My first paper
I recently published my first ever paper, here is its story (more…)
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Still in revision. Will start posting after three weeks.
As you might have noticed, I haven’t updated my blog for quite a while. This is because of exam revision and some personal reasons. I will start posting after three weeks where my last exams will be finished! So please bear with me and be sure to expect loads of great info coming from Henry’s Blog soon! 😀
Henry
About exams. Honestly.
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]
Analytics and Entrepreneurship Workshop
Since we don’t have an entrepreneurship module on our course, our student committee was able to set up a workshop for us focused on entrepreneurship and analytics. Below are some of the key take aways from presentations by Mat Braddy and Paul Cook.
BUILDING CHALLANGER BRANDS
Mat Braddy founder Rock Pamper Scissors
“Be the first thing out of someone’s mouth.”
UNDERSTAND THE BRAIN
It’s better to build brands through emotional messages rather than rational messages (tell emotional stories).
-Pilot brain: rational messages –> short term action
-Autopilot: emotional brand message –> long term habit
BUILD A CHALLANGER BRAND
Having a personality makes you more memorable.
-Become a lighthouse; not all things to all people
-Changing the category decisions making criteria in our favour
-Overcommit to ideas
-Becoming the category thought leader
AVOID THE MUSHY MIDDLE (e.g. food delivery brand advertisements always include a cheese lift…boring…be different!)
Who are WE? exercise to do with employees:
-What do we believe?
-What is our personality and tone of voice?
-What is the philosophy of our product or service?
-What is our rally cry?
UNDERSTAND ‘NOW’
Understand how you can destroy your own business.
Reduce services to utter simplicity with low commitment.
IDENTIFYING, SIZING AND TARGETING A POTENTIAL AUDIENCE
Paul Cook founder of Noetika
“Data is your marketing planning fuel.”
(1) Learn, improve, optimise.
(2) The four V’s of Big Data
(3) Simple solutions are not ‘wrong’.
(4) Build a compelling story.
-Create standout
-Cut through noise
-Deliver a message that resonates
-Create awareness
-Create clear call-to-action
-Make sure there is a so what?
(5) Cameodynamic.com splits people into categories: an important tool for segmentation.
(6) Dispel any myths about your customer.
Horizons and Exam update
Horizons
You can find the official stuff on horizons here, but I’ll try to give an idea of the experience behind it. Either way, I’d recommend the course, as it’s a nice non-course-related thing to do with your life.
Background: as part of the Year in Europe part of my degree, I have to study the appropriate level of the appropriate language (as well as a special language course which I’ve mentioned elsewhere). For me, this was level 4 German, since I had studied it up to A-level. The course outline, assessment details and learning objectives for this particular course: bam.
Briefly and in an as helpful as possible way, here are the main things I wish I had known/I didn’t expect/think of your own classic list title:
– Yes, this is a proper course. The lessons are two hours long and anything that lasts that long elsewhere in the course has a break between hours. There is also a lot to cover, so it ends up being rather intense with at least an hour of homework a week.
– There are exams and an oral assessment at the end, which are mildly important if you have to do the course. They are nothing too stressful, but some preparation would be good.
– It really is up to you how much you put into the course. There is always stuff to do in addition, if you happen to care and really want to learn the language. There is also not too much pressure to actually participate in the lesson or put much effort into the work if you want to chill through it instead.
– It’s another nice way to meet people you have things in common with. Joining clubs is more fun and less stressful, but yey, people.
Exam Update
When you arrive at uni, you hope to get a 1st. Around the wonderful Christmas test, you start thinking that a 2:1 might be okay. Now, we all just want to pass the exams and not fail problem solving. At least “we will all go together when we go”.
