For theatre addicts London is like a bar for alcoholics: a paradise and a hell at the same time. Since the beginning of my PhD I’ve spent a bit too much money and time on plays and musicals — more than I’d ever publicly admit. Meanwhile I’ve mastered the art of getting cheap tickets, so if you’re also a theatre lover on a student budget, read on! This article isn’t sponsored by any of the companies I mention (unfortunately).
The Globe, one of my favourite London theatres.
Install TodayTix on your phone. You’ll be able to book tickets with one swipe, get some additional offers (e.g. 24-hour-long sales) and, most importantly, participate in lotteries. This way I managed to get affordable tickets for “Everybody’s Talking about Jamie” just a few hours before the show — and the seats were great!
Check out Shakespeare’s Globe. In the summer season standing tickets cost only £5, the price of lunch in the student canteen. Yes, you’ll have to queue before the play to get a good spot. Yes, your legs will hurt after three hours of “Macbeth”. And yes, you’ll get cold and wet in case of bad weather. But you’ll also get a chance to interact with the actors and literally get inside the play. Even if you’re not a fan of Shakespeare, give it a go, as the theatre features plays by other authors as well.
Join Entry Pass at the National Theatre. If you’re 16-25, you can sign up for free to get £7.50 tickets for all plays, from ancient to modern, from funny to tragic, from classic to experimental. Some plays took my breath away (“Amadeus”), some almost bored me to death (“Follies”); all in all, I book for every season, before I get too old.
Consult the Theatre Monkey. Especially if you decide to splurge on some must-see play, make sure you get the best possible seat for your money. This website contains advice on choosing seats in all London theatres.
Get £10 tickets at Young Vic. For under 25-year-olds they offer £10 tickets for each play as well as “lucky dip” tickets: you find out your seats on the day of the show.
While London isn’t the cheapest place to live in, here you can enjoy theatre even if on a budget, especially if you’re lucky enough to be young and a student. Now, enough writing, time to book some tickets!
If you love nature, animals and science, you cannot miss the Natural History Museum. You’ll be impressed viewing their dinosaurs or experiencing an earthquake simulation in a Japanese store.
Last Friday after class, I visited the NHM as it was hosting a special evening event about the Blue Planet II TV show. I’m a huge fan of this BBC series that manages to capture the wildlife in the planet’s oceans with the latest technologies and innovative filming methods.
The Natural History Museum invited the producers to show exclusive behind-the-scenes footage and share more about the making of the TV series. You could also meet scientists that explained more about the wildlife seen in the show using the museum’s collections of corals, whales, fishes and more.
V&A Museum
Victoria and Albert Museum is the most elegant and fashionable museum I’ve ever visited. You can see from the finest jewellery collection to special exhibitions that in the past have even included Kate Moss’ wedding dress.
If you ever need a moment for inspiration too see great art or take a break, just go down the road, and enjoy some of the displays at the V&A.
Science Museum
The Science Museum is literally next door to Imperial. You can learn a lot from mathematics to biology, but you can also interact with latest technologies such as Virtual Reality. If you need even more than this, you can also watch Star Wars at their independent cinema. It has one of the largest screens in the UK and every ticket helps support the Science Museum’s work to inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers and Jedi Knights.
London, known to many as “The Big Smoke” has historically, and still today, been synonymous with air pollution, traffic jams and intense urban hustle and bustle. BUT, there is another side to the city – its “greener” side. London, despite the nicknames and assumptions, actually boasts 8 Royal Parks and countless smaller green spaces. So, if you need an escape from city life – the parks are a perfect saviour!
Hyde Park
Hyde Park Italian Gardens. Photo credit: Panos Asproulis from London, United Kingdom / Wikimedia.
