The Beginning of the End: Last Year at UCL

With the beginning of September, the hot summer has slowly but surely faded into a rainy and windy autumn, indicating only one thing. It was finally time to return to London, come back to UCL. After spending a year at the equator in Singapore with no need to wear anything warmer than a light summer jacket, I found myself throwing all my winter stuff into the boxes and suitcase once again.

When I first looked at my timetable, it seemed to me that this year is going to be a quiet one. And as always, I was mistaken. The list of my modules sounds a bit like an excerpt from a science fiction literature: Advanced Quantum Theory, Particle Physics, Research Software Engineering, Quantum Computing and Communication, and Quantum Field Theory. And of course, I must not forget to mention my master’s project, the icing on the cake called the 4th year at UCL, on “Exotic Contributions to Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay”. Its main goal is identifying and calculating novel decay models of neutrinoless double beta decaying isotopes. Therefore, I can assure everyone that the traditional tea parties in the library, exhausted closing of the laptop lid around midnight, and constant efforts to maintain the necessary caffeine saturation, continue.

To make things even more interesting, the time for writing personal statements, recommendation requests, and gathering all the necessary information for scholarship applications and just general applications, has come again. This time for a doctoral degree. Hopefully, successfully completing my studies (MSci in Physics and Inorganic and Materials Chemistry), is not the end my academic career. Actually, it is just a beginning of my dream to become a particle physicist. So perhaps, instead of the beginning of the end, it is rather the end of the beginning, for which I owe to my parents, friends, teachers and mentors, and The Kellner Family Foundation. Thank you.