Current state: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeugh
People who I know and are trying to find embarrassing things to run my face in later will have hopefully got bored by the official stuff up there ↑ and stopped reading by now, so I can write more honest things. <secretwhispers> I feel that it would be healthy to be stressed about exams and it feels strange that they’re not bothering me that much. I don’t feel particularly homesick either, because I’ve been away from home a lot and I see my parents often. I don’t feel lonely, because there are always people around and there are at least some I could go to for complaining purposes. I just feel meh. Highly meh. I think I ran out of life. I feel like a Morty. Meh. </secretwhispers>
#impfest
Let’s start from the beginning. So, we had our first exam on Friday, then the Imperial Festival happened on the weekend, and in between there was a BBQ party in Woodward as well. I could say it was a busy weekend, but that would be quite an understatement…
Friday
First exam: Mastery. This was an afternoon exam, so I woke up at 8:30 and then didn’t do anything in the morning so that I have all my brain capacity available for the exam. It started at 14:00 so I decided to leave from Woodward at 11:30 – just in case anything happens. Well, as it turned out I wasn’t the only one worrying about the time: I met 11 guys from the Woodwarder ChemEng squad at the tube station… You can imagine the faces of the people when we started to loudly discuss the pressure drop equation for the case of unknown pipe diameter… We went to have a pancake and then joined the other 100 supernervous freshers waiting for the Mastery.
Everyone had different strategy: some guys tried to do last minute revision, some were eating / chatting / reading. And then there was my group: the nervously walking around and trying not to panic type… I was doing the usual pre-exam ritual, listening to my favourite motivational music:
At 13:50, 120 students invaded the Design Rooms. We realised that the seating plan is terrible: you are sitting at one end of a table and facing someone during the exam. At 14:00 sharp we started the exam…
… and at 16:55 I realised I only have 5 minutes left. And 15 % worth of questions to do… The thing about Mastery is that it’s a pass/fail exam, with an 80% passmark. It means that you can only lose 20%. And if you couldn’t even start the last 15%, well, then you’re screwed… So, at the end, I was desperately trying to write down as many partial random information as possible, and I am hoping for the best. At least I was not the only one having problems: based on talking with a lot of classmates, I assume about the 120 of us will do the Mastery resit in June 😀
When I went home I couldn’t even think, so I just rewarded myself with a Subway sandwich and tried not to think about how terrible this exam was… Horrible… Awful… 🙁
Saturday
First day of the #impfest!!! On Saturday I applied for tour guiding, which was basically taking groups from the info tent to the Pilot Plant. Easy, right? I arrived quite early, so I helped with the setting up of the info tent. Then it was time to take the first group to the Pilot Plant. Part of my job was to supervise them while they were in the room, so I had to stand outside and… and wait. 😀 The tours started at every hour and the Pilot Plant is about 3-5 minutes from the info tent. So when the first group was still inside and it was already 12:58, I started to panic a little… Then the next group suddenly appeared and that’s when the confusion started 😀 I managed to separate the two groups, direct the first one out while guiding the second in. But then, halfway through the second tour, a guy fainted in the control room…
So, as a volunteer, I was given detailed orders about what to do when I find a lost child, a lost adult or a “suspiciously behaving individual”. But what to do with someone who fainted????? Luckily, Dr Hale, who is the god head of the Pilot Plant, managed to remain calm, call the security, and carry on, but I was quite shocked. These are the situations you just can’t possibly be prepared for…
The rest of the tours went normal, except that none of them was finished on time, so I always had to run to the info tent and get the next group and then take the previous one out and ahh… It was a very-very-very busy day and I only had time for lunch at 16:30… The funny thing about the Imperial Festival is that it’s organised together with the Alumni Weekend, so the department was full of people with “graduated in this/that year” badges. I talked with a few of them and it was quite reassuring to realise that so many people “survived” the course… 😀
When I finally got back to Woodward, I realised it’s the day of the BBQ party. As I was hungry anyway, I went down to join the queue and have some fun. You might have realised by now that I am not that “party-type”, so when I say fun, I mean helping with the packing up and cleaning 😀 I ended up cleaning the tables and collecting the bottles, and… It was so good! I mean, that’s what I call fun: the satisfaction of turning back everything to normal, transforming a post-bbq table back to clean study desk, filling several bags with recycle-waste. I loved it 😀 But at the end, I was so tired that I literally fell into my bed…
Sunday
Another #impfest day! There was no Pilot Plant tour this day, so I applied for being an Entrance Assistant. This was basically asking “Would you like a map?” about 2000 times and handing out these maps with some “You should see this or that” and “Have a wonderful day” 😀 It was quite funny, especially when people said no, then went to the other side of the street, stopped, looked in the street and saw the festival and the fun and the people and the feeling and the excitement, and came back, asked for a map, and went in 😀 Being an Entrance Assistant also meant standing. A lot. From 10am till 5pm, I only sat down for 10 minutes. At the end, I couldn’t even feel my legs 😀
Even though I have been there both days, I haven’t seen anything from the Festival (apart from the Pilot Plant tour about six times…). I could have walked around and check the Robot Zone or the Research Zone. But volunteering to make the festival successful was much-much better. I loved every bit of it, and I will definitely go next year as well. Seeing the happy faces, getting questions about being an Imperial student or getting random “Oh my god, this festival was AWESOME!”… I loved it. As you can probably tell…
Challenge of the Week: Fitness
This week my ‘Challenge of the Week’ is slightly more light-hearted than previous, but just as important: Fitness.
