Thankfully I managed to avoid being dragged to see the Oxford Street Christmas lights this year but as my Christmas-loving boyfriend was visiting it would be rude to not show him any and he was happy with seeing some of the Regent Street lights during a day out in London.
Regent Street Christmas lights
As I described in an earlier blog post, work last week consisted of mostly Christmas parties! Starting off with the the Natural History Museum Student Association Christmas Party and moving on to the Soil Biodiversity Group Christmas gathering where my supervisor Paul Eggleton tried on my Christmas hat! Sadly I was unable to join the group Christmas meal afterwards but it was great catching up with volunteers, students and staff.
Christmas hat wearing PhD supervisor
The next day it was the Purvis Lab Christmas party, including a ‘double-blind’ Secret Santa when you don’t know whom you are buying for or what you will get. We had a lovely lunch in a local pub which included crackers, party poppers and Christmas hats! Cue more hat wearing supervisor shenanigans!
Double-blind Secret Santa (and another Christmas hat wearing supervisor)
After tea, chocolate and bakewell tarts it was off to the Natural History Museum Life Sciences Christmas Party, this year’s theme was ‘Stars in Your Eyes’ and featured several Amy Winehouse, Slash, Britney Spears, Freddie Mercury and others I didn’t recognise. There was also some karaoke and a performance from the Village People! Not to mention lots of excellent food and drink.
Life Sciences Christmas party
This week it was time for some more sedate Christmas celebrations with the Museum choir group performing in the Victoria and Albert and Natural History Museums. Today I went along to watch the choir performing on the steps of Hinzte Hall at the Natural History Museum, which was well attended by staff and visitors. Fellow Purvis Lab member Isabel (bottom far right in photo) sang a solo part, shortly before her PhD viva!
Carol singing in Natural History Museum Hintze Hall
This week’s #throwbackthursday chronicles the final part of field work on the NERC BESS earthworm project in 2013 – hard to believe two years have past since we finished!
I think one of the many positive aspects about ChemEng is that we study a whole bunch of different subjects. While other courses have 4-5 subjects, we have … hmmm… well… I don’t really know 😀
According to Blackboard (online platform where all of the course notes and homeworks are), we have 14 different “things”, but some of them are jointly called “coursework” subjects (CE1-03) and we will get only one mark for it at the end. So, I am quite confused when someone asks how many subjects I have, but here is the list:
Can anyone tell me how many different subjects I do? 😀
Another interesting thing is our timetable. (Maybe it’s just me who finds this fascinating, but) we got an email at the beginning of the year, containing a link. When I clicked on the link, a pop-up window asked “Do you really want this?” Well, at least I was warned… But I said yes, and suddenly all my lectures/tutorials/other activities were imported into my personal calendar! It’s a subscribable calendar system, meaning it refreshes itself every hour and all the changes are immediately visible. Therefore if a tutor reschedules a tutorial and accidentally mistypes something, the whole class will have a random Maths appearing in their calendar all of a sudden… It is very scary! 😀
Here is an ordinary week with lectures in the morning, tutorials in the afternoon and loads of free time on Wednesday 🙂
After this intro, let’s talk a bit about the subjects! Engineering is quite special in the sense that most of the curriculum is very different from that of the high school. (I don’t know much about the English secondary education system, as I did the high school in Hungary, but I guess most things are the same). In high school we had general subjects like Chemistry or Physics. Now we have more specific ones like “Properties of Matter” or “Fluid Mechanics”. Hence I think it worths giving a brief description about these ChemEng subjects…
01 Chemical Engineering Mastery
This is our main subject, nevertheless it’s not a real subject! 😀 Mastery includes the core subjects like Process or Fluid, and we have one pass/fail Mastery exam at the end. Additionally, we have Mastery sheets (5 this year): each contains 1 very long problem description and 3-4 related questions. We also have Mastery seminars which are held by different professors every week and they give a summary of their subjects and some exam tips and tricks… 🙂
02 Process Analysis
