The Confidential Project

This is Wednesday.

In Cambridge, Wednesday is the last day of the week.

This means, today is the end of the third week of term and tomorrow is the start of the fourth week. We’re almost halfway into the term already, since Cambridge only has eight-week terms.

And in this term in my fourth year in Cambridge, there are fewer lectures, but it does not get less busy.

One reason is because I'm taking French this year, and that requires some extra out-of-classroom hours if I want to be any good at it. It’s been a while since I last learnt a language but so far, everything’s good. In fact, I think I’m enjoying it a lot.

Another reason is that this year we have the Part IIB research project. It’s something that we will spend most of the year working on, either alone or in pairs. My research partner is a Northern Irish guy from Fitzwilliam College (I might have mention him in the blog before) and he’s pretty good at this, which means I have to work hard and can’t slack off otherwise it’ll make me look bad. But I don’t really mind because that’s a good thing.

Oh, guess what my project is?

Nope, it’s not watching paint dry, even though I’m doing something along the line of my last summer project. We are modelling chemical explosion, and it’s a purely numerical/computational project. No experimental components at all, which may be a good thing for obvious reasons.

I just got told by my supervisor that the project is confidential. I can say what it’s generally about but delving into details is a no-no. Of course, people normally don’t blab about every intricate details of things they’re working on anyway, at least until the poster presentation or paper publication stage. Still, being told you’re working on something hush-hushed is really exciting, it’s like you’re in a team of scientists working on a secret project and you can’t let the documents fall into the wrong hands...

... or something like that.

Anyway, there’s one aspect of the project that got me really really excited about, but I won’t say it just yet, in case I jinxed it (and it might not happen anyway). We’ll just see in a few months time.

Yaz.