July Challenge

Last month, I set my self the challenge of looking after me. I have definitely improved my sleeping patterns; I now find it much easier to wake up at 7.30 and haven't had to nap during the day for a while! I (mostly) eat three meals a day, and my wardrobe is nicely sorted out to make it easier to get to all of my clothes. I haven't done as much exercise as I would have liked; I kept forgetting to do my stretches. I have, however, been for a 5 mile cycle ride with the family and gone for my first run for months. Well, run is a strong word. My step-dad has described it more aptly as "joggling", sort of half jogging, half walking and wobbling all over the place. It was quite a successful run though, no knee pain and it actually felt really good. I have plans to complete a Couch to 10K programme, which is supposed to take 14 weeks, but I may take longer than that to make sure I don't strain my knees too much. I have plenty of time until the next Market Drayton 10K though! Over the month I have done several things to help with my future as well.

It was my birthday on the 4th, and I spent a lovely day relaxing in the sunshine with family. I got some really nice gifts, including the first two series of Once Upon A Time (my boyfriend knows me so well!) and a really thoughtful gift of a bodyclock alarm from a family friend that will definitely help with my depression and sleeping when it comes to the darker months of winter. My mum took me shopping to buy what she calls "power clothes" to get ready for interviews. She bought me a nice suit and I had a really good time spending the day with her.

After my birthday I was supposed to be going to Portugal with Liberty to have a little holiday and spend some time with our father. Due to work commitments, he had to cancel, so we spent the week doing other things together. We went to Warwick Castle - purely for research purposes, honest - we picked up the boyfriend's sister from Uni and incorporated another shopping trip at the same time, and spent lots of time blitzing our way through Lego Lord of the Rings.

On 25th, I went with my mum back to Coventry to pick up the rest of my stuff, clean the house, move out and pick up my results. I took her to the Bread Oven on campus to get my favourite sandwich, a brie and salad baguette, and we ate it in the Piazza in the sunshine while we waited for the time to collect my results. It was beautifully symmetrical because we ate sandwiches from the Bread Oven in the Piazza on the open day I went to before I joined Warwick. It was a really lovely day, made better by the fact that I got a 2.1 for my degree!

The next day was spent at Alton Towers with the boyfriend, Liberty and her other half. It was brilliantly fun, and we even managed to convince the boyfriend to go on Oblivion. He was so scared that me might have passed out on the ride, but he survived! Just about... And I bought him the picture from the ride to keep as a trophy and proof that he was on it so he doesn't have to ever go on it again. I strangely enjoyed it this time, and I enjoyed the other roller coasters much more than I ever have previously. I think Liberty is right, once you have been on Oblivion, nothing is ever as scary as that. I didn't even cry this time!

I also have had some success with my job hunting. I haven't gotten a job yet, but I applied to Metaswitch, a company that I have liked the sound of for some time, and managed to make it through to the first round of interviews after completing an online aptitude test. The day of the interview I was so nervous that I was actually sick first thing after I woke up, but I managed to survive the day of travelling to London by myself and doing my first real interview. It was a really tough day, and I didn't make it through to the next round, but it was a really valuable experience. I have since applied for another two jobs, and have set up my own "Job finding process".

That brings me onto my July challenge. I have been looking for jobs in Software Engineering, but I don't have a great deal of experience with coding. I have been doing some online courses on Codecademy to try to learn some of the basics. It has been fun, but I learn best when I have an actual project to work on, so this month I am going to build a website. Liberty wants one for a mad project she wants to undertake, so we are going to do some designing this weekend, and hopefully I can start to put something together. This will also help towards my job search as I will have something concrete to talk about in terms of experience. Wish me luck :)

Getting back into the swing of things...

Since the Easter Holidays, I haven't been keeping up my blog at all. It's not because I haven't had anything to write about, but rather that I haven't had the time or energy to write about all the things that have been happening.

In the last couple of months, I have:

• Been to Comic Con
• Visited my father in Portugal
• Went on the world's tiniest spinning teacups with my brother while my family participated in the Market Drayton 2013 10K race
• Watched the Exorcist
• Been voted Vice President of Warwick Glee
• Won Performance of the Year with I Knew You Were Trouble by Taylor Swift in Glee Club
• Finished all assignments and exams for my first year of University
• Had my younger sister visit me for a couple of days
• Bought an iPad with my birthday money

And probably a whole lot more that I can't think of right now.

