Breakfast was as usual and I ate close to nothing. Afterwards we had to pack up our bags and drop them off in the Porter's Lodge along with our keys, meaning no more key checks - it was the beginning of the end.
We then walked over to the Materials department for our last day of activities. We had a team design project involving the usual task of designing and building something which could protect an "Egg Telescope" from a fall from space to Earth, or in our case, from a 7 meter drop. I managed to conjure up this idea of having a tetrehedral tubular paper cage which help the egg in suspension inside of it due to strings in tension. I've actually done various "engineering" activities like this before in the past, but this one was slightly difference as a fast decent was advantageous, so we also added a small parachute to only slightly reduce velocity. We had a set amount of Materials Pounds that we could spend and it was possible to gain monetary sponsorship from our course directors and student mentors. Our group managed to get this guy called Jon Connolly to join our team in manufacturing our egg vessel & parachute. He actually proved to be a worthwhile investment and our design proved to be highly successful with no egg cracking. We then had presentations to share our designs with the rest of the group. There were some incredibly impassioned presentations and I was astounded by just how good some people were at public speaking. In the end, scores were added up and turns out our team won! Yipee. We each got a commemorative Mansfield College mug as a prize which I will treasure till the end of time.
Next were some more presentations including the winners of the poster competition which unfortunately we didn't win, and finally our certificates for attending this Headstart course.
This was the time we made our final walk through University Parks, back to Mansfield to collect up our bags and say our goodbyes. I actually had a 2 hour wait before my coach back so I was one of the last ones to leave the college. Here are my final thoughts about the course in bullet points as I'm boring of writing in paragraphs:
- It has made me realise that perhaps materials is not the university course for me, but I still find it utterly fascinating.
- Gay bacon is nice!
- I loved how we actually had a decent amount of free time. I anticipated homework to do or other such more structured activities in the evenings but we could do whatever which was great.
- It was great to be surround by so many like-minded people, make random science jokes, spew out random science facts and for people to actually find them interesting - wow I sound so lame.
- The people came from all over the country but were all incredibly friendly, intelligent and talented.
- Punting is fun!
- It's a shame the course wasn't longer as once you finally get to know everyone's names, it's the end of the course
- I can't do without my veggies
- I weighed myself on the Friday we got back and I managed to lose 1.5kg of weight (or mass correctly speaking) over the previous 4 days which is absolutely insane as I cannot remember a time in my life when I have ever even lost weight - I love food too much.
- Being short in Oxford has its advantages as there were slanty ceilings in our halls.
Okay that's all I can think of for now. This is actually such an exciting time of year as I'm going on another course in Eton starting on Tuesday! This meeting even more new people which is always fun. I find sustaining friends is hard but making friends is fun. However, it's going to be a completely different vibe as there's going to be over 100 of us studying a plethora of subjects. I think I'm going to attempt to keep a diary log of my time there too on this blog as I love documenting everything. It's going to hard to sustain it though as I only managed to keep the Oxford blogs going for 3 days before I succumbed to tiredness and stopped writing them the day of occurrence. Let's just see how it goes?
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