My Little Trip to Wales

Hi there! It’s been awhile. I came back from Wales last Wednesday night but I guess I needed to recharge my batteries and take care of some other things, so I’m only able to write about it now. The whole thing was, literally, unbelievable.

We departed from Cambridge on Monday morning by train. This was my firsthand experience on seeing how people who live in Cambridge but work in London travel. The train was packed and we had to stand for 45 minutes. I’m used to having a relaxed breakfast every morning and then ambling slowly to the department, sometimes taking the longer way just because I felt like it. Those walks really help me to look forward to the day. I guess if you have to commute in a packed train for about an hour every day to get to work, that can be very stressful. Though I suppose they’re probably used to it.

Oh yeah, I guess I haven’t told you properly. The competition that I was entering was the L’Oreal Ingenius 2008 and the UK Finals was held last Monday till Wednesday in Cardiff. The winning team will advance to the International Finals which will be held in Paris next March. There were six teams in total from universities in the UK.

I personally think the whole trip was amazing. L’Oreal paid for our transportation, they booked us on a nice hotel in Cardiff and they even took us out to dinner. On Monday it was this Spanish/Mexican restaurant and on Tuesday was an Italian one overlooking the Cardiff bay. The days were spent visiting the L’Oreal plant and thinking of ways to increase its efficiency. A sad thing is that everybody was busy doing the assigned tasks that we don’t really have time to look at Cardiff in details or even socialise much with other teams. We did talk to each other a bit during lunch, dinner, and while we’re taking a break in the hotel lounge.

There is something vitally important that I learnt from this trip. Before this, I (and probably a lot of other students I know)… we were kind of detached from our lecture materials. That is to say, sometimes, we just view them as something that you need to study to pass the exams. But in this competition, I realised that I was drawing knowledge from my lectures. Thermo, separations, even biotechnology… they weren’t just stuff you learnt, but they were actually very useful and they helped our team to come up with a solution. This really made me appreciate lectures more.

All the teams did a PowerPoint presentation in front of a panel of ten juries on the last day, all of whom are engineering staff of the plant. After they heard from all of us, they discussed it amongst themselves to decide a winner. I think our team did well in presenting our ideas, and my two team members were really nervous and anxious and I can tell that they really wanted to win. I, on the hand, don’t really mind since I’ve already gotten a precious experience and a valuable lesson but I refrained from saying anything since it’ll sound too pessimistic.

After half an hour or so, we were invited back into the presentation room. The results were announced and guess what…

… we won!

I really can’t believe it. My team members and I will be representing the UK in the International Finals in Paris in March. To be honest, I never expected myself to go this far. The whole thing didn’t really sink in… not on the taxi ride to the station, not when we wandered along the streets of Cardiff afterwards, and not on the train ride back to Cambridge. My team members were feeling the same; we caught each other’s eyes and just spontaneously laugh. It was surreal for them too.

So yeah, that’s basically it. There weren’t any grand prizes or anything, those are for the International Finals. But we did get a gift box containing a belt and a perfume.

Me? Representing the UK? Hahahhahahahahahaha!

Yup, still can’t believe it.

Yaz.