Classes started! Well, they’ve actually been going for two weeks now, and fun as it was to take a break, it’s been just amazing to get back into the whole academic mentality. I suppose that’s incredibly geeky of me, but a good sign considering I’m planning on ending up in academia one day as a professor. Anyways, back to school:

The course I’m on aims to train physical science graduates (physics, chemistry, engineering, and mathematics) to contribute to problems of biological and medical importance, so we’re currently going through an accelerated introduction to the field. One of the things I hadn’t counted on before coming to London was the degree of specialization offered/forced upon UK undergraduates. Whilst I had the opportunity to do a triple major and take quite a few random classes, chemistry undergrads at say Oxford or Warwick take little else but chemistry; double majoring if pretty much unheard of, except through specifically designed programs. Thus, I’ve had a comparatively easy time these past couple of weeks in class because I took college level courses in molecular biology, biochemistry, etc. However, the modules are moving along quickly enough that I should be learning some cool new stuff soon, so all’s well. :-D

However, lectures are only a minor component of the MRes I’m on. Because I’m doing a “Master in Research”, there are no more than 10 hours of lecture per week for 8 weeks, meaning I’ll be basically done with classes by late November! Exams are in early January, and then afterwards, it’ll pretty much be full time research in the lab for 9 months. Most of my other American friends are on “taught courses”, so I’ve made sure to tease them over the amount of time they have to spend in lectures.

As for research, I selected my supervisors about a week ago, and am simply stoked at the type of stuff I’ll get to do this year; I get to apply graph theory, stochastics, and information theory to large time-scale protein modelling! Whereas current molecular dynamics techniques are only able to model large proteins over extremely short timespans, so this really is an improvement. Higher mathematics once again swoops in to (hopefully) save the day; how cool is that? You’ll probably be hearing a lot more about that this year, and who knows, if it ends up going well, I might even be tempted into staying for a PhD!

In other news, I think I’ve settled upon my major extracurriculars for the year, or at least this term. At Imperial, it’ll be the Dance Company (tap, ballet, contemporary, and maybe some jazz) and the Choir (I got to sing at Royal Albert Hall on Wednesday for the IC Commemoration Day!), and at Goodenough, I’m helping organize a Swing Dance Club and might participate in Vision (a volunteer organization) and Ballroom Dance if time permits. I must confess to feeling a bit guilty though, as any time I’m in an extracurricular is time I could be spending doing research, but only a little bit.

Toodles,
~William~