Hmmm, Process… Process is my favourite subject! (As I already mentioned in the post about the Christmas test.) We learn about process flow diagrams, stream tables, mass balances, vapour-liquid equilibrium, etc. Unfortunately, it’s only in the Autumn term 🙁 The good thing about Process is that “we have to put our chemical engineer / business / environmental hats on” and at the end, we are standing there with “3 hats” and design processes as big as a building on a piece of paper… The bad thing is that it takes ages to calculate everything we need because there are so many different equations and data to use. And unless you do it in Excel, you’ll definitely make a mistake somewhere…
03-1 First Year Design Project
I already wrote about this in another post, so I just mention one thing here: don’t forget the remaining power, for God’s sake! …
03-2 Foundation Laboratory
I don’t know much about this as we’ll only start it next term, but I know that we’ll work in pairs which is scary 😀 I would like to apologise in advance to my future lab-partner for splashing them with sulphuric acid… It won’t be on purpose…
03-4 Introduction to MATLAB
I also mentioned this before. Matlab is about coding, so those who did any kind of coding before will be fine. Those who didn’t… well, they should drink some coffee before the lectures. 🙂
03-7 Foundations of ChemEng Calculations
This subject was only 5 lectures long at the very beginning of the term. We looked at the unit conversions and dimensional analysis. It might sound silly (Unit conversions? Everyone can convert joules to kilojoules…), but when it comes to converting from cal/(gmol.K) to BTU/(lbmol.ºR) you wish you had choose Classical Literature instead of Engineering…
04-1 Fluid Mechanics
Everyone likes Fluid. Our lecturer is a nice and cheerful guy who tells jokes all the time. As he explains it the material looks dead easy, even the toughest equations make some sense during the lecture. But when it comes to the tutorial sheets, we are usually completely lost… 😀 Apart from that, I like Fluid. We started with incompressible fluids and we are now dealing with compressible ones. My sister is a wannabe pilot, so I often text her after the lectures and we discuss what I’ve learnt and what she already knows… 😀 One more thing about Fluid: it’s only in the first term 🙁
04-2 Heat and Mass Transfer
This is again a Spring term subject, but I’ve already heard horror stories… Everyone says that this is the most difficult subject, so I am a bit worried. We’ll see!
05 Thermodynamics
Many people struggle with Thermo because it’s full of equations, derivations, calculus, difficult concepts and new approaches. In high school I learnt about the Laws of Thermodynamics – in 3 lessons. Now we’ve been learning about them since October and we’re still just halfway through the Second… The lecturer is also my personal tutor, and he is very kind and answers all the questions – if he gets any. The problem is, most people don’t even know what to ask… 😀
06 Chemistry
It might be surprising that we study Chemical Engineering and we only have one specially dedicated pure Chemistry subject… I was surprised, too! But this Chemistry is intense enough to satisfy even the hardcore chemistry-lovers. We study about Chemical Bonding, Solubility and pH, Kinetics, and then at the end a lot of Organic Chemistry. This subject requires (or would require…) the most self-study: if you don’t read the recommended textbooks lesson by lesson, you’ll get lost and if you get lost, you’ll basically never have enough time to catch up… But the lecturer is amazing, he makes so much effort to properly animate every little bit of the power points. I wonder how many hours he spends on a daily basis just with animating the slides… 😀
07 Mathematics
Oooo, Maths… Just to make it clear: I love Maths. If I didn’t do ChemEng, I would be studying Maths… But I’ve chosen ChemEng, so my only interaction with Maths is the Maths lecture 3 times a week. And for those who love Maths, it’s just not really enough… Since we’re doing Engineering, we don’t really need to know how to prove the theorems. Or know the super-accurate results. Or know the exact definitions of the Riemann-integration…
08 Business for Engineers
This will also be only next term, but I heard that it’s super-easy… 😀
09 Properties of Matter
Well, for some reason everyone loves PoM… Except me… I mean, the lecturer is very good, the lectures are more or less understandable, but the topic is just not my cup of tea. Or coffee. Speaking of coffee, I don’t think there exists such thing as enough amount of coffee before a PoM lecture. Seriously, the different solutions of the Schrödinger-equation can only be understood when you’re 100% awaken. Which is definitely not at 9 am…
10 Separation Processes
We’ll only have this in the Spring term, and I haven’t heard anything about it yet. Interesting…
So, that’s it, this is everything we have! One could say it’s a bit too much, and sometimes it do feels a bit too much, but most of the time it’s very enjoyable and I am glad I ended up doing ChemEng at Imperial. 🙂
This week the biggest challenge was being confronted by an angry/upset patient.
