I had another choir practice yesterday and enjoyed it so much that I came back home completely hyper. I stayed in for half an hour, had a cup of tea to calm down and then went for a walk around the campus.
It was about 10 o’clock when I was out and still really warm. It’s been so warm these last few weeks, and I’ve been amazed by all the foreign students that live in my building complaining about how cold it is. I’m wondering if living in Wales has made me a bit more hardy. Especially after last winter, which Rhian and I spent huddled in front of our gas heater in the lounge. People actually came round to our house solely to warm themselves up, because it was warmer than their house. At the same time I got the cold from hell which came with an incredibly irritating and painful cough that lasted for three weeks. Cough cough cough. Cough cough cough. Cough cough cough. COUGH COUGH COUGH. And so on.
ANYWAY…at ten o’clock there’s still a lot going on at Loughborough University. Lots of getting ready to go out was happening and it was a really nice atmosphere walking through the student village, where all the halls are. I stopped and sat down next to one of the many sports pitches on campus, on which three teams were practising – girls’ football, men’s lacrosse and girls’ lacrosse. It was all pretty confusing, probably because they weren’t playing proper games. They only stopped playing at 10.30, I was amazed that they were out so late.
Anyway…the choir practice was great. Here’s a rundown of what we're doing, and if you want to hear us there’s a concert in Loughborough on 7th December:
• Handel’s Messiah: And the Glory of the Lord, And He Shall Purify, Glory to God, His Yoke is Easy, and His Burthen is Light, Hallelujah
• O Magnum Mysterium
• Go, Tell It On the Mountain
• Riu, Riu, Chiu
• Here is the Little Door
• Gaudete
• Lullay my Liking
They’re all very nice apart from Go Tell It On The Mountain which is terrible, mostly because there’s a horribly embarrassing attempt to make it ‘cool’ at the end where the sopranos tell everyone to spread the Word on Facebook... *shudder*. O Magnum Mysterium is the best of all of them followed closely by Lullay my Liking. All the tunes that aren’t Handel’s Messiah are old Christmas songs, and they’re very lovely even if they look funny and unfamiliar :)
I’m having a clarinet lesson tomorrow, and going to a Church Orchestra practice on Sunday (it’s a short but boring story!). I think all the music playing is a bit of a reaction to the incredibly hard work I’ve been doing, and needing to get out of the house. And possibly also because there’s so much sport going on that I can’t take part in (I have back problems because of a slipped disc – it’s not a day-to-day problem but it means I can’t do anything to aggravate it like running). So music it is!
This week’s module is Solar 1, and I’m in the middle of writing up a very exciting lab report studying how temperature and irradiance (amount of sunlight) affect photovoltaic cells. Definitely not as bad as the Sustainability module, but still pretty difficult, and lots of very hard maths! We’re going on a field trip tomorrow, to a PV lab and then to a PV installation.
I went to a careers fair in Liverpool last week, which was basically as I was expecting (a big corporate affair, not really the sort of thing I’m interested in at the moment) but I did manage to pick up a bit of information that was useful. I also managed to pick up loads of free sweets and even scored some cake at Dundee Renewables :) I’m starting to get an idea of what I want to do after…something involving people I think. That’s as far as I’ve got at the moment! Well it's a start.
Tuesday, 27 October 2009
Friday, 16 October 2009
Helen is hardly working
I’ve just finished a very stressful project so I’m very happy, and I thought I’d do an update before heading off to the pub. I’m celebrating by eating cake and drinking coffee whilst sitting listening to Super Furry Animals (the right kind of multitasking!).
The first module in my course was all about sustainability, which is about ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. I was glad it was first because it’s something I’m really into, and it sounds like a good way to start the course…then I realised how the course was going to be marked…100% group coursework, 8000 words, in a week and a half. Urrrrrggggh. Blimey I’ve had the same thought many times over the last couple of weeks, which is that if you gauged my stress levels with an emergency light on top of my head (signalling ‘danger’) it would have been going off constantly for 10 days. I had a lovely team but we had some very unfortunate miscommunications at the start (a poor Spanish guy called David has had a baptism of fire into the English language, I don’t think he’d be out of his depth at a football match with the expletives that I’ve uttered over the last few days, sorry David). Couple the miscommunications with reams and reams of information to gather, assimilate and make sense out of and you’re starting to get the picture. I’ve been working for all the 16 hours of the day several times, was in the library until half 11 last night and I didn’t spend one minute staring at the ceiling feeling bored. On the up side:
- I can write references in my sleep
- I’ve learnt quite a lot about the Greek language and
- I’ve learnt that when an Indian person shakes their head they actually mean yes. Oh how we laughed about that one.
- I’ve probably lost a couple of pounds through stress. Although I’ve undoubtedly put that on again through cake.
