Life has been very busy recently. Once you enter the Imperial bubble it can be quite hard to break out – life becomes an endless cycle of walking to lectures, walking home, studying, sleeping, rinse, repeat. I think it’s very important to burst the bubble once in a while and do non-academic stuff. Yes I know that the library is open 24 hours a day but that is not a good enough reason to spend every waking hour there (not that I have ever done an all nighter but I imagine it’s not that great.) So what do I do when I am not studying worms under a microscope or writing essays in French about whether one can be ‘free’ and still obey the law?
Well this Friday night, Imperial’s Christian Medical Fellowship organised a ceilidh at a local church. For those not in the know, a ceilidh is a Scottish kind of barn dance, so there’s a live band and someone who teaches everyone the dance moves and then calls them out during the dance. It’s a lot of fun but also a lot of hard work and you should definitely expect to be trodden on at some point during the evening. If you’re really lucky (like me) you will also get kicked in the legs and crushed in the middle of a sort of ceilidh mosh pit.
The church looked great!
We danced all night long and it was super great but I did have to dance with a couple of very tall boys which was awkward since I am not gifted in the height department…
Today I went to a pilates class at Ethos! I did yoga for a bit last year but one of my friends and I decided that we wanted to do somthing that felt more exercise this term, hence the foray in to pilates. I actually really enjoyed it, and if you want to try something new this year, I would definitely reccommend checking out the class schedule at Ethos. There’s all kinds of different stuff, from zumba to body attack (I have not been to body attack and I never plan to, it sounds very painful).
All in all it has been a pretty good weekend after a long and hectic week. It’s easy to forget everything else apart from your degree when you come to Imperial but I encourage you to keep pursuing your passions and to burst the bubble on a regular basis!
Guess who finished her exams this week guys… IT’S MEEE! I am so happy to have finished for this exam season. I had a great Christmas at home with the family but studying and having a horrendous cold at the same time was kind of sad. Last Thursday I sat my final paper for this exam period which was Genetics. I was expecting an absolute nightmare of a paper but it ended up being much better than expected so I’m very happy with that.
One thing that can be hard about starting university, especially at Imperial, is that you basically lose your holidays. The level of studying that you have to do over Christmas if your exams fall in January is quite intense and I know I get kinda sad that I can’t spend as much as time with my family and friends as I want to. Having a good work-life balance is really important and I think it’s really easy to get into a place where studying becomes your whole life and you let your friends and other commitments fall by the wayside. Ultimately it’s up to you how you decide to tackle this part of your university life but personally, I know it’s dangerous for me to put so much emphasis on my academic achievement. Yes my degree is important, BUT being happy, spending time with the people I love and having a well-rounded life is important to me to. At the end of the day, I put as much effort as I could have in to my exams and revision and I am well pleased 🙂
I spent the weekend post-exams chilling spending time with friends and having London adventures. I was lucky enough to be able to meet up with a group of people that I worked on summer camp with last August on Sunday and we had a great afternoon together in East London. I rarely have a reason to go East so spending time there with people who know it well was so much fun! We had a curry on Brick Lane and then wandered around the Sunday market, where you can find loads of amazing vintage clothes for really good prices, and went for a drink in a really cute French café. Brick Lane is full or quirky little places to have coffee and a French café filled with flowers, candles, trellises and bird cages in the middle of a street of curry houses was no exception!
I need a teacup like this, I have it on good authority that they come from the V and A so I might have to embark in a little adventure to find some…
A change at Gloucester Road, my closest tube station when I lived in halls!
Last night I went out for a good friend’s birthday dinner with all of my favourite people which was certainly an experience. We went to a Brazilian grill restaurant where everyone gets given a card by their plate and as long as you have the green side facing up, the waiters keep bringing meat to the table, which they carve right there!
So. Much. Meat.
Needless to say it was an intense, meat-filled evening (I didn’t manage to eat everything although considering there were fifteen different kinds of meat available I don’t feel like too much of a failure!) and a very interesting experience!
The weekend is over however, and I’ve had my first introductory lectures for my new course, Cell and Developmental Biology. SO excited about this course and considering that my intro lecture included a segment on why dragons can’t actually exist, I’d say we’re off to a good start. Basically, since dragons have six limbs (four legs and two wings) they would have to be classed as insects. Maybe insect-sized dragons could be a thing?
I don’t want to always be the person who remarks on the passage of time (like it’s a big suprise) but I can’t believe it is 2015. It feels like only yesterday that I was waking up on September 28th 2013 with butterflies in my stomach and the knowledge that once I left my house that morning to move in to halls, I’d never be living in my family home full time again.
