Tuesday

So I realize I have not blogged since Monday and it is now Saturday in the early hours of the AM. Sorry about that– I’ve been very busy lately, as I will tell you. So I’m going to try and do this very speedily without losing too much detail. Let’s go.

I’m going to post several posts tonight and tomorrow night, Tuesday-Friday, so make sure you are on the lookout. ^_^ If you care to be, that is.

Tuesday I had my major class (uneventful) with no minor, and meanwhile Sarah went to a castle on the outskirts of Oxford where Churchill resided in his youth. As I’m not in IR, I could not go but I did spend the afternoon very, very amicably. I tourned St. John’s College, Balliol, and Merton first-hand to get a better idea about where I would like to apply.

St. John’s has the most green space and it is one of the richest colleges, but they have irritating ‘modern’ architecture that looks horrendous in the middle of their lovely old historic buildings. You might consider this a minor quirk but it really irritates me, so although the grounds were green and beautiful I still have reservations.

Balliol is not as rich as St. John’s but is extreemly home-y without the drawback of stupid, ill-thought out architecture where it doesn’t belong. ^_^ It’s quite a bit smaller, though, and their main prestige is due to their success in PPE. Oh! And their porters are really nice– the porters let me in even though National Geographic was filming inside for a Queen Elizabeth Documentary.

Merton is my favorite–definitely my first choice–and is also the top scoring Oxford college in the University (they’re usually first– but St. John’s somehow closed the gap in 2009– Google the Norrington Table if you’re interested). Everyone says Merton students are intense and that the tutorials are intense, but that simply makes it all the more attractive to me. ^_^ I want to learn everything I can, and Merton still has lovely campus life in addition to its academic rigour. Plus– and here’s the wonderful thing– they’re centrally located on the GORGEOUS Merton Street along with Corpus & Christ Church, which means that as a student of Merton I would have access to the Christ Church meadows all the time. ^_^ Merton doesn’t need greenspace when acres and acres and acres lie just beyond its front gates.

After touring I went to Cafe Nero and read How the Mind Works (I’m making lots more progress now that I’m out of the chapter called Thinking Machines) because I kept attracting curious stares whenever I laughed outside in the third quad in Oriel. With a cappuchino and strawberry shortcake, though, I could do no wrong.

When I met up with Sarah it was to go see a speaker discuss mathmatics in engineering who was fascinating and used a free software called GeoGebra (a simple Java app) to explain the difficulties in creating engineering tests to measure eccentricity when merely given a physical object, for example. Contrary to popular perception, circles are not the only objects with uniform width, so tests for uniform width are not sufficient to prove something circular.  It’s more important than you think: the Columbia space shuttle was ripped apart because the fuel tank combused because of ill-fitting, non-circular yet supposedly circular-parts that had been dented in transport yet had nonetheless passed the American standards for being circular. The speaker actually created a shape to fool the UK’s test, so now he’s being paid by the engineers who wrote the test to make a new one.

And that was my Tuesday! So I will post about Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday after major tomorrow. ^_^ I’m exhausted- I must shower and go to sleep.

Cheers-

Laura

PS: I’m too tired to look up my own image. The one associated with this post can be found here: http://www.bloggersbase.com/images/uploaded/original/5f571e5de3bc676b1f071ddb2d519025ab6af2ac.jpeg

PS2: I appreciate the emails checking up on my well-being, and really, I’m fine. ^_^ Just behind on work.