Where should I start?… So here is this 1-month spring break, and your only task is to study-study-study. And you are supposed to be super-motivated, because you are an Imperial student and exams are coming and whatever. Well, let’s see how it is going so far. (Spoiler: terrible…)
The holiday started on the 24th March, Thursday. I decided to give myself a couple of days off after that horrible last two weeks with all those deadlines and rig building. I went home on Friday (Home, as in where my family lives, which is actually 15 mins from Woodward… Seriously, I can almost see their flat from my kitchen) because they have croissant and I don’t. Understandable 🙂
I planned to stay till Monday. But on Friday afternoon, I accidentally started watching Once Upon a Time on Netflix. Yes, I said Netflix. Perfect for binge-watching… And despite my continuous efforts to stop watching it and do something useful, I ended up watching the entire series – in 3 and a half days. (And a piece of advice from a serious binge-watcher: do NOT start ongoing series. Never. Just don’t.)
So after I successfully wasted the first couple of days, I planned to finally start revising. But my family… so every day when I mentioned I want to go back to Woodward, they turned into these “sales and marketing manager” type and listed all the things they have at home and I don’t have at Woodward: Nutella, croissant, waffles, a fridge full of food, unlimited orange juice and milk… And somehow I stayed till Thursday, when I finally had the strength to overcome the temptation and go back to my little room (where I actually have Nutella now, by the way…).
I even made a wonderful revision planner because I heard it can help the revision… It is carefully constructed based on the contributing percentage of the exam marks towards the final mark and my personal preferences. And how did it work so far? Well, on the first few days, I spent the entire days revising Maths…
Revision planner. Not quite useful but terribly colourful…
Then on the next Tuesday I went home because my mother texted me what’s for lunch, and I just couldn’t say no… And of course, they started the “marketing” all again, so I slept there and came back on Wednesday… Thursday and Friday were more or less good, I did some work (sponsored by caffeine) and I’m slowly getting into the revision-feeling… And I have less then a month till the exams!!!!
I’ve mentioned the rig building project already, but let’s refresh the basics again:
“Construction of a closed system rig to independently control level and flow rate of water between two tanks. Water must be delivered from one tank to the other tank while maintaining levels. No by pass or recirculation in only one tank will be allowed.”
We had a week to come up with a design, and then 7 hours to build it. It sounds manageable, but we had a couple other deadlines, so it was terribly exhausting and most of the time I was happy to be able to stand straight and not fall asleep…
First of all, the design. As I mentioned, my father and I drew a very creative and cool design, but the team decided that it’s not practicable because of the lot of calibrations and several types of flexible tube requirements… So we ended up with a very-very-very simple design: one tube up, one tube down with 1 valve. I just called it the “boring” design, but since we had to do a presentation about the “features” of the rig before the demonstration, the “boring” was changed to “simple, cheap and easy to use”… Power of the language 🙂
The benefit of a simple design is that you don’t need a fancy P&ID (piping and instrumentation diagram), you don’t have a long inventory and the description is 2 paragraphs. So, after we submitted our design on Tuesday, we could almost forget about the whole thing till the next Monday… Of course, just almost… The funniest thing about the rig building project was how the entire class worked together: as we did it in two cycles, the first already finished it by the time we, the second, started. So, we could ask them about everything and exchange ideas… Therefore, we ended up collecting bits and pieces like “one valve is not enough” or “be there early to get the best aluminium struts” or “do the calibration excel beforehand” or “use gate valve instead of ball valve”. It was hilarious when the weekend before the construction, I got a message from my teammates in almost every hour, starting with “one of my friends from Cycle 1 said…”.
So, when we went there on Monday, we already changed our design quite a lot, based on “friend-informations”. We ended up having two outlets with two valves and a float switch in the upper tank. So, time to build it! The first 3 hours were mainly about the aluminium strut: who would have thought that screwing together 10 pieces of aluminium with 18 angle brackets using 3 allen keys is so difficult? Our team was allocated a space at the end of the lab – the furthest away from the workshop where all the pipes, screws or angle brackets were. So my job was to run back and forth between the workshop and our rig, finding the right lengths of copper pipes with the perfectly fitting nuts…
On the afternoon session we finished the piping and we were the first to pour water into our system! It felt so good, we were so “ahead”. And then, the float switch happened… When we tried to test it, it didn’t work! Firstly, we changed how the circuit was connected together. Then changed the float switch. Four times. Then asked a GTA. And 2 other GTAs as well. So after 1.5 hours of trial and error, we finally made it work, but we couldn’t start the calibration, because the session ended.
