Imperial College London to Brighton

I woke up in my favorite city in the world to a bright blue sky. How is that for perfect? I made sure to get a bit ahead of schedule so I could sneak a few minutes in the square outside our hotel in Prince's Garden. Some of the best memories I have of London are of taking walks in the neighborhoods. I love to go into the posh neighborhoods and secretly peek in the windows to check out the insides. I enjoy watching the flats under construction because they normally have the doors open so I can get a better view from the sidewalk. [Disclaimer: I am not a stalker] I adore all of the moulding and beautiful details. For about 30 seconds I swoon and wonder what it would be like to live in Kensington or Chelsea. Then I come crashing back to reality, knowing I'd be hard pressed to ever afford a zone 3 studio. But that doesn't make it any less thrilling.

We participated in 3 great sessions coordinated by Imperial College London. The first was on career services (Jason Yarrow). It is quite impressive to hear about the number of sessions, workshops, fairs and services they provide, not to mention the fact that employers are beating down their door to hire graduates. Imperial College London is like the MIT of the UK (or MIT is the Imperial College London of the US). Either way, they produce some outstanding graduates.

The second session was on professional skills development. Knowing that Ph.D. students in the STEM fields (that's science, technology, engineering and mathematics for you non-higher education folks) are sometimes high functioning but not really able to communicate their skills and science to non-geniuses, Imperial College developed a mandatory series of workshops to help the students pick up soft skills and even reduce their feelings of stress and isolation.  They decided to give us a taste of the kinds of things they do with the students and took us out for a fun teambuilding exercise and debrief. I won't go into all of the details, but let's say things got competitive. It was a load of fun.

We also had the chance to speak with a group of current postgraduate students from the U.S. who are studying at Imperial College. They gave us some good feedback about what it is like to work in a lab and conduct cutting edge research in a research driven educational system. And I came to the conclusion that I wasn't born to touch the STEM disciplines (or medicine).

Afterward we took a campus tour and had to stop midway for a photo op when it was discovered that there are 6 (!) of us women having a birthday during the program. What can I say? Leos roar. There has to be something about our competitive nature.

We might have been able to walk to Brighton faster, but we took our beloved coach and fought rush hour city traffic down to the seaside. We arrived in town around 7:30 (late for the dinner reservations) but kept up our "no worries" attitude, dropped our bags, met the University of Sussex staff, and headed off down some lovely winding alleys to Jamie's for dinner. That would be Jamie Oliver's restaurant. I'll let you guess how the food tasted :-)

Our hotel, MyHotel , is stylish and relaxing to say the least. I'm thankful we get to stay 2 nights here. I can tell already that we will be treated well by Sussex. And Brighton is, well, sort of an eclectic place. I can't wait to get to know it better.