helen-louise's journal

Oh, ffs. If I wasn't stressed enough already, I just managed to hit CTRL-D and completely lose my last entry.

Am stressed out of my tiny little mind. Remember how my unconditional offer turned into a conditional offer? Well, that part wasn't a mistake. Birkbeck Registry want me to have either officially finished or withdrawn from the outstanding-since-2004 MPhil before I can start the new course. (This is different from Birkbeck's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, who don't care either way.) Which would've been fine if I'd known that a couple of months ago when I still had enough time to get the thesis done without KILLING MYSELF.

Basically... I have to reformat and reprint my thesis from 2004. It's ~130 pages and severely mangled by Microsoft Word - get it printed out, hard bound, and submitted to the University of London, otherwise I can't start my new university course ON MONDAY. Problem is, my old computer had a feebly small memory, and even splitting the thesis into four files, I couldn't paste the diagrams into the thesis in ye olde days because it took 15 minutes to print out each page that had a graph on. (And most pages have a graph on.) So I originally formatted it by pasting in the diagrams with glue - but I can't find that copy of the thesis. God knows where it is, we've moved house since I produced it. So to print another copy now, I have to open up the graphing program on the screen, take screenshots as the program is too old and too converted-from-Mac to output standard formats like .jpegs or .gifs, paste them into Photoshop Elements, cut out the crap on the screen, re-save as .wmf files, and import into my Word document. And I have literally megabytes of data and I'm not sure in all cases which files I want to use.

And my gall bladder hurts, and this level of stress DEMANDS CHOCOLATE, which I can't eat due to the PAIN. And I have work-for-money all this week, and argh argh argh.

That was the best university interview I've ever had. (Richard sounded shocked and said "How many university interviews have you had?". I thought for a moment and said "Nine. Or perhaps ten. This would be the eleventh." and he suddenly remembered that the reason he didn't have any was due to living in another country. I'm pretty surprised that he didn't even have phone interviews, but there you go.) I like interviews that start "You are eminently well-qualified for this course, of course you have a place, do you have any questions?".

However I don't feel eminently well-qualified for anything, not even for cycling down the road without crashing into things. I'm not even amazingly well-qualified at walking down the road without walking into things/people or falling over. I suppose I'm fairly well-qualified for sitting in front of the internet and not accidentally sending viruses to all my friends, but that doesn't take a lot of effort. Apparently I need more self-esteem. Or self-confidence. (Is that the same thing?)

Well, the reason I'm doing this course isn't so much to learn chemistry as to get more confidence that I know what I'm talking about, so hopefully it will be successful. And I'll figure out what I want to do a PhD on, and then I will apply for it. With plenty of time.

Now I have to deal with the Registry to find out how much the fees actually are (every document I've seen has had a different number on it, grrr) and talk to the Disabilities Office to sort out... whatever I need that I haven't already worked out that I need. And then I shall Get Educated.

You lot are all crap because I posted I have an interview at Birkbeck College at 6pm on Thursday but no one has commented on that post. It's nice to know that you all think I'm so fantastic I don't need luck, but I'd still like some good thoughts. Especially as my feeling a bit eurgh has become a full-blown virus with sore throat and fever. I shall warn the interviewer that I need to sit at the other side of the room to spare him from my germs, and that my brain is fried so he might need to give me more time to think.

Also I got the transcript of my degree from Imperial this morning, and it is Lying. At least, it shows my awesome achievement of 29% (fail) for Organic I in 1994-5, but doesn't include the resit result in 1995-6. It includes my other resits, so I don't know why that one was left out. Still, it gives me scope to talk about why I thought I was crap at organic chemistry.

Disability: If you have any access issues or special needs that you would like to bring to the attention of your Admissions Tutor, please state them here.

How am I supposed to fit even a very short summary on one line that is 14.7 cm long?!

And no, I can't see anywhere obvious that I could continue writing. I think I'll just send a letter with the form.

By the way, if anyone is suitably professionally qualified to comment on my admission to the course, please speak now. I'm really struggling to come up with two referees, especially as no one I've emailed (that I know in an academic sense) has replied to my email yet, and I can't get through by phone either :/

I have found the course I want to do at university: Chemistry* (Graduate Certificate / Graduate Diploma) at Birkbeck. It is for people who have already studied chemistry at degree level or equivalent, and wish to update their knowledge. Which sounds remarkably similar to my stated aim of "going back to do my degree again but actually listening this time". There's more to it than that, though - I want to go into a different area of chemistry.

When I did my degree, I ended up specialising in Physical Chemistry just because physical lab was the one I was least bad at. Though I did maths & further maths A-levels, I never have been particularly gifted in calculus - I never quite "got" things like integration and partial differential equations even at the time. Let alone now when I haven't used maths of that level in years. So I was never going to be very good at a lot of the quantum and thermodynamic stuff that requires that kind of pure maths. Then I ended up going into Environmental Chemistry, which is something I am good at - but it's not a good area for me to study from an emotional point of view. The problem with environmental research is that you can prove that something is extremely damaging and needs to be banned, and then it can take 5 years after your original paper before any other scientists listen to you, 10 years before pressure groups pick up on it, and a further 10 years before any legislation even starts going through governments. I like the idea that my research could change the world, but I find that waiting around for governments to act very stressful & upsetting. I'd much rather work in another field where I don't feel personally responsible for global warming.

Organic Chemistry was always my favourite at school, but I struggled with it horrendously at university - principally because we had one lecture teaching us skeletal formulae ("line notation"), and then every other organic lecture used skeletal formulae more or less exclusively. (I have, in fact, found most of my first year organic notes, and I'm not exaggerating!). I'd be sitting there trying to copy a diagram from the board with a certain number of wiggles: /\/\/ and having no idea at all how that related to a molecule. And if I got the number of wiggles wrong, I'd have drawn a completely different molecule and not even realise. Argh. Then the fact I had bloody awful organic tutoring and spent a lot of my degree clinically depressed without any useful medication made it impossible to catch up.

I don't know for certain that organic is what I want to do - I also want to study lots of Inorganic Chemistry. I've always liked Transition Metals, and the Lanthanide and Actinide course I took was amazing. I also enjoyed Acids & Bases and Non-Aqueous Solvents. I'm just sure it's all of that stuff I'm interested in and not Molecular Reaction Dynamics, Liquid Interfaces, Molecular Theory of Gases, Liquids and Solids or Chemistry of the Gas/Solid Interface.