If you’ve ever seen Charing Cross Hospital you will know that it’s a very tall building- 15 floors to be precise. If you’ve ever visited you will also know that the lifts are quite slow and busy. A typical journey involves waiting for 5 minutes to get into a lift, squishing in with patients, healthcare workers and various pieces of equipment/prams/wheelchairs. Then you stop at every floor- not just for people to get out, but to wave to all those people stuck on other floors who are also waiting for the lift (and keep pressing the button…).
Now, most of the time this is not a problem- I simply leave an extra 10 minutes to allow me to get to the floor I need looking calm and collected. However, sometimes I can be running late, which raises a difficult dilemma: to wait for the lift, or to run up the stairs?
Recently, with regret I picked the stairs, which is when I was challenged by my fitness.
The first few flights were okay, but after the 5th floor (there’s two flights of stairs per floor) it started to get a bit more challenging, especially as I was on a deadline to arrive for the ward round on time! A few minutes later I arrived, very red and sweaty, catching my breath on the 9th floor. Fortunately I had made it on time! Unfortunately I hadn’t appreciated that the ward round was about to turn into an exercise class!
Our patients were all on different wards, and for efficiency my team took the stairs. Unfortunately for me this meant running up and down all 15 storeys for the rest of the morning, with a very athletic team! It was hard work, so if you ever see me running up and down the stairs in my trainers, you know I’m in training for my next placement at Charing Cross!
How to Make Your Relationship Last: Lessons from Relationship and Services Marketing
You’ll find that there are a lot of things on the marketing course that you can apply to real-life situations. One of the most interesting lectures I have had was the first lecture of Relationships and Services Marketing. Commitment is the strongest predictor of relationship length when controlling for intimacy and passion. So how do you make a relationship last? There are three determinants of commitment: satisfaction level, quality of alternatives, and investment size.
If Hannah is satisfied with her relationship with Bob, Hannah will remain in the relationship. The higher the satisfaction level, the higher the commitment. Satisfaction increases when benefits increase and/or costs decrease. Benefits can be material or psychological. We usually understand how satisfied we are by comparing with previous relationships or those relationships of significant others.
If Hannah’s quality of alternatives are low, she will remain in the relationship with Bob. The lower the quality of alternatives, the higher the commitment. If there are highly attractive alternatives (e.g. super attractive Ben that is really into Hannah), this will lower commitment.
If Hannah has invested a lot into her relationship with Bob, Hannah will remain in the relationship. The higher the investment size, the higher the commitment. Invested resources enhance commitment because of the increase in cost of ending the relationship. This can be material (e.g. buying an apartment together) or psychological (e.g. time spent together).
Satisfaction is the most important driver of commitment, so if quality of alternatives are high and investment is low, but Hannah is very satisfied, she is still more likely to remain in the relationship.
So, if you are in a relationship or will be in one in the future, remember, high satisfaction level, low quality of alternatives, and high investment size will increase commitment.
10 things that the prospectus didn’t tell me
It’s that time of year again. Nervous students are wandering around campus dressed in suits, frantically re-reading their personal statement and trying to remember they are at Imperial not UCL. They know the prospectus off-by-heart, have learnt more about the NHS than anyone working in it knows and are clued up on all sorts of ethical dilemmas. Yes, it’s interviews!
