36 hour mark. How are the votes progressing?

16.03% turn out – just over 3% more than yesterday and a whole 0.7% behind the turnout at the end of the first day last year! However – it was a saturday, so we can’t expect to get too many votes at the weekend as there won’t be very much in person campaigning going on. (Note: Maybe the candidates should use the weekend to their advantage and campaign in the library cafe at lunchtime?

All year groups seem to have increased proportionally to each other -with 2nd years still having highest turnout. Compared to last year this is a similar voting spread across the year groups – is there a way to be more inclusive for 1st years to encourage them to vote?

The scientists and medics are still way out in front with 18.3% and 19.5% turnout respectively. The “others” category, which includes Humanities and the business school, still has a rather pathetic single digit turnout – which was a similar case this time last year with only 2.9% at this point. Is the union not very effective in these departments – should they be reaching out to these students? They may be difficult votes to get – but candidates if you try to get them to vote you might steam-roller the opposition with all of the business school on side!

We are back to our usual league table position – above UCL ! We’ve now broken the top 50! By tomorrow evening I predict we’ll surpass the university of Surrey and may even break 20% turn out!

WHY HAVEN’T ALL THE SABBS VOTED?! Surely they should be setting an example!

This is one of the new – rather interesting set of statistics – which societies have voted. It’s easy to see which societies some of the candidates are from.

Ali Ibrahim (Presidential Candidate) is a Lacrosse Player and Yasmin Edwards (DPCS candidate) is a Rugby player. Marissa Lewis (DPW candidate) is founder and chair of the Feminist society.

Geophysics have a slightly disappointing turn out considering they normally get 100% turnout for every academic survey!

It’s 00:00 and Imperial College Big Elections have been open for 12hours.

This year we have another awesome voting statistics page, with some rather interesting new stats.

I am not sure if anyone is taking note of the scores after each day. So I thought I’d make an attempt to do it every 24hours.

In a similar vein to last year – post grad turnout is very low – only 2% have voted so far. Candidates – canvas the post grads!

Here we can see there’s a relatively even split between male and female voters. The second and third year students have the highest turnout so far, candidates would benefit from campaigning to the bewildered freshers and slightly apathetic final years to get votes!

The engineers here are losing to the scientists and medics

here yet again. 

Medicine and Life Sciences have got into the voting spirit with the highest turnouts, whereas the institute of clinical science, humanities and centre for eduction development have a lousy 0%

We are 57th nationally at the moment, compared to 34th at the end of the first day last year – however we are not comparing like with like as last year the elections opened at midnight but this year they opened at 12pm.

Circles representing the number of people who have voted who are originally from each area. The UK is doing the best!

Last year, during election season I attempted to keep you all up to date with union voting statistics on a daily basis and made a few tenuous election outcome predictions. It was a rather fun project so I’m intending to try again.

Here are my start of elections, Sabbatical Officer 2013-2014 predictions.

*** DISCLAIMER ******Please note that these predictions in no way suggest that these are people you should vote for or people that I have in fact voted for. They are merely predictions as to who I think the general population will have voted for. **** Students who have not submitted a manifesto have been discounted from these predictions ***

Deputy President – Clubs and Societies This position has 3 likely candidates, Rowena Harrison,has held committee roles in two societies, Yasmin Edwards, captain of Women’s rugby and VP of BioSoc; and Lucy McGregor, the candidate with the most relevant experience, having been Chair of the SSC, sat on union council in addition to holding club positions.  I predict Lucy to win as the many members of the SSC will have heard from her as chair and this may drown out the voting might of Biology for Yasmin and Cheerleading for Rowena.

Deputy President – Education there’s only one candidate running for this position again this year – Jonathan London. He has experience of being Department Representative for Physics and again I don’t think enough people will vote RON to prevent him running.

Deputy President – Welfare. This year there are three strong candidates for DPW each with very different experience. James Hulse, chair of ERASMUS society has a very interesting manifesto. Philippa Skett, current VP of RCSU and BioSoc President. Finally we have Marissa Lewis, senior steward at the union, Welfare Officer, founded and ran a society. Purely on grounds of experience I would put Marissa to win this election, however with some serious campaigning this could be anyone’s position.

