Students blogs

10 January 2011

As I’ve been walking around campus this week I couldn’t help but notice that the University library appears unusually busy, with students sat working next to large piles of past examination papers and empty cans of energy drink (my office is next to the library’s large glass goldfish bowl-esque exterior which grants me ample opportunity to be nosey) and it occurred to me that it’s now January which means dreaded examination time for undergraduates – something from which as a PhD student I have been mercifully spared.

This is the first January in I think nine years in which I haven’t been preparing for examinations of one type or another (which is rather nice!) so I thought I’d use this entry to share my thoughts and experiences on exams and revision practices in the hope that someone somewhere may perhaps benefit and gain a couple more crucial percentage points.

So you normally hear people say ‘revise in the library so you won’t be distracted!’ and this is the attitude which I’m pretty sure 100% of all students entering university arrive with, but I’m sorry to say that in my experience this is a lie. During the two week exam period - and for the few weeks before exams start - the library is a place to avoid. It’s too busy, unless you arrive at 7.30am there’s a slim chance you’ll actually find a free desk, and I always found that it’s too easy to become distracted to the point of annoyance by the tiniest thing such as a couple whispering, someone sniffing (everyone including me has a cold in January) or just people constantly walking past trying (in vain) to find an empty desk.

This doesn’t mean that you’re doomed and the revision process itself causes more stress than the thought of exams. The University is full of quiet corners in which you can get loads of work done (there’s a lot of these around ECS for example) without fear of someone taking your workspace if you leave it for twenty seconds to fill up your water bottle.

Frankly I’m a big advocate of social revision and study groups - most people I’ve known who have been strong academically have ended up doing this. By social revision I mean working together with your course mates in groups of two, three or four and going through lectures notes and past examination papers discussing the topic, ensuring that everyone has an understanding of what you’re expected to know and only looking up areas which everyone is stuck on. I’ve always felt that peers are able to explain things much better than a textbook (and some lecturers/ academics). Usually by doing this you naturally start to question as a group why something happens, rather than simply knowing and remembering that it happens, which is a great way to read around the subject and actually helps me remember more because you can mentally connect it to other areas which you are already confident about.

Examinations themselves at uni are a lot less stressful than I was expecting before I joined Southampton. There are fair and helpful provisions for if you, for example, oversleep and miss the start of the exam, if you need special assistance or clarity on something such as which calculator to use, or if you accidently have a phone in your pocket (this one is still bad by the way but during high school I was under the impression that the world would end if this happened). The largest examination hall here fits just under 1000 students which is an impressive sight, and a part of me feels more at ease among so many other students in the same situation. The invigilators are normally pretty friendly and reasonable too which also helps.

Once the examination is over there are plenty of ways to relax, celebrate or start cramming for the next exam which you have at 9.30am the following day. ECS students – and most engineers/ scientists in general – seem to become adept at the process of passing exams simply because we have so many of them both at school and then university. People usually work out which revision practices or superstitious rituals actually works best for themselves but it’s a good idea to keep an open mind and don’t just be someone who goes to join the queue for the library at 7am in the morning.

22 October 2010

About three weeks ago the University’s Highfield campus once again became a place of queues to buy lunch, packs of undergraduates rushing between lectures (yes that is the collective term for undergraduates), no seating space on the buses, and little chance of being served at the bar in under half an hour – all clear signs that a new academic year has started in Southampton and the students are back.

I don’t really mind new and returning students being around, campus is quite an exciting place again with events regularly taking place outside of the union (and around campus generally) and general activity giving the campus its ‘buzz’ which I have always liked. I don’t know if I’ve said this before but being here almost feels like being part of a club, and even complete strangers are friendly and accepting because you share the surprisingly strong bond of studying here.

So you may have sensed that I haven’t had a break this summer as I did in my undergraduate days - which I’m not bitter about in the slightest - instead I’ve been working on my ‘MSc dissertation project’. Although I haven’t been studying for an MSc the first year of the Complex Systems PhD is taught and is very similar in structure to the ECS MSc courses, including the requirement for completing a summer project which is worth one-third of the year’s marks.

So for my dissertation project I was creating a simulation model of car parking behaviour, which involved creating ‘agents’ who drive around a road network looking for a space to park near to their destination. The idea is to give each agent an intelligence which is based upon human thought processes and use these to investigate how search time varies with the number of people trying to park and various restrictions on parking (such as charging schemes and parking duration restrictions). Our final results actually looked quite good when comparing them to actual search time measurements and we’re currently working on some extensions which should make it good enough to be published in a journal.

Related to my traffic simulation work I attended my first conference of the PhD a few weeks ago in Birmingham (on a train at 6.15am) which was a great way to see the users of our research. Quite a few of us from Southampton went to the conference which was about a piece of modelling software which we all use, and as someone who will eventually be developing algorithms to improve this software it was great to see presentations on some of its practical uses and meet the end users.

Also this year I’ve taken on the position of IEEE Student Branch chairman so I’ve been rushing around trying to organise seminars, events and visits for the student body here. We had our first seminar last night about privacy and advertising on the web which went down really well so I’m looking forward to setting up more! Watch this space!

26 July 2010

Summer is always a nice time in Southampton, the city’s many parks and green spaces become filled with people like me enjoying the sun. I attended a free event yesterday which involved the closing of several streets around the city centre and cyclists being given free reign, which I’m sure you can imagine was great fun. I should have taken my inline skates. The only downside of this warm weather is that I’m currently sitting in a warm office being ‘cooled’ by a fan blowing warm air at me.

It’s nice that now I’m through with taught modules and assignments - which I had as an undergraduate and the first year of my PhD - I can start to structure my life a little better, giving myself free time at evenings and weekends to engage in more extra-curricular activities. Having said that, I keep adding items to a growing mental list of ‘projects’ which I don’t expect I’ll get ever around to completing all of…

So I think I’ve mentioned before that my first year of study on the new Complex Systems Simulation DTC is very similar in structure to the MSc courses which ECS offers with two semesters of taught modules and a summer project, then in October of this year I will be let loose on the standard 3 year research component of a PhD. This means that I am currently working on a stand-alone summer project which is of relevance to my PhD. For this I’m looking at constructing computer models of driver behaviour when searching for a parking location in a road network, which can help when deciding on various aspects of transport policy such as amount and location of parking space provision, setting charges and penalties, or deciding on road network layout.

The aim is that this project will feed in well with my overall PhD investigation which is based on looking at factors influencing driver route choice, and how these change over time. While it’s taking me some effort to really get modelling software to do what I want it to do, it certainly produces some entertaining ‘sim city’ style visuals (I’ll try and post some pictures or links to videos here when I produce something pretty that works). This last sentence reminds me of one of the most important lessons I learned on my undergraduate studies with ECS – *never* expect anything to work first time! (this is related to ‘programming is going from one problem to the next’… I should write a book or something).

In other news I have been offered and accepted a position on the Southampton University IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Student Branch committee as chairman, which I’m really looking forward to working on. The IEEE SB, as it is known, host events such as academic and industrial talks, trips, tours and competitions in conjunction with and with support from the institute. Our branch has a very good reputation so I’ll be looking to sign up new members and hopefully find some exciting speakers to come and give presentations!

So that’s me at the moment, maybe I should finish by following up on a few of the things which I mentioned in my last blog post, in case anyone was sat on the edge of their seat in anticipation: our ‘agent’ ended up positioning 6th out of the 16 competing agents in the auction competition, which wasn’t bad considering we broke it twice during the competition; we finished working as ‘Support Assistants’ for the academic year and hopefully helped a number of undergraduates who otherwise wouldn’t have had access to the student led assistance; and the University Science Day was good fun but definitely exhausting.

