Back from the Haitus!
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Hello everyone! Well, I think it’s been almost a year since I’ve written a blog. I’m just starting the third year now. Gosh, I feel old. I was a fresher when I wrote the last blog. A lot has happened since then. Second year was just something else. First year at university was only the tip of the iceberg in every possible way.
Right from the start I had a good sense of familiarity of the place. Southampton was my jolly good town. I knew to expect the worst in the second year. My seniors who just finished their year didn’t help by saying that this was the year where sleep didn’t exist.
It started off fine. We had an interesting group project in which we had to make an app for a phone. I learnt quite a lot. The modules seemed to start off easy but just progressed into a foreign language that didn’t make sense unless you put in extra effort to study them. All this coupled with finding time for societies and sports ensured that I had possibly the busiest life in university. I only came back to my room to sleep. Time just flew. Before I knew it, I was packing up for Christmas vacations and ready to take my exams which went really well. I got my first comfortably. My thought after the first semester was that there was no way that the second semester could be as hectic as the first. Obviously, I was wrong.
The name of the task was D4. A group project in which we had to build a robot that played football. Sounds splendid and fancy but this was a truly gruelling task. The Zepler laboratory became my home. I used to work with my teammates till the lab closed. We gave Pizzaz Pizza good business I must say. Once the lab shut we carried on our work back at home. We finally finished it. Although it wasn’t a perfect model and it didn’t really play football the way we wished, all of us loved what we built. In retrospect, I loved this project. It was an intellectually stimulating exercise and I feel the effort was worth it. From this exercise and from the year I learnt that wireless communications and the field of computer architecture interested me the most. All this again, was done hand in hand with other activities. My second semester results were better than expected. I finished the year with a first overall.
Another thing I learnt this year was how much preparation a job interview required. I went to my first interview completely unprepared and it went horribly. I was looking for work in the summer and I managed to get an internship in university which actually proved to be quite exciting and informative. I got to work on processors. It gave me something to do in the summer and when I wasn’t working I would go to Bournemouth and enjoy the waves and sunshine. I also learnt to cook (eating take-away meals just didn’t cut it anymore)!
Well so that’s a year of my life in a nutshell. I have big plans for this year. The Olympics has given me a strange motivation to try out fencing. More importantly, I’ve begun a serious job hunt for next summer. By the looks of it the third year shouldn’t be as hectic as last year but who knows, its ECS after all!
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