So, my plan for the Summer is to get back into my blogging. I will start it off by writing posts about my C date and D date, then see where we go from there!

2013: Week 1

The first week of the new year has been a very mixed bag of emotions for me.

On New Year's Eve, it was my younger sister's birthday. She turned 16, so naturally, my 4 year old sister thought it would be appropriate to decorate a white chocolate snowman as a gift. She's so thoughtful. She did end up eating most of it though, as the birthday girl was more interested in the jelly sweet things around it.

I went after-Christmas-shopping with Apollo, Mum and various siblings. I got a cool new chalk board (which yes, it does say ages 3-8 on the box). Apollo bought me some DVDs to take back to Uni with me, and I bought a couple of posters because they were two for a fiver, and I had finally found the Catwoman poster I've been looking for basically since I saw it when The Dark Knight Rises came out in the cinema.

Isn't that just the most beautiful poster you have ever seen? Apollo wasn't so please with his Spiderman poster however...

I think I laughed for 3 days after he unrolled that. Best £5 I've ever spent!

We had a marshmallow, or 'Mashmallow' party as a farewell to me before I went back to Uni. People seemed to enjoy smearing toasted marshmallows on Justin/Spiderman's face rather than eating them. Can't imagine why...

My Step-dad also tried to impersonate the pose. Didn't really work did it?

Then came the time for me to go back to Uni. Mum, my Step-dad and the babies took me back on-route to visiting a friend in Swindon, so me and Apollo got an extra long goodbye when he stayed with me instead of going to Swindon. We built my chalk board up, which then got loads of messages written on it.

Apollo and I spent the rest of the evening, after putting away the tonne of food my parents kindly bought me, watching Big Bang Theory, 2 Broke Girls, Grahame Norton and finally Juno. In between enjoying spending my last day with him, I kept bursting into tears thinking about him and the rest of my family leaving the next day.

My parents and the babies returned the next day with lunch. After food and a drink, we went back to my room, had a little chat then said goodbye. I cried, again. I hate it when everyone leaves. It's so hard knowing that everyone I love isn't just downstairs, in the next room, or even on the other side of our small town.

I'm going to miss these two munchkins like crazy. And my Mum. And Apollo. And singing with my sister. Instead of all the mad things we do together, I have to think about taking an exam on Wednesday, and trying to survive on my own for four weeks before I can see Apollo again. And trying not to cry all the time because I miss them. I'm not doing a great job of that so far...

I love you guys.

My New Home

Today was a big day. I moved into my room at University. I don't really feel ready for it. I don't think I've ever cried so much when my mum and my boyfriend left.

But my room is really nice. It is a decent size, and has everything I need in it to help me survive my first year at Uni.

I am going to miss everyone so much, but I still want to have a good time. Right now I still feel a bit helpless, but it should get better. I have an introductory lecture tomorrow morning, so that should clear some things up for me about my course, and I get to meet my personal tutor.

Can you tell I'm a maths student?

This is the start of a very big adventure.

Results Day

This Thursday was my A-level results day. The day that would decide my future. I was surprisingly calm the night before, and managed to sleep quite well, when normally I have trouble sleeping when I'm anxious about something. That may have been because I got a phone call from school earlier that day asking me to come in at 9am to talk to the newspaper reporters. It seemed like a good sign.

I was still calm when I woke up on Thursday morning and had a shower. More good signs came when I heard my mum sing "Celebration" really loudly from her room. I had left my UCAS login details with my step-dad so that he could check whether I got into University or not and find out if it was safe for him to go to the results day at the school he works at. From all of these clues, I wasn't too nervous to log into UCAS for myself. Although I wasn't entirely surprised to see confirmation of my place at Warwick (my first choice) I was enormously relieved. It was quite stressful not knowing if I had done well enough in my exams. I wasn't worried about getting an A* in my maths, and I was fairly confident I was going to get an A in further maths, but not as confident about whether I was going to get an A* in it. The exams I was most worried about were business, as I'm a lot more comfortable with numbers than words, and the STEP papers, as they were really hard, and I had no idea how the marking and scoring worked with them.