We finally handed our coursework in at 4.20pm this afternoon, having had a last minute panic because our PDF file was too big to upload (honestly, they could have told us there was a 2MB limit at the start). Luckily our Nigerian group member kept his head and while the rest of the group was running round frantically trying to reduce the file size he calmly downloaded a file compressor, compressed the file and handed it to me, at which point I uploaded it and sat back. We’re all still friends amazingly. And apparently we weren’t the last people to hand our work in :)
Time for the pub I think!
The first module in my course was all about sustainability, which is about ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. I was glad it was first because it’s something I’m really into, and it sounds like a good way to start the course…then I realised how the course was going to be marked…100% group coursework, 8000 words, in a week and a half. Urrrrrggggh. Blimey I’ve had the same thought many times over the last couple of weeks, which is that if you gauged my stress levels with an emergency light on top of my head (signalling ‘danger’) it would have been going off constantly for 10 days. I had a lovely team but we had some very unfortunate miscommunications at the start (a poor Spanish guy called David has had a baptism of fire into the English language, I don’t think he’d be out of his depth at a football match with the expletives that I’ve uttered over the last few days, sorry David). Couple the miscommunications with reams and reams of information to gather, assimilate and make sense out of and you’re starting to get the picture. I’ve been working for all the 16 hours of the day several times, was in the library until half 11 last night and I didn’t spend one minute staring at the ceiling feeling bored. On the up side:
- I can write references in my sleep
- I’ve learnt quite a lot about the Greek language and
- I’ve learnt that when an Indian person shakes their head they actually mean yes. Oh how we laughed about that one.
- I’ve probably lost a couple of pounds through stress. Although I’ve undoubtedly put that on again through cake.
We finally handed our coursework in at 4.20pm this afternoon, having had a last minute panic because our PDF file was too big to upload (honestly, they could have told us there was a 2MB limit at the start). Luckily our Nigerian group member kept his head and while the rest of the group was running round frantically trying to reduce the file size he calmly downloaded a file compressor, compressed the file and handed it to me, at which point I uploaded it and sat back. We’re all still friends amazingly. And apparently we weren’t the last people to hand our work in :)
Time for the pub I think!
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
Thursday, 1 October 2009
End of week one
It’s been a very easy week but I don’t expect it to stay that way for long, so I’m enjoying it while I can. This week has been mostly about remembering names and getting to know people, and a few lectures about things like how to find information, what research the department does, how to use the careers service, and what the renewable energy sector looks like at the moment.
My course has about 50 people doing it, and we sit in the same room for all our lectures. The room is short and wide, and has two projectors in it, which is good for being able to see but must be a bit disorientating for the lecturers. I’ve been sitting at the back (like the ‘trouble’ element of the class that I am) and have noticed that there is a microphone above where the lecturer stands and a camera pointed there too. This is presumably a feed for the Distance Learning students, so have been making a mental note to remember this and not stand in front of the camera and scratch my bum or something. Being a lady I’m sure I won’t do that anyway.
I went to the first choir night on Monday and got hopelessly lost in Handel’s Messiah. I’m hoping I’ll start to get the tune after a few practices. It was really really busy, although thinking about it I think the choir at Leeds Uni was the same size. We sang some other tunes as well, can’t remember the names of any of them now. Anyway we’re doing a Christmas concert which I imagine I’ll drag my folks to some time in December. If I manage to learn the tune that is.
Loughborough Uni reminds me a bit of Butlins (I went there once for a festival, so it wasn’t the proper Butlins experience but you got the gist of the place). All the halls are on site and have nice little courtyards between them. It’s full of youngsters running round being sporty and they get ushered around in packs by other youngsters, who are their hall committee presumably. Luckily they know better than to try and involve the postgrads in any of their foam party/coloured tshirts/hanging round in packs nonsense as we are much too mature and refined for that kind of thing ahem ahem.
My course has about 50 people doing it, and we sit in the same room for all our lectures. The room is short and wide, and has two projectors in it, which is good for being able to see but must be a bit disorientating for the lecturers. I’ve been sitting at the back (like the ‘trouble’ element of the class that I am) and have noticed that there is a microphone above where the lecturer stands and a camera pointed there too. This is presumably a feed for the Distance Learning students, so have been making a mental note to remember this and not stand in front of the camera and scratch my bum or something. Being a lady I’m sure I won’t do that anyway.
I went to the first choir night on Monday and got hopelessly lost in Handel’s Messiah. I’m hoping I’ll start to get the tune after a few practices. It was really really busy, although thinking about it I think the choir at Leeds Uni was the same size. We sang some other tunes as well, can’t remember the names of any of them now. Anyway we’re doing a Christmas concert which I imagine I’ll drag my folks to some time in December. If I manage to learn the tune that is.
Loughborough Uni reminds me a bit of Butlins (I went there once for a festival, so it wasn’t the proper Butlins experience but you got the gist of the place). All the halls are on site and have nice little courtyards between them. It’s full of youngsters running round being sporty and they get ushered around in packs by other youngsters, who are their hall committee presumably. Luckily they know better than to try and involve the postgrads in any of their foam party/coloured tshirts/hanging round in packs nonsense as we are much too mature and refined for that kind of thing ahem ahem.
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