Blog posts

My Week

Harry profile

MEng Mechanical Engineering

Monday

Mondays are typically my busiest day. Out of the seven main modules I take, four of those lectures are on Monday. In some ways this is good, because this results in most of my tutorial sheets being set right at the start of the week, giving me plenty of time to complete them. I had lunch at the Queens tower rooms (one of the only places on campus where you get food on a plate), which I have concluded to be my favourite place to eat in Imperial.

Tuesday

Tuesday is design and manufacture day. Currently, we are working through 3d-modelling a gearbox for a cement pump.

THE BIG BUCS BLOG

Franz profile

MEng Biomedical Engineering

On the 6th of this month, a Saturday, 48 Cross Country runners represented Imperial College in Gloucester at the BUCS Cross Country race of 2016.

If you didn’t know, BUCS stands for ‘British Universities & Colleges Sport’.

The whole trip was organized and hyped up by our wonderful ICXC&A committee, who had put lots of work in to get us there, have a good time (especially for BUCS freshers – like me) and be safe.

And I did have a good time. The whole BUCS 2016 experience began with a text from a mysterious ‘GH’. The one and only Gary Hoare.

So Many Societies?!

Amanda Koh profile

BEng Computing

Going to university is all about trying something new, you go to a new place, meet new people… there’s no better opportunity to reinvent yourself, make some resolutions you might actually keep.

Societies at uni are all about the effort you put in. If you don’t take part, no one is going to come after you, in fact no one will even care. You join a mailing list, you turn up to events that interest you and hopefully along the way you’ll meet some nice people you’ll come to call friends, and if not maybe at least you had a good time.

TRIP GONE ALMOST FAFFLESS

Ksenia profile

MSci Physics with a year in Europe

Another great trip started off pretty well as the glorious leader, who wasn’t going anyway, fell ill and couldn’t do the shop. While the previous glorious leader dealt with that, three freshers managed to deal with boats. Then people arrived, things happened and we ended up leaving half an hour late anyway. But hey, we tried.

The tall clumsy one, being a pain by nature, needed picking up from Luton, which sucked, but at least we successfully implemented the grab-and-eat-in-bus attitude to food, saving a bit of time. We arrived, tried to create warmth by hoping for it and closing the doors.

Throwback Thursday

Isobel profile

BSc Biology with a year in Europe

Going through my sent box today I came across the piece I submitted to the student blogger search back in October 2013, when I had been in London for about a week and was still bright-eyed and excited about arriving in the Greatest City Of All Time. I still love London because why wouldn’t you, but life is very busy at the moment and I’m feeling so tired and worn out by work and revision! It was fun to relive my freshers week through reading this old post, which I don’t think made it on to this blog originally, and I thought I’d share it with you today.

Stories from the kitchen

Dora profile

MEng Chemical Engineering

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.

Challenge of the Week: Life and Death

MBBS Medicine

So this week the biggest challenge was being confronted with death. Sounds strange, but I hadn’t expected it that morning, so I was hit hard. Of course I’ve seen death before in medical school- the cadavers we use for dissection, old patients on the ward who pass away quietly in their sleep and death certification. This however was different as it was unexpected- someone younger who yesterday was walking around fine, then suddenly today they have gone. It wasn’t predicted or even suspected. Other than the suddenness of it all, I was also struck by the sadness as the team slowly realised they had done all they possibly could but that it simply wasn’t enough.

Spineless valentines

Victoria Burton profile

Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet Doctoral Training Programme (PhD)

Sunday was Valentine’s Day, and this year I managed to visit home to spend some time with my boyfriend, Andrew. We had an earthworm hunt! and then the more classic takeaway and movie.

I also enjoyed some of the entomological Valentine posts on Twitter, which I gathered into a Storify:

[View the story “Spineless Valentines” on Storify]

Check out the hashtag #academicvalentines too for pithy academic humour.

Broadening my Horizons…

Dora profile

MEng Chemical Engineering

Everyone knows that Imperial is (mainly) a STEM university. Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (and a bit of Medicine and Business): all the good stuff. The average Imperial student knows pi to the 40th decimal places by heart but probably couldn’t name 3 Shakespeare plays…  That’s why the Horizons program is such a good idea: it brings a little bit of humanities into our STEMy world. How little? Well, exactly 2 hours a week 🙂

Amanda has written about the topic in detail, so I won’t repeat the dropout rate or the advantages and disadvantages. I would like to write about my experiences instead…

In the first term I signed up for The World Today (I chose this over Spanish because I realised Spanish can be learnt anywhere, but this course is quite a unique thing…).

1st year labs, juggling and crying with tea

Ksenia profile

MSci Physics with a year in Europe

Having finally finished the lab cycles, I can talk about them in a much less bitter manner. They are split into three sections and there is a lab guide flying around the internet if you wish to see what actually goes on, but I’ll just go over them briefly through the filter of my opinions.

Measurement and Uncertainty 

This isn’t really a lab cycle, just an introduction to the pain of error propagation. It’s an unfortunately useful pain and actually clears up some confusion from A-level. I always asked why we calculated errors in one certain way, when more than one appeared to make sense and heard “because they are all valid, but OCR only accepts this one”.

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