Blog posts

Feeling blue?

Mathematics of Planet Earth

The mission of my life is to show people surprising ways of using maths. However, today I’ll make an exception: I’ll talk about an example of maths abuse.

Surely you’ve heard that tomorrow we have the Blue Monday, apparently the most depressing day of the year. Even restaurants and shops all over the UK become almost charities by offering great deals (I can’t believe I just linked you to the Mirror!) to make this day a bit brighter for us, customers – I’m sure they do it solely out of goodness of their hearts, without any profit…You might also have heard that it was scientifically proven and that this date is found using a mathematical formula.

Dealing with disappointment

Mathematics and Statistics

Moving on as an Oxbridge reject

Getting rejected from Oxbridge is one of those moments where you feel like you’ve lost control and things haven’t gone how you wanted or expected them to go, leaving you feeling utterly discouraged. Maybe you feel like you’ve let yourself or someone else down, or maybe you feel annoyed or angry. Perhaps you feel drained, not seeing the point anymore and wishing you hadn’t tried in the first place.

Whenever you do feel like any of these, from disappointment to frustration it is most important to share how you feel with someone, I know it can seem like the hardest thing to do but it will definitely help you cope better.

…and breathe.

MSc Sustainable Energy Futures

Phew! Relax, that’s the end of the first term.

What a rollercoaster ride it has been. Never again will I complain at the start of term when things seem to going quite slowly for the first couple of weeks; we finished the term with two major pieces of coursework to be submitted, an intensive week-long module on entrepreneurship (very interesting, by the way – I may come back to that in a future blog…), an exam and a presentation. All in the final seven days. Wow.

There was a palpable sense of relief at the end of term party. This was in two stages: firstly the more formal part, in the student room, where several recent alumni had been invited to join us for a networking event, and where the other main pass-time was changing the selection of the Christmas music playlist and the video of Christmas trees or yuletide logs ablaze on winter fires.

Laptop Performance Tricks

ERASMUS+ exchange student

In the last blog entry, I showed you how to optimize your laptop hardware. Now I’d like to show you my three favorite tips for making a quantum leap on the performance side itself.

Learn shortkeys

When you think about what amount of mouse movements we daily do across the screen, you could realize that there is a huge loss of time. Fortunately, there is a free shortcut for most common programs: Shortkeys! Personally speaking, I’m always happy when someone shows me a useful shortkey.

In the meantime, there are also many websites that list the most common shortkeys of e.

When PhD resembles break-ups a bit too much…

Mathematics of Planet Earth

Let’s face it: doing a PhD isn’t always rainbows and unicorns. The process can be painful and annoying, and at some point you’re probably going to get completely stuck. If you’ve ever done any research, you definitely know what I’m talking about.

There’s something you need to do, usually some task that was supposed to be easy – a toy example, an almost standard code, a “quick” experiment to check your hypothesis. And here you are, spending long hours, days, weeks, even months, not even closer to solving your problem. You’ve tried everything, used all possible sources you could find, but this devil isn’t giving up.

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