Since I started this blog quite late in the term, I thought I’d update you on some of the things you have missed!
In second year Physics, labs are divided up into four week cycles, so before writing this blog I’d already completed my first lab cycle which was computing. In first year computing was almost universally dreaded, expect by a lucky few who had programmed before. We use the computing language Python, and I would say for anyone who has a Physics offer from Imperial, that it is really worth having a look at beforehand.
There’s no need to stress about learning how to do certain things in it because you will be taught the specifics, but I think the reason that I and so many other people found it difficult was just that it was so unfamiliar. We were the first year to do the Python course, so I know they have changed it a bit to take on advice about what we found particularly tricky, but really it just takes time for the concepts to sink in.
This year I found programming alternately quite fun and satisfying (when my code was working and I started to understand what I was doing with my life) and horrific and stressful (when nothing was working and I had no clue if I’d ever known what an optical ray tracer was). But I got it done by the deadline (just about) and managed to get a good mark, so goodbye computing for this year!
Enough about work for the moment! This term I also met the rest of the student bloggers in the union bar for free food and a briefing about what to blog and how to blog and things. I already knew Liam from Physics, but everyone else was new and interesting.
I went home for the first time in term in November, for my brother’s sixteenth. We had fireworks and sparklers and a cake, and it was great to catch up with my parents and grandparents and great-aunty, though it felt odd to come back to uni and carry on working!
A couple of weeks before this I travelled down to Cardiff to visit my sister, who is in the first term at the university studying Biology (go science). My family came down too, and I met all the strange (& nice, OK) people she is sharing a flat with. Usually my family come down to visit me in London, so it is refreshing to have a different city to have a tourist around, especially as we have now made so many trips to London that we have been round every museum and the docks and tower of London about four times.
The next day I went to see Gravity (that film with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in space) with some people from my Horizons class, which was amazing. Such a good film! I cried for the entire second half of it, I think, but that shouldn’t put you off!
This term I have spent a lot of evenings running in the dark and cold around Bishop’s Park and Brompton Cemetery with Alex, which has actually been pretty fun. We are going to try and do an organised run for charity at some point next term.
You may now consider yourself caught up. 🙂
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