BPhO

Okay, so I may have forgotten to make blog posts while a I was at the BPhO training camp. I was very tired.

To be honest, there's not much to tell: we typically had a whole bunch of problems to work on and had fairly frequent breaks so that we didn't die of exhaustion. We covered some AC theory and some thermodynamics, both of which were pretty new to me (I knew a little AC theory, but really not much thermo at all) and were very interesting. On the Wednesday we did a practical test in the morning which consisted of two main tasks - determining the position of a lens inside a tube and finding the Poisson ratio of steel wire. (We were given the necessary theoretical relationships and told what experiment to do, so for Poisson's ratio we were given a method to measure Young's modulus and the modulus of rigidity, along with a relationship between the three properties. For the lens practical we had the lens equation given and were asked to derive some relationshipsto help guide the practical).

The practical exam was pretty tough - there were four experiments in total in only four hours and you had to collect enough data and analyse/graph it in that time. That's a pretty tall workload and I don't think anyone finished both practicals to their satisfaction. I know I didn't do especially well (but not terribly, either) and I think I probably freaked out a little with the geometry for the lenses.

On the last day we had a relativity session in the morning and then did a theory paper - short and sweet, we had to find the dimensions of an expression, find the maximum emf for a wire pendulum in a magnetic field and work out the angle that a sonic boom's bow wave makes.

That was all a week or two ago... so I know how I did now. Unfortunately I'm not on the final team, but I did make reserve, so that means I still get to go to the further training camps (and possibly to the finals, but its really unlikely). Hopefully we'll be given lots of fun problems on that as well!