psyche

Met Erroll on tube - he seemed cool and his interview went well. After the general talk (which I’ve now seen three times) there was one for just JMC people (about nine of us). Randomly, maths person pointed to Sierpinski triangle and asked if any of us knew what it was. I said “Sierpinski” in a mid-volume high-pitched whine. The speaker then said “BRILLIANT!”, looked at some admissions guy and shouted “TAKE THAT GUY!”. Wikipedia browsing has its benefits.

Random highlights included a candidate’s unassuming parent who had actually supplied the electromagnets for the LHC (!!), free food, the lulziest tour guide students in the history of lulz and some pretty good talks.

I applied for JMC 4-year but my interviewer didn’t know until I told him. He didn’t seem to have read my personal statement or know my A-levels either, so I spent about two minutes telling him a condensed version of my entire application.

He then gave me a wooden Towers of Hanoi thing, asked me if I knew what it was called (I did) and then told me to find out the number of moves to solve it. He gave me a piece of paper and a pen and for a second I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to just start writing. He didn’t do anything, so I solved it physically (it came out easily). He then asked about the number of moves. I said that since I had gone from a tower of 4 to a base and a sub-tower of 3 during the solution, it might be to do with recursion. He seemed surprised/happy for a moment - I scribbled a bit and got the recurrence relation and then pattern-spotted the closed form thing (it was some obvious thing of O(2ⁿ)). He asked me how I would prove it, to which I replied induction, which he then made me do. He seemed pretty happy after that and implied that that question was meant to take longer.

He then asked me to integrate 1/x² from -1 to 1. I became extremely suspicious because of how easy antidifferentiating it was which led me to realise that the point was that it was undefined at zero. I said this and he just didn’t respond, so I evaluated it (initially making a sign error, but then fixing it to get -2). He asked me what I’d said about undefinedness before and I restated it. He then asked me what the actual value of the integral was, and I non-comittally said it could be infinite but might converge. He didn’t do anything, so I sketched it and then re-said that it could be infinite but might converge. He agreed and then asked how I’d evaluate it, and I said by symmetry, integrating from 0 to 1 and then doubling by using a variable as the limit for the bit near the origin and making it tend to a value. He nodded “OK” and then said I’d be well-suited to the JMC course and shook my hand. The interview was about seven minutes of frantic scribbling and stammering, but I got the questions so I don’t care how crack-addicted I appeared.

They’re going to mail us offers/rejections within three weeks (probably within two).

The JMC course looks really good and it’ll be weird to choose between top universities if I have to. I was thinking that depending on how other people do, I may be able to ditch all of my friends in one fell swoop. Joy. As we (my mother insisted on accompanying me) trudged back down Birch Grove, she told me to “stop taking school and teachers so seriously” and “just coast”. It was strange to hear that type of psycho-social engineering.

It was almost as if she was reading my mind*.

Pax

* blog?