Thinking back on my first term at Queen Mary

I suppose this post was to be expected, at the end of the first term at uni: I am going to go through the main elements of these months and summarise my impressions on everything.

Biology course

Since I am in London to study, I should definitely start from my course. In general, I have to say I really like it, because it gives me a broad background in Biology and it helps patching up the holes in my Biology knowledge derived from not doing much Biology at school in the past. 

Evolution has been my absolute favourite module, both because of my lecturers and because of the topics we covered. Unfortunately we won’t have this subject in next term, but at least now I am even more sure that I want to go on with Evolutionary Biology next year when I can choose my modules!

Cell Biology is on the other side of the spectrum... I didn’t like it very much mainly because of the lecturers. I liked my first teacher at the beginning, but then he became mean to the class, and I never liked either of the other lecturers we had. The topics weren’t bad, but I am not into cell biology that much...

In the middle there is Molecular Biology :) Not as amazing as Evolution, but still very good. We had two great and interesting lecturers, who worked hard to keep us attentive on the lessons! Both of them were very funny as well and made us laugh every single time :P

My last module is Lab (Practical and Analytical Biology), which doesn’t rank anywhere because it’s too different from the other completely theoretical ones! At first I was scared I wouldn’t be any good at this, as I have never worked in a proper lab, but it turned out to be easier than I thought. It just took a few weeks to get used to and then I started doing my work with more enthusiasm and a lot more easily than at the beginning! It was fun to work together with my friends to solve some exercises that we can’t understand at first to then find out that they are not impossible. Lab turned out to be fun and I am enjoying a lot the opportunity of doing experiments first hand! 

Preparing to count blood cells in Lab

London, my new city

I hadn’t thought about it this way, yet, until a friend of mine mentioned in an email that I was sightseeing my “own city”. I had to do a double-take before realising she was talking about London, but she is right! London is my city now :) Though, I don’t feel like I really know London. I live in my safe bubble on campus, which feels like it has its own place not belonging to a city. I love it, I love it and I love it, I’d repeat it a hundred times, but it doesn’t feel like London that much. Of London, I know the touristic areas and some other parts that are near uni, but I can’t say I know it as my city. Well, I have lived there only three months, I have plenty of time to get to know it I suppose! 

Anyway, London is an amazing city, so busy and so original! I was scared by its being so huge, and I still am, but it’s also a place that gives you the opportunity to see things you can’t see anywhere else and do stuff you can only do in London! I have discovered new hobbies here, thanks to friends, but also thanks to the fact that I’m in London because I wouldn’t have been able to develop these passions anywhere else. The most important example right now is Musical Theatre :) I had no idea I would like it so much and being near the West End allows me to enjoy it a lot! Aside from actually seeing the musicals in this wonderful location, I also decided I am interested in trying musical theatre as a hobby... and that’s why I am going to start taking singing lessons in January, to get the basics I need to start a musical theatre course afterwards :)

Living on my own

There are aspects of it I like, others I don’t particularly enjoy, but in general it’s a great experience. It’s not that I didn’t like living at home, but being by myself helped me grow a lot, it helped me becoming more mature and learning quickly things that it would have taken me a lot longer to learn otherwise. I hate washing the dishes after meals, that’s the worst thing for me, but I don’t mind that much cleaning my room, doing the washing or cooking. I didn’t know that before, but I actually kind of enjoy doing these things for myself because they make me feel responsible and adult!

Of course this year is special, because I am living on campus, where I still have someone checking that I don’t mess up too badly. Residential Services do  cover the basics, they clean the communal areas, they take care of major issues and they pay bills for us taking them from our general rental fee. Next year will be another story, because next year will be when I have to move out of campus! Thankfully, I have met someone I want to move out with next year and I am not by myself in this, but it’s kind of scary to think about. From the end of the first week, I Have been thinking about next year and I have been talking about moving out, mainly with my flat mate and friend Isabela. The main topic we have in our mind when we think of next year is the house we will have to move to. We still haven’t found one, fairly enough since we haven’t done serious searching, but that’s not our biggest worry right now. At the moment we are still trying to work out who is going to be living in that house! We often have discussions on this, on the possibilities we have and the problems that might arise, and we end up looking at houses online pretty regularly, just to try and convince ourselves that we can make it! I am sure we can, but right now it is all very confusing and I am a bit scared of next year... moving out completely will be hard and  complications might come up often. I mean, this year we are in a safe bubble on campus, where we have cleaners for the shared areas, where our bills are included in the rent (therefore we have only one deadline to worry about), where everything is close by, where we have our own private and lockable rooms if we want to be alone. Next year it will all be different! Sharing a proper house will mean totally growing up, with no looking back because we will be officially facing all the aspects of living on our own. Sure, we won’t be working full time, we will still be students, but in a different way. We will have to be completely independent and rely on our abilities all the time, with pretty much only the help of our flat mates. [The last few lines of this were taken from a previous post]. All of this said, I am positive that it will all work out soon!