9 March 2010

I’m still here!

It’s been a fun - and very busy - few months since I last updated this page, but I am still very much undertaking a PhD in complex systems simulation!

So what have I been doing with my time since last writing for this pretty page? As I may have mentioned before, I’m doing one of these ‘integrated PhDs’ which means that I go through a taught first year component (essentially the same as an MSc or Masters year) but the intention isn’t to grade us or ‘sort the men from the boys’, instead it’s a time to learn valuable skills and get some background research done so I can really hit the ground running when I start the research component of my course properly in October this year.

To this effect I’ve been sitting modules much the same as undergraduate ECS students (and others from around the University – particularly in my chosen discipline of transport management systems). It’s nice to have the freedom in this capacity to study really interesting topics ranging from some fairly heavy statistics through to dual carriageway design. As an example I’ve spent part of my day today looking at developing an ‘agent’ (like an artificial intelligence) which is capable of competing in an auction competition similar to the process which Google uses to distribute advertisements on its search pages (this is an ECS module).

Along with these units I’ve been able to gain a better understanding of transportation systems and why modelling them is so important in urban design, along with using technology to use our transport infrastructure in useful (and really cool) ways. The research group which I’ll be joining seem like a really nice group of people, so I’m sure I’ll be happy there.

More recently I’ve taken up a role as a ‘Senior Support Assistant’ with the ECS undergraduate helpdesk team, contributing a few hours a week to aid ECS students in the computer rooms of the Zepler building with any coursework or systems problems they may be having. So that’s nice and quite fun to be able to help out, even if it can be tricky when one of the smart people in ECS comes to you wanting help with some system or programming language you’ve never even heard of!

Looking ahead to the near future I’m helping out with the University Science Day on Saturday, a day when particularly the quite young are invited to come along and experience the fun side of science and try out some of the cutting edge research work which the department produces. Then it’s a (I like to think) much deserved break from lectures and teaching for Easter! I can’t wait...

20 November 2009

So I expect that when you looked down the list of ECS student bloggers you probably recognised the disciplines which most of my other student colleagues are studying... but are you familiar with complex systems science? If you’re anything like my friends and family you will answer ‘No, but it sounds complicated?’ So having recently started my PhD in this field I feel a responsibility as a bit of an ambassador of the subject to try to explain what it’s all about – and how it may change the world.

I’ve recently been reading a great book called ‘Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams’ by Mitchel Resnick on the subject, and he begins with an example of flocking birds. Up until fairly recently it was thought that when birds flock they all follow a central leader bird, just mimicking its behaviour which results in the big formations you see. However upon closer inspection this isn’t the case, and every bird appears to be acting independently of the others. Scientists have been able to create simulations inside a computer of what can be described as ‘complicated’ flocking behaviour – just by giving each simulated bird three very simple rules to follow. Type ‘boids’ (so called because of a strong New York accent apparently) in to youtube and see some cool videos of what I mean.

Another good example is termites which all act independently of one another, and yet create these hugely extravagant mounds which have all sorts of functionality. They don’t follow orders communicated by leader figures, each termite simply does what it wants to do, and yet we see a higher level property in the mound which has practical uses we are able to describe and observe.

So in a nutshell complexity science is trying to gain a better understanding of the world as the sum of its parts, rather than a very hierarchical ‘top down’ approach which is so often used to simplify problems which aren’t understood.

It is admittedly a fairly new, very cross-disciplinary, field of research, and Southampton is one of only a few UK universities with centres dedicated to research in this area. As I just hinted, the applications are fairly broad; personally I’m looking at traffic networks dynamics – what the overall network level effect of drivers responding to some situation is. Others are researching financial markets, which are (apparently) normally stable and predictable, even though they are the result of millions of global traders, each acting in their own interests. It doesn’t take much of a leap of the imagination to move on to consider things like climate patterns, or even the spread of disease: any system where a total overall behaviour is observed which is the sum of its individual parts interacting in a complex way. Once we can understand these systems we will be much better placed to design new ones which really exploit their properties.

13 October 2009

So it’s been a while since I last updated this blog, and once again a lot has happened in the short space of a few months. As I type I’m sat in the comfortable surroundings of the new University of Southampton Doctoral Training Centre’s social area, sipping large amounts of water and listening to Samantha James (google her – she’s awesome) on my headphones. Here I am. A new semester has started, and I’m in my fifth year with the University, now a postgraduate student. Wow.

A month ago today, on 13 September, I boarded a plane out to Budapest to go to this year’s European Conference on Artificial Life, and although we all made our own way there a relatively large contingent (well, eight of us) from the University went along to present papers and give talks. The conference took place in the stunning ‘Academy of Science’ building which sits alongside the River Danube, and impressive looking statues watched over us as we sat in the main hall listening to the new and interesting developments in the field of Artificial Life.

You may recall from posts further down this page that my involvement with ‘ALife’ began by taking a fourth year module focusing on evolutionary biology, and how computer simulations can aid our understanding of how such complex situations and phenomena ¬¬¬¬occur. The paper which I presented through the medium of poster was about how a population of individuals could, if they are able to adopt some kind of visible marker trait, form groups which are then able to compete with other groups. This artificial life approach is what I am keen to bring to my postgraduate studies; the consideration of agents acting independently and each in their own best interests, which results in (sometimes unexpected) emergent behaviour. I’ll be applying this to the domain of transport networks, and creating computer simulations of intelligent drivers, moving closer to our own behaviour than what has been managed before, negotiating a new road system which could prove interesting and extremely useful!

So Budapest was fun. I wish I had taken the opportunity to stay on for a few days like some of the other postgraduates did, but I’m sure I’ll make a return trip for a short break sometime.

I also finished up working with ECS’ IT Innovation Centre which, as I mentioned in my last update, I spent the summer at. Working with a few other people in England and Switzerland we developed a new approach for person detection in a video sequence, which primarily relied on building up a context idea of the expectation of a new subject in a particular part of a video frame. It was great at the end to be able to look at the original video sequence, overlaying the results of state of the art algorithms and then watching ours perform much better! I think the team I was working with are going to try and publish a research paper on the work which we were doing with my name as one of the authors, which will be nice!

So that brings me up to date here, a new semester has started and ECS is once again full of new faces. It doesn’t appear that too many of the old familiar faces have left, and my new coursemates all seem really nice. We took advantage of the fine autumnal weather last weekend, going for a walk (and getting a bit lost...) in the nearby New Forest. I’m sure I’ll update this space over the coming weeks with details of how my projects and research is going. Right now I’m off to a group seminar about transport,

25 August 2009

So I’ll cut to the chase: I’ve been offered a place to study for a PhD at the University of Southampton!

After a bit of life evaluation and talking with some the academics in ECS I’ve decided that I’ve been presented with a fantastic opportunity and I’d be stupid to waste it - so for the next four years I’ll be working towards the University’s new cross-disciplinary Complex Systems PhD. I’ll end up working closer with the School of Civil Engineering than ECS, but I’ll be using a lot of what I’ve learned in my undergraduate studies. Specifically I’m going to be working on modelling transportation systems, and looking at ways to improve vehicle behaviour as drivers learn about networks and situations. The programme also features involvement with industry which is good for the softer skills, and I get the daunting prospect of being an expert in the field within the four years!