So as I am reminded of my own application to Imperial and interview now 6 years ago, I thought I would write a few words on things at college that the prospectus didn’t prepare me for:
1.South Kensington!
So, yes of course I realised Imperial was in South Kensington, but what I hadn’t appreciated was how utterly amazing it would be to live and study there! Every day wandering past the beautiful buildings and museums along Exhibition Road, being a stones throw away from Hyde Park and living in zone 1! I will never afford to live anywhere near Zone 1 or South Kensington, so to live there as a fresher was great fun. Although despite all it’s good points, nothing can prepare you for the tube station at half term- think mums, screaming children, buggies and tube barriers…
2. Hospitals all over West London
Before I started my clinical years I had some dreamy idea that my placements would be at various sites across central London. The prospectus probably did outline some details about hospital placements, but I (like many) never paid much attention to it. As there are lots of medical schools in London, the hospitals are divided up between them; Imperial (being in West London) gets the North Western hospitals. These range from Chelsea and Westminster, St. Mary’s at Paddington, right through to Hillingdon hospital and St. Peters (check out my previous post for more details). Most students find that this is really helpful as they get to experience a range of hospitals (sometimes living on site) and there are less students at each site so they can get more involved. However it’s worth remembering this if you are planning to live at home… commuting from East London to South Kensington may be okay, but over to Northwick Park might be more challenging!
3. A BSc year
Again, yes the prospectus did say about this, but I simply didn’t understand what a BSc was! I signed up not really knowing anything about it, but it turned out to be a great decision. All medics at Imperial automatically do an intercalated degree in their 4th year (making it a 6 year course, instead of 5 years long). Simply, you get to study another subject for a year. This is usually an area of Medicine in more detail (e.g. haematology, global health, respiratory) or an area relevant to Medicine (e.g. Management). It also involves a research project, or an opportunity to study medical humanities, ethics & law or the history of medicine in more detail. Great fun and very interesting!
4. Halls
Obvious, but it’s useful to practice how to cook and use a washing machine before you arrive. I managed okay, but my husband Sam ended up with many kitchen disasters, quite a few pink T-shirts from washing accidents, and needed to ring his mum for advice every time he had to use the washing machine. Be prepared!
5. The Keen-ness
If you work hard enough to get to Imperial you are usually a little bit of a keen-been worker! I found it was very refreshing arriving at Imperial to find that everyone was slightly geeky and worked hard too. It’s pretty easy to fit in here whoever you are, which is quite unique.
6. Being a small fish in a very large pond- actually, a very large ocean
Everyone told me this again and again before I started at university, but it wasn’t until the end of my first year that I realised just how true this was. I cannot write anything that discusses this better than Izzy’s fantastic blog earlier in the year- a must-read before starting at Imperial.
7. Pre-clinical lectures
Imperial is a traditional medical school, so the first 2 years are mostly lectures with very little clinical contact. This does prepare you well, and the short bursts of placement are great as an encouragement. Just remember not to despair in first term after hours of lectures on cells; I promise you, it gets better and better every year!
8. The encouragement I would gain from the amateur transplants
Ex-Imperial medics, this duo have recorded a number of parodies of pop songs related to Medicine. Their song ‘Always look on the bright side of life’ got me through many tough revision periods with a smile (or maybe just a grimace…).
9. The large amount of hard work
We really do ‘work hard, play hard’. The work is worth it, but honestly at times it is tough. This is universal to all courses- for example it’s usually hard to find a free desk in the library anytime after 10am, and we have a very big library!
10. How much I would enjoy it here!
Lyme Regis Fossil Festival 2016
Last year I blogged about my first visit to the Lyme Regis Fossil Festival. This year I was back – promoting my new citizen science project Earthworm Watch, which I have developed with Earthwatch and the Natural History Museum. This time the Natural History Museum occupied a whole marquee and I attended on the Saturday and Sunday by myself, which was hard work!
I brought along some live earthworms for people to hold which was particularly popular with children. It was heartening to hear more people comment that they were “cute” rather than “yuk”. I gave out leaflets and took several sheets full of email addresses to follow up with more information on Earthworm Watch so I hope it will lead to more recruitment for the project.