So we had to do all the calibration on Wednesday, in the remaining 1 hour. One hour!!!! We were there super early so that we could start at 09:00:00 🙂 In the first 15 minutes we quickly did the flow rate calibration, then in the remaining 45 minutes we did the flow level. It was terrible! After adjusting the valves, we had to look at the flow level and from the very little changes determine if it is constant or going somewhere. I thought we will run out of time when we only had 3 measurements done from the 15 and 20 minutes left, but somehow, magically, we finished all the calibration, did the documentation by 10:05 and even laminated it 🙂
The last half an hour was terrible but then the demonstration went very-very well: we had to do 10 and 20 L/min and 20, 50 and 70% flow level. The funny thing is that we only calibrated it for even levels (20,40,60 and 80), so the 50/70 were quite an improvisation 😀 But apparently the professors liked it because they gave us 20 As and 8 Bs which is awesome! So overall I was quite happy and despite the difficulties, I think this rig building was one of the best experiences in Imperial so far. And I made a picture before we took apart our system (in about 15 mins…), so here it is:
Our beautiful rig 🙂
I recently heard that despite my initial belief that only my parents read my blog, there are actual real people out there who are interested in my stories… Thank you guys, I hope you like it! 🙂 And if you have any comments/questions, just post it down here and I’ll try and answer them 🙂
Since my fellow blogger colleagues started to write about their average weeks, I thought I might try something similar… The only problem was that I always forgot to start it in the past couple of Mondays 😀 But this time I didn’t, so here is
my average week as a ChemEng student and Woodward resident.
Monday
05:45 Time to wake up! I like to wake up early because the tube is horrible after 8, so I try to avoid that period. Hence I get up when an average Computing student goes to bed…
07:00 The weather is cold but the sun is shining, the tube is half empty, the birds are chirping. Sounds like a good start!
07:30 Whenever the weather is nice (i.e. not raining) I choose walking through Kensington Park instead of the Circle line. It’s wonderful in the morning, the grass, the pond, the swans, everything. I love it!
08:00 Sitting in the lecture theatre alone, my favourite! 😀 I had to watch some video recordings before the lectures (because the Separation Processes lecturer sends us the theoretical part in pre-recorded videos and then on the lectures we solve problems).
08:50 My classmates start to arrive…
09:00 Maths lecture! To be honest, that one coffee in the morning probably wasn’t enough, because I almost fall asleep… This is something which I didn’t believe before uni, but I totally understand now: from October till June you are constantly tired. Constantly. There is no such thing as enough sleep. And you are especially close to falling asleep when the lecturer talks about undamped driven oscillators as non-homogeneous second-order linear ordinary differential equations…
10:00 One of my favourites, Separation Processes 🙂 Today we talked about interfacial mass transfer in packed columns… Sounds fun, right? We discussed a couple of problems and calculated a couple of numbers. Easy 🙂
11:00 Thermodynamics, the “bugbear”. I don’t dislike Thermo, I am just not quite good at it… Today was about the connection and physical relevance of Gibbs energy and availability. Full of equations, full of new material, and I already see myself failing the June exam…
12:00 Finished for today! Before I came home, I visited the new Transport for London shop at the South Kensington tube station. Not to buy something, but just to look around, check the latest items… Have I mentioned that I am totally in love with the London Tube? I just love everything, the design, the map, the infinite amount of “stuff” related to the tube you can buy. My favourite of today was the moquette cushion with the classic Central line design. And I almost bought the colouring pencil set which features all the colours of the lines. Top item on my Christmas wish list!
12:30 I got home and ate some weekend leftover for lunch. The good thing about weekends is that I go home and my mum cooks amazing food. The good thing about Mondays is that I always have some leftover from Sunday and I can still eat my mum’s amazing food 😀
13:00 Time to do the lab report! We have to submit the conclusion and the evaluation for the latest experiments (Conduction&Diffusion and Flow lines). It sounds easy, but the data is quite confusing, the equations are strange, and I have absolutely no idea what the conclusion should include… But at least my desk looks cool 😀
Yes, I have a post-it obsession 😀
16:00 Well, I got stuck with the labbook, so I started to discuss a coding problem with my sister. Not so helpful for my lab report, but definitely more fun!
18:00 Dinner time 🙂 I accidentally ate a whole pack of oreo cookies…
19:00 It’s so easy to procrastinate when you are the editor of the Woodward newsletter, the admin of the Humans of Woodward Hall facebook page, and a student blogger. I feel like the universe doesn’t want me to finish my lab report…
20:00 University Challenge!!! When you are an Imperial student and the Imperial team is in the University Challenge, you just watch it. No matter how much coursework you have. You just watch it.