In my opinion, probably one of the best known parks in London for multiple reasons. Found in the Paddington area, this park is HUGE – 142 hectares to be exact. Hyde Park is home to many events including an annual music concert and the popular winter attraction; Winter Wonderland. Speaker’s Corner is an especially famous spot in the park – filled with soapbox speakers talking (often at the top of their lungs) about a huge variety of things from religion all the way to free hugs – if you want controversial/unique views then this is the place for you. Hyde Park is wonderful in the summer; pull up a deckchair with a good book and an ice-cream, enjoying the sun and heat in central London – what could be better! Plus, if you fancy it, you can hire a pedalo on the water amongst the swans and other birds.
Kensington Gardens
Sunset over Kensington Palace – taken by yours truly
Adjacent to Hyde Park, Kensington Gardens is the definition of a Royal Park – home to Kensington Palace which has been/is home to some of the Royals. Imperial students are also well acquainted with the park, often walking through it to get to campus from Paddington. In the early morning, it is often filled with dogs and their owners frolicking around (the dogs that is, owners not so much) which certainly makes the bleary eyed walk to university a little better – bringing smiles to many. The colours of the trees in summer and autumn are truly stunning, as are the parakeets that fly around, often perching on individuals that hold their hands out. Interestingly though, no-one I’ve met knows where they came from, there are many different theories…
Holland Park
And breathe…Holland Park’s Kyoto Garden, where I go to escape when the city gets a bit too much!
HANDS DOWN MY FAVOURITE PARK IN LONDON. Found around High Street Kensington, this park is another favourite with dog owners (no surprise really – it’s a park in a city…) Home Opera in Holland Park in the summer, this park is full of little surprises. My personal favourite is the Kyoto Garden, complete with a small waterfall, pristine colourful trees and koi carp, this little slice of Japan is my favourite place to take time out when it all gets too much. Also, the park has peacocks! Beautiful, especially in summertime when the males are in full plumage often displaying at passers-by. Honestly, they act like celebrities in front of the paparazzi – unbelievable!
Regent’s Park
Regent’s Park bandstand. Photo credits: Wikimedia user Ed g2s
Found in the Camden area, this park is home to an open air theatre and ZSL London Zoo. I haven’t properly visited, but it is on my to do list! It is also home to Primrose Hill – a huge hill at one side of the park with legendary views of London – perfect for a romantic summer evening picnic 😉
Richmond Park
Richmond Park deer…before Fenton arrived. Photo credits: Wikimedia user Amertner
The largest of the Royal Parks (edging out Hyde Park for the top spot) at 955 hectares – HUGER. It is also home to a large amount of wildlife, therefore rightly designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, National Nature Reserve and Special Area of Conservation. Richmond Park is famous for its fallow deer (and a pug called Fenton, but that’s another story…) and many rare beetles. On another interesting note, for those who aren’t nature nerds – it is also home to the Royal School of Ballet.
So that’s a round up of the many green spaces in London, of course there are many more parks – all steeped in history and cultural significance, but since I’m not a historian I won’t discuss that here…
London is a big place, 1,572 km² to be exact, so you definitely need to know your way around. Whether it’s to shave off those precious seconds on the morning commute so you can lie in bed that bit longer or simply because you don’t want to walk in the rain, one of the most iconic transport systems has got you covered.
The Underground: A.K.A The Tube
Riding at high speed in a metal tube down a very dark tunnel, miles underground sounds like a great way to travel, right? Well, that’s basically the Tube! The massive network of underground tunnels crisscrossing all over London is one of the quickest (and more pricey) ways to get round on public transport. The underground system is currently made up of 14 lines, each one useful and unique in their own way:
Bakerloo – Think old and rickety but ultimately useful line. Beware of the seats though, if someone sits next to you, you will end up jumping 3ft in the air – just accept it.
Central – If you manage to avoid getting your head decapitated by the closing doors, enjoy a journey in a moving furnace – especially in summer!
Circle – The one that never turns up. Trains every 10 minutes + tourists = HELL.
District – Probably one of the most useful lines, especially when living further out in later years – is there anywhere this doesn’t go!?
