Um... Er... I... Oxford?

American-born student, she/her/hers, 20, Wadham College third year in physics, "my american oxford" tag for original content

[amerioxfordan]

It’s almost the end of my first week of my internship, but it’s the first time I’m posting about it on here, so luckily the first prompt for the summer studying challenge will fit in really well with summarising what I’m up to as an intern! Before this week, I’d spent my time since exams on meeting up with people outside to finally celebrate the end of the year, but now with covid cases rising, most people have gone home (and I have been lucky enough to get my first dose of the vaccine!).

1st July - What are your plans for this summer?

I’m an intern in my physics department’s atmospheric and oceanic physics subdepartment! Specifically, my project is modelling ice sheets, which will mean writing out a lot of conservation equations which humans can’t solve, and programming them into a computer model to solve for me numerically. The internship is 8 weeks, so should run until almost the end of August, and then my time is quite free throughout September - I hope to visit my parents in the US, and my family around the UK, but I’m not brave enough to make specific plans this early with the pandemic changing so much.

photos: a mass conservation equation for a “mushy layer” of water and ice I wrote out a few days ago

01/07/2021

[myhoneststudyblr]

It’s here y’all!!! The 2021 Summer Studying Challenge! 

I’ve literally been planning on doing this since my last summer challenge so i’m so happy to finally have it out in the world and i can’t wait to see what everyone posts and discover some amazing new studyblrs! i am genuinely so excited to get back to posting consistently and finally having the time to engage with you all after my exams so please get involved and give it ago! 

so without further ado, here’s all you need to know:

✨Info ✨

If you do the challenge, use the tag #summer studying challenge so i (and others) can see your posts

I will try to reblog as many posts in the tag as possible (and it doesn’t matter if you think they aren’t ‘aesthetic’ cause i will reblog them!)

This challenge will run for two months - from the 1st July to the 31st August

There are daily prompts for every day of July and August 

But, as always, I don’t expect everyone to be able to post every day so you can always do catch-up posts or answer the prompts in batches

Likewise, you don’t have to post for the entire period - it is completely up to you but i will be posting for the entire two months 

If you have any questions, feel free to send me an ask!

✨Rules ✨

If you want to do the challenge, please reblog this post

If you do it on any other social media platform (ie. Instagram), please give credit. My Instagram is also @/myhoneststudyblr

The challenge will officially start on the 1st July, but if you come across this later, you can definitely start anytime during these two months!

✨ Prompts ✨

1st July - What are your plans for this summer?

2nd July - Do you have a specific goal for this summer?

3rd July - Do you have a lot of work to do for school, university or your job this summer?

4th July - What is the most important task that you need to complete this summer? 

5th July -  Do you have any special plans or activities for this summer?

6th July - What do you usually do during the summer? Is anything different this year?

7th July - What did you do during the summer when you were a young child?

8th July - What’s your happiest summer memory from your childhood?

9th July - Do you usually go on vacation during the summer?

10th July - What is the best vacation you have ever been on? (note: doesn’t have to be a summer vacation)

11th July - What is your favourite vacation memory?

12th July - What is the worst vacation you have ever been on?

13th July - What is your dream vacation?

14th July - Would you rather stay in one resort for a month or travel across the country for one month? 

15th July - Are there any special events for you in the summer? (for example, birthdays, festivals, etc.)

16th July - Do you have any summer traditions?

17th July - What is your typical daily routine in the summer?

18th July -  How do you stay motivated during the summer? (for example, to study)

19th July - Do you stay indoors or outdoors more in the summer?

20th July - Are you a ‘summer person’?

21st July - What is an unpopular opinion that you have about summer?

22nd July - What does summer feel like where you live?

23rd July - Would you prefer summer to be hotter or colder than it usually is for you?

24th July - Would you prefer your summer to be shorter or longer?

25th July - Daytime or nighttime – what’s your favourite time during summer?

26th July - Do your sleeping habits change during summer?

27th July - Do your eating habits change during summer?

28th July - When you hear the word ‘summer’, what is the first thing that you think of?

29th July - What colour do you associate with summer?

30th July - What would be your perfect summer day?

31st July - Would you rather spend the day at the beach or at the swimming pool?

1st August - What do you do when you go to the beach?

2nd August - What do you like most about the beach?

3rd August - What is your least favourite thing about the beach?

4th August - What is your song of the summer this year?

5th August - What is your ultimate summertime song?

