Hello,
Since I am three weeks behind with writing here, I am just
going to make a general summary and then highlight the most important or weird
things the happened :)
Routine in these past weeks
The last three weeks have been pretty full on and university
is definitely entering the hard phase: I have to study, summarise notes,
integrate with textbooks, do assignments and lab exercises.
MONDAY: A typical week always starts with my Evolution lecture at 9am, with Mr Handsome teaching us. Seriously, apart from anything else, he is a real good lecturer, I love the way he teaches and he makes everything very clear. The fact that I truly like the subject also helps!!
After the first one hour of lecture I have a two-hours break during which I normally do some work with the girls from my group in Biology, for example to finish Lab assignments.
Next we have a second hour of lecture of Evolution and then a break of one hour. In these weeks we have talked mainly about human evolution and genetics in evolution!
In the afternoon, we have lab, which is harder, but I am also starting to appreciate it :) These three weeks in lab were about: critical thinking (we had to create a poster – I’ll talk more about this later), solutions to count cells and “freestyle practical” (solutions + microscope + modelling of chromosomes).
Lab finishes at 5 and usually after that I have my “Once Upon a Time” meeting with Maria Stella, either in her or my room and we watch the new episode and comment it together, which is a lot nicer that watching it alone :P Even though I anyway comment a lot also with Giulia and Chiara (in Italy) through texts hahah Once Upon a Time mania yay! I so love "Once Upon a Time" and this season is amazingly great, with both "Frozen" and the old characters in it *_*
MONDAY: A typical week always starts with my Evolution lecture at 9am, with Mr Handsome teaching us. Seriously, apart from anything else, he is a real good lecturer, I love the way he teaches and he makes everything very clear. The fact that I truly like the subject also helps!!
After the first one hour of lecture I have a two-hours break during which I normally do some work with the girls from my group in Biology, for example to finish Lab assignments.
Next we have a second hour of lecture of Evolution and then a break of one hour. In these weeks we have talked mainly about human evolution and genetics in evolution!
In the afternoon, we have lab, which is harder, but I am also starting to appreciate it :) These three weeks in lab were about: critical thinking (we had to create a poster – I’ll talk more about this later), solutions to count cells and “freestyle practical” (solutions + microscope + modelling of chromosomes).
Lab finishes at 5 and usually after that I have my “Once Upon a Time” meeting with Maria Stella, either in her or my room and we watch the new episode and comment it together, which is a lot nicer that watching it alone :P Even though I anyway comment a lot also with Giulia and Chiara (in Italy) through texts hahah Once Upon a Time mania yay! I so love "Once Upon a Time" and this season is amazingly great, with both "Frozen" and the old characters in it *_*
TUESDAY: I used to have Molecular Biology on Tuesday morning, but it was move to Thursday from last week :) However I’ll talk about it now! Molecular Biology is fine, it’s not my favourite subject (that is Evolution), but I started kind of liking it lately... I think the fact that Dr Curren, my lecturer, is very good helps a lot! We have been dealing with DNA, RNA and chromosomes.
WEDNESDAY: Wednesday is my first free day and I normally
just sleep in, do some work for the course, either at home or at the library,
and relax.
THURSDAY: It used to be my other free day and I would spend
it very similarly to the Wednseday, but from last week I started having
Molecular Biology at 9am, in the Whitechapel campus, which is two tube stops
away from here. I was really upset about having to commute, but the lecture
theatre there is just amazing! It’s worth the trip, which is fast, anyway, and
I go with a friend of mine (Laurana), so it’s fine!
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FRIDAY: On Friday morning, 9-11, I have Cell Biology and Physiology, which has
become my least favourite module because I didn’t like the lecturer we had for
the first five weeks, honestly... At the beginning I thought he was funny, but
then he started being mean and rude towards the people who were asking or
answering questions in the wrong way... he would tease them and I felt
embarrassed for them :( Then he kept complaining nobody was interacting... how
can you think people would want to interact when you treat them that way?!
After lesson, Andrea and I normally go to the common room in France House and we do homework together there for a while, which helps a lot because we understand things better and we do them quickly. We usually complete our Mastering Biology assignment, a weekly online test, our Lab preparation for the next Monday and our Lab exercise assigned for that specific week (lately, it has mainly been concerning the use of a software called Blast).
In the last couple of weeks, Friday has also turned into the days when Isabela and I go grocery shopping, either at the big Sainsbury’s in Whitechapel, 15 minutes from here, or in one of the smaller supermarkets around here! We always spend soooo much time out when we go shopping, either because we slowly walk around the supermarket chatting, or because we stop in other places, like last Friday, when we stopped at a French cafĂ© for a crepe. OMG the crepe was great, but we had such an embarrassing experience... we simply walked out of the place and the man had to run after us, because we had forgotten to pay -.-“ It was soooooo embarrassing, I couldn’t stop blushing and giggling!
