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Imperial Strikes Back: 2nd Year Physics GYG

About me
Hi I'm Sinnoh. A lot of people have made GYGs in quite a short time so let's not be too late to the party. I'm about to go into my second of hopefully four years of doing physics at Imperial College. Outside of physics I'm pretty fond of classical music, history, guitar, and Pokémon. I was somewhat active in the history society and quiz society last year so I'll be rejoining them for sure.

I previously did blogs for year 13 (here) and first year (here). I don't know what to expect from this year so I can hardly say what you can expect from this blog. Last year's was more aimed at prospective physics students, this year maybe I'll actually need the motivation. So I won't go into as much detail about the stuff I'm learning - or I'll put in a different section about it in my updates if people really care.

The academic stuff
For once I am actually intending to grow my grades. Most of the main assessments last year were done after the coronavirus hit, so they were done at home. I didn't revise well at all, and had they not been open-book I'd have been really screwed.

Results from first year

Actually not as bad as I was expecting! Still, I wouldn't want that to be my final grade, and as you can see I was very close to resitting one of the modules. Normally first year would've counted for 7.5% of my final grade, but there is a no-detriment policy in place: if my result for first year is lower than my average for the next three years, it won't count.

So at the very least, I want to get a better overall grade. I need to score at least 60% overall this year to progress on to the MSci course. Second year is normally worth 20% of the whole degree so I have much less room for messing up, too.

2nd Year Modules

I have heard many times that the 2nd year of physics at Imperial is completely bonkers, what with more exams and more frequent lab write-ups and an all-round infamous reputation. With the new course structure it might not be so bad, but I really don't expect to have those great swathes of free time I had last year.

Other goals for the year/things I want to do:

•

Not make a mess of things in my role on a society

•

Try out for University Challenge again (3 attempts left)

•

Suck less at Python

•

Develop some sort of daily routine for studying at home

•

Make use of office hours (even if done via Microsoft Teams!)

•

Problem sheets!!

If you want to follow this blog, either put it on watched or request to be tagged. I'll spam all of last year's tagged peoples with yet another notification, but there's no need to feel obliged or anything.

Index of updates

expand

last year's

(edited 3 years ago)

Scroll to see replies

Reply 80

Mr Wednesday

Original post by Sinnoh

Much appreciated! I've certainly learnt some things the hard way with this project.

No problem, it is the nature of project work that it teaches you all the hard stuff that doesn't fit nicely in a lecture course or lab script. Best to do all of that "learning the hard way" now before the MSci project. :smile:

Reply 81

Sinnoh

Got up early today to get into campus in the morning so I could get some work done before my lab session started. Opened up my emails and turns out that the first 4 sessions of labs were remote for everyone all along. So I've gone back home :indiff:

What that also means is that in this 'multi-mode' delivery, I have 12 hours of in-person teaching (4 lab sessions) for this entire term. Good thing I don't have the radioactivity experiments this cycle, else I'd have nothing happening at all on campus for the whole term.

Reply 82

Sinnoh

Differential equations questions are getting much harder now and I really need to not repeat what I did for the entire autumn term last year where I did the first page or so of each problem sheet and then ignored the rest.

In other news, there's the PhySoc v. MathSoc chess tournament later today and I've signed up despite being terrible at chess (my score on the chess.com app hovers around 500). This should mean I don't have to spend much time on it.

Reply 83

I AM GROOT 1

Original post by Sinnoh

Good luck

Reply 84

Mr Wednesday

Original post by Sinnoh

As Dr Strange says "They really should put the warnings at the beginning of spells". Problems sheets are like that to, except swap "warnings" for "looks like an exam question" :smile:

Reply 85

Sinnoh

Here's what has happened since Sunday:

- got absolutely bodied in the chess tournament, stopped playing after two matches because I was just giving points to MathSoc at that point

- had the Revolutions Horizons session on the Taiping rebellion, we discussed the essay questions a bit

- had the second remote lab session and a thermal physics seminar

- finished the second quantum physics APS, rewrote my last answer about twice, still not confident about that part but oh well

- caught up on last week's thermal physics lectures

- started and finished the first 3 quantum mechanics lectures, started the problem sheet

- started but didn't finish the first differential equations lecture of the week, it covers things I only somewhat understood from last week so...

