The Time I did Work Experience in UCL's Astrophysics Department.

Earlier this summer I had the immense privilege of going to University College London and spending a week in their astrophysics department. It was quite possibly the coolest week of my life.

I like UCL, I go there for Friday Night Lectures which are designed for sixth formers (16-18 year olds). They are free, they even provide us with biscuits and cups of water (what more does one need from life?), and the topics range from how the inner ear works to antimatter and it's role in our lives. You don't have to book seats or anything, you just need to show up early enough to get a seat before they all fill up (there have been several cases of people sitting on the stairs or standing in the back)

So when the head of Physics at my school found this work experience placement opportunity and showed it to me, I was eager to apply. Having been rather ruthlessly rejected from the National Physics Laboratory earlier in the year, I was hoping desperately for success as my summer was looking a bit bare in terms of work.

We were supposed to receive word back from UCL on the 4th of May, and on the fourth I received an email... saying that the astrophysics department needed more time to decide who they wanted. This was  the week before my GCSEs started and I may have started stress baking (my brother was very happy).
On the day my exams started, the first one being French, I received another email while doing some last minute cramming and opened it on reflex and as the page loaded all I could think was 'It's another rejection. I can't take another rejection before I start my GCSEs!'

I may have started hyperventilating when I saw my application had been successful. So my mother thought I was having a panic attack when I phoned her and then I had to calm down and focus on revising the various forms of savoir.

UCL was one of the most incredible experiences ever. Not least because of the people I was working with. When I think physics and space I tended to think of it being filled with geeky guys with glasses, that whole sheebang, so I was assuming I was the only girl who had gotten in. When I arrived on Monday to my astonishment, amusement and delight all four of the people whose applications had been successful were girls. It was brilliant! Out of more than 80 applicants, in which the ratio of applications had been 2:1 (girls to boys) all four of the successful applicants were female. So much for it being a patriarchal society, look at the girl power!

M51, The Whirlpool Galaxy (Image constructed by Me)

The girls I met were awesome. Diya, Rishara and Laura were all in the year above me and so when it came to the tricky maths they were very helpful in helping me so I didn't end up weeping onto my calculator (we also started looking up physics jokes and found one of the dirtiest ones I've ever seen, but that's a story for another time).

The astrophysicists who were supervising us were Dr. Jay Farihi, Marco Rocchetto who was Jay's PhD student and Nicola Baccichet who was doing a PhD in instrumentation. We did work on processing images so that we could make a short film from images taken by telescopes. The images were taken in Red, Green, Blue, H-Alpha and Luminosity so we had to piece it all together to get the clearest image we could using GIMP which is fairly easy to manoeuvre and is free to download. When we had each made an image of M51, two galaxies which from our point of view overlap (the swirl is one galaxy and the circular extension on the bottom of the whirlpool is another galaxy) and had made a clip of a star going supernova in M82 we moved on to more complex calculations.

While working on finding out how far M100 was from our planet using cepheid stars (stars which change in luminosity and size in the same way that a pot of boiling water begins to rattle with the lid on and them settles down once you take the lid off and then begins rattling once again once the lid is placed back on) I had the chance to experience what it is like for a PhD student at UCL as I was working in a room full of PhD students. From cosmology to radio astronomy to remains of planets crashing into white dwarves to galaxy formation, there was so much amazing astronomy and astrophysics taking place it made my head spin!

Along the way we got the pleasure of eating lunch with astrophysicist Amelie Saintonge, her work was on how galaxies developed, who was thrilled that there were young enthusiastic women who wanted to do astrophysics at university, and had been one of the people to help go through our applications. I was thrilled that there are pioneering women in astrophysics right now.

The Radcliffe Telescope (18/24-inch Double Refractor)

We also went out to lunch with astrophysicist Andrew Pontzen who was working on what dark matter is. I felt quite sorry for him because we asked him so many questions that I don't know how he actually had time to eat his lunch. We started off with the simple things, what is dark matter and dark energy and ended up talking about eternal inflation and how it could have spawned our universe and Boltzmann Brains (which are quite freaky things). Having seen him give a fantastic lecture on what dark matter might be, I may have been worshipping the ground he walked on (just slightly), and luckily he was very allowing and didn't get irritated when I came back the next day to ask him more questions.

Along the way, the three other girls and I got to observe radio astronomers and were given a tour around the ULO (University London Observatory). I never wanted it to end! On Friday I just wanted to come back and do more on Monday and I seem to recall telling Jay I would 'sort and count paperclips if it meant I could come back'.

The week was incredible and helped me cement the fact that I want to spend my life exploring the universe. If you're a sixteen to eighteen year old who lives near London and wants some interesting and eye-opening work experience in the summer I highly suggest applying for this. If I could apply again I would but I don't think we're going to be allowed to (even if we did buy Jay, Marco and Nicola chocolate to try and bribe them into letting us stay for another week).

My advice when applying for this? Your covering letter is vital. Jay said that we were almost completely chosen from our covering letters, he was American and so didn't understand the school system so my predicted grades meant nothing to him. Jay and two others went through all of the letters and all three of them had picked two of us by our covering letters and two of them had both picked the other two, again by their covering letters. You really have to put your all into the covering letter, no spelling or grammar mistakes.

Also makes sure you put the correct year. I accidentally said I was applying during 2013 instead of 2014...