20:30 We lost it 🙁 But I unintentionally stayed in the kitchen, talking with my flatmates…
21:00 I should really go to my room and study…
21:30 Seriously, watching Big Bang Theory in the kitchen won’t give me a good lab grade…
22:00 Really… I should go to bed now…
22:30 I really shouldn’t start another movie…
23:00 I have 5 deadlines in the next 2 weeks, there is no time to sit in the kitchen…
23:30 So I went to bed at half past eleven. Again. Damn.
Tuesday
06:30 Good morning! To be honest, it took me 30 mins to get up. Maybe I shouldn’t have talked with my flatmates till almost midnight yesterday, I guess… But when you’re at uni, these things just sort of happen, and then you terribly regret it next morning. And you need an incredible amount of coffee even to be able to get dressed.
07:40 I was so tired that I didn’t realise my Travelcard has expired and I used my pay-as-you-go credit. I hate this day!
08:00 At least the Kensington Park is beautiful as always. Swans! 🙂
08:20 Time to do nothing for another half an hour… I usually read news and facebook, and stuff like that, but this morning I was just sitting there and listening to some music…
09:00 Maths lecture! We learnt about the general non-constant-coefficient linear second order ordinary differential equations this time, and let’s just say I kind of had a clue what was going on, but I’m not entirely sure about this…
10:00 Heat & Mass lecture, with heat exchangers, proving that it doesn’t matter if you have co-current or counter-current or any other type of heat exchanger, the governing equation is always the same. I.e. no need to memorise more than one, phew!
11:00 Properties of Matter!!! Yayy! Our PoM lecturer is such an amazing teacher, he talked about the conduction in crystals and he asked 5 people to come and “dance” the whole thing with him! 😀
12:00 Nothing better than 2 sandwiches as lunch… Just joking…
13:00 Chemistry tutorial 🙂 Our tutor is amazing, but kinetics is just… Kinetics. Rate law, reaction orders, differential method. Most of the time, I was just guessing the answers.
14:00 After a large latte and a well-deserved chocolate muffin, I sat down in the library cafe and started to work on the lab report. Choosing the best 24 pictures out of 200 is not so easy, and then writing footnote and everything, laborious. But after all, we have the chance to do this cool stuff, so I’m not really complaining 😀
16:00 My last Horizons session this year… We did an amazing summary of what we’d done in the past 8 weeks and we got little awards for our achievements (I got a joint “Most active member” award!!!! I am sooo happy 🙂 )
The final summary of our Horizons course. It was amazing!!!
18:00 I’m finally heading back to Woodward… The tube is full as usual, but that’s just how it is in London. You can get used to it after a while. I usually watch others and try to guess what they work and where they are from…
19:00 Have I mentioned that they started to sell Uncle Ben’s Sweet & Sour sauce in Tesco? I’d consider this as the greatest news of the month! I love sweet & sour. <3
I’m still better at taking food pictures than actually cooking…
20:00 I just started to work on the Woodward Newsletter, when I got a message from Andreea (the designer) to come over and interview some guys from her floor for the Humans of Woodward Hall project. One thing led to another and I ended up…
23:50 Going to bed at almost midnight. Again… 😀
Wednesday
07:00 We didn’t have a 9am today (rare exception), so I could sleep a healthy 7 hours. Makes such a difference!
08:15 Travelling in peak-time in the morning… Avoid it if you can, it’s terrible.
09:10 After a nice morning walk in Kensington Park, I tried to work on my lab report before our first tutorial. Why is it so difficult?
10:00 Maths tutorial. It might help to look at the problem sheet before the tutorial, but Maths is not too difficult, so at least I understood what was going on (as opposed to Chemistry…)
11:00 On our calendar it said: “Rig Building Briefing”. I had a vague idea that we’d need to build a rig as our last Lab project this year, but I had no idea about the when/where/what and how. (And I had to google what a “rig” is…) Well, we had a briefing, where they said:
“Construction of a closed system rig to independently control level and flow rate of water between two tanks. Water must be delivered from one tank to the other tank while maintaining levels. No by pass or recirculation in only one tank will be allowed.”
We have 8 days to come up with a complete design, and after that we’ll have 9 hours to build it. And it has to work. Properly, and without leaking. I had only one question: HOW ON EARTH WILL WE DO IT???
12:00 In the lunchtime I tried to look into the recommended textbook for the rig building, and I got more and more distressed. Like seriously, a rig?! HOW???!!!
