Cold Christmas

Well, it’s suddenly very cold here but Christmas is coming over the horizon, bringing with it mulled wine and mince pies to keep me warm. The fact that Christmas is almost here also reminds me that exams are almost here too. At least I know I have a load of the marks already thanks to coursework and labs!

Being somewhat fickle, I have decided to change course! Nothing drastic, but instead of doing Electronic Engineering, I will now be doing Electronic Engineering with Mobile and Secure Systems. This is the first year that the School has run it and it looks exciting. The other advantage is that I have the option to take more computer science type modules in the later years. I’m a bit geeky and that suits me perfectly.

I’m still really enjoying life here. I come from a boring little town and moving to a city suits me far better. Buses come every 10 minutes rather than once an hour and we have not just one or two shopping centres, we have three. (With Christmas coming, that has proven most useful!) The work has started to ramp up a bit with at least one piece of coursework due a week. Most of the courseworks are just questions sheets, with some questions more fiendish than others, but one large piece we had to do this term was to build an electric motor as a team. The biggest challenge here was being able to find a time when every member of the team could meet up. The task was to get a motor spinning using only a piece of copper wire as the rotor and a bunch of paperclips to hold it up. We didn’t do too badly with 1500rpm but it was quite embarassing when the team across the bench from us started theirs off and it made a wonderful whirring noise as it worked its way up to 5000rpm.

I’m currently having to look into one of the research groups at the school to write a paper for when we come back in January. It’s very interesting hearing about the wide variety of research projects going on here. I doubt it’s going to be as much fun writing about them though!