6th August - What is your favourite summertime movie?

7th August - Do you read a lot in the summer?

8th August - What book are you currently reading?

9th August - What is your favourite summer ‘beach read’ book?

10th August - What TV show are you currently watching?

11th August - What was the last movie you watched?

12th August - What is your favourite summertime snack?

13th August - What is your favourite seasonal fruit to eat during the summer?

14th August - What is your favourite meal to have on the beach?

15th August - What is your favourite ice cream flavour?

16th August - What is the weirdest ice cream flavour that you’ve ever seen (and maybe even tasted?

17th August - If you could make up a new ice cream flavour, what ingredients would you use? What would you call it?  

18th August -  What is your favourite summer drink?

19th August - What is your go-to summer outfit?

20th August - Do you like wearing sunglasses?

21st August - Sandals or flip flops? 

22nd August - Do you wear sunscreen?

23rd August - Have you ever been really badly sunburnt? 

24th August - What three things would you take to your desert island? 

25th August - Imagine that you could fill a swimming pool with anything except water and swim in it. What would your pool be filled with?

26th August - Would you rather surf the waves or read a book?

27th August - What’s happening once this summer is over? Returning to school or uni? Starting something new? 

28th August - Have you managed to complete your main task and goal for the summer?

29th August - When you remember this summer, what three adjectives will define it?

30th August - What did you learn over the summer? (note: this doesn’t have to be academic-related)

31st August - What was your favourite memory from this summer?

✨ So this is the challenge! I hope that you will join in and enjoy doing it during the summer! Please message me or send me an ask if you have any questions about it or just want to have a chat <3 ✨

[Taglist under the cut:]

Keep reading

[amerioxfordan]

I haven't been posting since my exams ended but now that my internship's started I want to resume - so I'll be trying to do this challenge to keep me motivated, like I did last summer!

[amerioxfordan]

I now have only one more exam, and only one more flower to wear! Once exams got more under way the thought of posting just became somewhat exhausting, but tomorrow is special relativity and then I’ll be completely done. From the four exams we’ve had so far, I’d say 2 went well, and 2 went very poorly, but I’m hoping that if tomorrow morning is okay, my average across 2nd and 3rd years won’t be too bad, so that I don’t have to do too much better in 4th year to bring my final classification up. But mostly at this point I’m just thinking about celebrating with friends, and then being free to just read Jane Austen novels indefinitely.

I feel like I’m good at the special relativity questions I’ve done on past papers, but if they decide to test us entirely on something like Lienard-Wiechert potentials to make the open book format harder, which I haven’t seen many past questions on, I’ll struggle a lot more. So hopefully we get something reasonably standard, but not so standard that they curve everyone’s scores downwards.

Photos: some formulas from my printed summary notes, and the flowers from last week now in the process of dying

15/06/2021

[amerioxfordan]

1 exam down, 4 to go! It was pretty clear that today’s exam was harder to account for it being open book. Still, the rest of the students at my college all said it felt hard, so we’re all in the same boat. Tomorrow morning I have nuclear and particle, which I think I finally understand conceptual exam questions on, but we’ll see how I do if it also has different types of questions I haven’t seen before. At least I’ll have a day off afterwards!

For the most part I felt like I needed a break after today’s exam, and spent some time watching a movie on Netflix and walking to shops to buy flower food for the bouquet my boyfriend sent. I did also manage to condense a final copy of my nuclear and particle physics notes. They’re printed out and accessible on my whiteboard, so I guess I go to sleep now and find out what happens when I wake up?

Photo: my desk with a laptop and flowers in a glass jar, in front of a whiteboard covered in notes, cards, and a list of my exam dates

07/06/2021

[amerioxfordan]

My exams start tomorrow! I think at this point a few more hours of revision isn’t going to make a huge difference to my exam results, so I’ve switched from academic tasks to trying to put myself in the best possible position in everything else. So far I’ve relabelled my lecture notes by subject instead of date so I can find things easily in an exam, vacuumed, cleared my desk, and baked lemon bars to use up the lemon curd which was occupying too much space in the fridge. I’m planning on spending the rest of the day preparing more food to last the week, and printing out the most important notes and formulas for each subject so I don’t have to constantly change tabs on my laptop.