People I’ve met, friends & acquaintances

I left this paragraph for the end of the post, even though it’s such an important part of my life in London! There are so many people I have met in these months, but I can only consider a few as friends. I have plenty of acquaintances and some nearly-friends in London, but those I actually consider friends are about 7 :) I was thinking of it the other day and I was listing them to myself: it’s a big number, to be fair, but this just shows that I am very lucky in meeting the right people for me!

Coincidences do happen. I have started believing so after all the experiences I’ve had so far, where I have found amazing people on my way :) But this time one of the coincidences is even bigger! The best friend I have made in England, the person with whom I share so many of my hobbies and I love spending time with the most happened to be living in my same flat! We are doing pretty much the same course, we live in front of each other and we have so much in common that sometimes I am still surprised... if I can’t call this the luckiest coincidence, I don’t know what would be!  I have been so lucky in meeting Isabela here and becoming friends with her and I am so glad I made that effort the first week to overcome shyness, because it made the rest of my stay at Queen Mary so so much better :) I can never get bored or lonely, because we spend so much time together, between movies to watch, cosplays to plan, stars to "stalk" online, chats or even doing our own things but still in the same room.

 

Again outside my course, and outside anything else for that matters, there is Maria Stella. We met by chance, because we both knew Tommaso (my flat mate, her ex-class mate), at the very beginning and we became friends so quickly! She is my Once Upon a Time partner, the third person in our little amazing trio of friends. We don’t have a course in common, we don’t share a flat, but being friends and hanging out together just came natural and is always so good :) 

 

Our trio

Last but not least among the people outside Biology, are my other flat mates! Tommaso, the other Italian in my flat, who is kind of a “little” brother to me (well, he is only a few months younger, but that’s the feeling). I wasn’t really happy about having another Italian in the flat at first, but Tommaso is lovely and I really enjoy spending time with him and talking about our days or just laughing about random stuff that comes up at the most random moments :) Melanie, with whom I have started spending more time lately and that I hope I’ll get to know better with time, after a beginning in which we rarely saw each other. Josh, whom I barely see... he is a ghost in our flat, he is nice and kind when he is around, but that happens so rarely that I am not sure I can say he is my friend! 

Isabela, Tommaso and I

Eventually, here I am to talk about my course friends! I didn’t leave them to the end because they are less important, but because I preferred separating the two categories. My little group is composed of five people, including me. Andrea, Laurana, Coral and Elena are my awesome friend from the course, with whom I spend all my lessons, I revise, do assignments, hang out for lunch... we started out only seeing each other in class, now we are doing some more together, we have been to the theatre, we went out for lunch several times including an a great and funny Christmas lunch (where Elena was missing). The group was born so quickly, in a matter of days during Freshers’ week! I met Andrea on the Tuesday, on the Wednesday I got to know Coral and Elena and finally on the Thursday also Laurana joined us :) Again, it all happened by chance, and I am so glad it did *_* Andrea is probably my closest friend among all of them, because we share the tutorial group and we have our routine-Friday when we work together on assignments and go for lunch! Laurana is one of the funniest people ever lol We have some musical taste in common, but that’s not the reason I like her so much: she is so lovely all the time and she makes me laugh too much :) Coral is the sweet and quiet girl in the group, I would say, but that doesn’t make her less of a friend to me and I actually really like spending time with her!! Lately I have seen Elena a lot less than I used to, because she spends some time with us and some with her other group (the Medical Engineering people, because that’s her specific course), but when she is with us she is so funny as well and she is sweet and friendly and she is the one who always manages to get us through thinking workshops because she is a good group leader :)

Elena, me, Coral, Andrea and Laurana after Lab

Laurana, Andrea and me at Costa for a hot drink

Xmas lunch (Coral, Lauran, me and Andrea)

Leftover bits and pieces...

• I became a Student Ambassador and now I have the opportunity of sharing with future students my experience at Queen Mary. Lovely job, isn’t it? I don’t need to fake any enthusiasm, because it’s all real, I get to tell my story to people who want to hear it and are looking up to me to know what their university life will be like. It’s a lot of responsibility, to be fair, but I’m up to it, because I owe so much to those Ambassadors who convinced me to choose Queen Mary last year!

