Looking back at first year: Term-3 (Part-2)

Hey! (With the intention of welcoming you back to another blog) This one is the fourth and final part (hopefully!) of my series of reflections on my first year of university here at Warwick. Now that you know everything that happened in the first two terms, it’s time to move on to the best one of them all- Term 3.

Alright, so let’s dive back into Term-3 right from where we left it. As soon as the 2nd Design Sprint was over, the dreaded exam season began. We had exams for 4 of our modules- ES190: Dynamics and Thermodynamics, ES191: Electrical and Electronic Circuits, ES193: Engineering Mathematics, and ES197: Systems Modelling, Simulation and Computation. These exams were spread over 4 days with 3-4 days as gaps between each exam. These gaps were actually very helpful and didn’t feel too long or too short, they were just right. I spent most of the exam season in the newly inaugurated Faculty of Arts Building (FAB) studying with my friends in the common study spaces over there. The huge 6 floored building is an ideal study space. Apart from being the best-looking building on campus, there are a lot of study spaces available for students to study regardless of the department you belong to which I think is one of its best features. We usually spent 5-10 minutes searching for an empty room on any of the floors and usually found one on the higher floors which was great because 1- We get a whole room to ourselves and 2- The higher up you go, the better the view! Another reason the exam season was really great was because of the new-found love that I and my friends developed towards the for-hire Beryl bikes on campus. 😂 We spent multiple hours in the nights of the breaks between the exams riding all around campus, exploring new unseen areas, making trips to the Canley McDonald’s at 2 am, and speeding down the car park ramps! The bikes were one discovery we wish we had found out about earlier.

After all my hard work and dedication (towards procrastinating and cramming the entire module in 2 days), the exams went really well, some better than the others, but all in all really good. Everyone finally breathed a sigh of relief and thoroughly enjoyed the 1-week break we got after the exams after which our ES197 group project would start. I enjoyed the week by spending time with friends and playing badminton almost every day, but the week was over in the blink of an eye. The project was to filter out the audio file given to us which contained classical music with a loud high frequency beep playing through all of it. We had to filter the audio to remove the high-frequency noise by constructing a hardware electronic filter as well as a software model of the same. The groups were released, and I was elated when I found out I had two friends in my group, one of which was one of my closest friends! We felt happy and relieved knowing that we at least had someone dependable in the group and knew it would go well. What we didn’t know was that the project would go on even better than we expected as everyone was great, friendly, hardworking, and fun! We gelled together really well, and this was really great for the project as we had clear communication with each other, we delegated tasks and worked to our strengths, and we completed everything on time, all while goofing around and having a lot of fun! And for the cherry on top, we all received a first grade in the project!

Once that was over, 1st year of university was officially done! Well, the results were yet to be released but come on, we all knew we didn’t do that bad… well we hoped 😉. We now had about 15 days till the official end of term and our accommodation contracts and nothing to do! We realised that everyone would slowly start trickling away, back to their homes to enjoy the summer, so we decided to make the most of the remaining time we had on campus. Those weeks felt really different as the freedom of not having any exams or coursework felt really weird. It felt weird having no deadline on top of your head, no 9 am lectures, no late nights writing lab reports, nothing to do! But that’s when we could actually do the stuff we wanted to do! We tried different restaurants in Coventry, Canley, and Leamington, we tried different sports we’ve never done before like trampolining and volleyball, I started going to the gym more regularly, started cooking less spending more (which I realised when it was too late!), attended all the BBQ’s organised by different societies (even the ones we weren’t a part of 😉), and spent more nights on the bikes! I also spent a lot of time doing campus tours and other outreach activities as the Student Ambassador for the ESO and WWS which I will be telling you about in more detail in another blog, so look out for that! Another blog to look out for is going to be my experience of the Undergraduate Research Support Scheme (URSS) which I started after my exams were over and will continue for half of the summer break!

After the term started on such a high note, it definitely lived up to its expectations and proved to be the best term of my year. 😄

So with that, we reach the end of my reflection on Term-3 as well as of my 1st year of university at Warwick! Hope you enjoyed reading about all of my experiences as much as I enjoyed reminiscing about them as I wrote them! Well, there’s loads of more blogs coming up about the details and my experience of certain opportunities that I tried in 1 year so look out for them! Until then, thanks for reading and feel free to ask me any questions in the comments below! 👋