Yesterday was my last actual studying day, but rather than doing another physics past exam paper, I did a fluids past exam paper from the maths department - they’ve had a fluids course for a lot longer, so there’s more variety of questions to practice with, which should be helpful. And then I took a blanket down onto the quad to read over the fluids topics I was still struggling with in the textbook, and work on the exercises at the end of each chapter. I hadn’t felt like I knew this textbook well enough to reference it in an exam, which is why it isn’t bookmarked yet, but maybe after yesterday I do? But the fluids exam isn’t until Friday, so I can use my day off on Wednesday to stickynote it if I decide it's helpful - my first focus tomorrow is atomic and laser physics.

Photos: my fluids textbook held up above the quad, and Oxford’s High Street at dusk yesterday when I went for a walk

06/06/2021

[amerioxfordan]

Yesterday morning the college welfare officers hosted snacks in the quad outside my window, so I had some fun and aggressively hinted at my college son about carnations for next Monday. The weather’s been greyer since then, though - my bike was wet when I left the diner last night, although I didn’t get caught in the rain, and I’ll wear a rain jacket when I cycle into central today to buy a vase. But on the plus side, I need a vase because my boyfriend has ordered me flowers for my exams (and I have ordered some for him) on top of the carnations I’ll hopefully get from my college son, so that’s exciting.

Yesterday I finished the questions I skipped on an atomic and laser physics exam on Wednesday (including finding a random Berkeley professor’s explanation of the Thomas-Fermi model of the atom, which I am certain we were never taught about). That means I’ve done all the 2020 exam papers! I also put bookmarks in my textbooks so if I do need to look something up in an exam I don’t spend forever searching the table of contents, and watched the nuclear and particle physics revision lectures and did a timed past exam on it. The plan for today is to correct that exam, and then ideally watch condensed matter revision lectures and do that past paper.

Photos: Feynmann diagrams for pion decays I drew in yesterday’s nuclear and particle physics past exam, and stickynotes in my textbooks for atomic physics, laser physics, condensed matter, and special relativity

04/06/2021

[amerioxfordan]

The weather has stayed good for the past few days, and looks like it will be through my first exams next week! The picnic Monday evening was lovely, although one space we tried sitting was absolutely overrun with geese. This morning I actually tried studying outside on the grass, but there’s no shade in this building so my laptop couldn’t handle the heat. And it really has gotten hot, I had to eat ice cream to cool down when I came back inside!

It’s less than a week to my first exams, and my boyfriend is going home today until the end of his exams to avoid the construction noise in his accommodation, so I guess I won’t really be doing much except studying until they’re over. But there’s still a variety of studying to do! Yesterday I started going over a fluid mechanics paper against my boyfriend’s corrected one, and then rewatched the fluid mechanics lectures on turbulence and boundary separation, the topics which it seems I understood the least. So far today, I’ve incorporated the messy notes I took in yesterday’s nuclear and particle physics tutorial into corrections to my past paper, and I’m planning on doing an atomic and laser physics past paper later, because I think it’s been a while since I revised that, and it’s the first exam next week.

Photos: my picnic spread from Monday including homemade baguettes, and my desk today with ice cream and nuclear and particle physics notes on paper and my laptop

02/06/2021

[amerioxfordan]

Finally the weather is getting better! I wore shorts today for the first time in ages, although I didn’t get to spend much time outside, just the walk to and from the diner where I worked for the afternoon. My boyfriend and I are planning to have a picnic tomorrow, as our last fun thing before exams, so I’ll get to spend more time outside tomorrow (and actually, I’ve been assigned to bring the bread, but I don’t have any bread flour so I might cycle to the supermarket tonight before bed, as well).

Today has felt like a productive day, the fluids paper took me longer to get to than I’d expected, because I realised I really did need to make notes beforehand, but now I’ve done that, and almost the whole of last year’s paper, so doing more in future should be easier. I also started on a condensed matter paper, because that was one we last had a tute on quite a while ago. My boyfriend also asked me to send him my solutions to some nuclear physics questions so he could compare his answers, so I made some final corrections to those questions before sending them.

Photo: my table at the diner with my laptop showing a partially completed fluids problems, papers for my fluids exam and formula sheet, and a caramel milkshake

30/05/2021

[amerioxfordan]

Well, updating every day doesn’t seem to be possible, but my excuse for not updating the past few days is I’ve been busy doing fun stuff (in spite of approaching exams)! I spent yesterday morning in a Chinese bakery/cafe in central, had lunch with a friend, revised in the college gardens next to some other friends in the afternoon, joined in with them for somebody’s trashing until I cycled home for dinner, absolutely exhausted. It felt more like pre-pandemic Oxford than I’ve experienced in ages!