I have been involved in difficult, emotional, challenging situations on placement before but this has always been as part of the medical team. This week I was confronted by an angry and upset patient on my own. The wait to see a doctor was long, so I was asked to work my way through the patients in advance, taking a brief history, blood tests and other simple investigations to speed up the results and the wait when the doctor managed to see them. For the most part it was no trouble, but one patient was particularly distressed by the wait and made their feelings known to me as well as asking many questions about my role and the department’s system. They were questions that were impossible to answer with any certainty and after asking a senior for guidance my answers were still unsatisfactory to the patient.
It was interesting to reflect on how I responded to the questions and comments from the patient. It was hard not to take all of the criticisms personally, when actually the patient was only expressing their hurt and annoyance at the system and situation they found themselves in. I took a while to remind myself afterwards that it was not my personal fault that that person had waited for … minutes before being seen. It was hard to shake off the feelings of upset, guilt and disappointment however. This event caught me off guard as I was suddenly ‘on the front line’ with upset and distressed patients.
It made me realise two things. Firstly, there are probably many shop assistants, managers, receptionists etc who are on the ‘front line’ with me when I am distressed and upset about a situation- perhaps I need to think more about how I respond in this situation. Secondly, I need to build up my emotional armour- next year I will be more and more ‘on the front line’ with patients who are experiencing a range of emotions and situations, and I will have a lot of responsibility in everything I write or do on the wards.
It’s nearly the end of term and I don’t really have that much to report on! General Relativity is still crazy interesting, Quantum Information is still confusing and my Masters project and business course are still going well.
Last week we had our flat Christmas dinner and by some miracle all my old housemates were free to attend. It has been really nice to manage to keep the tradition going and still have a successful gigantic dinner even though our kitchen is tiny, everyone is so busy with deadlines and exams and we only at the last minute remembered that one of our housemates was a vegetarian!
As I don’t have much to say in this blog I thought I’d suggest that if anyone has any questions about Imperial—specific course recommendations, about living in London or going to university in general, then you can ask them in the comments and I’ll do my best to reply! I might even help with some physics homework problems if you’re lucky.
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:
Having lightly hinted at my desire to be dry while everything is water, I successfully ended up with a drysuit for Christmas! Whoop whoop. I already have it, because the smallest size available was a size too large and we wanted to make sure that it didn’t need swapping. It fits a little loose around the legs, but the body is perfect and the ankle can be tightened. Plus, I’m planning to wear my Totoro onesie underneath, so more room is never an issue.
It’s a Typhoon ladies, but has only the back zip, so allows no toilet breaks. It’s also damn expensive, since it’s a good one. As a clue, my dad, stepmum and mum all pitched in to get me this…THAT expensive.
Imagine a massive crowd of 500-ish people, dressed as Santa, playing christmas music and skating through the streets of central London. That’s pretty much all there is to it, but there’s just something so awesome about hijacking the roads. I went along with a handful of people from Imperial SkateSoc, who didn’t know I was coming so I was rather lucky to find them right at the beginning.
I also missed the fact that you could actually buy a santa suit from the people organising it. I’m hence dressed in rainbows and tinsel, as you can see in the video at around 5.30. T’was an awesome night and much thanks to the organisers!!
No, it’s not my footage (how did you guess?). It’s taken from Lilbizkit.
We’ve literally just started university, and the first term has almost already passed… So it’s time to talk a little bit about the achievements (or “achievements”…) so far.
On the first week we had several introductory lectures, but one of them was particularly interesting. It was about assessments and grades. And the lecturer kept emphasising:
“Don’t expect 100% on all tests!”
