Manchester Interview
On Thursday 29th November I had an interview at Manchester. This was exciting as it was the first time I had been to the city and the interview was functionally acting as an open day for me. For those of you who have interviews from Manchester: don't worry. The first thing they did was to tell us that anyone invited to interview was getting an offer, and that the interview didn't even have much impact upon the offer made.
Which is kind of a shame, I guess, because I am (hopefully) going to get an interview at Oxford sometime in December, and since that will directly impact both of those things, some practice wouldn't have hurt. But the day was made more relaxing because of that.
The day mainly consisted of tours around the place, and we got to see the labs, where one student was analysing data from a version of Cavendish's experiment. If you haven't heard of it, it's how the value of big G was first measured, essentially using a really REALLY accurate balance. He gave us some advice: do error analysis in Excel, not MATLab.
Overall, the day was pretty relaxed and the main focus - my 30 minute interview with Dr. Rene Breton - was also fairly relaxed. We talked about this website, my motivations, and my project at school, Helios:
I think (or I hope, at least) that I came across as fairly confident and in love with Physics. In fact, I've just uploaded a new version of 'A Spring Problem' to the As Mechanics Unit page, with an extra part to it that is a nice generalisation. I've also recently made a new JS applet using Khan Academy that models springs with non-linear elements, here are the links:
and
... and the reason I'm posting this now?
I've got an offer from Manchester! (at A*A*A)
