Astronomical (Offline)  

(Sorry, seems I like to go over the word limit too. )

You're right, visa stickers and stamps do look lovely - if only they weren't such a pain to get... My passport remains utterly blank to this day Nope, not seen TDKR, in fact I never watched The Dark Knight! Was it good? Have you been keeping up with all the olympics stuff lately?

And thank you for those congratulations. I look forward to being able to copy-paste that line and add a lot more smilies come August 16th!

I'm well, finally finished off the silly visa application form! Ah, how you must have looked forward to coming back to sunny England!

Gaining official recognition of my English skills feels absolutely... the same. I can think of a few reasons why my writing score wasn't so high. The 1hr writing section has two parts - describing a graph (>150 words) and a discursive essay (>250 words). First, "good" IELTS essays tend to follow a specific format, which I hadn't practised. Second, the discursive essay was on "Is having stricter penalties for driving offenses the only way to improve road safety?" which I know little about and so struggled to stay on topic. (Lucky for me, the speaking question was perfect: "How do you think technology affects life as a family?") Thirdly, my training in both Eng Lit and Maths screams "perfection" - so I spent more time that I should have on the first essay, because I couldn't move on to the second until I was happy with the first. Lastly, I've only ever written discursively once, which was 4 years ago, so I guess I never had much practise.

What sort of information have you put on your CV? A-levels and GCSEs? Year 11 work experience? Interests? My CV (if I had to write one) would be far emptier than yours I imagine! In terms of internships, my preference is a research internship, or failing that, an IT company or actuarial work at a stretch. Definitely don't feel like going into investment banking at all (at least, not now...). And I would hardly call tutoring entrepreneurial - more like a good job landing in my lap! I'm sure you're bound to come up with something more creative! Good luck in those job applications!

Apparently there are upright pianos in the Garden and Weeks halls, don't know about the other ones though. I really should learn to read music... but in the meantime, Synthesia and other videos on youtube have been my teachers too!

Hey, hope your holiday's going well? The pictures of Algarve on the internet look wonderful!

Sorry for my late reply too... I've been on tenderhooks for the past week waiting for my IELTS results; a few nights ago I got paranoid enough to start looking through the list of institutions that go into Clearing this year! Anyway, the IELTS results came out on Saturday and it turns out I've got the highest band scores in everything other than writing, which was a bit lower but still exceeds Imperial's requirements. So I'm safe! Anyway, looking through Clearing, I was surprised to see that the likes of Durham and Manchester are participating this year. I'm pretty sure they were all full up last year. But I'm very relieved to know that that is at least one road I'll not be going down!

Keyboard "lessons" at school weren't really lessons as such. We all had a keyboard and music sheets and got to do whatever we wanted really - which I suppose was quite nice. In any case, I only got 3 lessons... That's a lovely piece to aim towards - I take it you're also only using the keyboard to as a stepping stone to the piano, and you'll be moving on to piano as soon as possible? I'm not sure if I actually have an aim in mind, just sort of want to take is casually and see how far I get. I had no idea the RCM gave lessons to the public, and the prices don't look half as horrendous as I expected them to be!

I could swear that on the picture you sent me (this one: http://oi50.tinypic.com/2cengh0.jpg), the lowest band for Eastside was £190-£215. Or have they changed it?

Lucky for me, I'll be keeping up tutoring through at least the first year of uni over Skype, which should more or less cover food costs at least. I'm definitely going to try my best to get an internship of some sort for next summer though.

Did you have to apply for a visa to go to Algarve? The Chinese Visa Application is driving me crazy at the moment!

Ah, Fur Elise was the first keyboard song I learnt too (unless you count 10-note "songs" in keyboard "lessons" at school ). I also learnt Minuet in G and River Flows in You, never got round to finishing Canon in D... and that’s all I can play. I can't read sheet music either, so I leant from Synthesia, which you've probably heard of already. I was thinking about maybe trying to get piano lessons at university, but I'm not sure how that would work...

Isn't the cheapest band for Eastside £190-£215? So couldn't they theoretically stick you in a room where you have to pay £215/week? Or do you get to set a price limit?

My mum told me at some point she had spent a couple of months learning Japanese - so out of curiosity in the library one day, I decided to pick up a Japanese language book, and just became interested. There are some wonderful things about Japanese - unlike English which is riddled with inconsistencies in grammar and spelling (you can't always look at a word in English and know how it's pronounced), Japanese tends to be grammatically consistent, and you can look at a word and know how to say it. Tenses are also easier in Japanese, and they don't have masculine/feminine objects like French or Spanish. All in all, it’s a beautiful language! The Greeks and Romans were indeed amazing civilisations.

You say that, but I’m willing to bet your sister isn’t halfway through her A-levels! I remember one of my students once asked me why the square root of 1/5 was 1/sqrt(5) – “Why isn’t it sqrt(1)/sqrt(5)?” she asked... Any idea what kind of job you’re going to go for? And no, you’d have to be very lucky to stay that broke – we’ll have at least -£9000 to our names by the end of our first year...

Oh yes, Banach-Tarski. That is indeed something a practical physicist would dislike! But set theory’s lovely. Honestly. *Jedi handwave*

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There were few people there on the day, (I arrived there 30 minutes after the discovery!). Gratefully a physicist allowed me into the auditorium where they were confabulating with pertinence to the Higgs! Ya should take an odyssey to CERN then m'friend. ;>

From the promised land of Geneva itself! I went to CERN on the day of the Higgs discovery, inadvertently. What a contingent excursion. !

Nice choices - I take it you probably went for the lowest price band for each of those? Even then... if you ended up at Eastside, you could be paying £215 a week! Wow.

Well, it's a good theory, but the Imperial website says that Fisher has 93 singles, 30 twins and one triple - which seems to be plenty of people in single rooms for social purposes. I have heard that the rooms are by far the smallest though, and that the place is seriously dilapidated, but saving up to 50 pounds per week on even the cheapest other halls, 39 weeks a year, seems almost worth it...

You were right - I did mean 3 hours over the whole weekend, which gave a total of £80. Three hours per weekend day would have killed me - like I said, teaching's great, but when there's so much work you already have to do yourself, it sometimes gets to the point where maintaining professionalism while you explain how to add simple fractions to students halfway through their A-levels gets tremendously frustrating (And yes, that really happens... and somewhere in the middle of explaining fractions, you realise they don't even know their times tables...). And yes, I do have a small heap of money in the bank by now! Out of curiosity, have you ever had a job of some sort?

Oooh... has someone had a bad experience with set theory? That'll be a story to share, I'm sure... But I sort of know what you mean - some parts will almost no doubt be very very tedious, but still, it'll be worth it I'm sure. But while I know physics at university is nothing like A-level, I must say that A-level physics was the very definition of boring. And excessively so. The lectures on error that so many universities like to give physics students when they start their degree sound entertaining too!

I'm curious, what got you interested about classical history? My "non-maths project" at the moment is learning Japanese!

btw just remember we are communicating by the interent

I didnt threaten you and if thats what you think is threatening, wow