Category: My studies
Last night I was reminded of the fascinating world of moveable bridges. From the glorious transporter bridges of ports and river estuaries to hulking swing bridges of the…
Probably the best module I studied during my year at ENPC was not engineering-themed – but photography. The module was run as an English language course: the subject…
Back in 2004, I and fellow civil engineering student Andy Kosinski got together to create a new student newspaper for the civil engineering department at Imperial College. It…
This post is about rediscovering a childhood fascination for how things work, and the thoughts it has provoked about creating learning environments that harness that fascination for the…
Apparently it was too close to call. The judges deliberated for three hours as to which of the six shortlisted finalists should be given the prestigious title of…
Since my last post, I have been rather busy! The lack of posts on this blog since then can be attributed in part to the large amount of…
I am correcting a document that has been translated from French into English and I have hit upon a term that keeps cropping up, and I simply don’t…
At the beginning of the week, the architects for the project that I am working on flew into town for an intensive week of meetings. Most of yesterday…
Tube Challenge I always dreamed of doing this when I was a lonely and boring teenager. All the tube stations in one day. Thanks to Mary for sending…
Today I started getting into the nitty gritty of how to stop a floor from vibrating. When dimensioning the floor slab of a building, one of the considerations…
After much rudderlessness, it seems I now have something fairly conretely (haha!) defined subject for my Projet de Fin d’Etudes. Up until yesterday, I had been increasingly frustrated…
I am in the throws of reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig. In my view it is a philosophical book that challenges…
I have my cousin Ralph (of Stringfever fame – see link to the left, under music) to thank for that piece of advice, which makes me laugh each…
During these first few weeks of my placement I have been carrying out some fairly entry-level calculations on a forty-five storey tower. These follow on nicely from courses…
Last Friday I handed in my last piece of course work at ENPC. Despite having started my placement two weeks ago, last week I was still finishing off…
After seven and a half years, I had my final exam as an undergraduate last Friday. As final exams go, it counted for a minute part of my…
We were recently asked in one of our French classes to write an article about a business in the style of short piece for a newspaper. The brief…
Today I sat the final exam for what has probably been the most enjoyable course that I have studied during the last four years, the ambitiously titled “History…
We have just had the first of two earthquake engineering exams, and this one was hard! Revision for the exam was doubly frustrating: firstly because the key topics that…
dsc02040b.jpg Last week I got wind of a course at ENPC in photography. After a little research I found out that it is actually an advanced course for…
Glen Canyon Dam, as featured in the popular film «Superman» When designing, building and operating a dam, there are a few steps that ought to be followed in…
Time is flying by. I am already into my second week of college. These first three weeks are preparatory classes for all the Erasamus students at les Ponts,…
Sunday evening I started to pack my bag for my first day of school on Monday, or so I thought… A double-check of a letter from ENPC reconfirmed…
Thanks to all of you (well one of you) for your requests for photos. I have now been trying to get photos to work on my last entry…
This first entry is not a treatise on why one should blog. I am not even certain why I should blog. But I am certain that I like…