Tuesday, 28 January 2014

Trains, trains and Ziggy Stardust

Today marks the start of the new semester and a new selection of modules for everyone to dig their teeth into. Although the first couple of days will mainly consist of introductory lectures outlining syllabuses, recommending texts and detailing the various methods of assessment, I’m sure by the end of the week my workload will have returned to its normal trend. The module I’m most intrigued about (albeit with equal amounts of apprehension) is my computing labs course, which I opted to take instead of the traditional practical physics labs. I’m guessing this module will not be too dissimilar from the kinds of things that fellow blog writer Robin deals with in his course and hence I may be calling upon his help sometime in the near future!

Ever since I finished my exams over a week ago, time has simply flown by. It’s rare for a student to receive the same freedom during term time as you have over the summer break and as such I really tried to make the most of it.

Last Monday, as I mentioned in my previous blog, I travelled across to Wales to investigate a graduate level medical physics course, which I found to be really useful and has definitely helped me to understand where my future might take me. The most surprising thing I learnt was just how high the competition per place is, so although I would really love to stay in Southampton, I think I’d settle for any offer of a placement.

As if an eight hour round train journey wasn’t enough, a couple of days later I got on another train to go home for the weekend. On Saturday we travelled up to Barnet for my Grandad’s 80th birthday meal, where nearly everyone from that side of the family was present, including my Aunt who I hadn’t seen for about seven years. Needless to say it was fantastic to see them all again!

Tonight I am going out to celebrate the end of exams with some of friends, but bizarrely, it’ll be as part of a joint History and English social! I should probably mention that both my twin sister and my girlfriend study History at Southampton, so naturally this is not the first History social I have taken part in. We are heading into Bedford Place to go to a club called Ninety Degrees, which I have never actually been to in my two and a half years at Southampton! It should be a fun night.

As with all good socials, it has a fancy dress theme – historical figures for the Historians and fictional characters for the English students. Considering I was technically neither, I opted to go down the music history route (since that’s what I know best), eventually deciding upon David Bowie’s alter ego Ziggy Stardust! The great thing about my choice is that it has both historical and fictional elements, so I will be able to fit in with both crowds!



Getting prepared for my Ziggy Stardust transformation


Before I went home on Thursday, a couple of housemates and I went into the city centre to find our fancy dress outfits for the night out. It’s not every day that three men go shopping and between them manage to buy a flat cap, white tights, neon orange fishnet gloves and a pink wig! Since we are all part of the fancy dress society, we thought we really need to show these History and English students how to do fancy dress properly and start semester two in style!

James

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