Knowing that I had already got my place at Warwick made going into college to collect my results a lot easier. My whole family came with me to school so that we could go to Wetherspoons for a celebratory breakfast afterwards. My results showed that I got an A* in maths, an A* in further maths and an A in business. I was so happy! I worked really hard to get those results, and it was nice to see that it paid off. My teachers were really pleased as well. They kept taking pictures of me and my friends, who also did very well. I was also interviewed by the reporter for the local newspaper.

The rest of the day was a lot of talking to friends and relatives about my results. My boyfriend got his AS results as well. He did a lot better than last year with two Cs, but he was disappointed with his History result, so had to go back to school to talk to the head of college. When he came back with the good news that he was allowed to go into his next year, but the slightly less good news of having to wait for them to talk to his History teacher about whether he can carry on with that or not, he also brought me a surprise.

Crazy colourful flowers! He always picks the best flowers for me :)

My sister made a mad celebration dough dinner.

My mum decorated a plainly iced madeira cake to incorporate my name and my results...

...which quickly turned into fraction cake.

A close family friend was visiting, ready for the V festival at the weekend, and made me a lucky mascot out of the champagne (which he very kindly bought for me) cork and a coin. Apparently it's a tradition to put a coin in the cork of a celebration bottle of bubbly to give to the person the celebrations are based around for luck. I've never heard of the tradition, but I like it! I named him Fermat, after a mathematician :)

It was a really good day, and I can't wait to go to Warwick now!

University

When I was first looking at Universities, I didn't know where I wanted to go, or what I wanted to do. At the time I was enjoying ICT and thinking that I maybe wanted to do something creative to do with ICT. I couldn't find anything that grabbed my attention, so started to look at business courses. I was worried then about having a subject that would involve too much writing and essays, so I started to look for business courses that let me do other modules in maths.

In all this time I never thought of studying just maths. I always thought it would be too hard or too boring. But after looking at other courses, and not being particularly inspired by any of them, I settled on maths, simply because it's what I'm best at, and I didn't want to do anything else. But the more I thought about it, the more excited about the idea I got.

Maths has always been my favourite subject. It is logical, it doesn't involve many words, and it has a right answer. I hate it when you have to write an essay or something, and the teacher says "there is no right or wrong answer". How do you score points then? How do you know if what you have written is going to get you a good mark? I just don't, so that is why I like maths. I can usually tell if I've done well on a paper, just because there are methods to answering the questions.

My teachers were happy with the choice I'd made as well. They believed I was smart enough for it, and they knew that I enjoyed the lessons so they thought that I would be very interested in the subject at a degree level. With their support, I started to  believe that I could do it as well.

Last summer, a close friend of our family kindly bought me a couple non-academic maths books (one of which is the book I talked about in a previous post). I read The Number Mysteries by Marcus du Sautoy first. I found it surprisingly interesting and easy to read. I never realised how much more there is to maths than what you learn in the classroom. Reading this book made me think more about what I could learn at University, and how maths applies to the world, and I started to think more and more that it was something I wanted to do. Since then I have listened to a podcast and watched a TV series about the history of mathematics (both by Marcus du Sautoy as well). I have been given and bought a few more books that I have read various chapters from, and started this blog!

The next challenge, after getting exciting maths, was to choose which Universities to apply for. I had no idea where I wanted to go. I knew that I didn't want to go to Cambridge or Oxford, they just didn't seem right for me. Other than that, I didn't really know. My Step-dad suggested that I look at the Universities in the Russell group because they are below Oxford and Cambridge, but they are still high standing Universities. I ordered prospectuses from all the ones that weren't too far away, and looked at the courses they offered. The maths courses were all pretty much the same, as I decided I just wanted to do the basic mix of pure and applied mathematics, so I could find out what I like and specialise later on.

After a long time of still not really knowing what to do, my mum suggested a road trip to fit in with teaching my sister how to drive on motorways and to let me have a quick look at a University for myself. I'm not sure how we ended up choosing Warwick, whether it was purely because it was one of the closer ones, because the prospectus was on top of the pile, or because we used to go to Warwick castle a lot, but that is where we went. Although we only got an outside look at the Uni (it wasn't actually an open day), we had a drive around the town, and found a little shopping centre to get some lunch and we bought a couple of books. Mum kept saying things like "this could be where you do your shopping for food to survive!" which was a little bit scary, but kind of cool. We also decided that the maths course there would be ideal, because there was a lot of room for flexibility if I wanted to take a module of something else to break up the maths.

