We arrived early. Again.
Thankfully everyone else had too, so it started early. CompSci was first, and began with a Q&A session – nothing I didn’t know already, but was interesting to hear nonetheless. Bored, I asked about their usual ratio of girls to boys, for fun (17% last year), but that set off some foreign woman asking akward questions about encouraging girls to do Computer Science to the point of discriminating against boys. Oops.
All the questions asked pretty much covered the presentation the guy did – similar stuff to last time, but at least this was geared towards something I was interested in. I didn’t pay too much attention since I have already decided against applying to Imperial – I don’t want to work for an A* in Maths I probably won’t get anyway.
After the presentation we went to see a presentation given by a final year student on his prize project – creating a bot which can play the game DEFCON, and learn from it’s own mistakes. The whole presentation was like watching War Games without Matthew Broderick… plus some interesting computerey stuff. It actually did sound pretty cool.
Then there were some demos. I only saw one because I was pretty hungry and my feet hurt, but it was on graphics, including various techniques used in LOTR. Needless to say I was interested in that.
We had a lovely lunch in the Princess Diana Memorial Garden, which was absolutely beautiful, and it was so nice to have ice cold water running over my feet for a while. We met a very cute and very friendly toddler who was wandering around with her parents, and it was nice to spend what would have been my Music lesson in school relaxing outside instead.
In the afternoon I went back for the Physics. It did not start off well as the first part of the presentation was on Environmental Physics and Global Warming – possibly one of the topics which least interests me. The lecturer then went on to talk about atoms, protons, quarks, whatever’s inside quarks… and I found myself not caring one bit about the miniscule things which we’re made up of. If I think about things on that small a level my brain starts to hurt. He also said that to study Physics you need to keep asking “why?” and that’s something else I really couldn’t care less about, when you get to that level of questioning.
Another lecturer came and started talking about waves and particle Physics, which was my least favourite topic in AS Physics, so again, that put me off. I was mildly interested in the stuff he said about music and remixing it as a DJ (and, oddly enough spoke about Michael Jackson for a while – this was Thursday), but I concluded that this was not the course for me. The one thing I was jealous of was their joint Physics and Music Performance degree, with the music side taught at the adjoining Royal College of Music, since I’m currently torn between Music and CompSci, and a joint honours degree for the two is not in existance.
Tags: career, future, me, student, university