While I was watching the University Challenge today, I had this extraordinary feeling: the Imperial affection. It was not the first time… There are these little moments during the day when I suddenly realise I am at the best university in the world: when I put on my Imperial hoodie, when I look up at Queen’s Tower, when I see Imperial in the news, or when I see the Imperial guys beating Oxford in the University Challenge.
It’s hard to define this feeling: I would say it’s some kind of “belonging somewhere” feeling. Because I am terribly, terribly proud that I am an Imperial student and I belong here. But it’s also a way of “commitment”: I am wholeheartedly committed to Imperial. I take every chance to show that I am an “Imperial girl”: I put on my ID card in the morning and don’t take it off until I come home in the afternoon. I want everyone to see that I am from Imperial (which only interesting on the tube, since I spend most of my day at Imperial, where… hmmm… everyone is from Imperial… 🙂 ).
The first “Imperial affection” moment was in the summer, when I got an email from the ICT. It was a long email about all the ICT things we can access with our Imperial account. But the main point was: I finally had an Imperial account! One could say it’s not a big deal, it’s just an automatically generated @ic.ac.uk email address really. But this was the first sign, the first real proof, that I’m officially an Imperial student! Then they started to send us all these starter essentials like the invoice for the accommodation, which was less nice… But still, whenever I write down my email address, I have this “affection”, I have this strange feeling, that I really am an Imperial student.
When I got my ID card, I was staring at it for half a day. I couldn’t believe it: I never had an ID card before (my high school didn’t do such thing) and it was always some “grown-up” thing… ID card with a real organisation and barcode and photo and everything! Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes I just randomly look at it, and all I can think of is “I did it. I really did it. I am here. I am at the best uni. That’s really me. I should start believe it…” But it’s still hard to believe: during the Christmas holiday I was seriously worried that I was just dreaming the Autumn term and when I came back, they will just look at me asking who I am. Fortunately I had my ID card with me, so in these doubtful moments I just looked at it and tried to reassure myself that I should focus on the revision instead…
It’s very strange, really. The campus is huge, and there are thousands of students and teachers there. Hundreds of different faces I meet every day. And yet it feels like a home, it feels like a huge family. I love to walk around on campus, and see all these buildings, which were once (not very long time ago) so strange, and now so familiar. And it’s obvious that I have started to collect all the different types of Imperial hoodies and sweatshirts: it’s the only reasonable thing to do.
My flatmates pointed out today, that maybe I’m a bit too “in love” with Imperial: my facebook cover photo is the main entrance, I have 3 different Imperial-related things listed on my profile, every second item on my timeline has something to do with Imperial…. But I am indeed in love with Imperial, I love going there in the morning, I love studying there, I love coming home to the biggest Imperial hall of residence, I love wearing Imperial hoodie, I love wearing my ID card, I love wearing the “genius at work” Imperial silicone wristband, I love writing down my @ic.ac.uk email address. I love every bit of being an Imperial student.
Yes, my name is Dora and I have an Imperial affection. 🙂
When I was in high school, I never really had a problem with studying. Because, to be honest, I never really actually studied. I went to the lessons, paid attention to the teacher, more or less did the homework. But – except before the final exams – I didn’t really study. I never sat down with a textbook and read it three-four times, never made notes, never did practise exercises or past papers. And I got away with it quite well: I had outstanding final marks, perfect tests and all these strange awards for being the best in random years… I have never felt I have worked enough, because I knew I didn’t. Only I didn’t know how to work more…
And I spent an awfully long summer trying to figure out what will I do once university starts. Will I be able to keep up? Will I be able to study? Do I know how to study? Will I understand the material? Will I fall behind? I checked the statistics and there is a 0.68% dropout rate in Imperial. It means, about 1 student will drop out in our year. Will that be me? What will I do if I do badly on the exams? The problem with being a good student is that you don’t know how it feels when you are not good, because you’ve never experienced it. Before I came here, I didn’t know how not to be the best in every subject I study (except German of course, because of the bloody der/die/das: it’s not my cup of tea it’s not my bucket of artificially flavoured fizzy orange juice…).
