Posts Tagged ‘induction’
Turnings on the path of life
I’ve been meaning to blog about a few things that have happened lately but I don’t seem to be able to settle to do anything that requires some expenditure of effort at the moment. Even simple e-mail replies to friends are taking days because I just don’t seem to be able to get them done. My posting frequency on here has returned to the pathetic once a month on average. It’s rather rubbish, but I suppose given that it’s now the holidays it’s alright and I hope to be back to my usual form by the time 2008 draws to a close. I’ll have to as of course the usual January exams loom and I shall be revising hard for those. For the past year my school has had a building site on the field as a new school is constructed as the current one really is falling apart. We’re finally moving into it after this Christmas holiday, but said exams are due to take place in the mobile buildings that form part of the old site. According to a charismatic religious education teacher I know, the one that my maths exams are to take place in has been recently nicknamed ‘the fridge’ so we’re going to have an interesting time with that.
One reasonably major change that happened recently is that I’ve stopped living at my father’s house during the week. Since my parents split up about ten years ago, my sister and I have switched between the houses with a very complex system that no-one else seems to understand, spending time at both during weekdays and then alternating over weekends – and carrying or sending piles of stuff (mainly school books) back and forth. For years I have got on poorly with my father and have tried to get away from living there whenever I can, and now that I’ve turned eighteen my mother says she isn’t going to stop me anymore and is happy for me to live more at her house during the week. So now I only go to my father’s alternate weekends. I’m obviously not entirely happy with this turn of events: it’s a bit rubbish that I dislike living with one of my parents and my sister thinks I’m being very selfish. I don’t think this is a very fair assessment. I’ve done it because the general atmosphere in the house is rarely pleasant as my father and I clash continuously over trivial things and this is especially true on week nights when I’m dashing off to ringing, coming home late due to after school activities and trying to get homework done. My sister and I have an even worse relationship (always have) so to me it makes sense to try and defuse this situation where I can by spending less time together. You may well disagree, and as I say I don’t think it’s ideal. But given that I think in the long run people will have a pleasanter time during the week, and it’s not as if I’m leaving entirely, it makes sense to me.
Something else that has happened is that I’ve been asked to leave freenode‘s staff team because I clearly don’t have the time these days. I think I should have voluntarily given up the responsibility given that I knew this myself, but I just loved the place and the people too much to do that. So now I’ve been retired and told that if I do have more time in the future, I can always reapply. I’ve had a fantastic time with freenode. I’ve met some great and dedicated volunteers who I am definitely not going to lose touch with, and I’ve learnt a great deal about dealing with the more difficult users of the network. I do hope that I’ve been useful in the other direction and freenode has benefited somewhat. I will be sticking around the place and I am still on the network for SilentFlame and Wikimedia channels. I am going to try and focus more on my Wikimedia responsibilities with the extra time: I have jobs that are ideal for the amount of time I have and I shall very much try to do them effectively.
Far more exciting than the above notes is that I received a letter yesterday to inform me that I’ve got a place at Oxford at the college I wanted (Balliol) to study Maths and Philosophy for four years starting from October 2009. I just need, of course, to get the three As at A-level required but assuming I don’t do anything really stupid I think I’m on target to get this. This is fantastic news for me – I feel like I can do anything if I’ve managed this. After going down there to stay for three/four days to be interviewed about ten days ago, I really could imagine myself having a great time there. All the students looking after us were very nice, even if the sixth formers were loud and constantly trying to show off a lot of the time (I befriended two quieter Maths and Philosophy students and lo and behold all three of us got in!). The environment is of course very impressive in terms of the buildings, and the college library is such an amazing place to learn in. Accomodation is basic but fine and the food is okay but is served in a hall of epic proportions. The Balliol tutors who interviewed me were also lovely and I can imagine learning a great deal from them. And of course there are things such as the Oxford Union Debating Society, THE place for debating; all the usual university societies such as gaming and lots and lots of ringing; and it’s not at all a bad city to live in. After such a long time of waiting around and wanting to know I can finally imagine myself there with reasonable surety that it’ll happen.
The interview experience as a whole is a very convoluted affair. The amount of variation between Oxford and Cambridge and between the individual colleges is pretty astonishing at first. I stayed from Sunday evening until Wednesday evening and the vast majority of this consisted of sitting around and reading or revising material for interviews. Everyone gets an interview at the college of choice that they applied to and then at least one other at another college in order to try and give no disadvantage to applying to particular colleges which may, in any individual year, find themselves oversubscribed compared to others which may not have ‘enough’ applicants. The problem is that such extra interviews are arranged in a very haphazard way. When I arrived, the noticeboard holding interview details was about a metre wide and hadn’t extended too far with sheets of paper covered in names and times for various subjects. However, with people arriving and departing all the time and more and more interviews being arranged, the board spread out to the right rapidly, filling the common room’s noticeboard gradually across – including duplicates making it necessary to read everything to ensure you didn’t miss something aimed at you. I was also rung up when further interviews were arranged. By the end there was a dismissal notice up for all the maths and related courses but there was a special section at the bottom asking me to stay a bit longer to be interviewed again.
I ended up being interviewed by three colleges, but two of these had seperate interviews for maths and philosophy so I was interviewed five times in total which was rather a lot. Interviews themselves varied very widely. In maths, in one I was asked reasonably difficult but not exactly brain-mashing questions; in the second I merely chatted about recent topics studied and about the entrance test (which apparently I did pretty well on but I wasn’t told my percentage score); and in the third I was guided through a very hard problem (attempting to define a function of n that would tell you the number of zeroes on the end of n!; got there too). In philosophy, I was asked several technical questions relating to the problem of induction, and some interesting political and linguistic questions that I probably shouldn’t share on the web as they do like to reuse them.
And now it’s Christmas day and thanks to the above I have the best present possible. It’s been a very eventful year and it’ll likely be an equally eventful January, but I’m enjoying the fact that I have an absurd amount of family members over for Christmas right now before I start thinking about such things. In our tiny little three bedroomed semi, we have fifteen people: two grandparents, three aunties, two uncles, five cousins, one father and one sister to give their relations to me. My father’s girlfriend’s house is being used to house some and others are staying in a local bed and breakfast. I went ringing this morning while they all strained at the leash of present opening (I pointed out upon entry that calling people to worship is the whole point of the day *nods*) and now I’m at home writing this and am going to put the turkey in the oven for the non-vegetarians (i.e. the other fourteen people) while they’re out for a walk, which after walking all the way up to and back from my mother’s (fifty minutes each way) to get my Oxford letter yesterday and walking all the way to the cathedral this morning (about an hour) I think I’ve done enough.