13:00 My lab group agreed to meet and discuss the calculations, so we headed to the study rooms (challenge: find 3 empty seats in the study room in the Spring term). I don’t usually go to the study rooms because I prefer to study at Woodward at my desk where I have all my nice and colourful post-its but this time I spent a couple of hours there and realised a few things which I hadn’t seen before. Firstly, that the chairs are super-comfortable. And secondly, that it’s an amazing place. It’s designated to ChemEng students, so it’s very homely. And undergrad students from all years do their projects there, so for example there was a team on the opposite side of the table who did their third year Absorption column design, and it was just so… Cool! That’s why I love Imperial so much: I feel home here. And the ChemEng department is like a huge family. My huge family! <3
18:15 You know you have to stop when you close your eyes and the only thing you can see is Fick’s first law for diffusion… And when you open your eyes, there is this graph and you can’t decide any more if it’s generally this zigzag-shaped or just you are too tired to see straight…
Answer: generally zigzag-shaped…
19:00 I was waiting for this moment the whole day: eating the leftover sweet & sour chicken from yesterday!
20:00 I should really finish the Woodward Newsletter now. But just when I started, I got a message from Andreea to head down to the common room and interview some more people. Cool!
21:00 Have I mentioned that we have this new facebook page for our project? It’s getting extremely popular now! I love it! https://www.facebook.com/humansofwoodwardhall/
21:30 Time to finally finish up this Newsletter. Woodward needs some news!
00:30 DONE! I’m not as satisfied with this one as with the previous ones, but after all, I did it half-sleeping… 😀 My favourite part is the intro:
“Dear Woodward Citizens! In the midst of endless coursework and uncountable deadlines, the much awaited Woodward Newsletter is finally here! (No more pink in the lifts…) This week, it’s all about pictures: the Humans of Woodward Hall gets bigger and better, the Woodward Hoodie competition is coming to an end… And can you match the subwardens with their childhood photos? Read the newsletter and like, share, comment, vote, answer, but most importantly: enjoy!”
Thursday
06:20 It took me 20 minutes just to get to the out of my bed. Seems like another good day…
07:30 I love how there is always a “quote of the day” at the North Acton station. It’s usually about motivation and success, and it’s exactly what I need in the morning. JustLondonthings… <3
07:50 I just realised I haven’t yet mentioned the most important thing about Kensington park: the symmetric arrangement of the trees! I really like symmetry and perfect geometry, so looking around and seeing 10-15 trees perfectly aligned in a straight line is like getting a Christmas present… Infinite happiness!
08:15 Alone in ACEX250 lecture theatre, so usual, so good… That’s when I catch up with the news, write my blog, read my emails. People don’t understand how can I get up so early. And I don’t understand people who don’t understand it… 😀
09:00 We were supposed to have a Separation Mastery seminar, but the lecturer didn’t show up. Why I feel there is a problem with the mastery calendar again? It happened last week as well…
10:00 We were supposed to have a Mastery feedback session, but… Yeah, so we had 2 free hours. Perfect for finishing the conclusion of the conduction experiment…
11:00 Business Ethics. That is the strange subject which is taught by “outsiders”, lecturers from the Horizons program. We did case studies and talked about whether a business is a morally neutral activity (not really). Ohh, and by the way, the Separations lecturer came in at 11:00 to give the mastery seminar. We told him it was 2 hours ago… 😀
13:00 I’m getting better and better in eating my lunch and writing my lab report at the same time… Almost finished!
15:00 Separations tutorial. We discussed the liquid-liquid extraction, but everyone was terribly tired and disoriented so it was quite hopeless…
16:00 We came together with the rig building team to discuss the first steps in our rig building project. Well, first of all we tried to understand the handout and our tasks. Not so easy… But we have a clearer view now, and we’ve set up a vague idea about our rig. Hopefully it will work!
17:30 Ok, no more excuses. Let’s finish this conclusion thing!
18:15 Finished, printed, done! I could finally go home and eat something…
19:00 … Except that I didn’t have anything to eat… I made a quick cream of wheat, and regretted it immediately, because I realised today is our virtue area event…
20:00 … the Ice-cream party. So my calorie intake today was a smaller country’s yearly consumption, not so good. But the ice-cream was so good (and free!)
21:30 I was chatting with my flatmates because I was so tired (despite the two coffee I had) that I wasn’t able to start the next lab report.
23:30 After completing the risk assessment for the Friday’s lab session, I went to bed early. I mean earlier than in the previous days…
Friday
07:20 We didn’t have a 9am again (I don’t know what’s happened with the timetable, it’s quite unusual not to have a 9am), so I could sleep a bit longer.
08:30 There are these rare tubes which depart from the North Acton station therefore half empty even in peak-time. I managed to catch one of these, cool!
08:50 Kensington Park, classic foggy English weather, sunshine, chill temperature. The best way to start a Friday!