I did still get some work done, although I’m going to try to be more productive today - in the cafe and gardens yesterday, I worked on a past nuclear and particle physics paper. I also had my special relativity revision class, which I did over Microsoft Teams from a bench in college, and it seems I did well on that past paper! So I think I’m going to leave off on special relativity until nearer the exam, and instead focus on the rest of my papers - today will be more nuclear and particle, filling in the gaps I haven’t gotten to yet, and fluid mechanics.

Photos: sunset near the Head of the River pub on Wednesday and Feynmann diagrams for beta decay

28/05/2021

[amerioxfordan]

It has been almost an academic year since I said anything here, and I probably forget how I used to format it! I last posted the night before my second-year exams started, albeit second-year exams in October of third year. I’m now less than two weeks from my third year exams. But with exams so close, I could absolutely benefit from more motivation, so I’m back - and hopefully my summer internship will give me interesting things to talk about, so I’ll keep using this after the end of term!

For the academics (the whole purpose of this!) - I’m taking 5 exams this year, in Fluids, Special Relativity, Atomic & Laser Physics, Nuclear & Particle Physics, and Condensed Matter Physics. Today I had a 9:30 am to 1pm Zoom tutorial on Nuclear & Particle, which is very much my worst subject. Most of my work for the day was finishing up a past paper on Special Relativity, due tomorrow morning for a tutorial on Thursday, but now that I’ve submitted that I want to spend the rest of the night reading through Particle Physics notes and making my own, condensed notes from them.

Photos: the meringues I stress-baked at 10pm yesterday (the 2nd year physicists seemed very grateful to be fed!) and a part of my answers to a special relativity exam.

25/05/2021

[amerioxfordan]

I haven’t been posting on here since I moved back into Oxford, but in my defence, I’ve been busy revising, not fully slacking off! Our exams were changed from in person to online open book, so I’ve been able to create this lovely comfy space to take my exams in, no Now it’s finally exam week - Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so check back tomorrow for an update on how the first one, thermal physics, goes! This was my worst paper when I started revising, but seeing as it’s the most relevant paper for the field I eventually want to go into, I’m hoping I’ve put enough work into it now!

I really don’t believe that any more preparation at this point is going to make any difference, so for the rest of the night, I’m going to run and buy some tea, and then do yoga :)

11/10/2020

[amerioxfordan]

I’m in the UK again! Since arriving here I’ve written several postcards, watched part of season 2 of Orphan Black, and, well, continued revising - the Fermi-Dirac vs Bose-Einstein statistics comparison chart is actually not my idea, but something my boyfriend was doing on his whiteboard during one of our video calls and sent me a photo of, and I’ve just adjusted it to have a bit more my colour style. Nothing on the right is my idea either - we were voting as a family for new chicken names, and everyone in America made the suggestions, but I absolutely support having a hen named Gandalf. I’m still in quarantine in my friend’s house, but not for too much longer - looking forward to moving into my newly-assigned room on October 1st!

21/09/2020

More details? I’m supposed to be writing an application on why I want to do the B8 project I’m interested in, but basically I keep putting writing anything because I’m too worried about it. That’s not good. But if as a result I get rejected, I’ll do Symmetry and Relativity instead which also sounds like a cool course! The couple of past papers I’ve done I’d say went reasonably well - I’m clearly starting to understand A1 better than I had done. College has changed my assigned room to somewhere in the same building I’d been in last year, not with people I know, but it means I’ll have an oven and accommodation during the vacations which will be a big help. I still feel they ought to fight harder to have us allowed residency exemptions, but now one of the things I was most upset about is addressed, so I’m not as panicked about demanding it. Now I can actually relax and look forward to my boyfriend moving to Oxford and me getting out of quarantine to walk around Port Meadow in a week’s time.

[amerioxfordan]

Without doing any studyblr challenges I’m definitely not as good as posting regularly, but I’m going to try to make an effort! I’ve now done 2 thermo past papers, 2 electromagnetism and optics past papers, and 3 quantum papers - still doing the corrections from my second thermo paper, and there was a lot I got wrong but it seemed like I had learnt a lot relative to my first thermo paper (question 3 was almost identical to one on that paper, so this time I did it correctly), and hopefully I can stay on this trajectory! Leaving the US is now just 2 days away, arriving in Oxford 3 days away, so once I’m done with these corrections I should probably go pack...