In true new year spirit, I thought I’d give you a run down of some great 2014 moments and look ahead to what I’m hoping for from this year!
Izzie’s 2014 in Review
1. I came in to my own at Imperial. Anyone who knows me from home will know that I can be horrendously shy and awkward when going in to unfamiliar situations and to be honest, the idea of starting uni filled me with dread. On the day I moved out I was actually very excited but as we got to the Hammersmith flyover, my mother freaking out about driving on terrifying London roads, my father shouting at her to ‘JUST PULL OUT,’ and the contents of my life boxed up in the back of the car, I was overcome with a sense of impending doom. I didn’t want to leave home. I didn’t want to live with strangers. What was I doing. Can we turn back??! Suffice to say that after a blurry first term, I feel like I really found my niche in 2014. I met my best friends and my current housemates, got to grips with independent living and had some genuinely fabulous experiences.
2. I moved in to my first rented home. I got my first taste of true adulthood when we went on house viewings and signed the contract on the flat that will be our home for the next two years. I absolutely adore my flat and wouldn’t want to be living anywhere else, although moving into housing in the private sector is definitely a harsh wake up call to the world of real adult life. Rent, bills, broken washing machines, mice, broken showers, mouldy grouting, lights that don’t work and wobbly furniture have all come our way but I’m proud of having survived my first term in the new flat with no major mishaps (touch wood).
The view from my window
3. I survived my first year of exams. First year ended up being very challenging for me for a number of reasons, one of which you can read about in this blog that I wrote but ultimately, I passed the year and I’m very happy about that. Though I can’t say I am massively fond of 3 hour exams…
4. I met my best friends. This sounds horrendously cheesey but even if you get nothing else out of your universiy experience, I really do believe that uni is where most people find their friends for life. I couldn’t be more thankful to have found such a great group of people to share life with.
Bouncy fun with besties
5. I travelled abroad alone for the very first time! To the international students and travel lovers among you, flying alone is probably not a big deal, but to this kid who has lived in the same house her entire life and never been abroad without her parents before, making it to Gatwick airport and flying to Basel solo was a big triumph. In August 2014 I spent 8 fabulous days in Alsace, France, volunteering at a summer camp. A year ago I would not have considered doing this but I believe the confidence that I found at uni was a deciding factor in my decision to take the plunge and do it. And I’m so glad I did! It was a great week and I’m still in contact with many of the people that I worked with – we’re already counting down until we can go back this year!
Take me back to France!
6. I had an article published on the I, Science website! At the beginning on this academic year I decided to join the writer’s list for I, Science magazine. I, Science is a magazine produced in conjunction with Imperial’s student-run newspaper Felix. It focusses on current events in the science world and as well as being a print publication, there are a number of students who write blogs and articles for the website. I wrote about the transmission of Ebola virus disease from fruit bats to humans which you can read here! I’m trying to get more good writing practice in because…
7.The RCSU launched the 8th annual Science Challenge in December. The Science Challenge is a science communication competition run by the RCSU. Anyone can enter and the challenge is to answer a question set by one of the four guest judges (check out the questions here!). There is a cash prize for the winner and I think the final involves a fancy dinner (to be honest, fancy food is reason enough to enter in my opinion). I didn’t enter last year but I think I am going to make a good go at it this year as science communication has become my passion in life. If I enter and do well, it’s good exposure for going into a science comms career later, and if I flop, it’s still good practice! Whilst talking about it, please read fellow blogger Emma’s post about entering the SC last year… and winning!
Well that’s about it for my 2014 run down. It’s been one of the best and hardest years, both academically and emotionally(!), but I am glad to have made it through to 2015! Bring on a new year, new courses, new challenges and new experiences. I hope all you Imperial hopefuls had a lovely Christmas and best of luck for the coming year!
1. Getting your laundry done for you and not having to leave it out to dry for three days because…
2. The heating is on for a substantial amount of time each day. And you don’t have to worry about what your heating bill will look like at the end of the month.
