Autumn Flashback

On the other hand, I didn’t stay aside for a long time. My role of president of the Czech-Slovak society at ICL required me to participate on the Freshers Fair, which is a one-day event of ‚societies advertisement’ that takes place during the first week of term. Our committee traditionally met at my place and together we baked ‘strudl’ and marble cake to give a warm welcome to the new people. Even though typically not all people with Czech or Slovak nationality sign up for a membership, we achieved to count 28 people, which is the same as in the last year. I should say that the Slovak participation on social activities tends to be usually higher than the Czech one, but this year Czechs seem to have taken the lead. To break the ice we played a board game ‚Czech-Slovak Battle of Southern Moravia‘ at our first society meeting and the second event took shape of a central London pub crawl with tasting of local beer and ciders.  

This year I participated again in the mums&dads scheme in our Chemistry department and together with my Czech chemmate we adopted three chemistry freshers. Our ‚children‘ have reminded me how it felt like when being back in the first year. As everyone else I was full of expectations and excitement but also confused from the new information overflow. I hope that me and my ‚chemhusband‘ gave our children a solid guidance on how to survive first year without any significant mental or physical breakdown and how to experience less sleepless nights before lab report submission deadlines.

The Freshers week has gone very fast and lectures have begun, as well as laboratories. A blithe summer was replaced by darker times and suddenly one’s being greeted by grey mornings spent in the lecture theatres and find themselves lingering in labs for four to five hours almost every afternoon. That’s the time when one realises that it’s not too different to being a ‚lab rat‘ that barely gets to see a day light. But I don’t want to complain, because this year we were given at least some choice of labs. During my first two weeks of physical labs I worked on design of a spectrograph (analytical device) and then I printed the device using a 3D printer: it was so exciting! 3D printing enjoys currently a great deal of attention at ICL and many students come to the HACK space (workshops with great equipment available), where they have laser cutters, 3D printers and much more equipment free at their disposal, and manufacture Christmas presents for their close friends.

It’s a midterm time now and London is slowly falling into Christmas atmosphere. The shop windows became covered with fake snowflakes and trees along Fulham Road were decorated by Christmas lights chains. There is the most beautiful place – an ice ring - right around the corner by South Kensington tube station. Whenever I am passing by, I get into Christmassy mood and cannot wait to be in Prague to enjoy a proper winter with some real snow.