Also after some fairly hasty job hunting shortly after writing my last blog entry I’m spending my summer working with the ‘IT Innovation Centre’ which is associated with ECS and the University (fellow blogger Andy Baker is working there too). They act rather like a consultancy, working with the uni to apply state of the art research to business problems, and with them I’m working on a European partnership project which is surprisingly similar to my third year project and other computer vision work I’ve been involved with, which is developing surveillance systems which can track people around a scene. Interesting stuff and I’ve been able to learn some really funky things there, even been playing with linux! (but I’m yet to be sold on it…)

So that’s pretty much what I’m up to now, I’m sure there’ll be more blogs from me in the coming months as I get to grips with the postgrad work. Graduation was a really nice day too by the way, I’m really going to miss my coursemates that I’ve shared so many experiences with these past four years. A number of them are also staying on so I’m sure I’ll bump into them around and about.

Here's to another four years!

19 June 2009

So this is it, results day! We were told that our all important degree results would be posted in the School reception at approximately noon. I awoke not long before, annoyed that I had overslept and proceeded to race down to the Zepler Building in time to stand around nervously in anticipation with my fellow coursemates.

At about quarter past the Student Services team emerged from their office with the classification lists, signed by the relevant officials. Joining the mass of anxious finalists I managed to spot my name on the list – I got a First! I totally cannot believe it. If you scroll down this page and read my speculative writings the chances of me emerging from ECS with a First Class degree were pretty slim, and in conversations with my tutor later today I only did squeeze in, but I’m definitely not complaining – I’ll be proud to graduate in July.

So I suppose this is the end of my academic life in ECS, I’ll probably write a couple more blog entries about the graduation process itself but I pretty much consider myself to no longer be a student! I’ve had the best four years of my life here and this is the perfect way to round it off.

The only down note about all this is the fact that all of us are graduating into such a tough jobs market at the moment, as I am sure you’ve seen on the news. Crushing my dream of thinking I was avoiding such problems I was told a couple of weeks ago that I no longer had a graduate job to go to, so I’m now job hunting! I’m sure the fact that I’m a former ECS student will aid me through this process, the department does a lot of work to match students with employers, and I normally seem to land on my feet so I should be able to find something. Watch this space!

19 May 2009

I haven’t flipped, but I’m deliberately not doing any work this afternoon. I honestly feel like I’ve earned a few hours break from all that I’ve been doing lately, before I need to start writing a 2000 word essay on ‘how does technology make money?’ this evening.

So I completed my individual research project, producing a beautiful, over the word limit report on how the evolution of ethnic societies can help us understand why anyone is ever nice to each other, and my supervisor tells me that: `with a bit more work we might be able to get something published from this’… Not realising he was lying about how much work was required I went along with it, thinking that it would be great to have a published paper as an undergrad (especially for the CV).

After a painful couple of weeks regularly working until gone 2am to try and fit this stuff in around my uni work (it won’t count towards my degree) I was able to submit a paper to the European Conference on Artificial Life 2009 at quarter to midnight on a Friday night, with me as first author! Hopefully it will pass the review process and be presented by my supervisor in Budapest later in the year, and even if it doesn’t to be honest it’ll probably still find its way onto my CV…

And no matter how much I try to forget it I’m in my final ever week of lectures! While procrastinating today a friend and I worked out that we’ve had around 840 lectures in our four years in ECS. Which is scary. All I have to do now is write about how technology makes money, finish up a computer vision system which is able to tell pedestrians apart from cyclists (think of my third year project if you scroll down) and take an exam on data cryptography! If you’d have shown any of this stuff to me 4 years ago I think I would have been terrified…

20 April 2009

As I come to the final five weeks of my four-year course, I’ve been thinking about what useful things I can actually write about while I still have a chance in the hope that someone else can benefit from my experiences in ECS. To that effect I wanted to write some general tips for an ECS degree (and university in general) which I wish I had worked out sooner! I honestly learnt every one of these lessons the hard way.

Relax - Possibly the most obvious one to start with. It’s so easy to get totally drawn into a system you’re designing, or coursework that you’re doing - particularly when it’s late at night and deadlines are approaching you will encounter problems. These can and do drive you insane as you can’t see anything wrong with your code/ algebra/ wires. You can save so much time and trouble if you realise you’re stressed, stop and take a step back from the problem. Look again at the bigger picture; ideally explain it to a friend, just to regain the overall focus of what you’re doing. Coming back to the problem later can help.

Don’t expect it to work - This is related to the first point. I noticed that the majority of the time when first attempting something it won’t work, and you will be a lot better off not to expect it to. This doesn’t have to be a defeatist attitude – take steps to ensure that when it doesn’t work it’s easy to fix, which can include things like LOTS of output LEDs telling you when certain processes are done or extra lines of code which print out logging information so you can find out where your system failed. Designing a system as a series of connected small modules can help too; always break the problem down into smaller ones.

Get to know your coursemates - While the people in your halls might be into the same music as you or be able to party solid until closing time, don’t pass on opportunities to get to know the guys and girls on your course. An unspoken bond exists between ECS students, and when you’re all being over-worked or you’re nearly in tears because you don’t know what a ‘class’ is (it happened), you’ll rely on each other for support. A lot of the time they’ll be able to explain ideas clearer to you than any textbook. I have certainly received more than my fair share of help from my coursemates and you can too! What goes around comes around and there will be opportunities for you to return the favour.

Play with it - It might sound like the hardest thing to do, but toying around with the systems you’re learning about in your own time is a great way to get an understanding of the subject which at the end of the day leads to more marks. Experiment.

Get involved - This is almost a catch-phrase at university, and it’s difficult to go a week without hearing it. There are a lot of experiences and opportunities available, and many are never likely to be so readily available again, so take them while you can. There are a lot of random clubs and societies which do a lot of random things – one of which might become your new favourite hobby! Don’t be put off the idea of trying something new either; plenty of other people will be new to it as well. Even the older students aren’t necessarily experts!

Get to know ECS staff - A friend suggested I put this in here, and I totally agree with him. The ECS staff have a great knowledge of the systems in place and can offer tips and tricks to get the most from them. Many lecturers and support staff are good friends with past and present students.

Don’t go too wild - Every time I’ve been hungover I’ve wanted to mention this. While the student lifestyle does involve more drinking than you have probably ever experienced don’t go too mad with it, and don’t expect to be able to do much work the day after. Self-discipline is essential to meet deadlines and to function properly when work has to be done. Also dragging yourself to 9am lectures and sitting half-asleep helps you a lot more than staying in bed does!

... I think that easily became my longest-ever entry. I hope you enjoyed reading it and are able to learn from my experiences whatever you’re studying and wherever you’re doing it. I also re-designed my website the other day - it’s still more like an online CV but it looks nicer and has some more up-to-date pictures than the horrendously out-of-date one on this page!

16 March 2009

So right now I’m sat in the fourth year labs next to a window that’s as wide open as it can be, enjoying the sunshine. I love days like this when the sky is a deep clear blue, campus seems really relaxed and any grassed area is full of students enjoying the sun. I’m definitely looking forward to the upcoming Easter break and some (in my opinion) well earned rest!

As I mentioned in my previous post, the students’ union held its elections last week. A massive 6145 students voted which is a UK record for SU election turnout. The awards ceremony was one of the more elaborate things I’ve been along to, with a black tie gala and the whole evening being streamed live over the internet to over 4000 viewers. I think all this totally backs up what I’ve said a million times before in this blog, Southampton University Students’ Union is great (even though no one I voted for got in).