Deputy President – Finance and Services. I predict Kieron Creagh to win this position, not only because no one is running against him but he has experience as Treasure of the RSM and his DepSoc, which should set him in good stead for this role.

Felix Editor – There are two candidates for this role, Joseph Letts, Politics section editor and  Media Chair, he wants to open up felix to more contributors and introduce careers and what’s on pages to the paper. Will Prince, who I believe writes for the Felix aims to keep the humour alive in the paper and introduce more outside news. This is another hard position to predict – as I’ve only seen significant campaigning on campus from Will Prince I shall predict him to win.

President – This year there are three candidates running for the role of President this year. Becky Lane – this years Deputy President of Welfare, David Goldsmith – this Year’s RAG chair who has tripled the amount raised last year in just 2 terms and Ali Ibrahim – executive RCSU committee member.  The candidate most knowledgeable for the role during the meet the candidates show was Becky Lane, though this is to be expected as she is DPW this year, closely followed by David Goldsmith. Unfortunately Ali appeared to be struggling on some of the more important questions asked. All in all I shall predict David Goldsmith to win this position as he has a significant presence on campus and is the only candidate I’ve seen campaigning around campus so far.

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You may have noticed I’ve missed out one important candidate in these elections – Forhad Matin who has run for all the positions he was able to. If the imperial Tab’s online poll is to be believed he’s is a sure fire winner for the ICU president role!

Last weekend was the BUCS Cross-Country Championship held at Leeds University, which I attended along with 43 (the biggest team ever) Imperial team mates.

BUCS – British Universities and Colleges Sport is the governing body for University sport in the UK. It caters for 50 different sports across 170 member institutions, with 4500 competing teams and over 100 championship events every year.

On Friday evening at 5pm 43 of us piled on to a rather plush coach outside the union to  head to Leeds. An hour and a half later – we were still on the fringes of London having sat in “delightful” rush hour traffic… however after a  few games of  ”I went shopping and I bought…” and “Pie Tennis” we escaped the gravitational pull of the M25 and headed “oop Norf” on the M1.

We arrived at the rather fancy Jury’s inn around 11pm and headed to the bar for a night cap, some philosophical debate and tentative race time predictions.

Saturday morning, we were all up before 9am for a  team photo -only slightly more clothed than that weeks Felix’s centrefold – and waved goodbye to them Men’s A Team as they headed off to the course to get the lie of the land. Around 10:30 the Mens B  and Women’s teams left the the hotel to join the A team at the course and what a sight befell us!

To say the course was muddy, would be a massive understatement – imagine Glastonbury Festival was held in February and the field was previously inhabited by hippos…  and you might understand. Needless to say, the races were a sight to behold!

The Men’s A team placed 6th in their 10km race which is an amazing result considering the most of the teams in the top 10 were major sporting universities.

The women’s team had a great turnout with all 12 runners completing the, now rather boggy, course.

The men’s ‘Banter’ B team had 24 runners competing in their 7.5km knee deep swamp dash.

Overall the race was a rather muddy affair with obstacles such as  ”Glastonbury Corner” and hill that could have doubled as a “Slip ‘N Slide”.

However despite such obstacles I must take my metaphorical hat off to all the runners in the B race who were all rather gentlemanly and kept an eye on the stragglers (such as myself…).

My race was rather eventful, with my aim in the first two laps to keep up with Ed Hallett, the triathlon chair – which was successful – until I overdid it slightly and had to pause to take be a little ill at the end of the second lap. Fortunately, I recovered quickly, got a second wind and with a little encouragement from the crowd and Marcus Rose I managed not to finish last!

After the race we all dragged our muddy selves back on to the local bus, much to the bus drivers dismay, and headed back to the hotel to clean up and prepare to party. To re-energise after the race we had a team curry and then descended on Leeds Union for a night of “bandannered”foamy dancing!

Sunday morning was greeted us with hangovers and a fry-ups – as the best Sunday mornings do. We then caught the coach, catnapping and chatting our way back to London.

Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud!