A journey and a half through STEM

Hi! When you're in a room with 70 other science enthusiasts, you realise a few things. 1. We are all socially awkward human beings, that resort to hangman as a form of introduction. 2. Plot twist! Actually we're not and you find out that we aren't shy, quiet and painfully awkward, as you once thought but instead, we are the loudest, weirdest, most charismatic group of people that you will ever meet- who also happen to be able to put more than 2 and 2 together. As well as the interesting experience of meeting and having some very funny, awkward, fun and embarrassing moments with these people, we also got to have some fun with some pretty cool kit, following the safety lecture from pretty much every person aged over 18 that we encountered, some being more chirpy than others. "Where is this wonderful place?", I hear you ask. Well, it's only an Imperial College London summer school! What else could it be? honestly, come on. So after the excruciating experien

Hi! As it is Pi day, as a lover of all things maths, I thought it would only be appropriate if I wrote a little something for this rather special irrational day! See now being half Greek, for a long time Pi was just another letter than I had to know to say pretty much anything in Greek and then I turned 13. I walked into my Maths classroom and there it was, rather out of place on the interactive whiteboard and being the little miss 'genius' that I thought it was, put my hand up and shouted "that's Pi!" (Pronouncing it Pee) and well I got a fair few puzzled looks followed by a good minute's worth of laughter. Moral of the story- learn how to pronounce things in English before you, like me end up shouting stupid things in class. See, like those surds that I know many of you despise, Pi is also an irrational number so I just wanted to thank π for existing as it has saved my hands from having to write out 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105

Hi! My name is Vanessa and I love maths. In fact I would go one step further to say that I adore it, and sometimes it can be very difficult to explain why to people, as no one seems to get it. I love it with a passion to the point where words can't even explain why I love it so much- but numbers can. So, let's say we start with a very grizzly looking proof: i.e: Fermat's last theorem, for example. Now think about this, Andrew Wiles sat there for 7 years of his life trying to make sense of and to eventually solve this theorem- 7 years! Now, the part in all this that I love is this- that moment when that awful looking proof falls into place; that moment where everything begins to make sense; that moment when all that time you spent sitting down, staring at a piece of paper with an array of numbers and letters scattered on it becomes worth it- that beautiful moment right there is what I love about maths. But it isn't just on the piece of paper, its all around us-