A couple of weeks ago, the MSci projects for next year were announced for us to choose from!
MSci projects are projects that you do in the fourth year if you are taking an integrated Physics Masters, though I think there is a lot of overlap in the projects with regular Master’s projects—for people who come into Imperial just for the year.
They are pretty exciting— I think you have to log in to see the choices on the website, but I took a sneaky screenshot:
As you can see they cover pretty much every Physics topic. The actual names of the projects are like ‘A Search for Dyson Spheres and Cool Astronomical Bodies using the Wide field Infrared Survey Explorer’, ‘Physics beyond the Standard Model at the LHCb experiment… ?’ and ‘The physics of cooking’ and those are just three of the ones I am applying to!
The application process isn’t the smoothest thing in the world—for a start you need to find a project partner who is interested in the same choices as you. This is easy for some people, but turns out harder for others—many people are leaving next year, and choosing a project you will actually like is pretty important, as otherwise a lot of fourth year could be pretty miserable.
You get four choices, and as far as I can tell, just need to apply online and write a bit about why you want the project, as well as link up your choices with your partners. It has yet to be seen how many people will end up with choices they want…
You are also encouraged to go along and talk to the supervisors offering your projects—this is the fun part!
The two I’ve been to so far have been really interesting—both departments which I could see myself enjoying working in, even though they are both on completely different topics—as you can tell from my illogical list above, I have no idea which area of Physics is my favourite!
How are you meant to decide between high energy particle Physics and searching for new particles in weird quark interactions, searching for aliens by looking how they harvest the energy of stars, looking to use artificial intelligence to discover new laws of Physics, or finding out scientifically how cooking works?
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
