My Week in the World of Physics

This week in my life as a physics student

I am a third year physics student studying at Strathclyde university and this week has been a really good week  and I just wanted to share this with all of you who may end up reading this.

I have been organising taking part in an internship with the university during this summer coming, and this week I finally got all my applications sent off! It is even more exciting because the internship is going to be in conjunction with the Beatson Cancer Research institution so I will be working along side the leading experts in cancer research to try and help advance the imaging techniques used in analyzing cancer cells. I applied to a number of funding bodies one of which is the Carnegie Undergraduate Vacation Scholarship. 

This is a highly prestigious award that is very competitive and each applicant gets an academic grading based on there past exam marks and I was lucky enough to receive the highest grading. outstanding excellence, an A. I also sent of the application to the dean of science because i was under the impression he had to give the academic grading which turned out to be incorrect but he told me that the project looked very interesting. This doesn't seem like much of a statement, but to hear that from the dean of science made me feel like I have a much better chance at getting awarded the bursary. So now I just have to wait several months before hearing back so my fingers are crossed!

This blog was started this week as a way of getting some feed back on an assignment I had due that involved discussing how to explain entropy to a group of high school students. The post was very well received and I got excellent feed back from several different people and got it handed in in plenty of time. If you like you can read that post here. This was really great I had no idea so many people would enjoy reading it, so thank you to the people that did.

As part of my course I have weekly lab sessions that involve four hours in the lab twice a week. I always enjoyed labs as I love getting to preform experiments. One of the experiments I got to do was the Millikan oil drop, which is a famous physics experiment that determined the charge of an electron and showed that it is quantised, so I never had a problem with this class but this week I finished my final experiment and have finished my labs 4 weeks early. This means that my weekly contact time in uni is only a meager 10 hours which is very exciting. I will need to spend this time doing revision and other assignments but on the whole I've still gained 8 hours a week to fill with whatever I want.

So it's been a good week and hopefully I will have many more good weeks to come when the decisions about the bursaries come through.

On a final note I have been reading an Astronauts Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield. It has been a really inspiring read about one mans journey through life in the build up to becoming an astronaut, it is a real insight into what it really takes to do the job that all children want to do and then to hear the details of what being in space and working on the international space station is really like. Its been fantastic and I would highly recommend it to everyone.