Posted by martin on
Saturday, 07 June 2008 at 13:11
I had exams for the past week. For the past few weeks, I was doing not much but revising, although I went to Oundle two weeks ago for an IMO training camp and the final team selection. I did another geometry problem session, which was not as good as my one at Trinity because I had less time to prepare due to exam revision and because I had already used lots of my favourite questions on the first sheet.
I had four exams this week. All are essentially the same, and you are free to choose from 38 questions on all the different courses in the year. Of course noone has taken anywhere near all the courses - I took 12 and revised 9. In the end I did an average of five questions on each exam; I might have liked to do a bit more, but that is more than adequate for a first.
With exams over, I have a couple of weeks until the results with nothing in particular to do.
Tags cambridge, exams, imo, teaching, trinity, tripos
Posted by martin on
Sunday, 19 November 2006 at 09:19
Just to continue a little on the food theme, I thought I would clarify to you how I normally eat. The College Hall does three meals every day, except for Sunday breakfast. Lunch and dinner are cheap - £2.30 for a main course and dessert. Breakfast is pretty expensive. I usually go to Hall for dinner, or sometimes for lunch if I prefer the menu. Normally I have a simple lunch in my room, and a bowl of cereal for breakfast.
I am too lazy to cook for myself - going to Hall is much quicker, more friendly and probably cheaper. In any case, the hobs have been removed from our kitchens last month, because they do not meet recently-introduced safety regulations. The College are looking at what can be done to bring the kitchens up to standard, but say that it does not look likely that this can be done - I think because the kitchens are too small. Such are the difficulties of living in an old building - it turns out it was built in the 1820s, although I would have imagined it was older than that (hence the name “New Court” I suppose).
–
Martin
Tags accommodation, cambridge, food, trinity
Posted by martin on
Sunday, 08 October 2006 at 16:43
I have finally got some time to rest after a very busy week. First we had two events to recruit new members for TCMS: the Chaplains’ Squash on Sunday night (a small, fast event within the college) and the Societies Fair on Tuesday and Wednesday (a huge university-wide event). Finding people to run the stalls was hard; our new Director of Music also decided to hold a party to meet college musicians at the same time, and our committee had to put in a good appearance at that.
Said Director, Stephen Layton, is a fairly significant international conductor, so why he chose to come to Trinity I don’t really know. But while his primary responsibility is for the College choir, he seems very enthusiastic about getting all sorts of students involved in playing music. This looks like an exciting future for TCMS, although this term things don’t look so good: we don’t have a huge number of concerts lined up, and the termcard still isn’t finalised (but that is always late). We did manage to appoint directors for the Trinity Singers and Players this week (our non-audition chorus and orchestra), and the Singers have already begun rehearsing Handel’s Messiah.
–
Martin
Tags tcms, trinity
Posted by martin on
Tuesday, 20 June 2006 at 15:40
This week is May Week, which is full of post-exam parties. In particular, a number of colleges hold May Balls which are absolutely massive; last night was Trinity May Ball (£205 for a double ticket). It rained lightly during the fireworks near the beginning but fortunately it was only a little, and the weather was otherwise good. We queued from 7pm but this was worth it as we got in very quickly after it started at 9pm, and stayed until 4.15am (it goes on until 6am, when it ends with a survivors’ photograph).
As for things to do, there were so many it was impossible to keep track of them. There was a main stage with rock/pop bands, a jazz tent, a classical music room, swing/salsa/ceilidh dancing in the Great Hall and a cabaret tent, each with six or seven different acts over the course of the night. There was also a fairground, a synthetic ice rink and an endless supply of food and champagne.
During the fireworks, the Cam was totally blocked by punts who had come to watch - there might have been forty of them, plus some canoes. A few people came in punts in black tie and made an attempt to run up the bank and enter the Ball; these may have been just symbolic and certainly had little chance of success, there being a security guard every few metres.
–
Martin
Tags cambridge, mayweek, trinity
Posted by martin on
Thursday, 18 May 2006 at 09:26
Two weeks today until exams; the past papers seem to be reasonably doable - at least when you are used to olympiad problems that take hours each. We are still getting some lectures as well, of which the most interesting and hardest are on topology; I have been spending quite a bit of time thinking about this and learning it by discovery. (Very briefly, topology is the study of continuous maps: you start off with some space or surface, then map each point from that space to a point in some other space; the map is continuous if points that started off close together end up close together.)
There have been three TCMS concerts in the past couple of weeks, including a special one in the Wren Library instead of our normal venue of the chapel. That meant lots of moving of chairs from the chapel store to the library. It’s a nice building but a slightly odd concert venue; actually both the Wren Library and the chapel are very long and thin, which seems to me a strange shape for a chapel.