I did quite well on the first few weeks. Although I still think my English is pretty bad compared to most of the classmates’, I understood 99% of the lectures, I did most of the tutorial sheets and I didn’t skip a single lecture. And then came the first assignments (Mastery, Design), and I wasn’t the best. Not even close… And let me tell you this: it felt strange. It is like when you are forming groups on PE, and you are the last to be chosen. It is like when you are taking the lift with friends and you are the only one who can’t get in because it’s full. It is strange…
And I felt – for not the first time – that I don’t belong here. I am not good enough for Imperial. I can’t even study: I don’t know how to. And these results seemed to be proving that I am right: I shouldn’t be here. But after the Design, I got the Matlab results, and a bit later the Christmas test. And it was good. Very good, actually. And the sun was shining again: I felt I am not that bad after all, I felt I can might be even good at this thing called university. I remembered the first weeks when we had lectures about keeping up and motivation, and everyone kept saying we’re carefully selected students based on all of our previous results and they know we will do well on this course. Nice words… But after the Christmas test I started to believe these. And I planned to revise a lot during the Christmas break… Well…
The holiday was awful. I am not talking about the family bit, but the 2 weeks after the actual Christmas. The 2 weeks in which I was supposed to do some work. I even came back to Woodward a week earlier so that I can revise before the Spring term… On the first 3 days, I was just watching movies all day. And then, I slowly started to do some work, with regular “movie-breaks”. I rewrote my notes from Properties and Maths, and I re-organised my lecture notes and went through them. I was pushing and pushing this Chemistry homework, but after a while the deadline was so close, I couldn’t do anything but start it…
The thing about Chemistry is that you think you understand it during the lecture because it seems so clear and easy when the lecturer explains it. But then you go home, try to do a problem sheet, and you realise you don’t know anything…. We have these “homework assignments”, which are not mandatory but they can give you a “free” 10% off from the final mark. So everyone tries to do them as they were mandatory. Well, I tried, too… I printed out the questions and started to read the first one. When I re-read it for the third time, and still didn’t have a clue what it’s about, I felt I need some revision…
I revised Chemistry for 5 days before I could even start to solve the homework. I haven’t done any useful work during the holiday apart from this… I haven’t done the problem sheets and the mastery and past exams, as I had planned before. I ended up revising and revising, because apparently it’s not enough any more to just sit on a lecture and listen… And it was a shockingly new experience, a big “lesson”, which I hope will make me study more. I am not sure though: maybe I am just not good enough for Imperial. After all, this is the best university in the world, and I don’t know anything about studying…
Procrastination is the avoidance of doing a task which needs to be accomplished. It is the practice of doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones, or carrying out less urgent tasks instead of more urgent ones, thus putting off impending tasks to a later time. Sometimes, procrastination takes place until the “last minute” before a deadline. People may procrastinate personal issues (raising a stressful issue with a partner), health issues (seeing a doctor or dentist), home care issues (patching a leak in a roof), or academic/work obligations (completing a report). Procrastination can lead to feelings of guilt, inadequacy, depression and self-doubt. (…) Traditionally, procrastination has been associated with perfectionism: a tendency to negatively evaluate outcomes and one’s own performance, intense fear and avoidance of evaluation of one’s abilities by others, heightened social self-consciousness and anxiety, recurrent low mood, and “workaholism.” However, adaptive perfectionists— egosyntonic perfectionism—were less likely to procrastinate than non-perfectionists, while maladaptive perfectionists, who saw their perfectionism as a problem— egodystonic perfectionism—had high levels of procrastination and anxiety. (source)
It’s a well-known fact that freshers’ flu hits universities every autumn. It has to do with the lot of people from lot of different countries, as we were told. Another well-known fact is that the first week of the Spring Term is the Refreshers’ week, a thing I still don’t really understand, but this might just be due to my narrow-mindedness (Seriously, refreshers? Just why??) But I unfortunately got to know a not-so-well-know aspect of Refreshers’ week: the refreshers’ flu.
Friday
I started to feel something on Friday afternoon. I can’t remember when was the last time I had flu, so at first I thought I have a cold. Usually I have enough paracetamol for a smaller country with me (just in case a smaller country would approach me and ask…), so I raised the amount to “level 2 – suspicious” and tried to rest. I calculated that if I have a rest on Friday and maybe Saturday morning, I still have the Saturday afternoon and the whole Sunday to do homework. I had a worrying deadline on Monday afternoon…
Saturday
I woke up with a blocked nose, terrible headache, pain in the muscles, and absolutely 0% spirit for doing homework. I called my mother, who gave me some tips like “drink tea” and “eat vitamins and fruits”, which sounds quite useful – for those who have vitamins or fruits in their cupboard… I drank some tea and stayed in bed for most of the day. When I was awake, I could almost hear the Mastery homework on my desk saying “Monday 16:30, Monday 16:30…” When I was asleep, I had nightmares about running towards something and never reaching it… In the afternoon, I called my parents again and asked them to come and take me home from Woodward.
Sunday
I wanted to move in to a hall of residence because I wanted to be independent and “grown-up”. (Fun fact: originally I didn’t even want to apply to Imperial, because it’s in London, sooo close to my parents…) I think I am doing quite all right with this independency-thing (except that I still bring my laundry home and call my family every second day…). But this was the first case when I was ill and I didn’t know what to do. Going home where my mother makes me tea, tells me what vitamins to take and brings me fruits sounded the only good solution. However, that Mastery homework due on Monday was still unsolved, so I took some paracetamol, and tried to solve it (with the help of my sister, who was sitting next to me and checking if I made a numerical error). Let me tell you this: with 2 paracetamols, a noticeable fever and constant shivering, solving a Mastery sheet is not quite easy…
At 6pm I decided I want to go back to Woodward, because I had a Hall Committee Meeting from 8pm and I wanted to go to lectures on Monday anyway. My parents tried to stop me, but eventually they took me back. I packed all my stuff in for Monday, and set my alarm for 7am.
