January has been very much a prep month, with lots of cool things unfolding but not quite ready to be shown off yet. That includes work on community labs, preparing to speak at Dublin Tech Summit, antibiotic resistance project work, Physoc stuff, book stuff, lots of European Youth Summit work. But I can talk about the following.
FRIENDS:
I spent New Year's at Kevin's, then the group had our own New Year's celebration weekend together a week later, featuring ice skating and boat parties. We've had some really great times. I also hung out a ton with Leon this month, who's awesome.
COLLEGE:
Coming back to college was cool, and I was delighted when I found out we're doing Organic Chemistry and Astronomy this term. (We're also doing Electromagnetism and continuing Linear Algebra and Calculus). Unfortunately, the lecturers did that college thing again in which difficulty of material over time is much like this:
Our Organic Chemistry and Physics labs have been pretty fun, and we're allowed to type Chemistry lab reports now so that's cool. Just really need to get the hang of mechanisms...
I didn't like my timetable at first because of the Chemistry lab on Friday afternoons, but it's actually quite nice to have only a three-hour Physics lab and a one-hour Maths tutorial on the Thursday. It means four hours on Thursday (well, five counting early lecture) and four hours on Friday, instead of 7 hours on the Thursday and 2 on the Friday.
COLLEGE:
Coming back to college was cool, and I was delighted when I found out we're doing Organic Chemistry and Astronomy this term. (We're also doing Electromagnetism and continuing Linear Algebra and Calculus). Unfortunately, the lecturers did that college thing again in which difficulty of material over time is much like this:
I didn't like my timetable at first because of the Chemistry lab on Friday afternoons, but it's actually quite nice to have only a three-hour Physics lab and a one-hour Maths tutorial on the Thursday. It means four hours on Thursday (well, five counting early lecture) and four hours on Friday, instead of 7 hours on the Thursday and 2 on the Friday.
BT YOUNG SCIENTIST: I visited the BT Young Scientist to see my mentees and meet up with a bunch of old friends. You can read the post about that here.
BLOG REDESIGN: As you can probably see, I redesigned my blog. I'm a fan of the header, and I like how dorky the robot background is.
COMMUNITY LABS:
The team and I have had two meetings now with college staff about possibly running a pilot programme for the labs and are working on a business plan for it at the moment. We did a market research survey of 103 people - you can have your say on it here, and I'll be blogging the results of the survey soon. You can read a description of the idea here.
Here they are just before the second meeting:
ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANCE:
I'll be giving a workshop in UCD on Wednesday about antibiotic resistance public health education, so I've been preparing for that. *stares at my comfort zone in the distance*.
READING:
I had a chance to get a fair bit of reading done this month. I read Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre (review), Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (review) and The Social Animal by David Brooks (review).
WRITING:
I've been working on book stuff, and interviewed the new TEDxTrinity society for the print edition of Trinity News.
So, not many big things happened this month -- but lots of fun, and lots of cool stuff in the works.
What I'm looking forward to in February:
- Going to Edinburgh with friends on the Physoc trip
- Speaking at Dublin Tech Summit
- Doing book proposal
- More fun with friends
- Getting more on top of college work
