Written by Nino Chen
The whole campus, especially those foreign students coming to RHUL from all over the globe, got so excited during the middle of March, for the simple reason that the Queen of England, Elizabeth II, together with the Duke of Edinburgh, were coming to visit Royal Holloway, University of London.
The royal visit on 14th March, was to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee Regius Professorship of Music, awarded by the Queen in 2013. But for most students like me, curiosity perhaps was the major motivation, because even though we had seen the Queen numerous times from various media sources, it was certainly not so ‘common’ to see her in real life with our own eyes. Actually, she appeared more impressive in her typical British dress when she came. When she got out of her car with the acclamation from the crowds of welcoming students, all of us raised our cameras trying to capture this exciting moment. Moving to a better place, zooming my lens, I did get some fantastic photos.
What RHUL can offer to its students is more than an exciting visit from the Queen. I came across various highlights during my stay here. Some of them were about academic study, while some were about after-school life.
Taking courses shared by the various other colleges of the University of London gave us a chance to study and explore other colleges like UCL, King’s College and Queen Mary. In order to achieve the most optimized education, the fourth-year (master year) courses for MSci Physics are shared among these four colleges. Last term I took the fourth-year electromagnetism unit which was given by a Queen Mary professor with lectures in UCL. Local students might find it tiring to commute but for a visiting student like me, I not only had the chance to interact with professors and students from other universities but also got the opportunity to explore London.
As part of one course, we visited JET, the Joint European Torus, which is a magnetic confinement of plasmas experiment located in Oxfordshire, UK. It is currently the largest Tokamak in operation aimed at opening the way to future nuclear fusion experimental tokamak reactors such as ITER and DEMO.
For visiting students, supervised research project courses, intended for B.Sc. or M.Sci. degree students, are available in the Physics Department. During the course period, students have a weekly one-on-one meeting with their supervisor. Finally, students have to submit a written dissertation and take an oral viva. The first project I did was about Higgs decay. Then I also did a C++ OOP project on Ray Tracing. I highly recommend these supervised projects to visiting students who come to RHUL in the future.
Giving a voluntary Mandarin tutorial was another interesting experience. I organised a ten-session Mandarin tutorial for anyone interested in learning Chinese and offered it for free. Owing to my limited time, I eventually selected only one client from fifteen applicants. Teaching my own language through English turned out to be really interesting.
There are still so many stories to tell and memories to share: a three-day visit to a local family through the charity Host UK, days staying in Founders — an amazing Victorian castle on campus, beer in the pub and fish’n’chips in the dining hall. Besides all these great things, some things did require some getting used to, like desperate attempts to complete English written homework, crazy parties beyond imagination and monotonous ways of cooking potatoes.
Anyway, there are still many things to discover. I have to say that England is a unique country where opportunities to explore never end.
If you would like to study at Royal Holloway next academic year, please apply through the CSC Scholarship Programme in the International Office.