Monday
When I woke up at 4:30 with a massive headache, shivering and a burning forehead, I knew I had to miss this Monday. I tried paracetamol, tea, cold poultice, nothing worked… So I went back to bed and started to think how to catch up with the lectures by Tuesday. I woke up again at noon, took some more paracetamol and in that one and a half hour when it has its affect, I quickly solved and submitted the Mastery. After that I was not really able to go even as far as the kitchen, so I kept drinking water from the tap and I saw less and less chance of going in on Tuesday… My mother sent me some angry messages saying I should visit the doctor, but I only considered this as an option after I realised I exceeded the 3-day limit for taking paracetamol…
Tuesday
I went to see the doctor in the morning, because I was hoping I could go in to South Kensington in the afternoon for my first lab session. The doctor was very kind and smiling while I was telling her what my symptoms are. I told her I think it’s just a bad cold and she said I might be right. Then she measured my temperature… And she said it’s “proper flu”. She told me what to do and what to eat and things like that, but I could only hear “you can’t go to the university before next Monday”. On the way back to Woodward, I was crying… Missing one complete week??? Missing 16 lectures, 2 lab sessions, 4 tutorials??????? How will I ever be able to catch up?????? I immediately called my mother, who said I can go home right away because my sister is at home with flu, too… I wrote an email to the Director of Course Op., explaining how sorry I am and how the doctor said I can’t go even though I wanted to… On my way home I got the answer: “(…) Most importantly, do not return too early – make sure you get rest and plenty of sleep – once you are better, then think about returning to uni.”
…
Friday
So, what’s the sole message of this week?
When they say be healthy, that’s not a joke! (I didn’t know that, either…)
A few years ago I wouldn’t have thought that I’ll live in London one day. When I first visited the city in 2013, I was amazed: it is huge, crowded, full of famous buildings and places, full of classic “London” things like the double-decker or the black cabs. Then, as I came here more often (after half of my family had moved here), I started to get used to things: I memorised the underground stations, I got an Oyster card, I queued for the bus… But only in August could I say that I was officially a Londoner, when I got my +44 phone number and changed my current city to London on Facebook. So, based on the past 5 months, let’s see what I find the most interesting/annoying/unusual/strange in London: here is the ultimate #justLondonthings list! 🙂
#1 Queueing. People are queueing up all the time, to everywhere. And they are extremely patient. In fact, that’s how you can tell if someone is a tourist: they always want to skip the queue…
#2 Keep calm and travel on. In London, there are two different times for travelling: peak and off-peak (the former is more expensive in order to encourage tourists not to travel at that time). As the name shows, peak is very busy: people are going to work, they have to be there on time, etc. And yet, when something happens with the tube in peak time and there are “severe delays”, nobody starts panicking. If we are in between two stations, and there is a red signal, and we have to wait there for 15 minutes, Londoners just read another article in Metro or solve another crossword. If the bus driver says there is a diversion and he will miss out the next 5 bus stops, Londoners just check the time on their phone or turn to the next page in their book. They all know that they will arrive at their destination sooner or later, and since in London there are almost infinite different possibilities to get from A to B, there is no need to worry. I started to adapt this mentality: yesterday the Circle line was partially closed due to a signal failure at King’s Cross, and I didn’t panic at all. I got off at the next station and walked through Hyde Park. Speaking of…
#3 Hyde & Kensington Park. I love Hyde Park. It is a little (well, actually quite big) green spot right in the middle of the city, an amazing place to start your day. I usually come to campus very early (my personal record is 7:20), so I would expect there are not many people in Hyde Park at that time. How wrong! It is always full of runners, dog walkers, cyclists, birds, swans and squirrels. In the UK, most parks are bright green all year long due to the rain, and it makes them very picturesque. So whenever I enter the park, the outside world seems to stop, and I just stare at all the different little scenes happening around me and enjoy the sunshine and… Oh god, I love Hyde Park 🙂
I love it…
#4 It’s dead expensive. You had a budget in mind at the beginning of the year? You can forget it in two weeks… If you’re in London, you just spend and spend and spend… I don’t know why or how. I was planning to save some money, because why not. Well, I ended up spending all of it. Because it was Black Friday and I needed a new pair of jeans, but I couldn’t leave there these shoes either. Or I was thinking about buying a book or two to read, and I ended up buying a Kindle. Or I went to Tesco to buy some lunch, but the Oreo cookies were on sale for half price and I bought three… And now I am too scared to look at my bank account… 🙂
#5 Big Ben. I don’t know why, but I am a huge fan of the Elizabeth Tower (commonly known as the Big Ben, however, that is actually just the name of the bells). There are these classic famous London sights like the Buckingham Palace or the London Eye, but they can become boring after a while, if you see them very often. But Big Ben is simply not like that. It is awesome every time I see it. I can easily walk around London by now without doing these “tourist things” like taking pictures at every second corner or looking at the map to check where is the nearest tube station. But Big Ben is different: I have to stop and take a picture and post it on Facebook, because it is the Big Ben, for God’s sake! So beautiful… 🙂
Isn’t it wonderful?