• Theatre has become an important and wonderful part of my life, surprisingly! I never particularly liked theatre, but musicals changed it all :) So far I have only seen two (Wicked and Les Miserables), and I am about to repeat one of them in a month and a bit, but I know songs from various musicals and I already have a list of what I am going to see next! Moreover, as I mentioned above, from January I will be spending my Tuesday nights at City Academy, attending a singing course (level 1, of course – I am most definitely a beginner!) with Isabela. The idea is that if I get some vocal basics, then I can move on to musical theatre next year – as a hobby of course :)
• Societies – When it was the time of the Freshers’ fair at the very beginning, I signed up to something like 6 societies because they all sounded awesome... I still think they are great, but I haven’t been attending many events :( Sometimes I simply forgot to, some others I gave up because I was tired or didn’t feel like it... In the end I have been to a pizza/quiz night with the Biology society, a pub meeting with the Equality society, the MCM Comic Con with the Anime society, an introductory meeting with the science magazine (I have also carried out an interview, but it hasn’t been published yet) and an exhibition with the photography society. I have met a few people throughout the societies, but I didn’t really keep in touch with many. Though, the one I have talked to the most is Fenn from the photography society, who is a third year student in Zoology, therefore she told me so much about my future years! I also enjoyed being with the people from the anime society at the MCM but I haven’t seen any of them since then...
   

A visit from my dad , "moving" bedroom and other stories

Dear readers,

I know it sounds unbelievable but I am finally describing the events that happened LESS THAN A WEEK AGO! I am more surprised than anyone else... I really wanted to get up to date and I guess now I have made it! :)

Monday 1^st December: for the first time since I have been here, I found Evolution boring. Dr Hone talked about all the possible types of parasites and it was fine for as long as we stayed generic... but then he started going into details of little parasites, giving examples, some of which were awful... so I zoned out! Parasites are not my thing >.<

On the other hand, in the afternoon I had a great Lab session. It was the second Freestyle Lab of the semester, therefore we could revise all the experiments we had done in the previous week thanks to a revision booklet (we have an exam tomorrow). For once, I decided not to work with the rest of the group, meaning with the only two girls from my group sitting with me that day (Laurana and Andrea). So I tried to do everything on my own and it worked! I got a bit distracted at some stage, as I started talking with a boy and a girl I didn’t know who were sitting in front of me, but then I got back on track and I even finished early *_* I still called the demonstrator a few times, because we had the best demonstrator we had ever had and I wanted her to explain the reasons why I was going undertaking certain actions that I knew I had to do undertake. 

In the evening, first I watched “Once Upon a Time” with Maria Stella and then I Skyped my friend Giulia and we commented on it for a while :) Once again, it was a great and shocking episode! Afterwards, I had dinner with Tommaso and as usual we talked about our day and he showed me a video. When he left, I watched some more “Glee”, finding out that not only Idina Menzel is in it (which I already knew and is the main reason why I want to see the show), but also Kristin Chenoweth is *_* I had already seen an episode with her back in Italy, but I didn’t know who she was then so I hadn’t appreciated her as fully as now (even though I was absolutely in love with her character’s voice!). 

Tuesday 2^nd: in the morning I met Fenn (the girl from the Photo Society) at the Hive (a bigger common room on campus) and we chatted for a little while, before I left her so she could finish some assignment she was working on. Then I did some research for my tutorial presentation, until Melanie and Isabela joined me in my room and we started cutting Christmas decorations out of paper! That was Isabela’s wonderful idea, as we are all on a strict budget right now and we couldn’t afford proper decorations (should have thought of saving in the past weeks). Melanie made a beautiful 3D snowflake that is in the first two pictures I posted, while Isabela made a Snowman and I made snowflakes and Santa hats for the sticky pumpkins!
While we were there we made a decision: my room was going to be turned into a living room (despite all my stuff still being here) and I would move in with Isabela for sleeping :) We chose my room as the living room because I have the beautiful view on the canal!

 

 

 

After some time, Isabela and I left to walk Maria Stella to the post office to ask after a parcel that she hadn’t received, with me leaving my room unlocked so Melanie could use it... it was a big trust exercise for me, as I had never left anyone in my room other than Isabela, without me in the flat! In the meantime, Isabela and I received a parcel we were waiting for... our mutual Christmas present: Wicked-inspired necklaces saying “Because I knew you” (a line from “For good”, which is one of the songs we sing the most) – mine has Elphaba’s broom and green gem, hers has Glinda’s wand and a blue gem!

