Posted by Martin Orr on
Monday, 31 October 2005 at 08:54
Well I will have been here a month tomorrow. I don't have much to write about from this week so I will write a bit about why this is such a great place.
One thing I like is the variety of people I am living with. There are people from all around the world - 30% of Trinity's students are from overseas (a lot from Poland). First there are those whom I see many times a day, who live along my corridor and it's always good to say hello to or have a chat with. A group of us went to see the Wallace and Gromit film last week. Five out of ten are Mathmos and another two Natscis (Natural Science). Then when I go to Hall for a meal, I eat with other people from round the college who are studying lots of different subjects.
It is also a great place to learn. I have written about how useful I find supervisions; and always having another good mathematician to talk to about a problem is helpful. But for me who is interested in everything, there are lots of opportunities to learn about other things as well. For example there are the language courses I am doing, and a good college library. Plus of course you can go to lectures in other subjects - I did Engineering and Politics this week.
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Martin
Tags
cambridge, lectures, supervisions, trinity
Posted by Martin Orr on
Monday, 17 October 2005 at 19:34
Things have begun to become more settled this week: lectures in the mornings, working and relaxing in the afternoons. I have signed up for a German course on Friday afternoons, and I am going to the college Amnesty International group. Each Tuesday they have a meeting to write letters to governments about specific people around the world who are in danger of being tortured, executed, or unjustly imprisoned.
I am also going to an ecumenical discussion group on Thursday evenings, who have a speaker from a different church each week. This week it was the Orthodox Church, which was something I didn't know much about and was very interesting. On Sunday I went to the College Chapel. This is an Anglican chapel, but the service is (apart from changing the order of some parts) almost identical to the Catholic Mass.
Last Tuesday I had my first supervision, on differential equations. This was great and I think I learned a lot from it. I have another tomorrow, on algebra and geometry. I have also set out to go to a lecture from every subject - this week I went to Physiology of Organisms from Natural Sciences and Spanish Linguistics from Modern and Medieval Languages.
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Martin
Tags
cambridge, chapel, churches, languages, lectures, supervisions