09:15 Let’s write my blog 🙂
10:00 Maths lecture, the usual first. It was about coupled linear systems and how to solve them using the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a matrix. I like matrices and for a change I wasn’t that tired, so it was quite a fun lecture.
11:00 Heat & Mass. Ohh god, these questions when there is a zero divided by zero in the log-mean temperature and the lecturer asks “who knows why is that and how to solve it?” and everyone starts to look at the previous notes and everyone wants to be the first to answer, and this excitement/nervousness/terrified feeling that you are sitting in the middle of the second row and the lecturer looks at you expectantly and you have absolutely no idea about the answer… Why am I sitting in the middle of the second row? I am so stupid 😀
12:00 Two hour lunchtime… There is definitely something wrong with our timetable 😀 Anyway, I worked on the lab report and started the PoM project (with the easiest bit: drawing the molecules).
14:00 The last lab session this year! I will miss it a bit, I got used to doing these experiments in my fancy Imperial lab coat 😀 This time we did the Bernoulli experiment, with a Venturi tube and 12 capillaries and hundreds of bubbles and fluctuating flow level and 120 different data points, and… Ahh, this picture says it all:
Venturi tube and rota meter. All about the flow…
17:00 Time to go home… There are these moments in life when you are too tired to think and you just do things by routine, well, this Friday was exactly like that. Getting up, going in, having lectures, eating sandwich, doing labs, coming home… If anything would have changed (like a delay on the tube or a forgotten lab book), I just couldn’t deal with it, because I was too tired… But fortunately, it was all good and usual 🙂
18:00 My new Friday obsession: Subway sandwich! A good honey oat bread with tuna and 4 different salads, nothing beats it!
19:00 Ohmm, I just watched the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory. I deserved it…
19:30 Another Friday thing: the point when you can no longer function. When you are just sitting at your desk, staring at your notes, but you can no longer see the words just black points vibrating, and you look at your lab report and it makes no sense at all, just random graphs and numbers… So at this point, you just have to stand up from your chair, turn around and collapse into your bed. Because your bed needs you. Period.
Saturday
07:30 I love waking up without an alarm. And then just lying on my bed and reading the news…
08:00 … and then getting up and getting ready for a productive day!
09:00 I have never been to the Woodward study rooms to actually study. I’ve been there for the Committee meetings a couple of times, but as my desk is full of distractions, I decided to go down and try this study room thing. I have to admit, they are amazing! Huge windows facing the cemetery and the barbecue garden, white desks/walls/chairs, zero distraction, quiet buzzing of the water pipes in the walls. The only disadvantage is the temperature: it is like ACEX250, terribly cold. I don’t know what’s this with Imperial and the temperature…
11:30 Wow, I’m done with the conclusion of the flow line experiment and it wasn’t even that bad! This study room definitely has a good impact on me… 🙂
12:00 My father took me home for lunch. Ohh I was sooo hungry! My mother made fruit soup and rice with two different steaks. Just because I was “visiting” and I am the “uni student who doesn’t eat anything all week”. Which is not true but who cares when you have proper food in front of you 😀
13:00 The good thing about going home is that you open the fridge and it’s full. Then you open the cupboard and it’s also full. And it looks like there is infinite amount of food there, so you just start eating… And eating… And eating… And then you start packing food to take with you… Last time I took an entire box of chocolate powder, a jar of Nutella and 4 cartons of orange juice, just because why not… My home is basically like a free Tesco 😀
14:00 Classic Saturday afternoon: I accidentally mentioned the rig building project to my father who immediately had a design idea in mind and we spend the next 1.5 hrs making it better and better…
16:00 My mother recently signed up for Netflix and since that we usually watch Once Upon a Time every time I go home. The problem is, we can’t stop. So we ended up watching one…
17:00 … two…
18:00 … three episodes straight. Here goes my productive day…
19:00 Well, as I was already there, I stayed home for dinner. You just cannot say no when your mother offers free food…
20:00 I guess I should go back to Woodward now… Well, after eating another 2 croissants. And a sandwich. 😀
21:00 After packing my bag full of food and taking another 4 cartons of orange juice (yes, I consume an extensive amount of orange juice…), my father took me back to Woodward.
21:30 There’s still time to save the day and be productive. I went down to the study rooms again to do some work…
23:30 … until two classmates from ChemEng came in to do some group work and the silence was gone. (Note that only ChemEng students are so crazy to be in the study rooms at 23:30 on a S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y.)
00:00 I guess I should go to bed now, right?
