Different but the Same

I prefer these little guys to pigeons any day.

When you travel somewhere different, you expect it to be... well different. However if when I landed in Boston on Saturday, the sky was forest green with unicorns flying around it I would have hopped right back on the plane and have asked to go home. My point is that although a change can be nice you need some home comforts to feel comfortable. My time during this project so far has exposed me to lots of new experiences that build on things that I've learnt and tests how I handle new challenges. Differences to keep things different and similarities to keep me sane.

The first majorly different experience is having a research project. It's all up to you when it comes to this project, no marking scheme, no required working hours. I call the shots on what I do. This I found terrifying. My fears drifted away after a chat with my project supervisor on how to structure one's time relating to a project. The stage of research I'm in right now is research in it's purest form. Reading. My feeling towards just reading is mixed. I have wanted to be able to understand SDE's for a long time and this was my chance to get a slight understanding of what they were and what I could do with them. However reporting to my peers that my daily work consists of reading a book feels a bit pathetic, causing me to want to rush through and weaken my understanding. My solution to this has been trying to familiarise the experience by finding problems to create a problem sheet from. This helps twofold: helping me to feel like I am doing something a little more than reading and really testing my understanding of the topic. Another technique that has been suggested to understand the material a bit better is to take a look at some MATLAB code that models an SDE to get an intuition. This method I would highly recommend. 

Wannabe Boris Bikes.

The next big difference is living in America. Although I have travelled to the states before I had never expected to live here, nor live anywhere that wasn't the UK. Luckily so far as Boston has been beautiful and sunny (ignoring one freak thunderstorm). Some things have thrown me, for example; a zebra crossing here is NOT like zebra crossings at home, (I don't know how I survived my first day here without that information) coffee is prefered over tea and Hershey's over Cadburys. There are some good differences too such as it is acceptable to have pancakes for breakfast every day and squirrels and pigeons are replaced by cute little bunnies and brown birds. However, for every difference, something is similar to home. MIT has a campus very much like Imperial's, slightly spread out around a lovely part of the city and nearby to other brilliant institutions. Just like London,
Boston is a bustling diverse city. When the time comes that culture shock hits, I'm surrounded by 20 other travelling Imperial students who will be able to relate and of course, home is only a phone call away.