- did a little bit more of last week's DEs problem sheet

In other news -

- purple username gang

- My uni hoodie arrived last Thursday, it's actually really nice:

Spoiler

- I've been watching a lot of Twin Peaks, having finally finished the first two seasons

- saw a fox

Reply 86

Sinnoh

Things left outstanding:
Final part of the DEs APS (30 mins max?)

Thermal physics lecture 19 (1 hour max)

This week's DEs ordinary non-assessed problem sheet (could take ages)

About half of the quantum mechanics problem sheet (also could take a while)

Thermal physics lecture questions

Catching up on tasks from the lab session

Reply 87

flaurie

Volunteer Team

purple gang :five:

Hope you manage to get the rest of your work finished :hugs:

Reply 88

Sinnoh

Original post by laurawatt

purple gang :five:

Hope you manage to get the rest of your work finished :hugs:

Thanks, so far it's mostly done... I think... still haven't started that differential equations problem sheet!

Reply 89

Sinnoh

This morning I discovered an obvious and silly error in my DEs APS that I had finished on Monday and was due today at 1pm. I'd already submitted it but Turnitin allows you to submit a new one. The mistake pervaded quite a few questions so it took maybe about 40 mins to fix everything. Rescanned it, downloaded it off OneDrive, nice, went to take a break.

Realised at about 30 seconds to 1 that I never actually submitted the corrected version and reached the submission page just in time for the button to be greyed out, so that's just great :facepalm:

. Reminds me of that time in February or so when I left my APS at my halls on the day of handing it in and forgot how to answer the question in the two hours preceding the deadline.

Assuming they allow for error carried forward though, I'm unlikely to lose that many marks.

Tomorrow I go in for the first time in 2 weeks for labs :teeth:

(edited 3 years ago)

Reply 90

Synergy~

Can I be tagged please? (:

Reply 91

flaurie

Volunteer Team

Ahh noooo

Hope you enjoy the labs tomorrow!

Reply 92

Sinnoh

Original post by Synergy~

Can I be tagged please? (:

ja will do, though it's anyone's guess when I'll do a proper update with notifications and the like

Original post by laurawatt

Ahh noooo

Hope you enjoy the labs tomorrow!

Ah cheers!

Reply 93

Sinnoh

Lol.

I read all the lab-related emails except for the one that said to bring your laptop. Then I borrowed a laptop from the department, but it refused to open the software for the oscilloscope. So I've taken my lab equipment home with me - was possible since they provide all the necessary equipment in one box for each person.

Still, nice to meet people in-person even if we're a lot less chatty in the actual labs than we were in the Microsoft Teams calls.

Reply 94

Sinnoh

Done a bit of catch-up on the lab work, also finished all the lectures by the weekend for once-
ah **** wait there's probably one more thermal physics lecture isn't there. Damn.

There's also another assessed problem sheet, this time for thermal physics too. Given the content we were doing I was worried it would be hideously difficult but at first glance it's alright - just a bit about pressure-volume and temperature-entropy graphs and looking at coefficient of performance for a fridge. They released it kind of late so it's due next Friday rather than Wednesday. Still waiting for the marks for the first thermal physics and second quantum physics APS.

Next few weeks could be very hectic - there's the lab report to write at some point soon, I need to get a start on my essay for the Horizons module, I need to come up with a topic and plan for the quantum physics article project and there's a society event soon-ish that could take up quite a bit of time.

Reply 95

Sinnoh

A lot of writing - Update 5
Howdy. It's been some time.

It's the end of the ninth week. Two more and my first term of the second year is done. On the surface things seem better now than in the last update - I'm keeping up with lectures much better than back in the summer term or really this time last year, and there haven't been any particularly stressful moments, not like with the computing project. Assessed problem sheets haven't been unkind to me either. I've been to campus a bit more often recently since the start of labs and slight lifting of coronavirus restrictions, I've met up with some friends, I don't feel as distanced from the campus as before. So that's nice.