Sunday
07:30 I had an alarm for 09:00 to wake up in time for the Free Breakfast, but I just woke up at 07:30. Interesting…
09:00 The problem with the Free Breakfast is that it’s not enough. So even though it starts at 10:00 I usually go down 15 minutes earlier to be there when the pain au chocolates arrive. But today I took my laptop and did the lab report while waiting for the food, and I felt soooo productive 😀
10:00 Pain au chocolate! Yayyy! I lost count after 6, so I don’t know how much I ate…
10:15 And it’s gone. That was quick… I took a blanket from my room to balance out the temperature in the study rooms, and spent 2 hrs to finish the evaluation for my lab report.
12:00 Lunch: leftover from yesterday. Lovely!
13:00 After finishing the lab report, the next on my to-do-list is Mastery. It starts with this:
“Zerg is a planet with a gravitational acceleration of 1 m/s2…”
Ohh god, the terrible Mastery jokes…
15:00 This is worse than I thought. I need a break. Blogging time 🙂
16:00 I decided to go down to the study room and just finish this Mastery. It can’t be that difficult!!
18:30 After 2.5 hrs of pointless algebra and negative temperature values, I had to ask for some help. Fortunately, I live in Woodward, and the good thing about Woodward is that there is always at least one course mate around and available. Seriously, it is statistically provable…
21:00 Well, it makes a lot more sense now… One of my classmates explained the whole thing to me, and without laughing at me when I asked a couple of terribly stupid questions, and then a couple even more stupid ones… (Thanks again!!!) And I realised Thermo is really not my thing 😀
21:30 When you want to have a decent sandwich for dinner and you realise you ran out of bread. Arghhhh…
22:00 I set my alarm for 5:30 tomorrow, because I need to watch the Separations videos in the morning, so I should really go to sleep now, but I also want to finish and submit the Mastery sheet. I only need to type up the last 2 questions, can’t be that long, right?
23:30 … Submitted. Obviously, it IS long if you spend 30 minutes calculating a log-mean temperature again and again, because it becomes negative, and then you realise you were subtracting kelvin from celsius all along… I think it’s really time to sleep now.
That was a “short” summary of an average week as a ChemEng student. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did 🙂
People say ChemEng is a tough course. Let’s see why they might have this impression: here is my calendar for the next 13 days… [And – as everyone always talks about these anyway – I put how much each thing contributes to my grade this year in brackets] May the coffee be with me!
When I started Imperial, I wanted to focus solely on my studies. I did many “other stuff” in high school, but university is obviously a lot more difficult, so I decided to “stay out of any trouble” and just study-study-study. Well, I managed to do it for a couple of weeks… In the first few weeks, I only applied for the position of the Year Representative, but I didn’t get it, and looking back, I am actually glad. Being a year rep is mainly about arguing with the lecturers to extend a deadline or record the lectures. And I don’t really like arguing… I also applied for being a Student Blogger, and – as you may see – I got this one! I really enjoy writing about things, so this is not a work but more like a hobby for me. So far, it’s not that bad, right? Just writing about my university experiences in my free time, sounds manageable. But then suddenly…
Act 2 – The hall committee member
It all started with an email from the Wardens. It said:
“If you enjoyed freshers fortnight activities, if you have more ideas for better events, if you wish to improve life in Woodward, if you want to lively participate in the Hall community life… Then, YOU should be a Committee Member
Hall Committee Role and Structure: As part of the rent, every student contributes £2 per week to the hall’s student activities (or amenities) fund. This money is used to subsidise hall events such as those in Welcome Week which you’ve all just enjoyed and events throughout the year. The student activities fund is managed by the Hall Committee. This means The Committee’s responsibilities include planning, budgeting and running hall events, reporting on and discussing all hall activities and issues in as far as they affect residents, acting as representative for your designated group of students and making plans for the following year’s Welcome Week events. The Woodward Hall Committee will consist of 12 student representatives (1 from each area defined by your virtues).”