#6 Transport for London Shop. I have a crush on TfL things. I have Tube Map oyster card holder, Tube Map notebook, Tube Map bed linen… I can’t explain why I like it, but I have this “OMG” feeling every time I look at the Tube Map. Maybe because it’s so colorful… And they recently opened a new shop right at the South Kensington station!!!! Ahhh, satisfaction level infinite 🙂
I hope it was not too overenthusiastic, but… I just love London, I love living in London and I love every bit of being a Londoner!
I think one of the many positive aspects about ChemEng is that we study a whole bunch of different subjects. While other courses have 4-5 subjects, we have … hmmm… well… I don’t really know 😀
According to Blackboard (online platform where all of the course notes and homeworks are), we have 14 different “things”, but some of them are jointly called “coursework” subjects (CE1-03) and we will get only one mark for it at the end. So, I am quite confused when someone asks how many subjects I have, but here is the list:
Can anyone tell me how many different subjects I do? 😀
Another interesting thing is our timetable. (Maybe it’s just me who finds this fascinating, but) we got an email at the beginning of the year, containing a link. When I clicked on the link, a pop-up window asked “Do you really want this?” Well, at least I was warned… But I said yes, and suddenly all my lectures/tutorials/other activities were imported into my personal calendar! It’s a subscribable calendar system, meaning it refreshes itself every hour and all the changes are immediately visible. Therefore if a tutor reschedules a tutorial and accidentally mistypes something, the whole class will have a random Maths appearing in their calendar all of a sudden… It is very scary! 😀
Here is an ordinary week with lectures in the morning, tutorials in the afternoon and loads of free time on Wednesday 🙂
After this intro, let’s talk a bit about the subjects! Engineering is quite special in the sense that most of the curriculum is very different from that of the high school. (I don’t know much about the English secondary education system, as I did the high school in Hungary, but I guess most things are the same). In high school we had general subjects like Chemistry or Physics. Now we have more specific ones like “Properties of Matter” or “Fluid Mechanics”. Hence I think it worths giving a brief description about these ChemEng subjects…
01 Chemical Engineering Mastery
This is our main subject, nevertheless it’s not a real subject! 😀 Mastery includes the core subjects like Process or Fluid, and we have one pass/fail Mastery exam at the end. Additionally, we have Mastery sheets (5 this year): each contains 1 very long problem description and 3-4 related questions. We also have Mastery seminars which are held by different professors every week and they give a summary of their subjects and some exam tips and tricks… 🙂
02 Process Analysis
Hmmm, Process… Process is my favourite subject! (As I already mentioned in the post about the Christmas test.) We learn about process flow diagrams, stream tables, mass balances, vapour-liquid equilibrium, etc. Unfortunately, it’s only in the Autumn term 🙁 The good thing about Process is that “we have to put our chemical engineer / business / environmental hats on” and at the end, we are standing there with “3 hats” and design processes as big as a building on a piece of paper… The bad thing is that it takes ages to calculate everything we need because there are so many different equations and data to use. And unless you do it in Excel, you’ll definitely make a mistake somewhere…
03-1 First Year Design Project
I already wrote about this in another post, so I just mention one thing here: don’t forget the remaining power, for God’s sake! …
03-2 Foundation Laboratory
I don’t know much about this as we’ll only start it next term, but I know that we’ll work in pairs which is scary 😀 I would like to apologise in advance to my future lab-partner for splashing them with sulphuric acid… It won’t be on purpose…
03-4 Introduction to MATLAB
I also mentioned this before. Matlab is about coding, so those who did any kind of coding before will be fine. Those who didn’t… well, they should drink some coffee before the lectures. 🙂
03-7 Foundations of ChemEng Calculations
This subject was only 5 lectures long at the very beginning of the term. We looked at the unit conversions and dimensional analysis. It might sound silly (Unit conversions? Everyone can convert joules to kilojoules…), but when it comes to converting from cal/(gmol.K) to BTU/(lbmol.ºR) you wish you had choose Classical Literature instead of Engineering…
04-1 Fluid Mechanics
Everyone likes Fluid. Our lecturer is a nice and cheerful guy who tells jokes all the time. As he explains it the material looks dead easy, even the toughest equations make some sense during the lecture. But when it comes to the tutorial sheets, we are usually completely lost… 😀 Apart from that, I like Fluid. We started with incompressible fluids and we are now dealing with compressible ones. My sister is a wannabe pilot, so I often text her after the lectures and we discuss what I’ve learnt and what she already knows… 😀 One more thing about Fluid: it’s only in the first term 🙁
04-2 Heat and Mass Transfer
This is again a Spring term subject, but I’ve already heard horror stories… Everyone says that this is the most difficult subject, so I am a bit worried. We’ll see!
