Oxford Day Four: Posters, Materials and Free Time

This day has been written retrospectively on Saturday 22nd June as the accumulative effect of sleep deprivation over the last few days has taken its toll and I could not force myself to stay awake to write these blog posts on the actual days of occurrence. However, I thought as I well I might as well write it now as I'm going to forget most of the details sooner or later.

Breakfast was as usual although this time I skipped cereal all together and instead went for toast. I stole a little pot of jam to take home as they looked really cool. We then walked to the materials department for our first activity of the day, which was poster making for our group. Our poster was on "Catalytic Wizardry" and the article we had to review was utterly confusing.

Afterwards we had a lab sessions where we tested the tensile strength of steels rods with two different carbon contents (0.18% and 0.8% I think from my memory) until failure on an apparatus which recorded and plotted data with respect to force and area. We then had a really interesting chat regarding first year course content for materials, as well as introducing to us some of the basics of metallurgy, such as dislocations, work hardening, annealing, tempering, iron-carbon phase diagrams, characteristics and properties of pearlite and ferrite. I found this session incredibly interesting and made me really want to study materials. I surprised myself with how much I knew about steel already from studying resistant materials, but it was fantastic to get into the real nitty gritty of why heating up steel of a certain carbon content will give it certain mechanical properties instead of just memorising it as a fact that that will happen.

Again it was a brown buffet lunch at the Holder Cafe at the materials department and I had no appetite.

The afternoon was absolutely amazing as we had free time (yippee). We first went punting again as I didn't really get to punt much on my first time two days ago. I was initially apprehensive but it turned out we had the dream team on our punt and I think we did pretty well, apart from the part where we almost died from almost crashing under a bridge after we decided to hold onto another group's pedalo for momentum. After cruising around and harassing some geese, I managed to park our punt (badly) before heading off to our sanctuary - Tescos. I co-bought some strawberries and then group headed off to university parks. We chilled a bit before the boys started playing football and us girls chatted before heading off to view the physics department.

The evening included our formal conference dinner so the girls got dressed up in pretty dresses and the guys in their white and blue stripy shirts. We all politely sipped juices out of wine glasses in the JCR for the dinner reception. The atmosphere was lovely, although I was feeling particularly lethargic at this stage due to the warm surroundings and dim lighting. The actual dinner included posh pate and pickles for starters; venison, potato and root vegetables for mains; chocolate brownie and ice cream for pudding and lastly coffee and chocolates to round off the meal. By this point I was feeling absolutely awful and ate very little of this meal which pained me. I donated my entire dessert to a good cause so at least that wasn't wasted.

Afterwards was suppose to be a DVD night, but alas, there was no DVDs. Instead we had more circle time, which I was not feeling. I decided to have an early-ish/not really night and just head up to my room to sleep.