Lastly, Friday night is when we have our traditional “flat dinner”, which is not exactly a flat dinner, since Josh never comes! Lately, also Tommaso has been standing us up, but Melanie, Isabela and I are pretty much always there and sometimes also Maria Stella joins us, as an honorary flat mate hahaha I really love this tradition :) Up to now, we have cooked spaghetti and meatballs (week 0), gnocchi (week 1), hamburgers (week 2), pizza (week 4).
After lesson, Andrea and I normally go to the common room in France House and we do homework together there for a while, which helps a lot because we understand things better and we do them quickly. We usually complete our Mastering Biology assignment, a weekly online test, our Lab preparation for the next Monday and our Lab exercise assigned for that specific week (lately, it has mainly been concerning the use of a software called Blast).
In the last couple of weeks, Friday has also turned into the days when Isabela and I go grocery shopping, either at the big Sainsbury’s in Whitechapel, 15 minutes from here, or in one of the smaller supermarkets around here! We always spend soooo much time out when we go shopping, either because we slowly walk around the supermarket chatting, or because we stop in other places, like last Friday, when we stopped at a French cafĂ© for a crepe. OMG the crepe was great, but we had such an embarrassing experience... we simply walked out of the place and the man had to run after us, because we had forgotten to pay -.-“ It was soooooo embarrassing, I couldn’t stop blushing and giggling!
Lastly, Friday night is when we have our traditional “flat dinner”, which is not exactly a flat dinner, since Josh never comes! Lately, also Tommaso has been standing us up, but Melanie, Isabela and I are pretty much always there and sometimes also Maria Stella joins us, as an honorary flat mate hahaha I really love this tradition :) Up to now, we have cooked spaghetti and meatballs (week 0), gnocchi (week 1), hamburgers (week 2), pizza (week 4).
WEEKEND: it doesn’t have a routine, since I quit my job
(I’ll explain later) :D Every weekend is different from the previous one and
that’s nice, but I always get to relax a bit, sleep in, do some cleaning,
shopping and to watch some show or read!
Outstanding events – #1 (6 to 10th October):
- Monday 6/10: That day we had to hand in an assignments on statistics, one that had had me go crazy for four hours on Friday afternoon and four more on Sunday night, because I couldn’t work out how to do it... ARGGGH! But I had managed eventually, so I was fine :P But in the two hours in between the two Evolution lectures, I met up with my tutorial group to work on our presentation and I found out that four of them hadn’t done it (only Andrea and I had), so I started explaining it to them and helping them... I did it four times in a row, 10 minutes for each!!! I can’t believe it o.O I went crazy for hours on mine, whereas now that I know how to do it I find it so easy! I am glad I got to help them, because I practised a lot and now I am quite confident with histograms and box plots on Excel :D
- Later that same day I had Lab and I thought it was going to be some other hard exercise, instead when I arrived (late) everyone was already sitting in small groups. I didn’t know what this was all about, so I went straight to where Andrea and Elena were sitting, in front of Coral and Laurana. But one of the demonstrator stopped me and tried to make me go to another group saying that the girls were already five and groups could only be of 5... what?! I could only see four and so could they, so we couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t let me go to them... int he end in turned out she considered Andrea and Elena in a group with three guys behind them and Coral and Laurana with other three, because they were on opposite side of a bench!! So the poor girl was right, but we still didn’t let her win and the five of us unified in a group, standing up all the others, on one side of the bench :P And I am glad we did! The exercise for the day was a Critical Thinking one, which meant we had to analyse three themes we were given (each group had different themes), by drawing out plots of ideas on A3 sheets we were provided. Apparently, there were also some instructions on the QM website, but neither of us knew it, so we just made it all up and... we got it right!! The academics were really impressed and couldn’t believe we had done it without looking at the examples :P So we worked on the three topics, but we mainly concentrated on the first one (“Domestication of dogs created several different species”), since they told us we would only be marked on one. Then we spent the rest of the time just chatting, about tv series and movies :) At the end of the workshop, they told us we could take the posters home and that we would have to hand in our favourite the next Monday, after completing him and perfecting it out of Lab! So the next Monday morning, in between the two Evolution lectures, we gathered in the France House common room (which has turned into our study room) and stuck the A3 sheet to an A2 one, added more writing around it and glued pictures in :) I soooo love the result, as we also made it a bit colourful! Here is an almost complete version of it, with only some highlighting missing:
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- In the evening (yes, I’d say that Monday was particularly
eventful), Isabela introduced me to the anime “Attack on titans” and... I would
say I liked it, since we ended up watching 6 episodes in a row and after about
a week and a half we had seen the whole season 1 (22 episodes) + all the
available special episodes!! I don’t know why I got hooked so quickly, but I
couldn’t stop watching and I wanted to know what woud happen next all the
time... and I still do, since season 1 is not the end of the story!