05 Thermodynamics
Many people struggle with Thermo because it’s full of equations, derivations, calculus, difficult concepts and new approaches. In high school I learnt about the Laws of Thermodynamics – in 3 lessons. Now we’ve been learning about them since October and we’re still just halfway through the Second… The lecturer is also my personal tutor, and he is very kind and answers all the questions – if he gets any. The problem is, most people don’t even know what to ask… 😀
06 Chemistry
It might be surprising that we study Chemical Engineering and we only have one specially dedicated pure Chemistry subject… I was surprised, too! But this Chemistry is intense enough to satisfy even the hardcore chemistry-lovers. We study about Chemical Bonding, Solubility and pH, Kinetics, and then at the end a lot of Organic Chemistry. This subject requires (or would require…) the most self-study: if you don’t read the recommended textbooks lesson by lesson, you’ll get lost and if you get lost, you’ll basically never have enough time to catch up… But the lecturer is amazing, he makes so much effort to properly animate every little bit of the power points. I wonder how many hours he spends on a daily basis just with animating the slides… 😀
07 Mathematics
Oooo, Maths… Just to make it clear: I love Maths. If I didn’t do ChemEng, I would be studying Maths… But I’ve chosen ChemEng, so my only interaction with Maths is the Maths lecture 3 times a week. And for those who love Maths, it’s just not really enough… Since we’re doing Engineering, we don’t really need to know how to prove the theorems. Or know the super-accurate results. Or know the exact definitions of the Riemann-integration…
08 Business for Engineers
This will also be only next term, but I heard that it’s super-easy… 😀
09 Properties of Matter
Well, for some reason everyone loves PoM… Except me… I mean, the lecturer is very good, the lectures are more or less understandable, but the topic is just not my cup of tea. Or coffee. Speaking of coffee, I don’t think there exists such thing as enough amount of coffee before a PoM lecture. Seriously, the different solutions of the Schrödinger-equation can only be understood when you’re 100% awaken. Which is definitely not at 9 am…
10 Separation Processes
We’ll only have this in the Spring term, and I haven’t heard anything about it yet. Interesting…
So, that’s it, this is everything we have! One could say it’s a bit too much, and sometimes it do feels a bit too much, but most of the time it’s very enjoyable and I am glad I ended up doing ChemEng at Imperial. 🙂
The weekly Foundry Night is always a pleasant reminder that another week just passed… And another… And again… It feels like we moved in yesterday, though I’ve been here for more than two months already!
For those who don’t know: Foundry is the wonderful bar located in block A of Woodward Hall. There is a 20% discount for students and the food is quite decent. So my dearest flat created a tradition: we go there every Sunday evening to spend some time (and money) together…
Foundry Nights have a special importance in the flat’s life. We start to plan them around 1 pm on Sunday, we decide when to go, what to wear. The latter is not always easy… For the first couple of times, we just wore whatever we wanted. But than (after some accidental conjuncture of clothing) we declared the new floor colour: burgundy.
Our floor colour: burgundy
That means it was essential and mandatory to wear burgundy on the Foundry Nights. Why? Because we wanted to collectively represent our beloved flat during that 20 seconds while we crossed the common room. 😀
Collectiveness is a significant issue for us: we are very proud to have a kitchen with uniquely arranged sofas, a PS4, an Xbox and a TV fitted with HDMI cable in order to connect all kinds of devices. These are all part of the “C12 feeling” – the feeling that whenever some outsider visits our floor, we introduce it as “home”, and it actually feels home. And a huge part of the C12 feeling is the weekly Foundry Night.
While we chat in the kitchen, we usually watch TV, do homework or cook dinner at the same time. But Foundry Night is different: we focus on each other’s stories. It’s all about being together, reviewing the week, laughing and smiling. And, of course, having dinner. I believe we are the only floor whose residents could name each and every item on the Foundry menu… (Yesterday we even managed to correct the waiter as he didn’t know the item we ordered from their own menu…) We tried most of them, so we know things like “the fish always comes first” or the “chicken burger is too peppery”.
Following the Foundry Night, we usually come back to the kitchen together and continue talking. But there’s another inevitable part of Sunday night: the Jorge Challenge. During the Foundry Night, the boys discuss some disgusting or unpleasant “challenge” which needs to be done by Jorge, a guy from our floor. He started to do these challenges voluntarily, and now he has no choice… 😀 The past few weeks’ Jorge Challenges included eating cat food, drinking all kinds of mixed alcohols, and eating a combination of all the spices we found.
I wanted to wrap up this post with a few quotes from my flatmates, so I sat down and asked them:
We’ve literally just started university, and the first term has almost already passed… So it’s time to talk a little bit about the achievements (or “achievements”…) so far.
