Yesterday I had an enjoyable trip to Birmingham to visit a student on a sandwich-year placement. He is working at Cross-Country Trains, effectively doing logistics work. As it happens, there is a single Cross-Country train service from Guildford to Birmingham per day, so I took it (though at 06:02 it's a little earlier than I needed to travel).
Once there I met the student, and we had breakfast together at a place near his office called Boston Tea Party which, I can report, does an excellent vegan cooked breakfast. He's been getting on well and enjoying the challenges of the business world; not just the technical work that he is doing that draws upon his analytic, problem-solving and numerical skills that he has been picking up as a physicist, but the networking, dealing with work relationships and getting involved in the structures and reporting lines that business use. It's not an atypical placement for a physics student on our BSc programme, though it does not involve directly doing physics. Our sandwich-year students end up going to more or less any kind of place that wants to employ graduate physicists, and that include train operating companies.
Because I ended up meeting the student as soon as I arrived in Birmingham, I was done with the meeting with him, and later his supervisor, quite early in the day. I therefore had a wander round the city. Parts of it have changed a lot since I first got to know Birmingham (when I was an undergraduate in Oxford and my then-girlfriend went to study in Birmingham). The renovations are rather nice. Particularly impressive is the new library, which is beautiful inside and out. I went there for a couple of hours to do some work. The picture above is taken from the balcony on the third floor of the library.
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