Hammersmith and City – See Circle line, but with less tourists.
Jubilee – Think fancy businessman with slick silver hair that is almost always on time.
Metropolitan – Wait, this is a thing!? (never used it in my life)
Northern – As useful as the District line but just cooler and more edgy.
Piccadilly – Hello, 1973 calling – We’d like our trains back please.
Victoria – Ah, sweet sweet Victoria, fast and reliable like a tube should be.
Waterloo and City– See Metropolitan line.
DLR (Docklands Light Railway)– There are no drivers – that’s totally normal…
Overground – Great for getting to those hard to reach, far out places that are still in “London”.
Trams – I’ve never used them but I like the colour green…
BONUS: Crossrail/Elizabeth Line – a new Underground line coming in full in 2018 (#hypeisreal)
Of course, riding the Underground comes with some serious etiquette – here are the essential Do’s and Don’t’s of the Tube:
Do:
Stand on the right, walk on the left of an escalator
Link your 16-25 railcard with your Oyster (money saving everywhere)
Stand behind the yellow line – tubes create a lot of wind when they arrive at the platform (not that kind of wind…)
Mind The Gap – you’ll hear that so much, imitating it will become your signature party trick.
Be nice to the staff – they have a rough day most of the time dealing with tourists, grumpy Londoners and working underground.
Know where you want to go before you get in – achievement unlock: True Londoner.
Don’t:
Stand on the left of an escalator – just don’t.
Crowd at the platform/tube carriage entrance – move on down y’all there’s plenty of space!
Drop your phone down the gap – they’ll have to stop the everything all because you had to like that meme whilst getting on the Tube…
Put your bag on the seat next to you at peak times; a bag is not a person – it doesn’t need a seat
Most of all, enjoy riding the Tube – it’s a magically unique experience that gets you efficiently (most of the time) from A to B with some surprises along the way (think signal failures, leaves on the track and mariachi bands).
I have never been to an Imperial Open Day before. When I was applying, I lived in Hungary, so I couldn’t just turn up on a random Wednesday at London… But yesterday, I finally attended one of these, and it was a-ma-zing. So let’s start from the beginning…
I got an email a couple of weeks ago. Perks of being a student blogger: when there is a marketing work, you’re the first to be asked 🙂 So they asked me if I liked speaking in front of a lot of people, because there will be a talk on the Open Day where they need students (i.e. student bloggers) to present. Well, I obviously signed up within 2 seconds 😀 Then we needed to choose a topic. Course? Societies? Halls? Other? I did what I usually do in these kind of situations: I asked my sister… Incidentally, she was also attending the Open Day, so I basically did a non-representative audience poll… 😀
[Side-note: in case you’re wondering about the contradictions in my family history. My father moved to London 3 years ago, my sister and brother also moved here half a year later. I stayed in Hungary with my mother because I had some unbelievably awesome teachers in high school whom I didn’t want to leave, so I finished the school there and applied to uni in the UK. My sister finishes sixth form next year, so she is currently in the application stage, going to open days and checking uni websites all the time…]
Anyway. So I choose to talk about Woodward Hall because my sister said she is not interested in my course, and I don’t do any societies (yeah, I know, I am kind of boring…). I submitted the powerpoint and then prepared for the day (meaning I put aside my favourite Imperial sweatshirt so it would be wearable on the talk…).
