Meals
- Breakfast – Sausage and Hash Brown Sandwich & Orange Juice
- Lunch – Porkchop and fries with gravy and carrots & Watermelon & Berry Tea
- Dinner – Lasagna with fries and garlic bread & Watermelon & Lipton Mango Ice Tea
Weather
- Light showers throughout the day
The Physics of Instruments
Our new topic for the next two days is on waves and oscillations. There are a lot of equations for this cycle but the content seems more fun than previous weeks. I learned how sound and music are produced through a physics perspective and and now I better understand the overtone series and why certain instruments have different harmonics that contribute to their timbre. That was honestly the best part of the readings – learning how instruments work.
The engineering cohort had to read an additional chapter on gravitation last night and that was a bit rough. The two chapters on waves were long enough to read and those concepts are considered the rougher ones back in AP Physics C. They didn’t seem as bad this time but it might be because of my experience in multivariable calculus and differential equations. Last night it took me about 4-5 hours to do a good reading of the material, take notes, and finish the reading test. Hopefully that’s the worst midweek reading there is in the course.
Foosball
I am also making more foosball friends. It’s been fun playing with them everyday during lunch and dinner and it really helps pass the long lines for food. I still want to play against Leia and Kyle because they’re really good. Hopefully I’ll get to in the next week or so.
A Step Up
I feel like the food has gotten a lot better over the past week or maybe I’m getting used to the Scottish food. For lunch they had porkchops and they were pretty tasty. For dinner, they had either meat lasagna or creamy mac and cheese. I had the mac and cheese yesterday and it was very good so I tried the lasagna today. It didn’t disappoint and the garlic bread was very flavorful too. I commend the chefs for their hard work and great attitude while serving us three times a day. They’re really making the experience a good one.
Also the tutorial questions didn’t take that long this time! On Monday, the tutorial questions took over 3 hours and we even skipped one of the parts. But today we were able to finish them in just under 3 hours. It felt good to have a bit more time in the night to relax and sleep.
Test Distributions
We also got our test scores from last week back. The average dropped five points overall, giving an approximate average of 22/40. However, the engineering cohort averaged 28/40, a drop of one point from last week for the engineers. Professor Yao said this was a usual trend, with scores going down in the second week. He did say that this week would be better though so let’s hope so. There are a lot of equations and different concepts this time so it might be hard to really understand everything this week.