On the first week we had several introductory lectures, but one of them was particularly interesting. It was about assessments and grades. And the lecturer kept emphasising:
“Don’t expect 100% on all tests!”
He also said that it will be new for most of us, because we were most likely to be the best students in our class, and we were the ones who got 100% all the time. But that time is over, because everyone can’t be the best so we have to get used to the thought of failing. In addition, he said that “The competition part was to get into Imperial. Now that the competition is over, you have to help each other.” And that’s how we started the term…
Our first assessed coursework was the First Year Design Project – immediately on the third week! The idea is that we get a feeling for what “chemical engineering” means. Well, it was more like we tried to do something we knew next to nothing about, but we did it anyway 😀 It was a teamwork project, which means we had to work in our tutorial group. I am not that used to working with others, so it was a bit difficult for me to consider their ideas as well, but I somehow managed to get a quite decent peer assessment grade, so I wasn’t that bad after all…
We had 5 days to do the final design. The whole design was evaluated based on our powerpoint presentation and a poster. We spent the first two days chatting about ideas and thinking about calculations. On the third day we realised we should actually do something, because the deadline is coming. We did some calculations, and then we realised we need a lot more calculations. Then on the fourth day we stayed in till 19:30 to finish the poster and the presentation… 😀 Finally, on the fifth day we held our presentation. I thought it went quite well…
The next week we had a feedback session. They told us it was “good, but…” After that “but” I didn’t really listen, because that “but” meant not 100%. And I always expect 100%. I don’t care if it’s 99% or 30%. It’s below 100, therefore it’s a failure. It turned out we got around 70% (they didn’t tell us the actual grade). I was devastated… But then I remembered that first speech about “don’t expect 100% all the time”. I realised this is university now: success and failure, hand in hand. So, this Design Project taught me one thing (besides “what chemeng means”): what failure means, and how to handle it.
And the peer assessment? 😀 First of all, let me explain what PA is. When we work in a team, the lecturers or the teachers can’t be there all the time to watch everyone’s contribution and mark us based on that. Also, it’s not very fair if those who worked very hard and those who did nothing get the same grade. Therefore they introduced the system of peer assessment: we have to evaluate all of our teammates on a 1-5 scale and write a few sentences about their performance. Based on this score, we all get a normalised PA mark, which indicates our contribution to the team. And we also get the anonymous feedback so that we know what went well/wrong. I think it’s really helpful and I learned a lot from my feedback. And next year, our groupmark will be multiplied with the PA mark and that’s how we will get our final mark.
All in all, First Year Design Project is… fun, after you figure out what to do with the remaining power in the third stream 😀
Working on the poster in the evening…
The second “big thing” was the Matlab course. Matlab is a “very powerful calculator”, a programming language in which you can basically calculate everything you need. We had a 3-week Matlab course, 4 times a week, 3 hours a day. It was pretty intense…
For those who never had done coding before, it was a nightmare. I was extremely lucky, because I did some self-study in the summer, so I had a rough idea about the variables, the loops, the commands, the functions, and all these things. After the first few sessions, I realised doing coding in the summer was invaluable: I had hardly any problem understanding the new things, and I only had to focus on keeping up with the speed.
We had two assessments, one at the end of week 2, and a second (final) one at the end of week 3. They told us that we shouldn’t worry about them as they only count a negligible percentage towards our degree. But that’s not how an Imperial student’s mind works 😀 So I worried all day before the exams, and after that I was constantly checking Blackboard (our virtual learning environment) if they had put up the marks.
I was at my room in Woodward when I got the result. It was the night before the Christmas test, so I was trying to revise. And then, this email suddenly came from the course leader saying
“Just a quick message to congratulate you on your Matlab grade – you have done exceptionally well.”
I rushed to open Blackboard to see my actual mark… I was expecting something around 80%, but I got 94%!!! I was so happy, I couldn’t do any work after that. I called my family to tell them, then I went to the kitchen to tell all my flatmates, then I kept smiling for a ridiculously long time… This was my first real success in Imperial, and it felt so good… I love Matlab!!! 😀
Our last assessment was the Christmas Test. This was supposed to be the easiest from all three, because this is just a feedback, a progress test. It counts absolutely zero percent to our final grade. But still, everyone was super-nervous in the morning, everyone did more (or less) revision and everyone tried to “ace” the test (as our Process Analysis lecturer suggested…).
