Uni Open Days: BioChem at Imperial

Yesterday I started the long and hopefully not too difficult task of visiting Universities, before I have to choose five to put on my UCAS form, the courses I will apply for at each, and ultimately two (the one I want to go to, and a back-up should I not get the grades). I went to Imperial College London yesterday, for their Biochemistry department open day – the courses I am looking into are Biochemistry, if possible focusing on genetic diseases or immunology, Physics and Computer Sciences.

It started out pretty well, even if we did arrive 45 minutes early down to my mother’s over-planning. I’d originally said that only one parent could come, leaving the choice up to them, but my mum wanted to come because otherwise she’d worry over any decisions I’d make in the future, and my dad wanted to come for nostalgic reasons (he was at Uni forever, I think because he never wanted to leave and so used the excuse of coming over to England to study more), and possibly because he gets all sentimental at the thought of his elder daughter leaving home to go to University. My sister was dumped with our grandparents for the day, and we went up to London together.

After we’d eaten, and waited outside freezing our butts off, we were let in for “tea and coffee” (which I hate - they didn’t have juice or cold water so I ended up drinking hot water with bits floating around in it, looking and tasting like it had just been drawn from the Thames) for half an hour, and I looked through the prospectus they’d given me. It was quite interesting, although didn’t tell me much about the course, but didn’t put me off the actual place in any way.

We were then given a talk which lasted far too long, about how wonderful the place was, and which had far too many statistics for my liking. They weren’t bad (pretty great, in fact), but I can’t say that this made me any more keen to go there. Straight after there was another talk by a Professor there, which I did not enjoy at all, he seemed pretty dumb, actually. He outlined the structure of the Biochemistry course there, which was also a disappointment for me. Whatever you apply for/want to specialise in, you are all taught a mandatory fixed course for the first two years, which could very well mean I’m stuck doing boring stuff for two thirds of my time there. The names of the courses within this for the first two years didn’t inspire me much either, despite seeing immunology on the second year one.

Then we were given tours of the place by a student, which was very interesting. They have a lot of lovely new buildings, and, for what I was expecting in London, the whole setting was very nice. We were shown around the accommodation we are provided for the first year, which was tiny - I’d find it impossible to share without killing my roommate, I’m pretty sure.

There was a break then, and I’d almost made up my mind that although I would have no objection to coming here, the Biochemistry course just wasn’t for me, and I’d look into Physics here instead. However, we were then given a talk by the most gorgeous undergraduate, who made the whole course seem so much more attractive, and not only because he actually described some of the stuff we’d do on the course. Granted, he described one practical they’d done in the second year, which happened to be just the stuff I was interested in within genetics, but I was much less sure that I wasn’t going to be doing Biochem here. There was a final talk about careers which was only mildly interesting, and that was it.

Verdict: No definite answers. I’m going to have to wait and see what I think about different courses, but Imperial itself is definitely a possibility.

Tags: career, future, me, student, university