UCL IS OVER

Today I finished my last 3 hour final exam at 1 PM AND I'M OFFICIALLY DONE WITH UCL FOREVER!!!! I could not be more excited :) now I have a month in London till my parents get here June 13th and we head to Greece! LET THE ADVENTURES BEGIN :) ....and the med school apps

My life on Instagram

(Mostly) Instagram pictures from the past month and a half:)

Polina & I in Barcelona

 UCL Law Library

 Main entrance of UCL

 Pretty close:)

Tower Bridge & HMS Belfast 

 Reading outside in a small park

 Walking through Hyde Park on a pretty day:) 

 DUCKIES. Although I'm not sure if that's a duck...

 Laura's 21st birthday!

New skincare products

My friend at Hyde Park

Last week of school!

This week is our last week of school! My last class is tomorrow and then my classes in England are officially over. I still need to write a post about Barcelona, but after finally finishing everything on Monday, I've been relaxing :) So all I have now is my MCAT in late April and 3 exams in early May and then I'M FREE.

...everytime my US friends talk about midterms haha

Midterms, sorta

I haven't posted much since Stonehenge and honestly it's because I haven't done anything super fun and school has just been tedious. The next two to three weeks are my midterm weeks, but all my midterms are papers and I have one presentation. So I've been reading and preparing and outlining and researching and all the fun stuff that has to do with papers.

I'm also 2 months away from my MCAT date, so I've increased the hours per day I've been studying for that as well which leaves me little time to go out and explore :(

We're all going to Wales this weekend though! It's another IFSA-Butler sponsored trip and we're going to Wales for the weekend on an "adventure weekend." Fun is about to come back to my life :)

PS I am SO SO SO jealous of all my friends back at Vandy who are at Mardi Gras right now... this year it finally lined up with the beginning of our spring break and I'm missing it.. more importantly, Hugh Laurie is the Mardi Gras King and I can't believe I missed that!!!!

One Month

Today marks the day I've been in London for exactly a month. Technically I flew in on January 5th, but because of our red-eye flight, I was a walking zombie and miserable that entire day... so it doesn't count :)

It's crazy to me that I've been here for a month already because it still feels as though I just got here and while everything has been very exciting, nothing EXCITING has happened yet...

But, my highlights so far :)

1.  Taking classes with medical school students & masters students. What. I've never been in a class where there's med students and students who are 30-40 years old. It's normal here, but it's still strange for me to see someone my parents' age (if they had been teen parents, lol) in my classes. It's also a little intimidating to be in the same classes as med students since they're all freaking geniuses

2. The way science classes are taught here. Here, you're expected to read primary literature from pubmed... have you seen those papers?! They're like 20 pages long, size 5 font, incomprehensible pictures, and might as well be in Swahili. And, you don't have a choice. If you don't read a lot on your own, you won't do well on the exams since lecture doesn't go into enough detail :(

3. Multiple choice? Nope. Essays all day everyday. One midterm (20% of final grade) and one final (80% of final grade). If you're lucky, it'll be 50/50 & if you're unlucky, your final grade is 100% of your grade.

4. Technology & music. The English are slightly backward in both technology and music.... They play our #tbt songs which are great! But then it's like wait... the throwback never ends all night.

For tech, they still have do so many things, like seminar/recitation sign-ups, by paper and you have to go to the office to check on a taped up piece of paper what seminar you're in. Laura had to go and do something with post-its outside her department office...

5. Going out. People here don't stop. MTWRFS are all great days for going out.

6. Pronunciation. The Brits say things funny. And then you realize that no, you're the one who says it funny and they're actually correct haha

7. How hard the adjustment actually is. I personally thought oh London, they speak English, no big deal. It's a big city, can't be much different than NYC, living here will be a breeze. It's definitely been a hard adjustment for everyone and I've been homesick a lot even though I rarely ever get homesick..

8. The architecture is AMAZING. All the buildings are beautiful and just walking down the street is so scenic :) I'm guilty of taking pictures of all the cool/pretty buildings I see and then going back through them, I realize I took a picture of a McDonald's building or a Chipotle..whoops.

9. Fashion. People really aren't lying when they say Londoners love black. I can go days out on the streets without seeing any kinds of bright colors. So I take it upon myself to liven up everyone's day by wearing my bright pink fluffy Northface :) Fur is in, booties are always in, leggings are not pants (I still DGAF), beanies are in, tights with skirts are in.

10. How all these cool things are so close and so accessible! I take runs to and around Hyde Park and you can see all the memorials, the Serpentine, and also visit Kensington gardens. Buckingham palace and Trafalgar square are also walkable/runnable and it's just crazy to me that all of these places are so close! Makes me actually want to go out and run :)

11. How much more diverse London is compared to any big city I've seen in the States. I pretty much live in little Lebanon and it's a huge change in the kind of environment I've been used to. Also, their acceptance of LGBT rights is amazing- its not uncommon to see couples holding hands or being affectionate in public.

