Pretty uneventful week, except some progress on job applications and djkoa has contracted mild pneumonia!!! Poor thing.
Grandma and Grandad took me to a visit day and interview at York University yesterday, damn that course is good! They have a great balance of hardware and software with digital electronics modules and other cool stuff in the electronics labs. They program Z80 chips with Assembler and make realtime systems and… cool stuff. In short, the course is probably by far the best I’ve seen so far, but it’s so damned far away compared to the other universities I’ve applied to. About 114 miles, not as far as that Welsh place djkoa likes though 😉 Grandma RAN to a bus stop in York, yes that’s right, RAN. I couldn’t keep up. I don’t think she fancied standing around in the cold for half an hour!
The interview went much better than I was expecting. I had ample chance to explain the reasons for my maths grade last year and they seemed satisfied that I’ve improved enough since then. I was asked some maths questions on a white board which I’m pretty sure I got perfectly right.
A curve, f(x), was drawn on the board with x and y axes. I was asked what the integral of f(x) with limits a and b would look like visually on the graph. Then I was asked how I would go about finding that area (the area under the line between a and b on the x axis) if I didn’t know what f(x) was, so I explained the trapezium rule which apparently was correct. Then I was asked about the error involved in this method and how it could be reduced, so I explained that to reduce error, the width of the trapeziums should be reduced as much as possible, which could be very small indeed with a computer. I was then asked about how to find maximums and minimums using differentiation. The next bit was a cluster of points on a graph with a mean in the centre. Two extra points were added a long way from the cluster and I was asked how this would effect the mean and the median. I explained that the mean would shift slightly towards the two new points and the median would shift in the same direction, but not as much. I really don’t know what made me think that the median would move less than the mean, because thinking back afterwards I couldn’t figure out why I said it, it was just a gut feeling I felt very comfortable with. It turned out to be correct. Perhaps my subconcious was working overtime because of the adredaline in my system through nerves and it answered the question for me. Is this possible? kaz?
In short, the maths questions I got asked were pretty straight forward and I really don’t get what the big deal is about needing to get a high grade in A Level maths to get in.
The guy who interviewed me was Adrian G. Bors, born in Piatra Neamt, Romania. The first thing that struck me about this guy was that he didn’t seem to like direct eye contact, which was something I always try to do in interview-like situations, but that improved as the interview progressed. Another thing was that his english was a little difficult to follow what he was saying, but not too bad. I got the distinct feeling that at times he didn’t understand what I was saying on occasions either, I was speaking quite quickly I think. It also turns out that one of his research interests is “copyright protection for multimedia”. Hmm. I asked him what the chances are of getting an offer below the standard AAB and the “median” offer AAA. He said he wasn’t sure as it wasn’t him the made the decision. I just hope all the information I gave him gets passed on OK. Having said that, if I don’t get an offer from York, it will make my University choices a lot easier! At the moment I’m really not sure.
I really fell in love with Nottingham but the course contains basically no hardware. I loved Warwick but they cancelled their CSE course. I think York has the best course but it’s a long way away. York is very beautiful and the campus is based around the largest man made lined lake in Europe, apparently. The accommodation is average and the CS department has no lecture theatres of its own, the lectures are all over Campus. UEA HAS to be my insurance offer because it’s the only offer that’s lower than any of the others! So what do I choose?
lauperr has been making cookies, yey!