Despite all that, I think my situation is somewhat precarious. I'm not keeping up with problem sheets nearly as well as before and there are a host of other things soon to need attention. Autumn terms are never kind it seems! But I'll talk about that further down.

Advanced Practical Physics
7 sessions down, one to go. Yeah I left a lot more time between updates than I expected to. The first four sessions were remote, and on the one hand that sucks because it would have been nice to get more than just 4 sessions on-campus, but given how time-consuming the write-ups and analysis have been, I'm kind of glad we didn't have to actually perform the experiment on top of that. We had 'social support groups' in MS Teams so we weren't completely alone, and it was a good group. It was quite a heavily computational topic actually, but nowhere near as difficult to make work as the thermodynamics project from before. In fact it was nearly satisfying.

The in-person lab sessions have been a bit of a mess - for me specifically. It's on electronics, we use the same equipment as remote students are using, which means plugging in an oscilloscope into a laptop to read the data. For the first one I didn't realise we needed to bring in our own laptops, and then the laptop I borrowed from the department refused to open the software for the oscilloscope. So pretty much nothing was done in that first session, but I caught up a lot at home to the point that I was ahead for the second session, this time ready with my laptop. Except... now my laptop couldn't connect to the oscilloscope for literally no reason, so I lost two hours until I borrowed a laptop again which worked this time. Same story for the third session, except I didn't wait as long to give up on my laptop. Due to mistakes made in the actual experiment I'm somewhat behind again, but I won't be doing my lab report on electronics so it's not the end of the world.

Quantum Mechanics
Yes, we're on to mechanics now. Got 7/10 on the second assessed problem sheet - made a bit of a hash of things on the last couple questions, as predicted. This module is a difficult one, rivalling Differential Equations. I'm understanding the lectures alright, but applying the information in questions is much harder. It's more mathematically abstract than the introductory quantum course, but it's not boring either. My last academic tutorial we looked at a QM question and I realised the gaps in my understanding were bigger than I thought.

Part of this module involves writing an article on a topic within quantum physics. The article itself is due at the start of next term, but the plan needs to be submitted on... Monday. I haven't made a start on that, other than nailing down an area in which to look into a bit further - quantum control seems interesting enough and could work as an article topic.

Differential Equations
Moving on from power series solutions and eigenvalue problems which I think I understood, the past week and a bit has been on partial differential equations and using Fourier analysis to find solutions. It's making more sense than it did in February, and I did better on the problem sheet for this module than for QM. Lectures have covered the diffusion equations, wave equations and Laplace's equation, but the lectures themselves are pretty dull. And long. I'm quite glad there are only two per week. I also don't think any of my academic tutorials have been on DEs, which is annoying.

Thermal Physics
Hard to really summarise the topics because it feels like it just keeps on going and going. We've looked at heat engines, the laws of thermodynamics, various ways of messing about with gases essentially, pressure-temperature diagrams, recently this thing on generalised variables which was neat but also seemed a bit esoteric. The content has been fairly interesting, but looking back on it... yeah there has been a lot going on.

Horizons - Revolutions
I've decided (well, had long decided) that I'll be doing the essay question on the Russian Revolution which is "Given the Tsarist regime, was revolution inevitable?" and I think it's a very awkward question but I'd still be happy to give it a go. Easy to get bogged down talking about what's really inevitable, how you define it and just droning on about historiography. I've borrowed a chunky book by Pipes, but neither him nor Figes give much attention to this question which is pretty annoying. The essay is 2000 words and due in just under two weeks. Even though it's from an extra-curricular module, this essay alone is worth more than anything else I've got left to do this term - half of the module, so 4% of the year's grade.

I'll definitely relax once the term's over. Then I'll quickly realise I have a 3000-word article to write, and I'll stop relaxing. But for those few days I'm sure it'll be nice.

Thanks for reading (yeah it's long as heck)