Two done – two to go

All in all, everything went well so far. I finally found out what I would like to do after university, I tried things that I never thought of doing, those that I dreamt of doing and those I was terrified of. I enjoyed most of them, and for the rest of them I at least enjoyed their end.

Before I came to university, I was terrified of programming. Sure, computers were these useful tools and as most people my age I would be even more scared of being without a computer for more than few days. But as soon as you get rid of that pretty interface and all you have left are white letters on black background, who could possibly understand or write that? Well, I am still not much of a coder, every time I’m faced with a new project there is plenty I don’t understand or can’t do, but instead of fear I feel excitement. I spent 8 weeks this summer simulating dark matter detection in LHC, just me, a black terminal window with a half-finished code from other researchers and plenty of Skype calls and video conferences. And even at the times nothing was working and we couldn’t find a mistake anywhere, I really enjoyed just trying to solve the problem, exploring the structure of the code and the physics behind it. To some extent, I even understood why people research string theory, dark matter and all those hard to imagine concepts. As in all research, there is the amazing feeling of producing a plot nobody has ever seen before. The process of understanding the universe is an amazing product of human cooperation and computer power. Some people just enjoy the process without worrying about its applications or the possibility that they might be completely wrong.

As much as I enjoy learning just for the sake of learning, I don’t think I would be able to spend the rest of my life on something that probably won’t be useful for at least another hundred years for a regular human being. Fortunately there are areas where I can use coding, do physics and maybe have an impact on current technologies within the next decades.

The next big thing that happened this year was Science Challenge. I was writing about it in my previous posts, but it’s basically an essay writing competition encouraging school kids to communicate science. I still can’t believe I actually did it, organised a competition with help of a team, gave a speech on the Launch and another one on the Final, encouraged about twice as many people than last year to try and enter the competition and didn’t collapse somewhere in the process. I always thought I am terrible at organising anything and I am really glad that this worked out so well. And I am so happy that it’s over.

It is probably premature to say this, but after this year and especially this summer I feel like a grown up. I signed a contract for the first house I’ll be living in this year, went for a viewing of many others. I had my first serious discussion about a salary (well, technically it was a grant for my summer placement, which turned out to be a lot smaller than I was promised and I needed). I can now officially work in UK and apply for all jobs and know how the taxes and National insurance work. I had my first minimum wage job, which was ironically the best paid job I ever had – making and selling sandwiches. I loved both my summer job and my summer placement, even if I didn’t have weekends and sometimes spent twelve hours in a day working.

This year was a lot of hard work and lots of fun. The same can be said about the whole first half of my degree. I am only looking forward to the second half, when the physics becomes really hard and really interesting.