Oxford and BPhO
Firstly, the great news:
I was told last Friday (so exactly a week ago) that I am in the next round of the British Physics Olympiad - that means I came in the top 50 in the country in the first round. 15 people from the second round go to do a training camp where they are then whittled down to 5 to do to the international Olympiad.
I really hope I do well in Round 2, those papers are punishingly difficult and I'm going to have to spend a fair bit of Christmas looking at them.
Secondly, for Monday to Wednesday this week I was staying at Merton College Oxford for my physics interviews! I... really don't know how that went at all. Almost everything went smoothly, except for one question where I essentially just froze.
I don't know why, really. All I know is that it probably looked like I hadn't met anything like it before and was reacting badly to new situations. That's not really fair I think, because I'd barely seen any other problems before as well and it's not like the situation was totally alien (it was about tensions in a suspension bridge). I think my problem was that I didn't understand what I was trying to achieve - if I had registered that I was trying to get a maximum vertical component of tension but have low overall tension then the answer would have been immediately obvious.
Other questions included the average speed of a bouncy ball that loses a set fraction of it's energy every bounce - you can calculate the total time and total distance travelled using geometric series formulae and then finally divide one by the other. And another fun question involved the number of times a ball bouncing back and forth in a well crosses the well before it hits the ground (this is loosely equivalent to the old question where a man walks home and his dog runs back and forth between him and his house until he gets home, find how far the dog travels in total).
Overall, the problems were fun, but I didn't get to show off much - questions on electromagnetism would have suited me better as I could compute curls and things of that ilk. And I did have that dodgy moment in my first interview where I'm sure I just looked completely thick. My only consolation is that I did solve one quite hard problem in that same interview and I'd never seen that one before (and I only needed a couple of hints, like when I'd defined my distances going a way that obscured the useful physics and they pointed this out).
I also met lots of very fun people, even though I am awful with names. The mathematicians were great fun to talk to (and to wind up by doing non-rigorous 'physicsy things') and the physics applicants were cool and relaxed - no-one was trying to sabotage what I suppose was their competition. Anyway, I don't know whether I've done enough to get in (I did at one point mention the top50 thing, but I don't think they paid too much attention and I'm not sure how much weight they'd put on that test over interviews which feel more personal) but I really hope I have; Merton was really lovely, but I'd be happy to go to any Oxford college so long as everyone else there was as enthusastic as the applicants this week! It was three days of highly enjoyable geekines interspersed with occasional bits of more serious physics (read: interviews) and I'd like to do that all the time to be honest.
(My triumph, five words in one turn)
(Platonic solids made of Jenga)