It all makes me pretty sad to be leaving in June really, as there’s a lot of really exciting new things only just starting. My friends who are remaining to do post-graduate studies or are only just beginning their final years may well find that I am hanging around a lot more than they would like.

With graduation in mind another activity which has been occupying fourth years a lot lately is constructing elaborate excel spreadsheets and carefully studying the department’s literature in an attempt to discover EXACTLY what we need to graduate with a first class honours. My outlook looks pretty bleak if I want a first; I need to average 82% this semester (not going to happen) OR average something like 72% and have half of my results within the first boundary (took us a while to find that condition). So maybe I might not get much of a break over Easter…

27 February 2009

Well I was preparing to write a fairly ranty blog entry today, as it’s that time of year that the Students’ Union host their elections and once again it’s impossible to walk in front of the Union without being harassed by hopeful presidents and vice presidents for various roles.

HOWEVER I was awoken (too) early today by a text message from one of my eager course mates demanding to know what my semester 1 results were, so fairly bleary-eyed I crossed to my computer and managed to bang the correct keys to bring up my results and I was very pleasantly surprised. Not one of my results was less than 70% and my average was 75%, definitely my best achievement for a single semester in ECS, I even got 76% for my group design project which if you scroll down you will notice caused me much pain. And on top of that it’s a beautiful sunny day in Southampton, so all I need now is to be asked to go on the trip to Athens for the web conference in a few weeks… hint hint… and all will be well :-)

In other news semester 2 is well under way now - I’m taking modules involving data cryptography and image processing which is fun, and my individual research review is based primarily on studying and modelling evolutionary processes, which is really interesting, so all that is keeping me entertained.

I’m finding that when slipping into a fairly consistent work routine it becomes important to plan for leisure time and enjoy it when you do take the time off work. To that end I have recently entertained friends from various corners of the country and shown them the bright lights of Southampton, and spending time in nandos.

Last Sunday I also found myself at the Southampton versus Portsmouth Varsity competition, where Southampton and Portsmouth Universities compete across about 30 sports (including inline hockey which I went along primarily to watch). Southampton ended up winning the day something like 25 sports to 4, and I noticed how little I know about the rules of American Football! So in summary at the moment it’s all good, except trying to walk into the Union…

18 January 2009

Okay sorry it’s been a while since my last update; I’ve been pretty swamped with work lately. I am however very pleased to say that the Group Design Project is finally over! The three of us were able to produce an 18,000 word report and even managed to design a system that met the spec. In retrospect it probably wasn’t the best idea to try and give a live demonstration to our customer at the final presentation (it didn’t work) but it was fun seeing what projects the other teams had been working on, including a single wheeled skateboard (like a segway), a car collision detection system, loads of stuff to use on planes, and even a pain-measuring device!

So that will be the last time I mention GDP as I attempt to erase it from my memory. Christmas passed without too much incident, for the second year running I spent New Years Eve in Southampton with friends, which is always fun, however now we’re in scary exams territory.

One of the good points about the fourth year is that the focus shifts from examinations to individual coursework which tend to be open-ended and give plenty of room to be really creative. This means that thankfully I only have one exam so I’ve been battling procrastination and normally losing. It’s during exam time that you will find my room tidiest, my level of fitness highest, a perpetually full mug of coffee on my desk and anything else beneficial from time spent not revising.

The other large section in the fourth year is the individual research project, which, according to the website requires me to ‘demonstrate mastery of an advanced aspect of the discipline’. And that sounds terrifying. So I’ve been trying to decide which advanced aspect of the discipline I want to demonstrate advanced mastery of, I think I might look at evolutionary algorithms in more depth, that’s my current ‘hey this is cool’ thing. I didn’t expect I’d spend more time looking at algorithms and coding than fiddling with wires in my final year of an electronic engineering degree!

3 December 2008

I’d like to tell you why I’ve had an awesome day today…

My alarm went off at 7am (this is the worst part) and I braved the cold wind in the short trek over to campus. I had been given the opportunity to sit in on a friend’s radio programme on the student radio station, SURGE, which was really good fun. There were probably more people sat in the studio than listening at that time of the morning but we had a good time, and I got to meet the new president of the Southampton University Engineering Society, who’s a rather interesting person.

Once my short frolic into radio stardom was over I met a friend and we went to grab breakfast in the students’ union. If you’re ever on Highfield Campus before 11am make sure that you head down to the Students’ Union Café and try their fried breakfast. They must have Jamie Oliver or someone employed there because, particularly the bacon and the fried bread, is amazing. Definitely recommend it, and the fact it’s only served in the morning makes it a bit of a reward for getting out of bed!

Feeling satisfied I went over to ECS where my mission for the day was to try and prove that our Group Design Project problem actually exists. For various reasons we had until today been unable to actually observe the effect in real world data, so I breathed a real sigh of relief when I got the results I was expecting. The report for our project is due in in a week, and it will be nice to be able to say that we are solving a problem that exists.

I also received my contract today for a job which I have been offered (and will be accepting), which I am sure I will spend more paragraphs mentioning in future posts. The knowledge that I’m definitely not going to be living back at home next year though is a weight off my mind.

And to top it all off, in about ten minutes time I’m going to the recently constructed ice rink in town with some friends. This time I won’t end up in A&E!

31 October 2008

BOO!

Sorry about that, I thought that considering the date I should make some effort to do something scary.

So we’ve been back at university a full month now and I’ve been working hard to keep on top of the part IV workload. Our group design project is going well, and I now have an even more expensive toy (than the one mentioned in the last update) sat in front of me which is destined for a new high spec lab being made for the new Mountbatten Building. I feel like I can now explain our project in a bit more detail too.

When you send a signal over a wireless or wired network, it can be extremely difficult for the receiver to know how to interpret the message. The main problem which we are investigating is how to know how fast the receiver expects the data to arrive. It’s pretty much impossible to lock on to this speed exactly, so you need to use feedback which corrects your expectation depending upon how wrong it was. This works fine in the back of your television but we are looking at a different scenario where you don’t want to lock on exactly. In this case further processing needs to be done in order to see anything useful. Which introduces all sorts of other problems.

So that’s all keeping me entertained at the moment, we had to give a presentation on our progress so far yesterday which went fine apart from one awkward question at the end.

My other modules (all two of them) are going well at the moment too, evolution of complexity looks at how it’s a great idea to evolve algorithms similar to how evolution occurs in nature, and wireless networks is mainly about mobile phone standards at the moment, although this course is interesting since every week a different student gives the lecture (I had to talk about how signals travel through the air).

And for those of you who were worried after the update at the end of my last entry my chin is fine, it just now has a bit of a hole in it. I completely blame the skates I was provided with, and I got a box of Celebrations for the nice barmaid who provided the whole first aid thing.

Anyway I have rambled on for too long, I need to go and get some bread and vampire teeth from Somerfield!

16 October 2008

So here we are at the start of my final year at Southampton. I really can’t believe I’ve been studying here for the past three years, and keeping this blog for the past two!

ECS is full of new faces at the moment; I was able to meet some of the new first years when hovering around ECS’ ‘jumpstart’ events in freshers' week. They all seem like good fun, I was a bit concerned today when I became stuck trying to offer advice on some first year coursework though!

Moving swiftly on, the fourth year feels completely different compared to other years of study. It’s nice to pick every module I take, so I can tailor my degree how I want, but it’s intense!