The test itself was a Mastery test. That means only the Mastery subjects were covered: Fluid Mechanics, Thermodynamics and Process Analysis. We were given a calculator, a data sheet and a steam table… and 3 hours to write down everything we learnt about the subjects so far. After I quickly read through all 3 papers, I decided to start with Fluid because that seemed to be the easiest. I used some equations from the equation sheet, converted some numbers, and got some roughly reasonable answers. I checked the time, I still had 2.5 hours left, so I started Process…
There is one thing I might haven’t mentioned yet, I love Process. It’s exactly what I was looking for in ChemEng: it includes a bit of chemistry, a bit of physics, a bit of maths, but most of the time it’s just sudoku and logic. You are given a description of a process, full of data. You have to extract all the relevant information to draw the diagram (after you read the process description at least 3 times… 😀 ), and then you have to make a stream table (a table listing all the streams and all the compounds involved in the process). It’s usually an approximately 10×10 table, so most people just skip this part (if you are focused and know what you do, you might be able to solve it without a stream table). But I do stream table all the time, because I like the stream table 😀 It’s surprisingly similar to a sudoku, and those who have ever done sudoku know what I mean when I say: filling out a stream table gives pure satisfaction…
So I started the Process question, read it line by line, draw the diagram, and started the calculations. I lettered them so that I didn’t get confused… When I was at line T, I realised I made a mistake. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know where it was, I only knew there was a mistake somewhere… The thing is, finding a mistake in a sudoku table is almost impossible. You might have better chances with a stream table, but it’s still unusual to find it without losing plenty of time. So I quickly switched to Thermo, but I couldn’t get Process out of my mind…
I found the first two Thermo questions quite easy, but then I spent too much time on the last one, and got no actual answer… So I went back to Process and I spent the last hour trying to find my mistake inside the jungle… I checked every calculation from the beginning, and after 20-25 minutes, I realised I have the mistake in line K. That meant the whole bit under K was completely wrong… I crossed out everything from K to T and hurriedly recalculated all of them. Eventually I filled out the stream table but it looked a complete mess.
When the time was up, I felt sad. Not because I did particularly badly on the test (it counts zero anyway), but because my stream table looked so messy… I was angry because I practised it a lot and I knew where the possible chances of making a mistake were. I was tired because even though 3 hours sound not too long (my high school final physics exam was 5-hour long), it required extraordinary focus from the beginning till the very end. And foremost I felt sad because I wanted my stream table to be shiningly perfect, and at the end it was just a complete mess with (hopefully) the right numbers…
I had my Imperial interview almost exactly a year ago. It’s rather unbelievable that an entire year has just flown by… But it didn’t really hit me until the first admission day. About a month ago we got an email from the department that we can volunteer to help on the admission days, and I – of course – applied.
Admission day is a lot more than just interviews: the applicants are shown around the campus, they have lab tours and they visit the Pilot Plant, too. When I volunteered to help, I didn’t know that it would be this shockingly amazing experience. It was not only good because I could help make the interviewees less anxious but also because as I was taking them to the offices and watching them nervously chatting with each other, I remembered my admission day…
12th November 2014
I couldn’t really sleep, so I woke up at 7 am. Then I couldn’t really eat, so I only had a coffee. I had never been to the South Kensington campus before, so I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be late: I had to be there by 11.30, therefore I was already there at 10.30. Despite the common belief that the ACEX building is difficult to find, it took me less than 5 minutes. Nobody was there yet, so I sat down on the sofas and waited… Waited… Waited… Then the other interviewees started to arrive, and I realised everyone wears suits or formal clothes – except me. I read on some website that “on the interview day you should wear whatever you feel comfortable in” hence I was wearing a blue hoodie, jeans and red training shoes… It was soooo embarrassing! I tried to be as invisible as possible, but you can’t possibly disappear in red shoes…
When I was looking at the students this year, they were all wearing formal. I think I was the first and last one who thought red trainers are a good choice for an interview in Imperial…
After we got our “welcome packs” (a folder with all the useful information about Imperial, accommodation, the course and the admission day), we went into a lecture theatre to listen to a “welcome talk”. That lecture theatre was the most high-tech classroom I have ever been to: two projectors, six whiteboards, 150 chairs, audio system, everything was clean and white, it looked all professional, it all looked an “excellent place to study”.