–
Martin
Tags exams, tcms, trinity, tripos
Posted by martin on
Friday, 05 May 2006 at 17:21
I have become warden of the College Chapel for Thursday evensongs. This means ensuring there are readers (a rota is produced by the Chapel Secretary, but I have to sort it out if someone can’t do it), lighting the candles, giving out orders of service, closing the doors at the start of the service and opening them at the end, and counting the people in the congregation - this has to be recorded in a register of services (is this some sort of peculiar Anglican custom, or does it happen in the Presbyterian church as well?) Last night it added up to 64 people (counting 28 in the choir) which is far more than I thought there would be!
Yesterday we had elections to Cambridge City Council. These work in a somewhat bizarre fashion, with one third of the council elected each year and a break every fourth year. The reason this is so silly is that people get to vote the same way every time, so each ward has three councillors from the same party; whereas if all three were elected at once, a candidate from a second party could be elected if more than a third of people voted for them. Secondly, I did not have to prove my identity to vote; even the polling card which I received in the post said I did not have to bring it. Elections in Northern Ireland are clearly much better organised.
–
Martin
Tags chapel, elections, trinity
Posted by martin on
Tuesday, 21 February 2006 at 13:50
The room ballot, when we choose our rooms for next year, will take place on 6th March. The way this works is: the second years have already made their choices and the college has allocated rooms for prospective first years, so we get what’s left. We are assigned a random order, then choose rooms in that order. Next year the same list is used in reverse order, although people who get firsts are moved to the top. I am 44th out of 199 which is reasonably good.
Tags accommodation, trinity
Read more...
Posted by martin on
Sunday, 05 February 2006 at 12:55
Well this week I had (as I think I mentioned previously) a busy Wednesday afternoon, with three supervisions, and a busy few days before that doing the work for them. David, one of the chaplains, asked me to do the prayers of intercession in the College Chapel for Candlemas on Thursday. (Candlemas is the festival of the presentation of Christ in the Temple, and involved more candles.) That meant both writing the prayers and reading them. We had a brief lesson on how to write them last Sunday. I was very nervous but it went well.
Last Sunday I went to the United Reform Church (what the Presbyterian Church in England merged to become). It was fairly similar to a progressive Presbyterian service at home; one interesting thing they did was to compose a “psalm” during the service by different people in the congregation suggesting a line of praise. There was also a fire drill following the benediction; I’m told that neither of these things happen every week.
This morning I went to a Lutheran Church. This surprised me because the liturgy were almost identical to a Catholic Mass, starting with Kyrie, Gloria, etc, and some people crossed themselves at each mention of the Trinity. However it was a very Protestant sermon, focussed tightly on the text and enthusiastically preached, and of course all the Catholic theology of the Eucharist was dropped. Also they replaced “holy catholic church” with “holy Christian church” in the creed.
–
Martin
Tags cambridge, chapel, emmanuel, lutheran, trinity
Posted by martin on
Saturday, 28 January 2006 at 13:08
There has not really been much happening so far this term. My first supervisions (except ones left over from last term) are not until Wednesday of next week. However I do have three on that Wednesday so I now have to start working hard - most of the supervisors wanted to supervise on Wednesdays. I am doing a second-year course, Groups, Rings and Modules, for which my supervisions are also on Wednesdays but on the other week (all the supervisions are once a fortnight).
On Wednesday, we returned from lectures to find several fire engines parked in front of Great Gate and porters directing you to use other entrances to the college. There were many more porters around Great Court directing people away from Great Gate. Someone was told that a suspicious package had been found. It emerged that when the mail was being sorted, acid had leaked from a letter and burned a porter’s hand. The Cambridge Student reports that a man is now in custody.
–
Martin
Tags trinity, tripos
Posted by martin on
Monday, 28 November 2005 at 08:46
Yesterday I was stewarding at the College Advent service, the biggest service of the year. This meant welcoming people and directing them to seats; but also being in charge of fire safety. In fact in the event of a fire I was responsible for getting people through the main doors from the Chapel into the ante-Chapel; this is a major job as there were 500 people in the Chapel and only one other fire exit (and that exit is newly added). Fire is in fact a significant risk at this service because it is all candle-lit. Fortunately that part of my duties was not required.
The last few days of this week were very busy as I had one examples sheet due in on Thursday and another on Friday, as well as a German class and supervision on Friday. I now have just two more questions left to do on my last examples sheet for this term, and two more supervisions. Plus a German listening test on Friday, the day before I come home. In terms of going to all courses’ lectures, there are three left: Law, Oriental Studies and History of Art. There are also three more days of lectures. History of Art in particular is difficult as there is only one first year in the college doing it and I don’t know who they are. So I may or may not get that completed.
For those in Focus, see you on Sunday,
–
Martin
Tags cambridge, chapel, languages, lectures, trinity