Looming deadlines
There’s now just three weeks left of term and everyone’s pushing to get the results they need to write up their project reports. Those in third year are in dedicated project time, and both years are now split into groups of similar topics to present their work each week in project seminars. These are great […]
UCAS Days and Energy Efficiency
Around this time of year the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science hosts a series of UCAS days to prospective students, offering a tour of the labs, seminar rooms, the department’s research and computer suites, along a talk giving an overview of the course, an informal interview, and even a free lunch! For someone thinking of going […]
Applying for PhD Programmes
After a few months of research and deliberation, I’m happy to say I’ve accepted an offer for a PhD starting in September. Doing a PhD after completing an undergraduate course is becoming increasingly common in steps towards a career in both industry and academia, and generally consists of 3-4 years spent on a very specific […]
Writing a project report
One of the most important pieces of work on the natural sciences course in both third and fourth year is the report detailing your research project done throughout the year. Moving from five-week long module deliverables to such a large piece of work felt pretty daunting to me, and considering nearly every waking moment in fourth […]
Numerical methods, argon plasma and planning for the future
The second term is now well underway and it already feels considerably different to before Christmas. With microcontrollers soldered beyond recognition and the report handed in, the fourth year programming module now focuses on numerical methods, which are used to approximate solutions to functions that can’t be solved exactly. One of the best-known examples of […]
Attending a spectroscopy and dynamics conference
This week I got the opportunity to attend the annual meeting of the Spectroscopy and Dynamics Interest Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Taking place over three days at Nottingham University, around 150 delegates from across the UK and as far as America and Iceland came together to discuss current developments in the field. […]
Ending the year with all things Christmas
The final two weeks of term flew by in a blur of tying up loose ends on various bits of different modules and a host of Christmas-themed events. Despite the many broken components, finger burns and sanity lost over seemingly spontaneous problems, my year managed to complete the Arduino computing project in time, with everything […]
Detecting life in the solar system
This week the Centre for Interdisciplinary Science hosted a talk by Dr Zita Martins on her research in the field of astrobiology. Her work focuses on, among other things, studying organic matter from extra terrestrial sources as a possible starting point for the origin of life on Earth, and with Philae landing on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko […]
Getting back in the lab
With some initial computational work out of the way and a somewhat interesting eye test, this week I started work in the laser spectroscopy lab as part of my masters project. The plan is to identify the spectra of novel molecules that might be found in the interstellar medium. Not surprisingly, achieving this requires a […]
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