On the first day back from our summer breaks we were all sat down and briefed about the notorious ‘Group Design Project’ (I think one of the old groups kept a blog on here somewhere…) in which we are given ten weeks to completely design and build a system for a (in our case external) customer.

Our title is ‘Reducing quadrature phase-error in receivers’ (google ‘phase shift keying’ for an idea of what this involves), and we have spent most of our time so far trying to beg, steal or borrow suitable equipment from various sources - we have ended up in possession of a signal generator belonging to Harvey Rutt, the head of ECS, so I daren’t think what would happen if anything happens to it…

You may also have noticed a complete absence of any kind of mention of any regular sporting activity on my blog; well this year I have taken up what I am starting to think of as being the best sport ever. Inline and ice hockey is basically awesome in every way. In a way it’s sad that I’ve only discovered this in my final year but at the moment it’s serving as a great distraction from quadrature phase analysis.

Tonight the Students Union is holding a roller disco so a group of us are going along to discover the dangers of roller skates and alcohol. I like to think that I’m providing a service.

[Update 17 October: James actually ended up in A&E, having his chin stitched back together ... some more practice needed, James?]

10 July 2008 (just!)

(By the way as the title suggests I’m up rather late typing this!)

I must apologise to those of you who can only think that my extended absence from ECS’ blogging section must be because I was actually arrested soon after posting last time’s entry. That wasn’t the case and Southampton students not only turned out in force to protest their right to vote for the new Vice Chancellor they also were granted it. As I have said before I think that Southampton, perhaps more than other uni’s, has a very active students union.

So what have I been doing in the two months since I last blogged? Well I turned 21, that was fun, or at least I’m told I looked like I was having fun. I got 77% in my third year project that I’ve mentioned before, and that was fantastic, which along with some great exam results really brought up my average into the sunny realms of 2.1.

So if you scroll down this page you may read that this summer I’m working for an investment bank in the fair city of London. I’m not entirely sure if I’m meant to tell the world that it’s Goldman Sachs but I just did. ECS has good relations with Goldman, who are possibly the only large investment bank which is weathering the financial storms well, and I know that their many ECS alumni are keen to recruit more technologists from Southampton. Having now finished my third year, many of my friends have gone off to find work in various parts of the world. One jammy computer scientist is going off to Switzerland to work for Google!

And that’s what I’ll be doing up until September, it’s a hard life enjoying posh meals, nights out and the like in London but someone’s got to do it. I’m sure I’ll update again but to keep you entertained in the mean time watch this (I’m Darth Vader and you don’t even need to be on the university network)!

12 May 2008

I’m feeling political at the moment. Normally I leave Students' Union politics to people who’ve got too much time on their hands, however last Thursday I was in the Stag’s Head, the main Students' Union pub on Campus, enjoying a few too many jugs of Pimms with some friends (we had just handed in our 10,000 word dissertations), when a friend of ours came in - who is one of these people who do have too much time on their hands.

He told us to get ourselves along to the Students’ Union emergency general meeting which was apparently going on. We were feeling rather suggestible at this point so we found ourselves sat on the front row of the Union ‘Uniplex’ cinema clasping our jugs of Pimms listening to what the Union President had to say.

It turns out that the University is trying to remove the vote of the Students' Union President from the selection of the new Vice-Chancellor, who oversees university running. While I potentially might not care too much about such an event this is the last seat of power which the Union President holds within the University staff, so if this goes ahead the University bosses will have no reason to listen to the Students’ Union. Obviously this upset a few students and apparently we have voted to protest this Thursday outside the Union building when the University holds its annual important meeting attended by the Chancellor and Mayor of Southampton.

So I plan to go along to this, I know the idea has gone down well with the majority of students. I’ve received duplicate emails from several society mailing lists suggesting to go along and make our student voice heard and all that.

Southampton seems to have a very active Students' Union, in the recent union elections a record 24% of students voted which I appreciate isn’t a massive number but I have a suspicion it’s more than at any other university. I’ll let you know how it goes anyway, I guess it just shows how even as a simple ECS undergraduate you can still be dragged into the political lion pit…

7 April 2008

I suddenly feel a bit guilty. As I type I am sat in the ECS computer lab, on facebook and a popular web messenger service with a big box of chocolate muffins next to me, generally not doing any work, and a large group of school kids have just walked in. So I have opened up my project write up and now just about look as if I am doing something productive.

Last term passed busily, third year project seems to take up vast amounts of my life as usual. I was conducting a UCAS tour for potential new ECS students and some of them were asking about workload and it was probably the first time I noticed that I spend a lot of my life working at the moment. I think it’s a gradual thing as you work through university, but you do end up spending most of your day working by the time you reach the third year.

I have to admit I didn’t do anywhere near as well in my exams as I had liked so I am hoping that my third year project, which alone is worth one third of the year, and my two taught modules this semester which I am confident about, should be enough to pull me back on track. My tutor offered to chat to me about my concerns which I keep meaning to take him up on when I get chance, I SWEAR I did better in some of the exams than the results sheet says.

In general news we have one week of Easter left, in which time I want to pretty much finish my first draft of my project write up (approximately 10,000 words eek) so I have a lot to be getting on with, creating endless tables and graphs and diagrams seems to be consuming much of that time. Great fun. Anyway I plan to be working until about 10ish tonight (you’ll find if you try and hang around ECS too long you get kicked out at 11) so I will no doubt update soon when my eyes are in pain from too much projectness.

11 February 2008

So things to get out of the way first, I hate the new Southampton University logo and ELEC3030: Computer Networks is the best module you will ever study at ECS. Anyway I wanted this blog entry to give you the reader a great idea of the kind of work you will be doing in your time here at Southampton on your electronic engineering course so without further ado I give you

James’ 90(ish) Second Guide to Electronic Engineering

Everything in the universe is made of tiny things called atoms. Everything from your pet fish to the chair you are currently sat in is all made out of the same stuff - atoms. To get a sense of how tiny an atom is consider this dash: - . It would take a line of 20 million hydrogen atoms to reach as long as that dash. They consist of the nucleus, where the bulk of the atom resides, and orbiting electrons; the rest of the atom is empty space. If you consider an atom is the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be the size of the centre circle. I suppose the main point to take away from this paragraph is that everything is on a small scale here.

Electronic engineering concerns the movement of the orbiting ‘fundamental subatomic particles’ (Wikipedia’s term – not mine) known as electrons. These are not fixed to a particular nucleus so they can move between nuclei when forced to do so (like everything in nature they are lazy and you have to supply the energy to get them to move). By injecting more electrons (using something like a battery) into a metal wire the electrons are pushed along and into a ‘sink’ (commonly this is earth). This movement of electrons is known as a current and the amount of energy you give them is known as the voltage. However it can be difficult for the electrons to push through some materials, and this is known as resistance.

One rather useful property of an electron is that it contains a certain charge (-0.00000000000000000016 Coulombs which is also tiny by the way when you consider that your iPod works at about 0.1amps of current - 0.1 Coulombs (62,500,000,000,000,000,000 electrons!) passing by every second). The movement of electrons in your current also moves the charge around.

By looking at the currents and voltage at various points around your electronic circuit it is possible to analyse the behaviour of funky toys like transistors and opamps which basically just alter these two values according to some set rules. Digital electronics entirely concerns the voltage level of a certain part of your circuit, with a ‘1’ being electrons you have given some energy to, and a 0 being electrons which have no energy and are sat there not doing anything.

