So, things have been intense.

My first week at uni is now done, I have so much to report I have no idea how long this post is going to be. I’ll do my best to detail everything, without going into too much of the rocket science as I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. So, let’s start with Monday morning…

Over the past few days I’ve been trying to train myself to wake up early (around 7am), it usually involves a lot of alarms and me forcing myself to go to sleep earlier in the evening, you know like a competent adult. Well anyway I’m happy to report that I have succeeded in my task as I woke up this morning at almost exactly 7am. My first day at uni was ahead of me so I guess I was just raring to go.

I’ve opted to walk into uni everyday. It takes me just over half an hour to walk their so it seems silly not to, plus it helps me to wake up in the morning to get a little bit of exercise. I packed my bag (notebooks and fruit is all I’ve got so far) and set off just after 8am, I don’t have a lecture until later in the morning, but I want to hit the library first!

When it comes to learning the material, I think I’m going to go all out. I have some beautiful notebooks I got from a stationary shop in the city centre and all of the material has been released online for my lectures. My notes are going to look incredible! So, by getting to the library before the lecture I can make some notes on the powerpoints available, that way when I go into the actual lecture I can pay attention a bit better and not have to worry about writing everything down.

One of my first modules is called Astrodynamics, which is the study of how objects move in space. This means it’s going to be a lot of drawing pictures of orbits and planets, which I am so excited for! These aren’t going to be works of art, don’t mistake me, but I love being able to add a bit of variation to any notes I take. Speaking of astrodynamics, the latter part of my morning was spent in a two hour lecture learning the basics of how bodies interact in space, and how we can measure it all. Amazing!

After that, I decided to grab lunch with one of my new classmates at the campus cafeteria. I really have to remember that alongside all of my studies and self improvement efforts, I have to be a social being. It’s a lot to balance but if anyone can do it, I can!

Next up was Systems. I’ll be honest I didn’t think this one would interest me much, beaurocracy and report writing sounds like one of the most tedious parts of space engineering, but I was surprised at how much I liked the organisation of everything. Our lecturer recommended reading a book titled: “Moon Lander” by Thomas J Kelly (one of the engineers who worked on the Apollo missions) in order to get more of an understanding for the process and so far it has been a really good read. When you think of Apollo you think of the launches and Neil Armstrong, but you don’t think of the decade of research and design that went into every tiny detail. Perhaps this book will change my perspecive on that!

Finally, most of my afternoon was spent back in the library. Any spare moment I get I want to spend either preparing for the lectures ahead or making sure I’ve understood everything I’ve learnt so far. This is one of the most complex subjects I think a person can learn, I have to make sure everything’s going into my head properly. Whilst in the library I went over the reading lists provided by my lecturers. Those textbooks will become imperative for my learning efforts so I need to make sure I’m checking them out before someone beats me to it. In total I checked out nine different text books, so it’s fair to say I’ll be strong both mentally and physically taking these around with me.

The first day is always tricky, but I really feel like I balanced my time well, and got a good head start on my studies. I closed off the night with a few board games at the tabletop society, but now it’s on to day two!

Day two introduced a new module: Foundations – which aims to cover the geology, structure and evolution of the planets.

In our first Foundations lecture we covered a bit of the geology of the planets and how the different things going on deep underground can have large effects on how the surface looks and acts. Plus we got to look at some great pictures of gem stones, if there’s one thing I love, it’s rocks! On the right is a picture of a chondrite, it’s like a meteor that floats through space, but chondrite’s are made of almost the same materials of the sun so it’s likely that chondrites are the progenitors of Earth!

Day three brought on my final new module: Case Studies. In this module we’ll have to work in groups to review an engineering scenario to see what went well, and what went wrong. By the end of the semester we’ll need to have made a presentation and show everyone what we researched. Luckily for me, I love to talk, this is going to be a cake walk! Case Studies also introduced us to a bit of the software we’ll be using this year, most importantly MatLab!

MatLab is a piece of software that I used for my first master’s degree. We didn’t get along. I’m a woman of second chances though, so if Leicester says that MatLab can be trusted and promises it will work, then I am willing to give it a try. A few resources have been recommended to me in order to get more up to speed with the software, most importantly the MathWorks: MatLab Onramp course. So that’s what I spent the afternoon doing. MatLab and I are on good terms, for now…

Thursday brought me back to some Astrodynamics, and this is slowly becoming my favourite module as the maths we do just seems to make so much sense in my head. I can’t overstate how helpful I’m finding doing pre-notes for lectures also, something about having everything already written down so I can focus my full attention to what the lecturer’s saying, I feel like I’ve really cracked this studying trick!

After a bit more time in the library, I needed to head to the hospital, but don’t worry it’s just because I’m giving blood today! I learnt I could do this last week at one of the university fairs and figured why not sign up to donate. I drank a lot of water all day so that I’d had the best chance to donate and after getting set up, and watching gardner’s world for half an hour, nearly a pint of my blood was sealed away ready to be given to someone in need. This has certainly been an interesting week!

I couldn’t go to the gym like usual today (on account of having less blood than usual), so I decided to get myself tucked up in bed and make a start on a project I’ve had an idea for. I’m sure I’ll make a seperate post about this soon, but the project idea is essentially an orbital simulator. You see, in my astrodynamics lectures we’ve been learning about all the different numbers that go into orbits, and whilst seeing the equations is helpful, nothing beats a good simulation. I reckon I could code this up in a few hours and really benefit my learning with a good visual reference!

Day four was a busy one, I’m going to be spending all day in the same room doing astrodynamics, as much as I love the topic, I’m hoping I don’t find my limit today!

We started off with a lecture, finishing off learning about the orbital parameters and how you can move around between them. During the break I showed the lecturer my coding project and they said it was great! Fortunately, they also gave me some pointers on how to improve it as I was at a bit of a roadblock on a few parts. After the break we started learning about an amazing piece of software, the General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT for short). This tool (or tools just like it) is used by every company that has anything to do with aerospace, it’s essential for any mission design!

It was so much fun playing around with the different orbits and seeing how I could alter the trajectories of spacecraft, with everything I’ve learnt this week, I’m really starting to feel like a proper rocket scientist!

My first week was a lot of fun, but quite overwhelming too. Sometimes I don’t quite know when to stop especially when it comes to learning things I’m passionate about. Right now I feel like I can definitely keep going so I am going to keep this trajectory!

There are so many great moments from my first week, but I think the absolute highlight is when, after spending all week answering questions, my lecturer hit me with the classic: “I know you know this, let’s let the other’s answer”. Looks like I’m making a good impression already, or maybe I need to step out of the limelight a little … oops!

Gotta go, I’ve nine textbooks to read!

Cassie 😀