On the tube to South Ken, we saw three boys, who looked like “uni applying” age. Me and my sister started to make bids on whether they’re also going there or not. Then they started to pass around a paper with the Imperial logo and a big barcode… Ahh well, if the great and wonderful Imperial College London has an Open Day, suddenly everyone is going to South Ken…
To those who have never been to an Open Day (like me before yesterday…) here is how you can imagine the whole thing. There is a main registration tent on Queen’s Lawn, and also that’s where the Accommodation Tours start from. Yes, they do tours to Beit, Southside, Eastside, even Wilson. No, they don’t do tours to Woodward 😀 Then there is the Queen’s Tower Rooms (that big thing under the Sherfield Building) where all the departments and other things like Horizons and the Union have separate stalls with flyers and free pens and nice people from the departments who are happy to tell you all the nice things about the courses… Then there are the departmental talks: the Admission Tutors talking about what it requires to get an offer from Imperial. And then there are other talks like the “This is Imperial” talk, in which I took part 😀
When we arrived there was an awfully long queue to the registration where we got our goodie bags (I got one, too! #happiness) and some leaflets about the day. They were handing out last year’s Accommodation Guide, which reminded me…
… I did an email interview a few weeks ago about my hall. (Yes, marketing stuff: student bloggers first.) They said they’re doing the new Accommodation Guide and they needed some quotes about the halls. Well, I wrote a page 😀 But I never heard back, so I didn’t know if any of what I said got printed. I wanted to check though, so I walked around and found the accommodation stall. I asked if I could get the latest and newest Guide (they looked at me like “what are you talking about” but then they pointed me to the one person who knew what I was talking about and he gave me the shiny “fresh out of printing” flyer). And I quickly scrolled through until I found this:
#lifegoals
Woooooooooooooowww I am in the official Imperial Accommodation Guide! This day couldn’t have started any better… After I sent the picture to my mother and posted it to Facebook, I showed my sister where her first open day talk was, and I went to my “second home”, ACEX building. Because it’s one thing to choose the topic for the talk and do the powerpoint presentation, but writing a speech is also useful… So I sat down on my favourite sofa outside LT1 and started to write the speech. Or at least I was trying to write the speech. But there were two departmental talks in ACEX (ChemEng and MechEng) and I just couldn’t sit there and watch all those lost souls walking around in despair trying to find LT1 (even though there were arrows and signs all over the place…). So I started to play the usual “Can I help you?” which I already mastered at the Imperial Festival…
(Question to those who were 40 minutes late to a 1-hour presentation: just why bother?…)
So after the presentation started and everyone found their lecture theatre, I started to work on my speech again. I wrote down a couple of jokes and tried to memorise them, but if there is one thing I am terrible at, it’s rehearsing for a presentation. I am more of a “standing up there and improvising” kind of person…
Once my sister finished her departmental talk, we had lunch then went to my talk at the Pippard Lecture Theatre. When I got there, the other bloggers said we have 3 minutes each. Well, if there is one another thing I am terrible at, it’s keeping the time limit for a presentation…
The first speaker was the Head of Student Recruitment and Outreach who talked about how awesome place Imperial is, and showed some numbers and some general information about the College. Then the next one was the Deputy President of the Union, who talked about how awesome the Union is, and showed some numbers and some general information about the Union. Then Franz was the next, who talked about how big London is compared to St Martin. Then I was the next… And Harry after me, who talked about how he built a hovercraft and joined the gaming society.
So my presentation was about Woodward Hall. My favourite hall <3 I was talking about how far it is, how great the community is, how quiet the cemetery is, how many pizzas they ordered and how good the view is from the kitchen. I think the audience liked it (they laughed a lot, that’s a good sign, right?).
After that, we looked around in the Library then went back to ACEX where the last of the three departmental talks was just about to start. I asked Dr Kogelbauer if I could just sit in without registration, because I have never been to an open day talk before and… I was curious, you know 😀
So me (who already finished the first year of ChemEng) and my sister (who wants to apply to AeroEng) went to a lecture for students who are thinking about applying to ChemEng. Logical, right? But even though it doesn’t make a lot of sense, I loved every bit of it… Dr Kogelbauer talked about what chemical engineering means, what the course involves, what the different options in the later years are, and most importantly, what the entry requirements are.
It was the kind of talk after which I was like “OMG I want to apply to ChemEng immediately” and then I realised I am already here… Ohh I love our Department so much 😀
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 🙂
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!
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:
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?)