3. There is food?? Like all the time??!? You don’t have to eat breakfast cereal for lunch. And that is great.
4. Sofas and TV.
5. There is always milk so you don’t have to run to the shop when you need a cup of tea in an emergency.
6. You can visit your childhood best friends who live five minutes away from you.
7. Revisiting childhood when you sleep in your old room.
8. Fam time. I miss mine a ton when I’m away.
9. Also babies. My mum looks after kiddies for a living so I love playing with the babies when I come home.
10. Getting out of London. It’s good to be able to slow down from the pace of London life for a while!
I haven’t posted about French in a while so I thought that now would be a good time to talk about Horizons. If you select the average biology second year and ask them their opinion on Horizons, you will most likely be met with a loud groan and possibly screams of horror. I’ll say off the bat that in the life sciences department and I think a few others as well, doing an extracurricular Horizons course becomes compulsory after first year and counts for credit, meaning that the marks you get go towards your overall degree. I don’t want to freak anyone out by saying this but what I will say is that as long as you choose your course carefully, you don’t have to be filled with terror at the mere mention of the word ‘extracurricular’ and I actually quite enjoy my course.
So what is Horizons? It’s a program of extracurricular courses offered by Imperial to supplement our degree programs. Read as: the powers that be at Imperial are worried that we will become reclusive and unemployable if we spend all our waking hours in the lab and so they want us to do some humanities courses to prevent this from happening. You have the option of picking one long course that will run over Autumn and Spring terms or two shorter ones that last a term each. The courses available are extremely diverse (click around here to check out the course lists) ranging from lanugages to creative writing to philosophy to politics to stuff like Engineers Without Borders. You’ll have one, two hour lesson once a week with coursework to complete as well. In my French class, we do about six pieces of coursework throughout the year, including in-class tests, but in other classes you’ll have maybe one big essay to turn in or a presentation or project to complete. The aim of Horizons is to equip you with transferable skills outside of the lab which are valuable in a myriad of different situations and if you choose something that you enjoy and can get really get stuck in to, you’ll have a great time!
Personally I am something of a linguaphile and I adore French. Having completed A Level French to a decent standard, I didn’t want to give up at uni and so I enrolled on a Year in Europe course. I think the name of this course has changed slightly but if you’re interested in spending time abroad, definitely think about applying to do a year abroad whilst you’re at Imperial! It’s an incredible opportunity and talking to people who either have done it or are currently doing it, you will have a fab time and won’t regret it. Due to some slightly unfortunate circumstances I’ve had to leave the Year Abroad program but I am carrying on with French for Horizons and loving it, so I guess I’ll try and give you my argument for doing a lanugage as your extracurricular
1. Employers love lanugages. The job market is tough as it is, having a second language under your belt can only benefit you, espeically if it’s a less widely spoken second language such as Mandarin, Japanese or Arabic, all of which you can learn in Horizons!
2. It gives you a break from the grind of science. Obviously I love biology or I wouldn’t be here but there’s something so great about being able to tap in to a completely different part of your brain to engage with languages. You get to look at real life issues in the country of the language you are studying and discuss current events and popular culture. It also sounds pretty cool when your friends ask you what’s going on in Horizons and you can tell them that you were discussing secularism in the French education system… in French.
3. Improves your confidence loads. I’ve found in my French classes that there is a lot of emphasis on conversation practice and debate where you are forced to have an opinion and talk in your chosen language. I definitely lacked confidence in speaking but the regular conversation practice has helped me to improve. Although one time we were discussing Facebook and I mistook ‘amis’ for ‘années’ and told my partner that I only had three Facebook friends when I thought I was saying that I’d been on Facebook for three years. Slightly awkward.
4. Opportunity for creativity and becoming more cultured. You just don’t get the opportunity to read French short stories and do translations in everyday life (and I really love translation because it feels like such a responsibility to preserve the meaning of a passage whilst converting it to comprehensible English and when you do it right you feel really great).
In conclusion, French is amazing and my Horizons is great. The only downside is that my teacher has a fondness for making us sing strange French songs in class. And when I say ‘making us’ I mean ‘making a condition of leaving class singing the song.’
Do Horizons but make sure you pick a good course that you’re really interested in and can get excited about!
Woah, I just checked my timetable and we’re in 9th week? How did this happen?! Time has flown by. It feels like not that long ago I was on the CU stall at freshers fair handing out free washing up liquid to slightly dazed looking freshers. The amount of deadlines that I have coming up are making me cry inside a little but there’s still a lot to look forward to in the remaining three weeks and I’ve had such a lovely weekend.
On Saturday, I went for Thanksgiving dinner at my friend’s house. There are a few American students at my church so they educated the rest of us about Thanksgiving traditions and cooked us the most incredible dinner, including the biggest turkey I’ve ever seen, mashed potatoes, candied yams (essentially, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top that make a crust when you bake it in the oven. It’s as weird as it sounds), green beans, stuffing and pumpkin pie. It was so nice to spend time with close friends and think about how lucky we are to have so much in our lives. I would definitely recommend befriending Americans so that you can share in this fun holiday.