Anyway I have rambled on for far longer than I should have done so I will leave you to consider the above and decide you want to study electronic engineering (unless the previous 300 words have made you feel ill in which case you might not want to…)

Also as a footnote if you ever cite Wikipedia in a technical report you will get shot.

15 January 2008

I hate revision. I’ve never enjoyed it, and yet I seem to have - as is common with ECS students - always taken subjects which lead to many exams and a need to revise. So I’ve come to seek sanctuary in ECS from the library where I have spent most of today reading and working through exam questions about signal processing. To be fair though I do feel like I know it a lot better now than I did at the start of the day, even though my brain is currently rather scrambled.

Semester one examinations start next Monday and typically I have all of my four exams spread out over the first five days of the two week period, which is lovely. The period before exams is also a busy time in ECS, since as I am sure I have said before many subjects have their final deadlines in the weeks running up to the end of the semester.

On Friday I submitted a 3,000(ish) word interim report for my third year project. It documents where I’m at now and where I am going with the project which is taking up a large chunk of my life these days (even though it’s meant to be on hold over the exam period). I have been able to produce some good results; my project is about analysing footsteps of subjects walking past the ECS building here in Southampton, and so far my code can detect 100% of the footsteps, so long as the subject isn’t walking behind something like a bush…

My hunt for a summer internship is going well at the moment too, after attending the interview I talked about in my last entry I have been offered an 8 week summer job, and I was also rung and put on the spot by a different company today who want me to go along tomorrow and be in the centre of London at twenty past nine in the morning so it will be good to see if I can have some good choices with regards how I spend my summer.

I’m off to the gym now anyway with my friend who wants a study break but I just thought I’d mention that if fellow blogger Emma Burton mentions my inability to detect if a computer monitor is switched on or off like she was threatening to, then ignore her, she’s obviously lying =)

11 December 2007

‘An entrepreneur is a strategic innovator. Discuss and relate to concepts and examples.’ Don’t be alarmed dear reader, I haven’t changed to a management degree in my absence. I am merely recounting the title of an essay I am currently in the process of putting off. In the third year we enjoy the compulsory module ‘Management for Engineers’ which isn’t exactly the highlight of most people’s time at Southampton. You may detect a slight hint of criticism in my words but I really shouldn’t slate it too much, I’ve chosen to do a module on entrepreneurship next semester.

The autumn term is drawing to a close, and it has been a busy one. Memories are still fresh of last weekends ‘ECSS Christmas party’ which involved 350 ECS members and guests coming together for an evening of free food and alcohol. By the time you read this there should be some funky photos at our society web page (http://society.ecs.soton.ac.uk) and if not I need to give the web master a further prod.

Poking my head up from behind the new widescreen dual monitors we have now in labs I just noticed a group of UCAS students being shown around. I can’t help but remember my UCAS day three years ago. I remember worrying that my interview was going to be in some way taxing but to be honest it really wasn’t, I think my interviewer (turned out to be my tutor) spent more time generally chatting to me than quizzing me. Getting up at 5am wasn’t much fun though.

Also this term, after my annoyance at last summer’s boringness, I have been applying for summer internships. It really is surprising how many hoops the larger companies expect you to jump through just to have an offer to go work with them in your summer. For example tomorrow I have to go over to Canary Wharf for an interview, and this company has already made me fill out a lengthy application, complete online numeracy and verbal reasoning tests, and go to Reading for an assessment, so hopefully I don’t fall at this final hurdle.

However with spending time trying to get jobs it does mean that you have to prioritise your workload. Which is why I should probably get back to writing about Alan Sugar and his entrepreneurial chums…

Saturday, October 20th 2007

So here we are in my third year at Southampton University. Freshers week came and went with alarming speed, I worked with ECS in their ‘jumpstart’ program designed to let the new ECS recruits get to know Southampton and each other which is always fun. My role as ECSS vice president also meant that we were organising many events for the new students including one involving free alcohol where I decided it would be fun to grab a microphone and start singing along with the PA system, but despite this I think we all had fun.

Interacting with the new students, not just ECS, has really made me notice how much I have changed within the past two years. I feel almost like I have become an adult and not realised it. I think the biggest change in me is that I have realised that at university you can be whoever you want to be. Coming from a small sixth form there were often times when you would feel like an outsider for doing anything which the rest of the year group weren’t. But when you get to uni you soon realise and accept that no one cares about how ‘geeky’ you are or how you look or dress. It’s a nice feeling which I hope continues post university, I think Southampton students are generally a friendly and accepting bunch.

In terms of the work and lectures third year seems to be agreeing with me thus far, my earliest start in the week is 10am which is fantastic, I don’t even consider staying in bed rather than going to lectures. Not that I’d ever do that before… ahem… I have a title for my third year project now too, ‘Using gait to analyse outdoor scenes for automated visual surveillance’ although some people seem to have issues with the ethics of it (gait is how you walk by the way) the project is extremely interesting and so far I have managed to create a program in C# which plays videos at you. Next thing I need to do is look at how to separate out all the frames in the video so I can analyse things which move between them, which is proving to be difficult. So my plans for today include going and sitting in the ECS computer room staring at mind destroying articles about DirectShow, watching England win the rugby this evening, and I’ve just been informed by my friend (the one obsessed with squash) that I’m going to the gym as well at some point. Fun…

13/9/07

I don’t actually like the summer break. Since the start of June I’ve been hanging around waiting for term to start again. Sorry to start this entry in such a downbeat sort of way. Some positives: it’s a beautiful sunny day outside; I have a job which is earning me some pennies (although making sandwiches for drunk people in the middle of the night with a well known sandwich restaurant is hardly fun) and I’ve been able to use my ample free time to think about some basics to do with my third-year project; including looking at research papers and producing code that interfaces with webcams.

Since the start of August I’ve been down in Southampton, hanging around with the other students who want to get away from their families for a bit. It has enabled me to acquire some good new friendships, and it was nice to find someone else within the ECSS committee that I could become obsessed with big brother with (I probably shouldn’t mention his name…). It seems to be a fairly common part of university life that you often drift away from your old school friends back at home, so I haven’t had much desire to go and see anyone back there.

It’s nice that the university offers employment helping out with the open days. I helped out with the uni-link bus service last Saturday, which involved standing on a bus travelling between town and the university (makes you feel rather ill after a few hours) and talking to potential students about how much fun it is to be at Southampton University. I’ve also signed up to work with them in fresher’s week and I’m also helping out with jumpstart too which I’m looking forward to, imparting my wisdom. Anyway I’m going to head home now and hopefully the bike shop should have replaced my front bike tyre which I found was flat this morning…

2 July 2007

So here I am at the end of my second year at Southampton University. The past two years have gone so quickly it’s scary and if you had shown me some of the things I would be capable of doing now before I came to university I think I would have cried. Walking around Southampton this weekend is rather amusing because pretty much every student is moving house. The average tenancy agreement for student houses ends on the 30th June and the new one starts on the 1st of July, so everybody tries to haggle with their landlords to get their tenancy agreements overlapping. Thankfully I was able to do this and I moved houses yesterday (30th June). My new house is lovely and I really am looking forward to spending the next year there. However we don’t have internet yet and for an ECS student this is a disaster, so I’m currently sat in our beautiful new computer room - which has an entire video podcast devoted to it (seen the one with me shamelessly copying maths notes next to Sean Nuzum yet?) – doing lots of change of addresses on various websites.

