Well, first of all, they’re difficult. Especially if you had no “revision strategy” at all, and you have a tendency for procrastination. Like me. They’re also difficult, because this is Imperial. And you know, it’s the best uni in the world… So let me tell you a few things about exams…
1. You can get used to sleeping on the tube. That precious 30 mins can’t be wasted, so you need to use it the best you can: put on sunglasses, sit on the end seat and relax. Don’t forget to display your ID card (or at least some Imperial badges) so people don’t think you were partying yesterday…
2. There is this urban legend about “taking a 20-min nap makes you more productive”. Well, I tried… I was about to fall asleep between two maths problem sheets yesterday, so I thought “why not try this”. I looked at my bed: full of opened folders, papers piled up everywhere, all sorts of data sheets and tables. Then I looked at my desk: laptop, maths problem sheet, refill pad, thousands of identical pens, post-its, a massive maths textbook… And I realised I can’t put the stuff on my desk onto my bed or vice versa, because they’re both full. So I chose the easiest option: putting my pillow on the floor… It worked! 🙂
3. Revision lectures are… supposed to be useful. And most of the time they are, but when you live in Woodward and it takes more time to just get to the lecture than the lecture itself, it’s just… AHH
4. The guys in Subway will learn your name. The guys in Domino’s will at least consistently misspell it the same way. But when it says “limited edition” in Burger King and you already had 3 of it, well, it’s time to think about your eating habits…
5. You want to cry. But you don’t have time for it…
6. You have 2 new best friends: Ibuprofen and Paracetamol. (Disclaimer: Taking medicine on a daily basis is definitely wrong! But having a 2-day headache nearly every week and having a terribly weak hand which basically needs to be constantly covered in Ibuprofen gel just to be able to move it, it’s even worse…)
7. You haven’t seen your flatmates in a month. Or two.
8. Your conversation with your friends looks something like this:
– How did you get pi/2 on the maths problem sheet 8 / question 7 / iii / b?
– Have you done the 2014 POM past paper? Do you think we will get something similar or more like the 2012?
– Why is heat&mass so bloody difficult????
– Hahahahahahaha I just managed to round 4.6508*10^-26 to 4.661…
– Do you know how to calculate the integral of (cos(x))^3? I don’t understand the Wolfram Alpha explanation… [To which my sister answered: don’t do maths at 22:40!!!]
9. Every time someone asks “how is revision” you just stare at the table. And pretend that you are not in this universe.
10. And the most important: the relativity of time has never been this true. You wake up, do 3 problem sheets and 2 past papers and it’s already 10pm. But when you think about when your exams will be over, it’s like they will never end. Seriously. Never. And then you look at your calendar and it says your last exam is in less than 3 weeks. Not that bad, huh? And then you realise you have 6 exams in between. [insert desperately crying emoji here]
Revision is going wellterrible ok. I still expect to fail my exams, but at least not with 0%. I made a new revision planner (because the previous one was not effective enough), this is a bit like when I download stuff and there is this progress bar and it slowly fills and… well, you get the idea. Except that this one down here, it fills VERY slowly…
Th/theoretical part, Ps/problem sheets, Pp/past papers, the little stars are indicators of percentage towards final mark
I also found out that the study rooms are amazing. Seriously, they are so awesome. Look at this:
Acton cemetery – official sponsor of my Imperial degree
What else? Ohhh yeah, The Night Manager… So, as I mentioned before, I have this problem with series and binge-watching. This time, I accidentally started The Night Manager (I should log out from imdb.com, it causes all the trouble). The good thing is, this one is just 6 episodes and not ongoing. The bad thing? I watched all 6 episodes without even standing up… (About the series: Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie against each other, at various locations including London and Switzerland. Let me start again: Tom Hiddleston. Tom. Hiddleston. <obsessed fangirl screaming>. )
Hmm and the strawberry rice pudding is on sale in Tesco. #faithinhumanityrestored
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!!!!
