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My (Somewhat) Triumphant Return to Imperial

Isobel profile

BSc Biology with a year in Europe

It’s official, I have now been back in London for a month. I am no longer a fresher – it usually takes me a moment or two to remember this when someone asks me what year I’m in – and I do grown up things now that I live in a flat and not halls, like pay rent, set up direct debits and clean the kitchen. Wow.

After a great (but long) summer, it’s been a little bit difficult to settle back in to Imperial life but I’m enjoying my courses so far and also the change to my timetable! Morning labs can be hard to motivate yourself before but on a non-lab day I now get a lie in rather than the continuous 9am starts that I had last year so I’m not complaining too much!

Filming filming filming…

MSCi Physics

So, the weekend before last I attended the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican as film crew no less! Having being pumped full of camera knowledge for the last two weeks the culmination of all my training was pretty stressful, especially as I had to get up at six both days…

The WORLDwrites crew was split up into four rooms to film the debates, though there were loads more going on all the time. The Barbican is vast– it’s like its own little city with streets of flats and two tower block included (it is my new ambition to live there) with open spaces, restaurants, multiple cinemas, fountains and millions of conference rooms and theatres.

The second year work/life balance begins..

MBBS Medicine

So freshers came to a close and I jetted of to France for my birthday weekend at 7am after beach bop. We had hired out a castle in rural France all to ourselves…it was amazing! Then came back to London and back to reality. There is just so much content this year and it is a mission trying to stay on top of it all already…ahh!

We have done a bit of pharmacology, neuro, endo, haem and ANATOMY!  I reaaaaally love anatomy this year. We are currently doing anatomy of head which is so interesting (mostly because you get to examine human brains..).

More second week…

MSCi Physics

This is an extra blog I wrote about last week…

Last Thursday I went to a meeting of the London Forum for Science and Policy (LFSP). I didn’t really know what to expect from this, but it was amazing! It is a newly set-up student think -tank whose job will hopefully be to mediate conversation between scientific experts in their fields and politicians. Through it you can learn about writing policy papers, the way that policy is implemented and hopefully help policy makers get the evidence they need. In this meeting we were spoken to by Dr. Jason Blackstock a senior lecturer in Science and Global Affairs from UCL, who introduced to us just how vital it is to teach scientists the workings of policy.

Second Week

MSCi Physics

 This has been a busy week 😛

For a start I made Dino cakes:

For seconds, lectures are already interesting 😛 I finally found out what people are going on about when they say ‘centrifugal force isn’t real’ and how Newton’s laws can apply when we are not in an inertial reference frame. That has bugged me for years—being on a spinning planet flying across the solar system, how can we use F=ma if we are already always accelerating?

It turns out when you look down at the Earth from a stable—let’s say relative to the Sun, vantage point, you see things on the surface of Earth moving as you would from Newton’s laws.

How is it still freshers?!?!?!

MBBS Medicine

So term (and lectures!) have started again and freshers has begun. We are now a week into the ICSM Medics Freshers Fortnight and I am SO TIRED. It is seriously bizarre to think that schools around the UK are about to break up for half term and we are still having our freshers fortnight.

It has been so much fun being on the Student Union during freshers but it has also been so nice to have a night off and just being able to sleep.  The meetings, the 4am calls from lost freshers and the 300 t-shirts we had to iron have taken its toll on me.

Learning to film…

MSCi Physics

Hello 🙂 The new term is underway 🙂 I hope all freshers are looking forward to getting hundreds of emails detailing the events of meat appreciation soc and all those other weird societies they signed up to because they felt guilty about taking the free sweets. If you are anything like me, you will never unsubscribe from these emails.

I actually didn’t make it to the freshers fair in the end because I spent the day learning to film (!) but there is a list of all societies on the imperial college union website that I am currently scrolling through- I would really like to join imperial radio and tv as well as the society on science policy and debate which I had never heard about before.

Freshers Map

MSCi Physics

Hi everyone 🙂

So Freshers finally starts next week! Imperial offers a fair amount of stuff, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, but Halls also offer a lot more, which I can’t remember if you find out about beforehand or not. My halls took us to clubs, for a boat party, on a bus tour, paintballing, to markets and loads more stuff.

I hope you are all excited! I am, even though it’s my third one!

I am sure there are enough freshers tips (including mine!) )for anyone nervous to read and make themselves more nervous, so instead of that, I have a made a freshers map.

Horseshoe Crabs, Hox genes and Virtual Palaeontology

MSCi Physics

This blog is inspired by the first lecture I went to last week at the British Science Festival, about virtual palaeontology. It was given by two excellent speakers, Dr Russell Garwood and Dr Imran Rahman and I’ve now done a bit more research into what they spoke about, as well as found a video of some 3D fossils like I promised!

First of all, here is a video made by Dr Garwood about using Micro-CT to get 3D images of fossils. The crack you can see through all the scans is the break that was made that allowed the fossil to be discovered.

British Science Festival Pictures :)

MSCi Physics

There was another day of the festival on Friday, but in the end I couldn’t make it, except for one final talk on brain stimulation. In the tradition of my other blogs here is a little summary of some of the interesting points:

Brain Stimulation: Perils and Promises

The first speaker talked about working with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation which seems to be as simple as slapping and anode and a cathode on the head, the anode on the bit of brain you want to increase activity in and the cathode on another bit to reduce activity.

This is a cheap, non-invasive and portable method that simply raises or lowers the threshold for activity that the neuron needs to fire, kind of like how a catalyst can lower the energy needed for a reaction to start.

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