Soc overload!

Yesterday and Monday were the Socs and Sports fairs and today's the day to sign up/try out a lot of them. But there's just so many! I can't choose!
Here's what I'm looking at:

• Social
  
  • RockSoc
    
  • Salsa
    
  • French Flair
    
  • Scandinavian Society
    
  • Welsh Society
    
  • Curry Appreciation Society
    
  • Engineers without Borders
    
  • Gastronomic Society
    
  • Sci-Fi Society
    
  • Film Society
  
  
• Sports
  
  • Archery
    
  • Canoeing
    
  • Gliding
    
  • Motorsports
    
  • Mountaineering
    
  • Sailing
    
  • Pub Sports

They all sound like fun, but there's no way I can afford the time or money for more than a couple. Plus my weekends are rarely free as it is!

Small World

In the last few days, I have added over 50 new friends on Facebook, mainly those who live with me at Brendon Court. There are more appearing every day too. Now that I "know" so many people, some very surprising links are appearing.
For example, one of the Fresher's Week crew at Brendon is acquainted with two of the people that I met while on a Year in Industry, neither of whom are currently at Bath.
This is not the only example. The Facebook Application Friend Wheel (created, incidentally, by a current student at the University of Bath), shows the relationships between all your immediate friends. From this I have learnt that someone that I met many years ago at "Chemistry Camp" happens to know someone that I later went to college with!
I find these coincidences staggering. Excuse me while I take a moment to marvel at how small the world has become...



Okay, I'm done.

You may notice that I've not posted at all on the subjects of moving to uni or Fresher's Week (which is happening around me as I write) but I'm sure I'll get round to it some time soon.

Bath Accommodation Applications: Nerdy Analysis

Two weeks ago, on Wednesday the 10th of June at precisely 10:00, the University of Bath opened the floodgates on its accommodation applications system.
If you're going to Bath, you'll have applied already (or should have!), and you'll know that getting a room in the most popular halls is competitive. Popular theory has it that those applying sooner will have a better chance of being allocated the place they want. I don't know if this has ever been confirmed. I intend to ask the staff all about the process when I get there. Regardless, everyone rushes like crazy to get their applications in as soon as it opens.

With the help of some posters on The Student Room, I have managed to plot the progress of these applications. The results are dramatic (if you're a nerd like me).

Around 2,500 applicants make Bath their first choice every year. Within 8 minutes of the form opening, 500 have applied for their halls. After half an hour, 1,000 have applied. By 8PM, the number of applications has reached 2,000. By the next evening, almost everyone has applied for their room.


I have (inexpertly) calculated the rate of applications based on the rough data gleaned from TSR. There is a huge spike, approaching 300 applications per minute, at T+7 minutes. This suggests to me that the form takes an average of 7 miutes to complete, and that by completing it in less, you will get a much better place in the queue.



It is notable that the first few minutes are relatively slow as everyone is filling out their forms. In the first two minutes, only 14 people had finished (one of them being me!). I suspect that most of these 14 had read all the information on the TSR Wiki and were very well prepared! I had a list of all the answers the form asked for, so I could just copy-paste them in.
In fact, I completed the form in about 1 minute, but I missed the opening time as my work computer's clock was wrong! Disappointing, I wanted to be first, (if just for bragging rights on TSR) :P

Gap Year Fair

Today brought me some more business in Bath - this time, manning the Year in Industry's stand at a gap year fair – a collection of gap year organisations in the hall of a fancy school, all selling their stuff.

Strangely, whenever I come back from Bath, I feel really chilled and elated. I have no idea why. Today, I caught the train back, chatted briefly to a nice Indian lady, went to Asda, bought vegetables, walked home and listened to Northern Kings all the way. Then I ate two excellent cheese toasties and posted some stuff on my local Freecycle group. And it was awesome.

I wonder if Bath's really that nice that just going there gets me high? It is certainly a nice place, and I plan on testing the theory by making excuses to revisit the town.

The gap year fair itself was a bit of a dead loss in terms of getting students involved. I can count the number of students who really sounded interested on one hand.

The Year in Industry are in a difficult position at these events, as they are surrounded by people offering students the chance to spend a year snowboarding, swimming with dolphins or saving starving children in Africa. And along comes the YinI  saying "How would you like to get a job instead?" Doesn't sound so attractive now does it?

In order to deal with this, the YinI have started to offer an option called 'YinI Combo', on which students spend part of the year working like usual, then spend some of the money they earned to go off on a typical volunteering project abroad.

That's all well and good, but it's still called a Year in Industry. Countless times today, I heard students saying "Industry?" in a disgusted tone as they walked past the stand. The idea of working on a gap year is not one that appeals to the average 17-year-old.

I think that while the YinI is badly placed to sell its own YinI Combo, its partners that offer the volunteering part of the year are perfect for it. They can say "You can do all this stuff, and over here are the YinI who will help you to work up the funds to do it too!". Not only that, but the YinI looks great on a CV and it will help you prepare for your time at uni. Sounds a lot more interesting now, you see?

I'm not suggesting the YinI should stop attending these fairs. On the contrary, I think it should invest more in its involvement, and also be a bit smarter about how it does it. For a start, they should make sure that the people representing the partners understand the YinI and the Combo option. I spoke to representatives of the four partners today and three of them knew nothing about the YinI, even though they were giving out our leaflets!

I think they should also co-ordinate with the partners to ensure that the stands are physically close together and can refer students to each other easily.

Also, there was a lack of strong YinI branding on our stand. Almost all of the exhibitors had some sort of large-format backdrop with their name and an indication of what they do. Not so with us – we where the second-worst equipped of all the exhibitors there. It turns out that people are scared or simply uninterested to go up to a stand and find out what it is for, if it is not immediately obvious.

So yes, I have a lot of criticisms of the way the YinI represents at these events, but they can improve and I will tell them how!

And I am still in love with Bath!

Bacon Butties

I just have to say, that Bath University is home to the best bacon butties in the world. I would post this information on the TSR Wiki, however I am banned from the site. More on that later.

I was there on business (wow, it sounds great to say that!) last week. Anyway, the café known as Dol•c^He Vita (why do café franchises have such pretentious names?) serves a beautiful bit of grilled bacon in a fresh-from-the-oven French loaf that only costs 90p! I have a feeling I'll be eating a lot of these when I get there in September!

Having done a brief bit of research on the topic, it seems some underworked and overfed postgrads at Leeds have done a "serious study" into what makes a perfect bacon butty.

Apparently, the most important variable is the crunchiness of the bacon, and they have developed an equation to evaluate it:

N = C + {f_b(c_m) · f_b(t_c)} + f_b(T_s) + f_c · t_a

Where:

N=force in Newtons required to break the cooked bacon

C=Newtons required to break uncooked bacon

f_b=function of the bacon type

c_m=cooking method

t_c=cooking time

T_s=serving temperature

f_c=function of the condiment/filling effect

t_a=time or duration of application of condiment/filling

Now this looks very dubious to me. There are so many significant variables not considered - for example, the quality of the bread is completely ignored!

Obviously, tensile strength is not a measure of crispness, so the equation is bogus from the start. A bit of deeper searching, and I find out that our own Bath University has produced a study into the perception of crispness, and found it statistically analogous to hardness.

Clearly, the study is incomplete and a great deal of further research is required. I would like to take this opportunity to volunteer myself as a human guinea pig for any further live trials that may need to be conducted. I believe we must all make certain sacrifices for the benefit of society, and this shall be my contribution.