He also said that it will be new for most of us, because we were most likely to be the best students in our class, and we were the ones who got 100% all the time. But that time is over, because everyone can’t be the best so we have to get used to the thought of failing. In addition, he said that “The competition part was to get into Imperial. Now that the competition is over, you have to help each other.” And that’s how we started the term…
Our first assessed coursework was the First Year Design Project – immediately on the third week! The idea is that we get a feeling for what “chemical engineering” means. Well, it was more like we tried to do something we knew next to nothing about, but we did it anyway 😀 It was a teamwork project, which means we had to work in our tutorial group. I am not that used to working with others, so it was a bit difficult for me to consider their ideas as well, but I somehow managed to get a quite decent peer assessment grade, so I wasn’t that bad after all…
We had 5 days to do the final design. The whole design was evaluated based on our powerpoint presentation and a poster. We spent the first two days chatting about ideas and thinking about calculations. On the third day we realised we should actually do something, because the deadline is coming. We did some calculations, and then we realised we need a lot more calculations. Then on the fourth day we stayed in till 19:30 to finish the poster and the presentation… 😀 Finally, on the fifth day we held our presentation. I thought it went quite well…
The next week we had a feedback session. They told us it was “good, but…” After that “but” I didn’t really listen, because that “but” meant not 100%. And I always expect 100%. I don’t care if it’s 99% or 30%. It’s below 100, therefore it’s a failure. It turned out we got around 70% (they didn’t tell us the actual grade). I was devastated… But then I remembered that first speech about “don’t expect 100% all the time”. I realised this is university now: success and failure, hand in hand. So, this Design Project taught me one thing (besides “what chemeng means”): what failure means, and how to handle it.
And the peer assessment? 😀 First of all, let me explain what PA is. When we work in a team, the lecturers or the teachers can’t be there all the time to watch everyone’s contribution and mark us based on that. Also, it’s not very fair if those who worked very hard and those who did nothing get the same grade. Therefore they introduced the system of peer assessment: we have to evaluate all of our teammates on a 1-5 scale and write a few sentences about their performance. Based on this score, we all get a normalised PA mark, which indicates our contribution to the team. And we also get the anonymous feedback so that we know what went well/wrong. I think it’s really helpful and I learned a lot from my feedback. And next year, our groupmark will be multiplied with the PA mark and that’s how we will get our final mark.
All in all, First Year Design Project is… fun, after you figure out what to do with the remaining power in the third stream 😀
Working on the poster in the evening…
The second “big thing” was the Matlab course. Matlab is a “very powerful calculator”, a programming language in which you can basically calculate everything you need. We had a 3-week Matlab course, 4 times a week, 3 hours a day. It was pretty intense…
For those who never had done coding before, it was a nightmare. I was extremely lucky, because I did some self-study in the summer, so I had a rough idea about the variables, the loops, the commands, the functions, and all these things. After the first few sessions, I realised doing coding in the summer was invaluable: I had hardly any problem understanding the new things, and I only had to focus on keeping up with the speed.
We had two assessments, one at the end of week 2, and a second (final) one at the end of week 3. They told us that we shouldn’t worry about them as they only count a negligible percentage towards our degree. But that’s not how an Imperial student’s mind works 😀 So I worried all day before the exams, and after that I was constantly checking Blackboard (our virtual learning environment) if they had put up the marks.
I was at my room in Woodward when I got the result. It was the night before the Christmas test, so I was trying to revise. And then, this email suddenly came from the course leader saying
“Just a quick message to congratulate you on your Matlab grade – you have done exceptionally well.”
I rushed to open Blackboard to see my actual mark… I was expecting something around 80%, but I got 94%!!! I was so happy, I couldn’t do any work after that. I called my family to tell them, then I went to the kitchen to tell all my flatmates, then I kept smiling for a ridiculously long time… This was my first real success in Imperial, and it felt so good… I love Matlab!!! 😀
Our last assessment was the Christmas Test. This was supposed to be the easiest from all three, because this is just a feedback, a progress test. It counts absolutely zero percent to our final grade. But still, everyone was super-nervous in the morning, everyone did more (or less) revision and everyone tried to “ace” the test (as our Process Analysis lecturer suggested…).
