Today was a big day. My choices are Imperial, Southampton, York, Edinburgh and Bristol (not in that order). I had my Imperial interview today. It was interesting.
I woke up at 9. Got out of bed at 10. Had breakfast. Then spent two hours deciding what to wear (I eventually ended up in a suit). I was worried that I’d be the only person there in a suit and look stupid, but fortunately I wasn’t.
The day went pretty well; at first we just hung around in a waiting room but then we waited in a different room which had food in it (this is a big deal). Dr. Bradley came along after a while and we went off to a talk by him about Imperial in general and a bit about Computer Science at Imperial. Then the JMC people separated from the straight CS people and we went to a talk about Computer Science at Imperial (which I had seen before). We were then split into groups based on the timings of our interviews; I was in group 6. We were shown various projects that students had done and taken on a short tour of the campus (”The bars are here, here and here. There is alcohol in them.”).
I was the second last person to be taken to their interview, so the wait was pretty stressful.
The interview actually didn’t go that badly… We started by talking a little about The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth which was pretty fun. I was then asked to work out something about the sum of all fibbonaci numbers up to k, and then prove it by induction (this made me lulz inside, because last night I tried re-reading some of Knuth but got bored after the first section (which happened to be on proof by induction)). It went okay but I was nervous and so kept making stupid mistakes, and then correcting them.
We talked a little about my PS but only a bit about my visit to Princeton to visit Kernighan and about how being a “computer geek” would be beneficial but it wouldn’t be good to be *too* into it. I’m glad she didn’t point out the typo I made (unlike RAB who took great pleasure in informing me of it).
I was then asked a programming question. It was about an array full of As and Bs. It was okay. I suggested the least efficient method of switching the As and Bs (bubble sort) as a joke but then went on with the real thing. It was all good.
All in all it was good. We’ll find out in a month.
“Even though we have fast internet, it’s wasted speed since you can’t torrent… that was a lie; as Computer Science students, you can torrent all you like.”