Moreover, we decided to cosplay characters from the show at the London MCM *-* I wanted to be Hanji and she wanted to be Mikasa, but we only managed to have one piece of costume each for the MCM, as will be shown in the post I will write specifically about the MCM! - Being sick – no specific day: starting from that Thursday I had my job trial, I was sick for about three weeks, with a very bad cough, a cold and some days even a fever! I could probably have healed a lot faster if I had thought of buying medicines, but I waited until I went back to Italy in mid-October to get some, so I had this sickness for quite a while!
- Tuesday 7/10: nothing particularly special, but it’s worth mentioning that because we were watching “Attack on titan” the whole time... Isabela and I ended up doing the washing until midnight! And once it was out of the washing machines, since the drying machine hadn’t worked very well, we had to hang the clothes on a drying rack in my room... but there wasn’t enough room for everything, so we also used my chair and Melanie’s extra mattress that was still in my room from the night of the Ball :P It seriously looked like a favela (word of a Brazilian girl!) HAHAHA
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| Hanji is the screaming girl at the back |
- Wednesday 8/10: at the 10am, I had my first real
tutorial meeting! I was nearly late, because they are doing some refurbishing
in the uni and every day some of the areas are closed, so I couldn’t find my
way to the building where I was meant to go. However, I met Lina on the way and
we walked there together, so it was fine :) The six of us that showed up (there’s
8 of us in the group, but Harry and Rose didn’t come... actually none of us had
any idea of who Rose was!) presented our slideshow on “Function and Structure
of a Chair” and it went sort of well... even though most of people got negative
feedback (luckily, I was fine). But it was our first presentation and it wasn’t
marked, so it was very useful to start working together and understand what our
tutor expects of us!! I like our advisor/tutor, even though he seems even more
nervous of us during the tutorials, as if he was the one being assessed :) But
he is really nice and kind! I am also becoming friend with the rest of the
tutor group, not only Andrea and Lina! The people in my tutor group are: Andrea,
Lina (Karolina), Rose (who I didn’t know back then), Moh (Mohammed), Kash
(Kashif), Hisham and Harry (same as with Rose, but at least Kash and Hisham
knew him).
When tutorial finished, I went to the Common Room with Moh and Andrea and we worked on one of our Lab assignments together until lunch time, Then something adorable happened *-* Moh offered me lunch as a thank you for helping him with statistics on Monday!! That was so sweet of him! - Thursday 9/10: Since it was my only free day for the week, I relaxed and took a day off from studying anything. I talked on viber with my Australian host family and then my mum. Afterwards I had lunch and I finally caught up with the anime “Sailor Moon Crystal”, that I hadn’t watched in a month and a half, so I was three episodes behind! Now, I know I have never mentioned Sailor Moon before, but this series is another obsession of mine and i adore everything that concerns it, be it anime, manga or gadgets of any sort :P I even cosplayed one fo the Sailor warriors (Sailor Saturn) last year, so... hahaha By the way, I strongly suggest to anyone to watch “Sailor Moon Crystal” because it’s amazing (and for the people who have read the manga, it’s also very faithful to the original storyline).
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- In the afternoon I went to the meeting for the QMSci, the Science Magazine here at uni, and I truly loved the presentation *_* I am so exicted about starting this, even if I haven't wrtiten any article yet! Just after this, I picked up Maria Stella from her flat and then Isabela from our and we walked Maria Stella to the minimarket, to then leave her there and run to the the Biological Society meeting: we had a quiz & pizza night, in which we sat with random groups (my group counted Roshee, the girl I met one of the first days of Frehsers' week, a friend of hers and two other guys, plus of course me and Isabela). We didn't win, but it was fun, even though it wasn't very well organised... especially the "pizza" part, as there wasn't enough pizza for everyone! I only got 1 slice and most of my group didn't get any at all :(
- Friday 10/10: I had an awful night because my cough got very bad and i couldn’t sleep :( So I was literally a zombie at Cell Biology in the morning... and afterwards I had to run to the airport to fly to Italy, but that will be the topic of the next post!!
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