I highlighted the words which caught me… 😀 I immediately knew that this role was designed for me. Representing students, planning events? Anytime, all the time! So I applied to be the hall committee member of my virtue area, and I was elected! To be honest, I didn’t think about the time and commitment it requires until I was elected because I just didn’t care. I knew I want to do this, I knew I would terribly regret it, if I didn’t apply, so I just applied. And suddenly I found myself sitting on committee meetings every second Sunday, enjoying the ability to make changes, to plan the events, to be “behind the scenes”. That’s what I like, that’s who I am. So why should I fight against it? … Well, my coursework and my grades were not so happy about it… 😀
Act 3 – The newsletter editor
This one was kind of incidental… I was sitting on one of the first meetings, and the wardens said we should apply for different roles in the committee. Chair, vice chair, treasurer, secretary were the main options. But then one of the wardens just briefly mentioned that “you might also help out with the newsletter, though I don’t know if they need any help”. And that was it. I just had this feeling again, that “I’ll regret if I don’t apply immediately”. I tried the vice chair, too, but it was fairly obvious that I wouldn’t get that. So I just submitted a few lines about why I want to be part of the newsletter team, and the next week I was already doing the first edition. As it turned out, two subwardens were doing the newsletter before, but they mainly focused on the housekeeping news like “don’t leave a mess in the kitchen”. So I came up with a couple of ideas and we slowly started to include them. I’ve always liked reading other people’s stories and there is this amazing page called Humans of New York, so I thought why don’t we do a Humans of Woodward Hall column? This turned out to be so successful that now we have our own Facebook page! My other favourite column is the “Cooking made easy by Dora” which I already wrote about in a previous post. But in general, I love every bit about our newsletter, from editing the texts through making the interviews to seeing the final product in the lifts for two weeks. But why would be being a student blogger / hall committee member / newsletter editor (and just incidentally a first year ChemEng student) enough for me? …
Act 4 – The hall senior
Well, this one only starts from October, but it required a couple of hours of work already. Due to the limited number of places, Imperial only guarantees accommodation for first year students. The only option to stay in halls is if you become a hall senior (second/third/fourth year student who looks after the freshers and helps running the events). I got an email again…
“Hall Seniors are Imperial undergraduate student who loved halls so much that they decided to come back for another year. They are approachable, highly motivated, and hardworking students that voluntarily assist the Wardening Team in helping first year students settle into College life and organising events throughout the year. In return, Hall Seniors can take advantage of excellent living conditions in a fun and challenging social environment, and will gain valuable teamwork, organisational and leadership experience. Successful candidates must be available to move in to Hall at the start of Hall Senior Week, i.e., one week prior to the start of the Autumn Term. Hall Seniors should be prepared to play an active role on the Hall Committee and be present to ensure the smooth running of hall events.”
I can’t highlight anything: the whole thing was exciting. So I wrote my personal statement for the position, applied, and waited. Then I got this email:
“Congratulations! You have been invited to attend the Woodward Hall interviews for becoming a hall senior next year.”
And only two hours after my interview, another email:
“Congratulations, Your application to be a hall senior at Woodward hall has been successful! We would like to extend a warm welcome from the current Wardening and returning Hall Senior team to the halls, and hope you will be able to join us next year for what will be an even bigger, better, more fun packed year here at Woodward.”
I am soooo happy! I have so many ideas about next year and so many plans, and I wish it had already been October, I want to move in, I want to help, I want to……… Ahh 😀
So the story continues, there are still several positions I can apply to… 🙂
This is the fancy name of the lab sessions, something which we only started in the spring term, but I can understand now why… Even though we only have 2 sessions in approx. every two weeks, it requires a lot of preparation and work afterwards. In short, it is extremely time-consuming.
In my high school we didn’t have lab sessions, because my school didn’t have a lab. I did only a few experiments before uni (usually in summer camps or in other schools) but I think we can easily say I had no experience in labs. Literally, none. I didn’t even know what a lab book is…
So, that’s how I started my first year. I was a bit worried that I would be the one who spills sulphuric acid on the table or accidentally drinks the hydrochloric acid. None of these have happened (yet) but I’m still not really confident, so I usually ask about a thousand questions before doing anything. Fortunately the GTAs (graduate teaching assistants) are very helpful, and answer even such silly questions like “where is the distilled water” or “how to use the distilled water flask” or “why is the distilled water flask not working” or “how to refill a distilled water flask” (yes, they all happened…).
I was super-excited before my first lab session. I’ve seen the labs on the admission day (it’s part of the “let’s look around” tour) but this was the first time I could finally go in as an “Imperial student”. And then, I got flu… I missed the first two lab sessions, all the introduction, the “where is what”, everything. That’s why I still don’t know how to refill a distilled water flask…
Everyone has a lab partner, because it is more fun to struggle with the Ubbelohde Viscometer if you have someone to complain to… My lab partner is a very tolerant guy, he answers all my questions like “how am I supposed to wash up a one-meter long burette” or “does your graph also look like a chipped mug” and when I can’t refill the distilled water flask for the third time, he simply refills it for me! (If you’re reading it: Thanks! 🙂 🙂 )
The assessments are a bit strange… From the first two experiments, we had to make a poster. They said we shouldn’t spend too much time on it, because it only counts 10% to the overall lab mark. They recommended 6 hours, I spent 12 hours on it… It’s not that much, right? 😀 I tried to make something unique, something new. Well, ours was definitely very exceptional, according to the markers it had “nice font and attempt to do something different”.
