Ranking

I just had my first meeting with my DoS (Director of Studies) yesterday for chemical engineering and she gave me a piece of news that can both be considered good and disappointing. On one hand, I am in the top ten in the final exam ranking last year and the only Trinity student who got a first class (hence her star pupil, as she jokingly put it). On the other, being in the top ten is just a vaguer and grander way of saying you are ranked number ten and bearing in mind that there are fifteen students who got first class, that’s just two-thirds of the way down. That’s pretty disheartening, considering that even though I got ranked number 65 in my first year in Natural Sciences, that’s halfway in the middle of the hundred something people who got a first. Now, I know it doesn’t quite scale like that, but I can’t help feeling like I should have done better. In fact, seeing my disappointment, that’s what my DoS told me, “You’ll do better next time, won’t you?”

BP came to give a talk about their summer internship yesterday evening (which I’m giving serious thought to, considering this is my last summer here and I haven’t done any internships at all) and as I mentioned in this post one year ago, they gave free copies of Perry’s Chemical Engineers’ Handbook (which normally costs around £60) to everybody who got a first or two-one. One thing I found when lugging it around back to college: that stuff’s quite heavy.

Yaz.