After that, everything got a bit easier. I applied to Warwick, Bath, Nottingham, Liverpool and Leeds, mostly based on the grades, and the flexibility of the courses. I went to open days to all of them (except Bath, because no one could take me and I wasn't ready to go on my own after having just gone to Liverpool by myself). I got offers from all five, which was very exciting, and I decided that I wanted Warwick as my first choice, and Nottingham as my back up.

I found out, at some point, that I would have to take an additional paper alongside my A-levels to get into Warwick. The STEP papers use A-level syllabuses, but the questions are designed to be more like the kind of questions you would see at University, so it tests you on how you would cope with degree level work. I surprised myself by not being put off by this. Even when I tried some questions and they were really hard, and I didn't really get them, I kept going with it. The day I got an answer (or close to part of an answer maybe...) I was so ridiculously excited. It was a really good feeling. I think it helped that my teacher thought that I could do it, and my mum said, even if I don't do very well in the exam, just the process of doing it will help me so much, and she is so impressed that I even had a go. The exams were hard. One of them more so than the other. But I gave it my best shot, and I was really quite pleased with what I did for one of them, so fingers crossed!

Even if I don't get into Warwick (the grades are really rather high!) I will still be happy to go to Nottingham. So from starting out with no idea what I want to do, I've managed to get to a position where, no matter what happens, I will be sorted for the next 3 or 4 years. After that, I have no idea what I'm doing!

Astrid Task and the Summer Blog Challenge

This summer is my last summer before I head off to study maths at University. I really want to make the most of it before I have to leave everything I'm comfortable with and head into the big wide world. To help me make the most of things, I use to-do lists. It is very satisfying to each day cross off all of the things that I wanted to achieve. To make the to-do lists, I downloaded an app.

I recently got a new phone for my birthday. I've never had a smart phone before, so I'm still getting used to it. My favourite thing about smart phones is that there is an app for almost anything you can imagine, including to-do lists. The one I downloaded is called Astrid Task. I'm not going to lie, I only picked it because it was free, it was at the top of the page, and it had a red octopus thing as its logo. However, I'm glad I did, and here's why.

1. This little dude is so cute. He pops up with little motivational messages such as "I like it when you are productive!" when you tick off tasks. He sends you reminders when you have a time set on a task, and sends one at 6pm (although you can choose the time) for each task without a due time that hasn't yet been completed. For me, having a cute mascot just makes it that bit more fun, so it is less of a chore.

2. You can access the app on Android, iPhone or online (astrid.com). I have an Android phone, my sister has an iPhone, and my mum has a brick phone that isn't a smart phone, so we can all get to the app one way or other. My sister actually downloaded the app after I showed it to her. She wanted the motivational octopus too! My mum was a bit upset that her phone can't download apps because she wants it too, so I imagine she'll be very happy when she finds out you can get it online too!

3. You can share tasks with other people. I admit I haven't yet tried this, I'm still playing round with the app to find out what it can do, but I imagine it will come in handy when organising events, such as the writing club I've recently joined with my sisters. We will be able to make sure we all know when it is on and what we need to have done before we go to the next meeting.

 

4. The layout is simple. I like things that aren't overly complicated. A clear layout is important for ease of use. Astrid task has a clear layout, with tasks set out in a list, different colours for different levels of priority of tasks, a check box to tick off tasks that you have completed, and different styles of check boxes depending on the type of task (e.g. a recurring task). The recurring task feature is useful for something you want to do every day, or every other day for example, because you don't have to set up the task every single time, it is done automatically.

5. There is a widget available that you can put on your phone homepage. It allows easy access to the tasks you have set up for the day as well as allowing you to create new tasks quickly.

There is a lot more to this app. For example you can organise tasks into lists, add notes or comments onto tasks, sync lists to Astrid.com, Google Tasks or Producteev, and not to mention the added features when you buy the premium version of the app. Like I said before, I'm still exploring the app, but I am very much liking what I've found so far. Who wouldn't want a motivational red octopus to congratulate them on completing things really?

Part of my to-do list for the writing club is to complete a summer blog challenge. I want to write (at least) one blog post a week. I can tick that off for this week now.