On Sunday I went to Oxford to visit a friend from home. I should have taken photos to post here because it was really beautiful! We walked along the river by Port Meadow which was all misty and mysterious looking, went to church and then did some Oxford sightseeing. This included going to Christ Church college (where they filmed some of Harry Potter!) which was pretty fun because lots of tourists were queuing to pay so they could get in but my friend can bring in a +1 for free because he’s an Oxford student so we just walked in. Christ Church is very very beautiful, it has a gigantic, very stately quad, a meadow, a boat house and a cathedral. It was nice to be able to look around but I imagine that it’s pretty annoying for the students who live and study there to constantly have tourists coming in and out (although apparently they charge the tourists loads during the summer so I doubt the college minds too much). We also visited the Ashmolean Museum which apparently was the world’s first university museum. I learnt a lot about the history of Oxford this weekend.
This week it’s back to lectures after a week of mostly doing a genetics practical. One of my deadlines that’s coming in is writing up my practical in journal format. I found the theory quite hard to get my around so I’m a bit worried but also excited as this is probably the only time I can write myself in as the lead author of a paper 😉
I hope you all are doing well and are looking forward to Christmas xx
Now that I am 19 years old, a second year and living in a flat that I rent myself, I feel like I should have my life slightly more together. I had grand plans for this year. I would decorate my new room with fairy lights and candles, prepare delicious homecooked meals every week in my new kitchen, study every night at my brand new Ikea desk and keep a spotless home. Domestic goddess meets super intelligent lady biologist if you will. I would have my cake and eat it too once I’d moved into my new flat with my housemates. (As an aside, if my housemates are reading this, I love you so much and I’m sorry if I’ve been bothering you with the amount of time I spend singing Let it Go in the shower xxx)
Well. I don’t think I’m quite ready for this kind of adulthood.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my flat. It’s a great location, most of my friends live within walking distance and if not, I’m only minutes away from tube and bus links. It’s close enough to uni that I can walk everyday, far enough way that I don’t have to shell out a bomb to live there. It has four bedrooms and living space, which is pretty good for a flat in central London, and we’re literally on top of an incredible and super cheap market, plus right next to two supermarkets, an iceland and a poundland.
Although I have been doing homecooking, I have been so busy this term that I tend to bulk cook a couple of times every fortnight and then freeze portions. As such, I have eaten more rice with chilli/curry than I can bear to think about. I was planning a big get fit/live clean thing for this year but that went down the drain considering how I barely have time to go shopping. Come to think of it, all I have for breakfast tomorrow is dry cereal…
Studying at home hasn’t really been a thing due to the fact that we didn’t have wifi in the flat for the first six weeks after moving in. Don’t use EE as your internet provider kids.
I am a bit of a clean freak so I have cleaned my room since moving in at the beginning of term and we have a rota for the bins and bathroom but the other day I picked a mug up off the kitchen side to make a cup of tea and it was literally stuck to the worktop. I’m still not sure why.
Other adult things that I’d rather not have to deal with at the moment include the fact that our washing machine is broken and I am running out of clothes, most of the lightbulbs in the flat have died and no one is tall enough to reach them, the shop we live above has been throwing out our post so we’d missed all our water bills and received a scary letter telling us to pay or be taken to court, and the lump sum of rent we put down in June is about to run out so I need to figure out my finances to pay rent next year.
I now have an insane amount of respect for my parents – who knew that running a household would involve so many responsibilities!
It’s official, I have now been back in London for a month. I am no longer a fresher – it usually takes me a moment or two to remember this when someone asks me what year I’m in – and I do grown up things now that I live in a flat and not halls, like pay rent, set up direct debits and clean the kitchen. Wow.
After a great (but long) summer, it’s been a little bit difficult to settle back in to Imperial life but I’m enjoying my courses so far and also the change to my timetable! Morning labs can be hard to motivate yourself before but on a non-lab day I now get a lie in rather than the continuous 9am starts that I had last year so I’m not complaining too much!