Since exams I have mainly been playing in Southampton really, ideally looking for a job, I think that for money reasons I may go stay with my mum and try and find something that resembles work up there. She’s moved to Carlisle (other end of England) recently so that will be fun.

I also met with my third-year project supervisor. The third-year individual project makes up one-third of the third-year mark, so it is a major assessment. In ECS you specify which areas you are interested in (eg Image analysis) and you are matched up with a supervisor who matches your interests the best. I feel really fortunate I was able to get my first choice, and I am going to be working on a fascinating system which has seen plenty of media attention recently. Someone walks down a tunnel which we have here and they are viewed from many cameras which make a 3D image of them which is then open to all sorts of analysis. Interestingly this has many applications, primarily in security where it is possible to recognise people and look at their behaviour based only on their walk. My supervisor has given me a couple of books to read over the summer so I’m sure that will keep me busy.

My current understanding is that we are going to be receiving our results in the post in the next few days so fingers crossed I should still be here at the start of next year!

30 May 2007

So I had my first exam of the summer today, all about processors and fun things which make this magical box I’m typing into work. It went alright I guess, it’s annoying how you can spend a lot of time focusing on one particular area because you identify it was a weakness then it doesn’t even come up in the exam. Oh well. I wrote down what I knew anyway.

It’s always surprising how busy the library gets during exam time. Some time ago the students union put a lot of pressure on the library to remain open later during exams and it’s really useful. I went up there in the rain on Sunday and the place was packed. I was quite surprised really. I know lots of people that seem to think that they work better without the distractions associated with working at home but I have to admit I like to sit and work through information across a range of sources available on the internet and use popular instant messaging services to discuss it with coursemates, at least that’s what I should be doing.

Everyone on the course was rather stressed on the run up to exams as we had lots of coursework to be doing which didn’t really leave us with much time to revise. While many others were grumbling and finding fault with everything that was going on I don’t really mind having a relatively large amount of work to do, it all gets done at the end of the day and we’re all in the same boat.

My group was actually shortlisted to be put through to a national competition with IBM based upon our D4 design but we were put up against the computer scientists' groups who had done a similar exercise and one of their groups won. Not that I’m bitter about it at all. Nope. I also had to give a presentation based upon our cool GPS toy (that we got working nicely in the end) which I felt underappreciated for going out in the rain taking photos of bus stops to make a poster!

So this evening I might do some light revision, next exam is maths which isn’t for a week so I’m going to revise some of my other modules. There’s a pile of electromagnetism notes over there looking at me sadistically…

9 May 2007

Well I’ve certainly been busy lately. I’ve been back at university for three weeks since the Easter break (which the only thing I really have to comment about was that I discovered I hate the escalators on the London underground) and I have literally been in the university from 9am until 5pm every single day.

I don’t know if I mentioned before the break that the d4 design exercise second year electronic engineering students undertake is a major part of the part II course. We are set a task to carry out in our groups of six, with rather an open specification to encourage us to do something inventive. We then have a week to carry out all preparation for the task, a week in the labs doing the practical work, and a week to write up a report. On Friday my group handed in a 90 page report. That was fun.

This year we were given the task to create a digital signal, encode it, send it down a wire whilst adding noise to it (that was my part!) and then get the signal back again. Our design actually worked extremely well and we were even able to do fancy things like get rid of the wire altogether and send the signal via infra red.

Now I have another similarly large assignment to finish in a couple of weeks which involves programming a GPS toy which I mentioned on here some time ago. I have to admit I’m not the biggest fan of programming. I remember being in a staff student liaison committee meeting and the chairperson commenting that in ECS it is impossible to escape programming. That’s a warning to you all. My only problem is that the programming languages are all very similar and it’s very easy to forget how to do simple things with a certain language, for example how to write a line of text in C or C# (and that will probably be a cue to my friends who will tell me that it’s exactly the same or something…)

On top of these larger assignments I also have other smaller pieces of coursework and I would like it if I could maintain something of a social life at the same time. So yeah I’m busy. I’m going to get back to spending my bank holiday weekend at my desk but I’m sure I will feel that another break is required soon in which a blog needs to be written.

16 March 2007

A lot’s happened since I last updated this page two weeks ago. I am officially now the Vice President of the Electronics and Computer Science Society, which I am really pleased about. I’m looking forward to organising events and helping run the society. The entire committee seem really keen, there’s lots of really enthusiastic people involved so it should be a good year for ECSS. One of the last things which the outgoing committee organised was a paintball trip which took place last Saturday. I still have some nasty looking bruises but a good time was had by all. I think we’re going to try and organise another trip there for some time around fresher’s week next year which I look forward to.

I got my semester 1 module results back as well. They were actually much better than I expected them to be, averaging 69.6%. I’m wandering whether or not I can claim that as a first (which is 70%), it’s my best average since starting at ECS so I’m happy.

So as I sit here at my desk on this gorgeous Friday in March I have just finished for Easter. We have been set a group assignment which I’m really looking forward to working on after the break. ECS have lent each group (there’s 15 groups with 5 people in each) a really really cool toy. It’s a HP iPAQ rx5900, and we have been told to program it however we want. This thing has maps of the entirety of Western Europe, GPS, wireless internet, Bluetooth, it even plays music at you. I’m rather upset that I wasn’t more determined in my effort to take it home with me over Easter. I suppose the obvious thing to do would be to program it with locations of pubs in Southampton, and information on each of them. But that is rather unimaginative, so we considered the locations of all post boxes in Southampton or something.

So I’m going to take the train home tomorrow back home to the sunny midlands which I’ve just noticed will take four hours and involve changing at Birmingham. Should be fun!

1 March 2007

‘Voting for me is basically like voting for yourself’. I couldn’t help but smile as I walked past a potential candidate for union president insisting this to some poor undergraduate that she had cornered outside the students' union earlier today. This week is when the members of the students' union – which is pretty much every student – vote for their new officers who take up positions such as president and various vice presidents in charge of different things. I’ll get around to voting at some point but it is temporarily a time when if you don’t want to be stopped and given a lecture at least five times outside the students union on why X deserves to be vice president for communications it’s best to either avoid the place or walk around so that everyone can see you’re wearing headphones and unable to stop.

On a similar theme I have decided to run for Vice President of the Electronics and Computer Science Society. I’m not going to use this blog as an advert as to why I’d be good for the job but I will say that it would be fantastic if I got the position and I would certainly make sure that the society and all involved in ECS benefit from me being the VP.

I was wandering the corridors of ECS last Wednesday morning after returning a software installation CD to the department when I came across a close friend of mine in the electronics lab doing scary looking things with LEDs. It turned out Luke was producing a lighting toy for use with the stage society who help backstage with the plays that regularly occur. I found this really interesting so hung around and he showed me this project that he and some of his friends were working on that the department had helped out with. They have positioned two cameras pointing towards the site of the former Mountbatten building which take photos every 30 seconds then at the end of every day a time-lapse video is produced. This has been going on for over a year and the videos produced are extremely impressive, I found watching the time lapsed clouds passing over the department to be particularly mesmerising. If you want to see these videos for yourself you have to be on a university computer (or connected to the network) and can be found at eye.ecs.soton.ac.uk. This has got me thinking that I want to start doing some kind of project in my free time to further my electronics understanding and just to have fun as well. Suggestions are welcome as to be honest at the moment I’m a bit stumped as to what I could do other than some kind of lighting display or amplifier…

12 February 2007

So today I’m having a productive day. After living in a plague house for the second half of last week when every resident of my flat was ill I’ve bounced back. Today I’ve been shopping and stocked up on food supplies, I’ve sorted out my lecture notes and folders for semester 2, I’ve tidied my room extensively, I’m currently writing my blog entry and after eating dinner I’m either going to go to the gym or work on preparatory work for a lab at the end of the week, maybe even both. I scare myself sometimes.