For the remaining five experiments, we have to gradually do more and more. For the third experiment, we only had to submit the data collection, which is basically the raw data we wrote down during the measurements. However, for the fourth, we had to do the data collection and the data analysis. 15row x 100column Excel tables, 4 graphs, 8 pages… Sounds fun, right?
First version… It seems a bit strange, don’t you think?Second version, after spending half an hour checking every line of calculations…
For the next experiment, we will have to do the conclusion, and then the evaluation. Whatever those might mean…
Let’s talk a little bit about the experiments themselves: in the first year we do seven experiments (and a rig building, but I have absolutely no idea what that will be about…). The “Great Seven” are Conduction, Flow lines, Bernoulli’s principle, Solutions & Reactions, Critical Point, Viscosity and Complexometry. Having missed the first two sessions, I’ve only done the Viscosity and the Complexometry so far.
The former was about three different types of viscometers: falling ball, Ubbelohde and rotational. With the first two we had to measure water on different temperatures. (Let me tell you a secret: the Ubbelohde is terribly boring. You do 3 measurements, then wait 15 minutes to warm up the water for the next temperature…) With the rotational viscometer, we had to measure such funny things like ketchup, honey and shower gel. I got the honey… There is only one trick here: you cannot eat it 🙂
The Complexometry was several titrations about calcium: standard calcium solution, milk and calcium tablets. My favourite things about titration are definitely the wonderful colours:
Before…… and after!And – of course – the inevitable selfie 🙂
And what is the most surprising in the lab sessions so far? The enormous amount of waste we produce… I still have these instincts from high school that distilled water is a rare, precious thing and safety gloves need to be reused infinitely many times. But here we wash up with distilled water and use a new pair of safety gloves nearly every hour… I think I’ll never get used to it…
The Spring test is some kind of “preparation” for the final exams in May/June. A “taster”, where we can get to know what kind of problems to expect, how to deal with exam stress, how to use the calculator… It counts 5% in the end of year mark, which is lower than the Matlab test (6%). That’s where things went wrong…
Not every subject is “spring test subject”, only Fluid Mechanics, Properties of Matter, Mathematics, Thermodynamics and Process Analysis. And even from these, not every lecture is “spring test material”, just the previously specified ones… And we were told that we shouldn’t worry, it’s an easy test, we should spend about a week on revision, that is more than enough. Well…
The problems started when I realised I didn’t know where to start. I made this amazing list about the lecture notes I should re-read:
Spring test revision list
… and I started to re-read them. As I already mentioned in a previous post, I don’t really know how to study, so this re-reading was not very effective. I made some notes and I felt I understood the material. But then came the shock: I tried to solve a Spring test past paper. And I couldn’t answer a single question on it… Of course, this is a normal thing, you just need more revision and it’ll be fine, right? Except that the test was on Friday, and I realised I need more revision on Thursday at 3pm…
So I spent the rest of my Thursday desperately trying to figure out how to quickly squeeze as much knowledge as possible into my poor little brain… I made a few summary sheets, because I love colours and I love summaries, but they were just hopeless attempts to save the day.
Colours, colours everywhere…
The next day I woke up very early, and I went through a past paper for some final bits of information… And then at 10am I went into the room knowing full well that I would fail this exam. In the morning we had 3 hours for 3 subjects, and then another 3 hours in the afternoon for the remaining 2.
I don’t know the results, and I didn’t want to discuss my performance with my classmates, so I will wait and see what the markers think about my “work”. But I know that I am satisfied with only one out of the 5 subjects, and you can imagine what that means in terms of marks…
To sum up, I was too light-minded. I thought 5% is just not worth revising that much. And then, when it hit me that I should’ve studied much more (because there is always this “moment” when it hits you, sooner or later…) it was already too late. I made a mistake which I hope I won’t make again and the only good thing is that it was “just” the spring test, not the actual summer exams. I’ve written about the emails we get if we do particularly well on an exam, but there is this other type of email, too, for those who did particularly badly… And it’s just a matter of time when I will get a notification from the Outlook app about an email with the subject “Spring test results – you have an urgent appointment with the director of course operations”…
So, what have I learnt from this?
1. Don’t wait till the very last minute with revision. Take a deep breath and stop procrastinating.
2. Focus on what will be asked on the exam. Start with doing a past paper.
3. After you messed up, don’t expect others to understand. It was all your fault…
And what’s the good news? (Because everything should end with some positive thoughts…)
We got an email yesterday with a nice little Excel containing the summer exam timetable.
Let’s try this revision thing again, this time for 73% of the year!
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. 🙂
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.