Week 2

This week I didn't do too much sightseeing, but we did have our first class in the British Museum on Thursday! Here are some pictures I snapped while we were in the lobby :) We're going back every week for about 2 months and then we'll be switching over to the Petrie Museum

Wednesday night we went out to the UCL pubs and Thursday night we went to some event at club xoyo

ladies of flat 1 before xoyo :)

Everyday I'm studyin'

my afternoons after class

1. coffee - occasional Starbucks splurge here :)

2. MCAT studying- 45 I'm comin' for ya

3. Reading - literally every class

...at least I'm not sick anymore :)

Also, our last two roommates in the flat moved in Saturday!

First day of class

First week of classes at UCL are done! I've been sick all week and am currently writing this while drinking tea in bed in an empty suite because everyone else is out...but at least my class schedule has finally been finalized!

It's been a rough 2 weeks having my registration page not work, running around to different departments asking permission to take classes, emailing a ton of professors & administrators, and watching my friends go through similarly stressful situations. Vanderbilt did not at all prepare (or warn) us about the horrors of registering here as an affiliate student so we've all just been stressed and overwhelmed the past week.

To my limited understanding, British college students only take classes within their own departments. So, unlike us, they don't have to run around to different departments to ask for permission to take classes because...that's just not done. Kudos to those students in bio departments, I don't know how they do it all!

Anyways, here's my schedule for the next 3 months! No class on Fridays, my 4-5 PM class on Thursdays meets only 4 times this semester and my Ancient Egypt in London class only meets in museums! Wooo all my knowledge from my favorite movie The Mummy will be put to good use this semester :)

And now it's back to re-reading "Analysis of Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus Internalization Events in Cultured Cells" (O’Donnell (2005) JVI 79; 8506-8518) <--- In case anyone's interested in suffering with me. All textbooks are too outdated for this class and so our expected reading for virology is primary literature and we're just supposed to "read what we like."

.............help

Recap

Last night we all went to the UCL student union pub to take advantage of 1 pound drinks :) Apparently Mondays are the night to go out here and I was pretty skeptical after showing up to a sparse looking pub at 9 PM. After about an hour we headed over to Leicester Square and went clubbing at the Moonlight Club.... which according to Laura's tinder bf was a "very grimy choice." It was apparently a student's night and it was packed-- when we left at 12:20 AM the line outside was ridiculous. Laura and I went around hitting on random pairs of British guys and, according to our male friends, Brits don't find our American accents to be sexy :( Also, Laura is also not a racist... go figure.

And then Jess started talking to a man from Liverpool, we missed the last tube home, had to figure out the whole bus situation & eventually made it home around 1 AM. I had a ton of fun mostly because we were being heinous at the club but I think the general consensus is that we won't be going back there anytime soon... oh well, Fabric's next on my list.

what you see after you step out of the Leicester Square Tube stop

attempted roomie pic

selfies of the night

Second day of class- only had 1 class, Neoplasia, and the professor was hilarious. Also not-so-subtly was reading about Franklin/Vandy/Penn State, boo.

My classroom today, you're practically sitting on top of each other

Lunch @ the pub today

 Chicken pie & chips

First day

Today was my first day of school here at UCL! Only had one class that was in a building not on campus, so I had a fun time looking for that. Apparently google maps just guessed where the building was, and when it told me that I had "Arrived" and I was standing in front of the BBC headquarters, I realized google maps had no idea where the Charles Bell building was, haha. But I had a nice walk in the area around campus and made it to class 5 minutes before it started :)

 Cruciform building where the offices of the department of infection & immunity are & where there are a bunch of biology labs

aptly named since it's in the shape of a cross & it used to be a hospital :)

 Front of UCL

Tottenham Court Road, part of my walk to class

Today I had a virology class and tomorrow I have my second infection & immunity class, neoplasia & its treatment. There's no assigned reading for these classes so it looks like I'll be digging through Pubmed for primary sources on these topics... cheers to the start of school again! 

UCL Orientation

Thursday: January 9th, 2014

Lots of UCL orientation things that are basically repeats of IFSA-Butler orientation. Pretty much didn't need to go

First time having afternoon tea at a small bakery near our flat and the tea was amazing!

Going out with UCL International students and getting stared at by everyone. Woowww going out here is nothing like going out back in the States. Everyone just sits down with their friends and drinks a lot, no one is really wasted/ratchet/disruptive.

Friday: January 10th, 2014

Last day of UCL orientation! Today we were supposed to register for classes but I ended up having some kind of internal error, making me unable to sign up for classes until at least Monday :(

and tonight.. back out to the affiliate student's party at UCL and then out to the cider tap