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 🙂
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… 🙂
I’ve already mentioned that I’m terrible at cooking… (A piece of advice: try to “cover the basics” before coming to uni. Your life will be so much easier if you don’t have to google how to make pasta…). On the other hand, I love baking! (Not so useful at uni, but anyway…) So I brought a muffin tray and my favourite bowl from home, bought a dry measuring cup so now I can bake muffins any time I like! 🙂
The first Woodward Muffin Time was just before Valentine’s Day. We have this nice project called Woodward Newsletter (I am the article editor, because I don’t do enough things already… 😀 ) and I have a personal column in it, called “Cooking made easy by Dora”. But this time we made a very special Valentine’s Edition and I decided to do something different: muffins! So it became “Baking made easy” and I finally had a reason to bake 😀
I could go on and on about how beautiful it was, but here is the proof:
Valentine’s Day <3
And that’s our wonderful Woodward Newsletter (I am totally in love with the design, Andreea is amazing!!!)
A page from our Woodward Newsletter – so beautiful!
Then yesterday I had this insuperable desire to bake muffins again… (If you can choose between Chemistry homework, Properties of Matter project, Business Ethics essay and muffins, what is the only logical option? Yes, of course, I chose that one, too…) So this time I decided to use Nutella and banana, because I don’t consume enough calories already ( 😀 )
I wanted to take a before-after shot, but because of undisclosed reasons I forgot to take the after one… 😀 So here is the “before”:
The exact recipe is so secret, even I don’t know it: I prefer approximating the quantities as a true engineer 😀
The result was amazing! (Full of calories, but who cares?) I made the muffins because Andreea (the super-talented designer of the Woodward Newsletter) had her final exams this week and I wanted to surprise her with a little something… Fortunately she didn’t forget to take pictures of them:
Having flu (to be more precise, missing an entire week from school) made me realise that I should live more healthily. I’ve always known that I am not the Embodiment of Health, but somehow I managed to get away with it without any serious consequences. But this time, it was different… And I decided to change a few things in my lifestyle. It is not as easy as it sounds… 🙂
First of all, I started to pay attention to my “five-a-day”. To those from outside the UK: this is an expression used to promote eating at least five portions of fruit/vegetables per day. And let’s just say, in the autumn term I barely had my one-a-day… So I stocked up on extensive amount of bananas and tangerines (since these are the only two fruits I’m willing to eat with daily frequency) and started my new diet. After one week, I’ve already got bored with them. 🙂 But I don’t care: I have to eat them because I don’t want to miss lectures again. And if I have to choose between a boring tangerine and a missed lecture, we all know what my answer will be…
My second “post-flu resolution” was to minimise my Tesco ready-meal consumption. In the autumn term, I ate ready-meals six times a week (and it sounds even terrible if I tell that there are only 3 or 4 different types I like…). I know it’s not very healthy but I was telling myself “I don’t have time for cooking, that’s my only option”. I only cooked once in every two weeks, when I needed something for the newsletter.
[I am the article editor of the Woodward Newsletter, and I have a regular column called “Cooking made easy by Dora”. No, I don’t know why I am giving cooking advice when I cannot even cook… But I managed to cook different things every time, and I haven’t messed it up so far 🙂 I’ll talk about it in detail in another post…]
I started with basic stuff I know how to do (or know how to google…) and I’m doing quite well so far! I realised I actually like fiddling around in the kitchen and creating edible stuff from scratch. I even bought a recipe book (though I don’t know why, I am the “natural instinct” type who cannot follow a recipe).
So, here are my recent cookings (I am sooooo proud 😀 )
Meatballs in chili con carne sauce with pasta – “The meatballs were on sale in tesco”
Potato with chicken and salad – “I had to google how to make the potato”
Burgers with potato and salad – “I had absolutely no idea what to do with the burger things, so I just put them in the oven, went to facebook and then took them out when I got bored with facebook”
Pasta with cottage cheese, soured cream and sugar – “Classic Hungarian, except that when my mother makes it, it looks 3x better…”
Scrambled eggs – “The good old… That was the second thing I learnt how to cook, because I googled it so many times.”