Exams came and went with alarming speed. To be honest some of them were trickier than I hoped they would be but I wouldn’t say any of them went spectacularly badly *touch wood*. I always enjoy exams in the big sports hall at the university. I find it reminds me that I’m at a big university because there are so many people in that room, we calculated once that that hall can fit 1000 people, and when it’s full of students doing exams it’s quite an impressive sight.

Semester 2 is a new chapter of university life with new subjects being taught, new sports clubs running, and the anticipation of summer. I’ve signed up to play for the engineering society cricket team which I am looking forward to immensely. Last year one of my friends started up the team which proceeded to lose every match they played. I believe that it will play out like a Disney movie in that they will only get good in our last year at university and then proceed to win the league, probably aided by some kind of paranormal being.

The subjects we’re being taught this semester seem extremely interesting too. Now that we have a knowledge of the basics of electronic engineering we are being taught about all sorts of clever applications and creating things that I would have never have thought I would have understood before coming to university, like how computers work and the principles of software engineering and communications which really interests me at the moment. There’s also some really fun sounding assignments to come which I am actually looking forward to working on which I’m sure I’ll be writing about here. I’m off to have some dinner now anyway, then see if I still want to go to the gym…

17 January 2007

I think I’m becoming paranoid. I don’t know if it’s stress of upcoming exams causing me to commit crimes without realising it (in my sleep perhaps) or merely coincidence, but I swear every day for the past few months I have seen at least one police car or policeman strolling through my quiet little suburb of Southampton. It certainly makes me feel safe but I’m not used to it and frankly I’m a little suspicious, so if my blog suddenly stops one day and there’s stories about an attractive ECS student being arrested I’m innocent!

The period after returning from Christmas holidays is a busy one at ECS, filled with two weeks of coursework deadlines and then two weeks of exams. I have five exams spread out in a rather unhelpful manner, with three over consecutive days right at the beginning. Typically the weather outside is currently rather nice and there are many things that I would rather be doing right now other than revising, however when you get into the flow of working on a past paper it does become easier. It’s helpful that ECS (unlike some other departments) offer revision lectures up until the week before the exam period. These ensure I get up out of bed at a reasonable time of the morning and it is extremely useful having the person who sets the exam telling you what he/she is looking for in your answers.

I feel I should also mention a lab session which we were tasked with last week that I found good fun. We had to write a program for a digital combinational lock and my lab partner and I managed to get the thing working without too much difficulty. I think everyone had problems with the fact that push button switches don’t actually behave exactly as you would expect them to, which calls for some clever programming.

Anyway I should get back to studying; this revision break is starting to drift into the realms of sheer procrastination. It’s interesting how different people find different ways to put off doing work, I know someone who insists that their entire house must be spotless before they get started doing any work, and my other friend just seems to spend most of his life playing squash.

11 December 2006

There are some tricky social situations when it can be tempting but also a potentially very bad idea to get too drunk. I believe I found one of these on Wednesday at the ECS Christmas party. I suppose it is the university equivalent of an office party. All I can really say on the matter is that it was an extremely enjoyable evening at the time but I received some rather horrified looks in lectures the next day, and that I managed to stay on the bucking bronco for forty seconds, which is about thirty nine and a half seconds longer than our much loved senior tutor at ECS.

In slightly more constructive news I have started thinking about possible career options. The large investment banking company Goldman Sachs came to ECS to hold a drop in session and I went along to find out about working with them. It actually sounded extremely interesting and I plan to apply for a placement with them next summer. The world of finance sounds appealing to me, fast paced and competitive. The university careers office was useful too, with plenty of material to take away and read.

We have also been set an assignment to design and build an audio amplifier that can power a pair of headphones. While this may sound like lots of fun it is fast becoming rather frustrating, for example it took us two hours to realise our computer simulation became unhappy seemingly when we labelled a wire next to a capacitor. When returning home from the lab the temptation to kick my own amp was immense.

This time next week I shall be back in the sunny midlands enjoying the festive season. It’s been another enjoyable term and I will miss my friends at university. I may even go and find some of them at their respective ends of the country. One of the things that for me did require some getting used to at university is that it becomes more difficult to go anywhere other than Southampton. While Southampton is a lovely place I am looking forward to being somewhere else than the three square miles which I have spent most of my last ten weeks in.

24 November 2006

To start in a similar fashion to my last entry, a phrase which has been playing on my mind lately is ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know’. I have discovered over the last year and a half that making relationships with a wide range of other people is such an important and useful part of university life. I say this now mainly because I currently have total respect for my flatmate who spent a lot of time last night (I think he may have not had much to do) sat next to me talking me through how HTML code works and as a result I was able to produce my first proper website (www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~jrs105). It ended up turning into more of an online CV but I was really proud of my achievement.

In other news I competed in an ECSS (Electronics and Computer Science Society) organised table tennis tournament which was good fun. Of course I did terribly but it was still good fun. There were a lot of people there so it was a good use of an afternoon. I also went to see ‘Mr Scruff’ DJ at the Students Union. Mr Scruff is an international DJ so it was a fantastic opportunity to go see him.

The work we have been receiving lately has taken on more of a creative theme which suits me perfectly, as before coming to university I was concerned that engineering might not be creative enough for me. For example we have an assignment where we are looking at how the efficiency of a solar cell varies over a day, so I’ve been coming up with ways to model the behaviour of a solar cell in Southampton and in Kenya, and looking at how they would differ. It even involved taking my first ever book out of the university library, which shocked and appalled many of my friends.

Anyway I need to go over to my lab partner’s house to discuss a lab we have next week about making a toy lift move up and down.

10 November 2006

‘Work hard, play hard’ is a phrase I try to live my life by, the problem however is that whoever first came up with that phrase probably died of exhaustion shortly afterwards.

This past week I have been extremely busy doing all sorts of things so I’ll try my best to sum up.

Last Wednesday I was dj-ing in the Students Union with the DJ Society. They do an open decks night every other Wednesday and being on the society committee I turn up when I can. The next night some friends and I went to The Stile (a nice pub on the corner of Highfield campus) and took part in their weekly pub quiz. We ended up doing rather comically badly, coming second to last out of about eleven teams.

On the Friday night the University hosted a fireworks display at the Highfield campus, which I had been hearing exciting sounding things about this for weeks beforehand so I turned up with high expectations. I wasn’t disappointed, it was really good!

I spent most of the weekend doing preparation work for my lab session on Monday which lasted six hours(!) and involved playing with lots of multicoloured wires and bits of plastic that have transistors inside them. I’m really enjoying the practical side of electronics at the moment. It’s a lot easier to understand what you are being told about how a transistor behaves when it’s doing it infront of you, rather than you just having to accept it from a powerpoint presentation.

I also had to do my first piece of coursework for the year. Most modules replace coursework with labs in the second year but maths still likes to set us problems sheets.

We’re also in the middle of a design exercise where we are designing a chip which ECS will send off to be made. It basically acts as a bit of a calculator (addition and subtraction for any numbers up to 16) which is really clever. We did want to write ‘If Carlsberg made chips…’ in metal on our design but unfortunately we didn’t have room!