This is the ACEX250 lecture theatre, where I spend 50% of my life these days. I still like it, I love to be the first one to enter the room in the morning, because the lights are motion sensing and it’s funny to be the one who illuminates the whole room… There is only one unfavourable thing about it: the temperature. Even if it’s warm outside I have to bring a coat, because I would freeze to death during four lectures. It’s so cold one could say it converges to 0K from below…
The welcome talk was very impressive. I wanted to study in Imperial more and more minute by minute. Finding out new things about the course, the department, Imperial, the opportunities after graduation – I was astonished. Suddenly I realised I can’t mess up my interview because this is where I want to belong, Imperial is the most awesome place I had ever come across. And that realisation made me even more nervous…
In the past couple of admission days, I was watching the faces of the interviewees when they left the lecture theatre after this welcome talk. They looked amused and nervous: just as I did last year. The only difference is that they were talking with each other, while I was just following the crowd in silence and embarrassment due to my red training shoes…
The next thing was the free food. Yes, there is free lunch on the admission day 🙂 We had about half an hour to eat some food and ask some questions from the first/second year students who were there. I talked with some of them and I got even more nervous… I looked around the room full of top students from all over the world, and I started to lose the faith that I would ever get an offer from any UK university. Everyone looked so much smarter than me (red trainers weren’t helping…) and they were all talking about super-intelligent stuff and I could only understand half of what they said because of my poor English. This was the first day when I had to speak English for longer than an hour. It was exhausting – I had to concentrate really hard to understand what others said and I had to ask them to repeat it again a thousand times. After a while I gave up: I was just smiling, nodding and hoping it was not a question…
Being on the other side is better than I thought. Now that I was that first year student who walked around, mingled and answered the questions, I could see how nervous I could have been last year. I was trying to tell jokes and make them loosen up but I knew that’s an impossible mission. Most of them asked about the interview, a few of them about studying and during the three admission days I took part in I only had one question asking about how much free time I have…
After the free lunch, we started the tours. First we had a campus tour: we saw the library, Beit Hall, Princess Gardens, Ethos, the usual stuff. Then we had the long-awaited Pilot Plant tour! I think I fell in love with Imperial definitely on that tour. Our lovely Pilot Plant is such an amazing place, it’s a state-of-the-art carbon capture plant where we can practice all the skills we will need in real life. It’s a very unique thing and a huge opportunity for Imperial students. And you can make amazing selfies in those hardhats 😀 After that we also had a lab tour where they demonstrated some experiments we would do in second year.
To be honest, Pilot Plant is still the coolest thing in Imperial. Every morning when I enter the ACEX building, the first thing I see is the super-modern control room with these huge screens and colourful charts. We will have a longer Pilot Plant project next year, but we have already had an introductory session when we had to find all the heat exchangers. And there was also a competition for the best selfies…
Pilot Plant <3
Finally, we had our interviews… My interview was on the 6th floor of the Roderic Hill building – in other words: at the end of the world. It took us 5 minutes to get there and my nervousness started to increase exponentially. When I entered the room I didn’t really know what will happen, I had never been in an interview before. And I was still in my red trainers! The professor was very friendly, he asked a few technical questions (I couldn’t answer the first one…) and then the rest was more personal: he asked me about my motivations, plans after graduation, my family, my high school, these kind of things. Overall, it was a very nice experience, and I shouldn’t have worried at all! When I went back to the common room (after getting lost in the building about three times), I asked the other interviewees about their interviews. I realised all interview was different, because every professor asked their own set of questions. Some of them were more maths-focused, others were physics-related. But everyone said it went terrible, and nobody was satisfied with their performance…
After one year, I see my interview from a different perspective. It was more about testing my motivations and that I am really as enthusiastic as I said in my personal statement and less about technical skills. So, for all those prospective interviewees out there: don’t worry! If you get an interview invitation, you are on the right track! The funniest experience on the admission days was when I had to take students to the exact same office where I had my interview, to the exact same professor who interviewed me and who is now my personal tutor. It was hilarious, because I could see myself in all those students, in all those worried faces, and also in all those relieved faces after the interviews.
After speaking with quite a few interviewees, I wanted to call my family. But when I switched on my phone, there were two new emails on it: one from the University of Birmingham giving me a conditional offer and another one from the University of Cambridge inviting me for an interview. I could have thought: OMG!!! But at that very moment there was only one thing in my mind: sleeping. I spent an awfully long day speaking solely in English (which gave me a decent headache) and I had my first ever interview, so many things happened, so many new experiences… I was so tired I almost took the tube in the other direction… On the way home I was trying not to think of the results, but it was really difficult. I wanted to get an offer from Imperial really badly, but I didn’t know if they found my interview and my personal statement good enough to give me one. Would I get one? Wouldn’t I? Before that day I was nervous because of the interview. But almost immediately after that, I started to worry about the offer…
Well, it’s quite obvious I indeed got an offer from Imperial after all… 😀 I will never forget that day: I just finished a terrible interview in Cambridge when I checked my phone and there was an email from Imperial, saying:
Dear Dora Petra!
Having met you and assessed your application, we are convinced that you would do well in our Chemical Engineering course. Admissions are extremely competitive and the course is oversubscribed by nearly a factor of ten. We are therefore delighted to be in a position to make you an offer and congratulate you.
Welcome to my blog! Are you interested in Imperial? Or ChemEng? Or Woodward Hall? You are at the best place… I want to tell you everything from the moment of getting my @ic.ac.uk email address through the weekly Foundry Nights to my amazing Fluid Mechanics lectures. I hope you will enjoy it!
You might wonder what the categories mean at the side…
C12 – That’s where I live, the amazing Woodward Hall C block 12th floor! This category will include the ups and downs of living away from home and the joy when they introduce a new type of microwave food in tesco…
ChemEng – It is my course, MEng ChemEng 🙂 This will be all about the working bit of university life (who would have thought that going to Imperial actually involves studying?)