Cream of wheat (made of semolina) – “My all-time favourite dish, I could basically eat it every day… The first thing I learnt how to cook, because I didn’t want to ask my mother every morning to make it…”
It’s a well-known fact that freshers’ flu hits universities every autumn. It has to do with the lot of people from lot of different countries, as we were told. Another well-known fact is that the first week of the Spring Term is the Refreshers’ week, a thing I still don’t really understand, but this might just be due to my narrow-mindedness (Seriously, refreshers? Just why??) But I unfortunately got to know a not-so-well-know aspect of Refreshers’ week: the refreshers’ flu.
Friday
I started to feel something on Friday afternoon. I can’t remember when was the last time I had flu, so at first I thought I have a cold. Usually I have enough paracetamol for a smaller country with me (just in case a smaller country would approach me and ask…), so I raised the amount to “level 2 – suspicious” and tried to rest. I calculated that if I have a rest on Friday and maybe Saturday morning, I still have the Saturday afternoon and the whole Sunday to do homework. I had a worrying deadline on Monday afternoon…
Saturday
I woke up with a blocked nose, terrible headache, pain in the muscles, and absolutely 0% spirit for doing homework. I called my mother, who gave me some tips like “drink tea” and “eat vitamins and fruits”, which sounds quite useful – for those who have vitamins or fruits in their cupboard… I drank some tea and stayed in bed for most of the day. When I was awake, I could almost hear the Mastery homework on my desk saying “Monday 16:30, Monday 16:30…” When I was asleep, I had nightmares about running towards something and never reaching it… In the afternoon, I called my parents again and asked them to come and take me home from Woodward.
Sunday
I wanted to move in to a hall of residence because I wanted to be independent and “grown-up”. (Fun fact: originally I didn’t even want to apply to Imperial, because it’s in London, sooo close to my parents…) I think I am doing quite all right with this independency-thing (except that I still bring my laundry home and call my family every second day…). But this was the first case when I was ill and I didn’t know what to do. Going home where my mother makes me tea, tells me what vitamins to take and brings me fruits sounded the only good solution. However, that Mastery homework due on Monday was still unsolved, so I took some paracetamol, and tried to solve it (with the help of my sister, who was sitting next to me and checking if I made a numerical error). Let me tell you this: with 2 paracetamols, a noticeable fever and constant shivering, solving a Mastery sheet is not quite easy…
At 6pm I decided I want to go back to Woodward, because I had a Hall Committee Meeting from 8pm and I wanted to go to lectures on Monday anyway. My parents tried to stop me, but eventually they took me back. I packed all my stuff in for Monday, and set my alarm for 7am.
Monday
When I woke up at 4:30 with a massive headache, shivering and a burning forehead, I knew I had to miss this Monday. I tried paracetamol, tea, cold poultice, nothing worked… So I went back to bed and started to think how to catch up with the lectures by Tuesday. I woke up again at noon, took some more paracetamol and in that one and a half hour when it has its affect, I quickly solved and submitted the Mastery. After that I was not really able to go even as far as the kitchen, so I kept drinking water from the tap and I saw less and less chance of going in on Tuesday… My mother sent me some angry messages saying I should visit the doctor, but I only considered this as an option after I realised I exceeded the 3-day limit for taking paracetamol…
Tuesday
I went to see the doctor in the morning, because I was hoping I could go in to South Kensington in the afternoon for my first lab session. The doctor was very kind and smiling while I was telling her what my symptoms are. I told her I think it’s just a bad cold and she said I might be right. Then she measured my temperature… And she said it’s “proper flu”. She told me what to do and what to eat and things like that, but I could only hear “you can’t go to the university before next Monday”. On the way back to Woodward, I was crying… Missing one complete week??? Missing 16 lectures, 2 lab sessions, 4 tutorials??????? How will I ever be able to catch up?????? I immediately called my mother, who said I can go home right away because my sister is at home with flu, too… I wrote an email to the Director of Course Op., explaining how sorry I am and how the doctor said I can’t go even though I wanted to… On my way home I got the answer: “(…) Most importantly, do not return too early – make sure you get rest and plenty of sleep – once you are better, then think about returning to uni.”
…
Friday
So, what’s the sole message of this week?
When they say be healthy, that’s not a joke! (I didn’t know that, either…)
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?)