During dinner I watched “Glee” again and then Isabela came back from seeing her mum and we set up the second bed in her room :) We the finished cutting some more paper Christmas decorations and we hang all we had in the kitchen *-*

Around midnight we all went to bed and I started reading a Gelfie (Glinda + Elphaba) fanfiction on my phone. The deal Isabela and I had made was to stop “socialising” at midnight and we had begun well... but when we both stopped reading we suddenly started talking about the fanfiction and that led to countless more topics to talk about. For example, we discussed “Hunger Games”, “Chronicles of Narnia” and some other books/movies, before moving onto some deeper conversations... we ended up talking about our friends, including all of our flat mates. We went on talking until past 4am!

Wednesday 3^rd: at 10am I had Tutorial and Andrea and I had to make a presentation on “Structure and Function of posters”. I was in charge of structure and I had found a lot of information, but I wasn’t as confident as usual when I delivered my speech... probably because it was kind of an unusual topic! Anyway, the whole tutorial was a bit weird, because nobody was completely ready for their presentation and two girls didn’t even turn up! Thank goodness it was not marked!

Around lunchtime, I went and met my dad at Liverpool Station and he gave me a packet of Tarallucci, but then he immediately had to leave because he had to go to Windsor for work (the reason why he was in London).

When I got home, Isabela and Melanie joined me in my room and we looked up some Disney Infinity action figures (I love the Merida, Tinkerbell and Maleficent ones out of those I don’t have – mine are Elsa, Rapunzel and Anna) and Nintendo 3DS games... I wish I had a 3DS *_*

That evening, Isabela and I promised we would talk about anything we wanted to talk about before midnight, so we would manage to sleep early... but we switched the lights off at midnight and then we ended up starting a new conversation out of nothing :P This time it was serious from the very beginning, as we talked for over two ours about our personalities and how easy/hard we find it to meet new people and build trust.

Thursday 4^th: I went to my Molecular Biology lecture and we talked about regulation of genes, but i got distracted in the second half because I started writing a letter for a scrap book for one of my Australian friends who is going to university soon. On the way back from Whitechapel, where the Thursday lecture is, Laurana, Andrea and I stopped at Costa and the two of them got a hot chocolate... I am kind of moneyless right now and I am on a very strict budget. Well, to be fair I am not moneyless, but I am saving some money to go and see Les Miserables at the theatre next Monday, so all that money is untouchable! 

The three beautiful Xmas cups at Costa
(the Santa one was already on the table)

 

As soon as I got home I went to rest a bit and... I ended up asleep >.< I eventually met up with my dad, properly this time, and we went for a tea in Kensington. We went Chez Paul and we sat there for over an hour, chatting and catching up on our news :) Then we came back to Mile End and we had dinner at the Half Moon, so I wouldn’t have catch the tube alone at night! It took ages to get the food, but again we had some time to chat, before he had to leave (early) because he had to go to Stansted... he had a very early flight the next morning so he couldn’t go to bed to late :(

For the rest of the night I went on reading the Gelfie fanfiction I had started (I LOVE THAT FANFICTION! It’s called “Unadulterated something”), while Isabela was Skyping. Because she was talking, I also moved back to my room for the night.

Friday 5^th: I was nearly late to lecture so I rushed to be there at 9am exactly... but apparently there was no need! I met Lea, an American exchange student, on the way and she stopped me to tell me the lecture had been cancelled because our lecturer was not well! So I met with Andrea in the Common Room and we did some Lab work and revision, then also Laurana joined us. However, I had to leave early (at midday) to have lunch and go and meet my tutor. 

With him, I discussed the Research project at University of Queensland and he approved of the idea and said that it would be great to get some experience. There’s also the fact that he is very partial to Australia, of course, having been there to research himself ;) 

Later on I went to Maria Stella’s place and we went to the shopping centre in Stratford. I bought Isabela’s Christmas present, before she joined us and we went looking for Ben’s (a friend of Maria Stella’s) and Melanie’s presents. Then we wandered around Stratford and I bought a snack... I was also upset for a while, because I was mad at Maria Stella for having me left alone when I went to eat, but I guess tiredness just made me overreact to the thing because I was nearly crying! I was a lot better soon after and the three of us stopped in our kitchen to talk and I told them what was wrong with me... I didn’t want to say it at the shopping centre!

 

Eventually, we all went to bed and I went back to my “new” room (Isabela’s) and this time we actually went to sleep early :P