I’ve also had the privilege of meeting some biology freshers – shout out to my kids who are really cool and actually talked to me during the Mums and Dads event rather than sitting in awkward silence. You two are the greatest – and they seem like a nice bunch. It’s an incredibly surreal experience to return with a year of hindsight under your belt. Although I loved my first year, I’m glad I don’t have to relive freshers week again. I was at the The Mingle with the IC Christian Union handing out teas and coffees to the revellers who had only arrived in London that day and watching the freshers going through that endless loop of going up to complete strangers and asking them what they studied, where they lived and where they were from gave me a very strange sense of déjà vu. It’s a weird time for a lot of people, I know I found it very frustrating to be having so many superficial interactions with people I ended up not being friends with, but I hope that all of you first years have found a good bunch of mates and are settling in well.
So what’s going on in the Izzie life right now? Well, I have just finished my first course of the year, Applied Molecular Biology, and am about to start working on a bioinformatics project which promises to be very interesting. My AMB lab has been so fun, I have really enjoyed getting to practice lab techniques which are used on a wide scale in the majority of molecular biology labs, try out new equipment and see real results. It’s also pretty cool to tell your friends that you’ve been cloning DNA to create recombinant bacteria when they ask you what you’ve been up to. I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to my lab partner for messing up so many times (including using up all of our sample on something that didn’t even matter in the long run, not setting our pipettes correctly and generally making a fool of myself) and thank him for being so patient and no doubt hiding his anger at my incompetence well. You’re the best.
Second year biology starts to get interesting because we’re given more freedom to pick and choose courses that we have a special interest in. As such, next year I’m going to be taking Cell Biology and Development, Virology and Immunology – all courses which I have been reliably informed by my third year buddies have an insane workload and will probably make me cry. Add to that a practice dissertation which I start this term, a compulsory Horizons course (why on earth did I think level 5 French would be a good idea this year…), secretarial duties for the IC Christian Union, applying for summer internships and trying to have a social life, this academic year promises to be one of the heaviest but also most full and fun that I’ve ever had.
Advice to freshers who might still be reading this blog – study hard but play hard too. There is so much out there to get involved with and this is probably the least busy time of your degree so utilise it well.
Advice to the new batch of Imperial hopefuls who might have just started reading this blog – you have a hell of a lot to look forward to!
So results day has been and gone, many of you are now unconditional offer holders for Imperial College…. CONGRATULATIONS! You should all feel very proud of yourselves. I know from experience that A Levels feel like the hardest thing in life at the moment you’re taking them but your hard work has paid off so well done. You can now enjoy the rest of your summer worry-free!
My summer has been great so far. I’ve just gotten back from a week in Alsace, France where I helped out at a summer camp and I had the best time. I worked with a fantastic team of people to serve the camp by washing up, cleaning, serving food and dressing up as an evil gang for a night game so that the kids could capture and ‘arrest’ us (the theme of the week was secret agents and there was a lot of back story going on… I still don’t understand all of it myself to be honest). We also went on a couple of great day trips, one to a lake where we went swimming and ate crepes, one to an outdoor swimming pool (swimming in the rain and ultimate frisbee were both super duper fun) and one to a patisserie. French patisserie is almost my favourite thing in life to be honest, it’s so good.
The beautiful lake! Most of my team decided to swim across the whole thing but I’m not a very strong swimmer so I watched from afar insteadA selection of the cakes available at the patisserie we went to
Anyway, that’s my summer blogging done for now, time to look ahead to freshers week! I was terrified about freshers week to be honest. Prior to starting uni I had never been out drinking or clubbing and was dreading a nonstop week where everyone was expected to go out every single night, get drunk and generally be crazy. This was made worse by the fact that I’d managed to sign up to what I thought was an official Imperial facebook page but was actually one of those that are used by club promoters to try and sell you expensive wristbands to club nights. Oopsy.
Truth is, freshers week is what you make of it. I received a handy booklet from the RCSU about the events they would be throwing during freshers and also found my way to my hall facebook page which put me at ease massively. All kinds of events happened during my freshers week and once I arrived at Imperial I found that there was actually no pressure to drink every night if you didn’t want to. One of the first events that you’ll attend will most likely be the infamous boat party. Every hall goes to a boat party on the Thames and it’s a great opportunity to meet people so I would definitely reccommend going. The only downside is that you’re stuck on a boat for like three hours so you can’t leave and if you want to buy drinks it’s horrendously expensive. I also went to the Mingle (a freshers party in the Union that you’ll go to on the first or second night), an afternoon tea party put on by the RCSU, a pub crawl which was fun because I got to hang out with my biology sister and meet some others from our course, freshers ball, a CU games night and a campus tour. My hall (the mighty Fisher!) also put on loads of stuff like a trip to China Town, bowling, a games night, movie nights etc.