The test itself was a Mastery test. That means only the Mastery subjects were covered: Fluid Mechanics, Thermodynamics and Process Analysis. We were given a calculator, a data sheet and a steam table… and 3 hours to write down everything we learnt about the subjects so far. After I quickly read through all 3 papers, I decided to start with Fluid because that seemed to be the easiest. I used some equations from the equation sheet, converted some numbers, and got some roughly reasonable answers. I checked the time, I still had 2.5 hours left, so I started Process…
There is one thing I might haven’t mentioned yet, I love Process. It’s exactly what I was looking for in ChemEng: it includes a bit of chemistry, a bit of physics, a bit of maths, but most of the time it’s just sudoku and logic. You are given a description of a process, full of data. You have to extract all the relevant information to draw the diagram (after you read the process description at least 3 times… 😀 ), and then you have to make a stream table (a table listing all the streams and all the compounds involved in the process). It’s usually an approximately 10×10 table, so most people just skip this part (if you are focused and know what you do, you might be able to solve it without a stream table). But I do stream table all the time, because I like the stream table 😀 It’s surprisingly similar to a sudoku, and those who have ever done sudoku know what I mean when I say: filling out a stream table gives pure satisfaction…
So I started the Process question, read it line by line, draw the diagram, and started the calculations. I lettered them so that I didn’t get confused… When I was at line T, I realised I made a mistake. I didn’t know what it was, I didn’t know where it was, I only knew there was a mistake somewhere… The thing is, finding a mistake in a sudoku table is almost impossible. You might have better chances with a stream table, but it’s still unusual to find it without losing plenty of time. So I quickly switched to Thermo, but I couldn’t get Process out of my mind…
I found the first two Thermo questions quite easy, but then I spent too much time on the last one, and got no actual answer… So I went back to Process and I spent the last hour trying to find my mistake inside the jungle… I checked every calculation from the beginning, and after 20-25 minutes, I realised I have the mistake in line K. That meant the whole bit under K was completely wrong… I crossed out everything from K to T and hurriedly recalculated all of them. Eventually I filled out the stream table but it looked a complete mess.
When the time was up, I felt sad. Not because I did particularly badly on the test (it counts zero anyway), but because my stream table looked so messy… I was angry because I practised it a lot and I knew where the possible chances of making a mistake were. I was tired because even though 3 hours sound not too long (my high school final physics exam was 5-hour long), it required extraordinary focus from the beginning till the very end. And foremost I felt sad because I wanted my stream table to be shiningly perfect, and at the end it was just a complete mess with (hopefully) the right numbers…
The last two weeks of term have so far been a flurry of carol services, Christmas trees, mince pies and mulled wine. I am loving life (apart from the massive piece of coursework I’m doing but let’s suspend disbelief for a moment and pretend that this fortnight is a fortnight of fun and cinnamon sticks).
By the time I go home next Sunday I will have attended no less than four carol services! Last night the Christian societies at Imperial hosted our annual carol service at the beautiful Holy Trinity Church next door to Beit Quad. It was a lovely evening and loads of people came over from Imperial to join us for carols, readings and a short talk about the gifts that Jesus gives us. There was a performance by the IC Gospel Choir and we were accompanied by a small band of musicians and the organ (side note: to get the organ in this church you have to climb a spiral staircase and then the organ is located in a little pod above the band. It was cool but going back down the stairs was scary as someone with a fear of both heights and falling down stairs…). Check out Lorna’s blog also getting hyped for the number of carol services available at this time of year!
After the carol service a couple of went out for dinner at Ottoman in Hammersmith. This is another side note but definitely go to Ottoman if you find yourself down Hammersmith way. It’s a Turkish kebab restaurant that serves very reasonably sized portions of meat, rice and salad AND there is free bread. The food is delicious and fresh, the service is great and one of the friends I went with has been there enough times that the waiting staff greet him with a handshake and know his order by heart. It’s hilarious. Whenever ‘Ottoman’s?’ is suggested everyone knows what the right answer is.
Have a great last week of term friends and I hope that you have a peaceful Christmas! xox
By the time I go home next Sunday I will have attended no less than four carol services! Last night the Christian societies at Imperial hosted our annual carol service at the beautiful Holy Trinity Church next door to Beit Quad. It was a lovely evening and loads of people came over from Imperial to join us for carols, readings and a short talk about the gifts that Jesus gives us. There was a performance by the IC Gospel Choir and we were accompanied by a small band of musicians and the organ (side note: to get the organ in this church you have to climb a spiral staircase and then the organ is located in a little pod above the band. It was cool but going back down the stairs was scary as someone with a fear of both heights and falling down stairs…). Check out 
