Day One

Today was the first day of the Physics Academy!! It was awesome!! I was slightly surprised by how few people there were, only 31, but I suppose that kind of makes it better.

I was right though, the ice breaker was awkward! We had a bingo sheet and had to find a person who was a vegetarian or was left handed or has read a book by Steven Hawkin or owns an unusual pet. So I became known as the Rat Girl... This isn't how I expected to be introduced to everyone! I should just have pretended that I had seen Saturn through a telescope..

And then we had a tour of the university which for me involved all of us squashing into the ladies bathroom to see the Dixon hand dryer and walking past my entire year group at school (they had a trip too) whilst they screamed my name! I'm not going to lie, I told a few people that I was famous!

It wasn't actually on an extremely steep hill...

If I were to treat today as an Open Day I would have to write that I was not immediately impressed by Queen Mary University. Some of the buildings appear quite shabby and I was not blown away by the facilities. However the lecturers were very good and I am extremely grateful for the generosity and hospitality the university has shown as in the form of student ambassadors, free lunch and the general sense of care that they have provided. I also have to say that the food was very reasonably priced and quite tasty. From the outside the accommodation seems nice and there is a pretty canal which came as quite a surprise when we found it!

Then we had a few lectures. One was about 'Condensed Matter Physics' which I knew nothing about before but it was linked to some things were had talked about in Chemistry. Then we had a talk about 'Particle Physics' which was about neutrinos and was completely brilliant! The lecturer told us about all these amazing research facilities accross the world and I will make a post about them later. Finally we had a talk about 'Astrophysics' which was about solar flares and was great as well. The lecturer gave us a list of websites for veiwing the Sun and this one is my favourite.

So then I had to chose a research project for the next week, and it was SUCH a hard decision. In the end I decided to choose the Condensed Matter Physics research becasue it will give me a chance to try out some computer simulations which I have only tried once before, it is a practical I think is likely to work and we will be doing some actual real research! I mean actually finding out things people have never found out before! There are 197 different zeolite structures and they haven't all been studied before so we will be looking at some of them and finding out if they have negative thermal expansion. I can't wait to get started!