My point is, there is loads of stuff going on during freshers week but no one will come to your room to make you go. It’s really hard at first, but it’s so important to get along to as much as possible and just mingle and chat with people. You won’t necessarily meet your best friends immediately (although I actually met my current housemates by gatecrashing the conversation they were having when the people I thought I was hanging out with left from campus without me…) but sitting in your room feeling lonely is no way to spend your first week in London when there is so much going on!
I’m so excited to get back to London and see all my friends and move into my house! I’ve got to get down to IKEA pretty soon and buy last minute stuff for my room and I suggest you all do the same! Definitely bring stuff to make your room feel more homey, I think there’s nothing more sad than an undecorated halls room.
I’m also excited to meet my new biology children. I’d definitely reccommend signing up to the Mums and Dads scheme which is run by the IC Union. If you are lucky enough (hehehe) to get me as your mum, you will also get one of my best friends, Adam, as a dad and three siblings. Your mum and dad are there to answer your questions about student life, help you settle in and buy you drinks when you decide to skip the family scavenger hunt that the department organises wait I mean help you win the very exciting and fabulous scavenger hunt that the department organises. I’ve found it really useful having my bio family this year, my two mums were great at answering all of our questions and it was good to have my sister to hang out with in the early days where we didn’t know too many people.
That’s about all I have to say on the topic of freshers at the moment, please do comment if you have any other questions you’d like me to address more deeply! Getting comments is what makes this blog so much fun 🙂
Stay safe during the rest of your summer friends, can’t wait to see all you biology guys in October.
I’m about a month in to my long summer holiday and to be quite honest, I don’t know what I’ve been doing all this time O_o I feel like I should be as busy as I usually am at uni but to be honest it’s been nice to kick back a bit and chill at home. The novelty of free food and laundry is starting to wear off a little but once I move in to my new place in September I expect I will sorely miss it! More on that a bit later though.
This might sound a bit sad but I decided I needed to start a new hobby over the summer since now I’m not thinking solely about biology and CU committee 24/7 and my life seems to have lost it’s meaning. SO I’ve started knitting again (don’t judge me). My first project is this Gryffindor scarf:
And y’know, you can think I’m ridiculous for knitting Harry Potter themed clothing buuuut I get a super awesome scarf out of it so LOOK WHO’S LAUGHING NOW. I also went on a yarn buying spree with one of my friends who can knit a thousand times better than I can (we enable eachother’s yarn-buying habits, it’s not healthy) and I have stuff coming in the post to make a beanie hat.
I think the knitting habit will come in handy when my flatmates and I move in to our new flat in September and are too broke to have the heating on over winter. I am sooo excited to move in, it’s such a nice place and it fulfils all my criteria for where I want to live. Finding a place to live in London has been a steep learning curve to say the least. It’s very strange to think that less than a year ago I was living at home, almost entirely financially dependent on my parents and oblivious to the workings of running a household. Rent? Bills? Naaah. But now I have been to house viewings, made an offer on a property, signed a contract, almost ended up in a contract race (that was a stressful 48 hours), paid an insane amount of money (they’re really not lying when they tell you it’s expensive to rent in this city!) and begun to set up house bank accounts. WHAT. It’s fun though. I can’t wait to live with my flatmates and decorate our flat and have like, Mexican nights. Ok we haven’t discussed Mexican nights. Guys if you’re reading this, please can we do this.
BUT there is still about two months until I move in, so what am I doing in the meantime. In a couple of weeks I am flying out to the East of France to be an animateur en formation at a bilingual Christian summer camp for a week. An animateur en formation (animef for short) is like an assistant leader and we help facilitate the camp, so washing up, cooking, cleaning, organising games etc. We also do Bible studies together and generally have fun. I’ve not been to this camp before but I’mvery excited! It’s an opportunity to practice my francais and travel abroad without my parents… another adult experience that I need to get over!
When I get back from camp I have a couple of weeks and then I’m off again to Oswestry in Shropshire for a five day conference for Christian students who are going to be serving in Christian Unions at their universities. SO EXCITED FOR THIS. I went to the regional weekend version of this conference back in February and it was unbelivably fun so I can’t imagine how great it’s gonna be spending a week with all the other regions and also getting to see my Imperial friendlies again after a long time apart.
Not long till results day for all you Year 13s! My tip for results day is to check track before you go in to collect your paper results and to take the phone number for the admissions office along with you in case there’s any problems. I actually missed my Imperial offer by a grade (happens to the best of us) but had already seen on track before opening my results that I’d been accepted, which I was able to verify when I called the admissions office.
