{"id":4776,"date":"2019-09-01T19:24:20","date_gmt":"2019-09-01T19:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/?p=4776"},"modified":"2019-09-01T19:32:05","modified_gmt":"2019-09-01T19:32:05","slug":"i-survived-my-first-year-at-imperial-here-is-the-ups-and-the-downs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/2019\/09\/01\/i-survived-my-first-year-at-imperial-here-is-the-ups-and-the-downs\/","title":{"rendered":"I SURVIVED MY FIRST YEAR AT IMPERIAL \u2014 here is the ups and the downs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Coming to Imperial was honestly surreal for me, it felt like a dream, and when I woke up it was exam time, and I had to fought tooth and nail to survive. Until I was actually in London, there was always a possibility at the back of my mind to back out. I wanted the easy path, the \u201cI know I can ace every<br \/>\nsingle class\u201d, which was why Imperial was sort of my second choice. Yes, you heard me, it was my second choice, despite the fact that tons of people are dying to get in.<\/p>\n<p>I know from the beginning, that Imperial would be hard, so I lost hope since the beginning. I thought, it would be better for me to fail and get expelled than actually try and fail. <span style=\"color: #ff6600\">There was no doubt that I picked the right course<\/span>, I actually love the course (except well, maybe one or two modules). But, I was doubting myself, I kept on asking why did they accept me. I thought, by no means am I an ideal candidate, I wasn\u2019t top of my class at school (except math), I\u2019m the furthest from a teachers pet, I haven\u2019t quite accomplished much in my life. I\u2019m just a girl who <span style=\"color: #ff6600\">absolutely loves math<\/span>, and thinks I can make an impactful difference through it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Okay, here comes the ups.<\/strong><br \/>\n1. I just spent the last year <span style=\"color: #ff6600\">being taught by world leading researchers<\/span>. I mean one of them even worked on the Twin Tower in Malaysia. Plus, one time, the engineer who was working on the Shard came to Imperial and gave a talk about the construction. (P.s. How can you not think it\u2019s so impressive)<br \/>\n2. Being <span style=\"color: #ff6600\">constantly awed by the work of one or all of your lecturers\/professors<\/span> \u2014 No jokes, sometimes I\u2019m so awed I can\u2019t even form a proper sentence talking to them.<br \/>\n3. Living in London. Despite it being excruciatingly expensive, <span style=\"color: #ff6600\">I absolutely absolutely love living in London.<\/span> Anything you could imagine doing (including surfing, just find a big enough hydrodynamics lab to do it?), you could almost always do it in London. Meeting Prince Harry maybe? Well, guess what he\u2019s been to Imperial, just this summer.<\/p>\n<p><strong>And the downs.<\/strong><br \/>\n1. I just mentioned that living in London is expensive, well imagine exam week. You just tap your Apple Pay here and there, eat out, <span style=\"color: #ff6600\">calling Uber for a 5AM pick up<\/span>. Trust me, it adds up real quick. And oh my gosh, stress shopping is legit. If I\u2019m telling myself I can\u2019t go to Harrods because I have to revise, I\u2019d spend an hour scrolling through most of the major shopping sites.<br \/>\n2. The dumb stare \u2014 okay, to be fair this could happen anywhere, not just imperial. It\u2019s basically when you\u2019re like so lost, and you have absolutely no clue what\u2019s going on. So, a person that has superior knowledge of the subject just stares at you in silence \u2014 I call this the dumb stare, and did I mention that I\u2019m not a fan of the awkward silence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Coming to Imperial was honestly surreal for me, it felt like a dream, and when I woke up it was exam time, and I had to fought tooth and nail to survive. Until I was actually in London, there was always a possibility at the back of my mind to back out. I wanted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1324,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[272456,138666,127582,385,268,148187,179710,85172,142,92137,1,123757],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-272456","category-first-year","category-first-year-funsies","category-imperial","category-life","category-life-at-imperial","category-life-in-london","category-living-in-london","category-london","category-london-life","category-uncategorized","category-year-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4776"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4781,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4776\/revisions\/4781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-staging.imperial.ac.uk\/student-blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}