11/09/2020

So, what else has happened in the past couple of days? My sister’s been at school all week, I talked my worries through with the college chaplain, cracked and then replaced my phone, ordered an iPad keyboard for the friend I’m going to stay with in the UK which will hopefully arrive on time for my departure. Travelling in a pandemic still feels like a lot of stress but I feel like I’ve been addressing the things outside of that, which at least makes the total stress more manageable. Of course, the department did decide to spring 3rd year paper choices on us, a bit early and out of the blue considering we still haven’t had exams, so we’ll see if my tutor replies about that...

[amerioxfordan]

Any tips for those of us going into our freshman year of college? Thank you for your time!

Specific advice is really going to vary by where you’re going and what you’re studying! In general in terms of academic advice, I think it’s valuable to put time in to your classes on you own - in secondary school going to class and doing the homework that’s required of you often means you understand enough for exams, but that’s less likely in university. And when you’re not required to use a particular textbook for its homework problems or something, experiment with different sources for your studying, different books or online lectures might be better for different people! (Also, remember that academics aren’t everything - especially since nobody expects you to be perfect from the beginning, and it’s normal to get better at university over time just like at anything else, you should definitely have the space to take care of your mental and physical health and form a good social network and so on at the beginning, not spending all your time studying!)

[amerioxfordan]

Technically the summer studying challenge is finished, but I really want to give the last few answers in spite of having missed the last few days, so this is my extra slightly late post. And missing several days means there’s so much other news - I’ve seen several high school friends, I’ve made substantial progress with thermal physics notes, and physics has switched to open book online exams! Now just waiting for all the other subjects to do the same, and then for us to not go back to Oxford if we don’t want to...

4th September - When you remember this summer, what three adjectives will you think of that define your summer?

Familiar, quiet, and outdoors.

5th September - What did you learn over the summer?

Most of the content from my second year physics course, it seems! First quantum mechanics, then electromagnetism and optics, and now thermal physics I’ve made progress understanding more deeply than I could during the academic year. Not to mention I learnt about decolonising science, something I didn’t know anything about before!

6th September - What was your favourite memory from this summer?

Acting like a kid again with my sister. You’d think that after I left for university we would have grown less close, we would have grown up and not wanted to tickle each other, we wouldn’t have had a huge stretch of time together again... but we had this time together and I’m really grateful for it.

Tomorrow my sister goes back to school, but luckily I have scheduled a Teams meeting with the college chaplain so if I start crying there’s somebody to address it. Today, as the last day that we could all really be that close as a family without my sister possibly being infectious, we went out to an authentic Mexican restaurant (always the type of food I miss while I’m in the UK! I love chile relleno!) and toasted s’mores around our firepit in the back garden. Not to mention one last canoe trip, further up the pond this time! I am a bit worried that I’ve been neglecting my university responsibilities other than exams... but oh well. I can try to improve tomorrow or something.

[amerioxfordan]

I announced to tumblr every other time I went to the beach, of course I was going to do it on my last beach trip of the summer! I decided I was going to finish correcting yesterday’s quantum paper by the end of today and I’ve just about done it - it took substantially less time than correcting my electromagnetism paper! It’s good to feel that I’ve got one exam handled but this means tomorrow I get back into thermal physics, the one I really struggle with...

3rd September - How have you prepared to return to school/university?

The thing about Oxford is that term doesn’t start until October! So all the preparation I’ve done so far has been exam revision, really, I won’t be packing to move back for a week still, and even after that it will be a while before I’m actually in my term time room.

Boyfriend agreed to watch an episode of The Last Airbender with me even though it wasn’t a Friday yet <3! Also in a good mood about having invited the maths society to be advertised on the physics space in our virtual fresher’s fair stall. And making plans to see a couple more friends over the weekend! It’s weird, I think I did miss my opportunity to see a lot of people, but nobody was doing anything earlier in the summer, and I’m happy about the ones I will be able to see. For more about my plans for thermal physics, the lecture notes from some guy at Cambridge are apparently really good, so I’m going to hopefully convert all of them into my own notes in a couple of weeks, and then maybe there will be enough time left to do exams until I’m vaguely competent?

[deliriousacademia]

If you’re a stem-based studyblr, please reblog this and I’ll follow you!!!!

I need more stem-based studyblrs to follow!! literature is wonderful and all, but I can’t relate

where are all my mad scientists with anatomy posters hung across their walls and tangled hair and wild ideas at???