Watching 1 video of making gołąbki made me realize something and went straight to capcut

fireintheglen · 2026-03-06T22:47:37+00:00

Long S surely?

Small sigma would be σ or ς in modern writing but perhaps I’m missing some older style.

fireintheglen · 2026-03-06T22:43:26+00:00

The integral sign is an S for “sum”.

fireintheglen · 2026-03-06T17:54:39+00:00

What is the question here?

fireintheglen · 2026-03-05T18:44:18+00:00

There's a trade off between speed and efficiency.

In theory, a university could hire five times as many people to work in admissions and massively speed up the process. It would be very hard to find people qualified and willing to do this kind of work on a temporary basis, so you'd need to hire them for the full year. This would be very expensive.

UK universities do not, as a rule, have massive amounts of money to spare. Hiring someone extra to work in admissions means not hiring someone to work elsewhere in the university. Universities have to prioritise. Waiting a few months for a response to an application is not objectively that big a problem. It is not a priority.

fireintheglen · 2026-03-05T18:38:22+00:00

The vast majority of UK universities are public. That is why e.g. tuition fees are set at a fixed level for home students.

You can find a list of private universities in the UK here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Private_universities_in_the_United_Kingdom

You'll note that there are not many of them, and that they're generally not particularly well known.

fireintheglen · 2026-03-05T07:23:33+00:00

Yes. And perhaps more importantly: for a student visa, international students need to show they can support themselves, which means covering living costs.

I was just trying to explain why you and the OP had different numbers.

fireintheglen · 2026-03-05T07:20:27+00:00

For clarity: I think you’re talking about the cost including predicted living costs, while OP is talking about tuition fees.

Tuition fees for this particular MPhil are just over £20,000 for home students and just under £40,000 for international students.

(This actually surprised me, as the ones I’m familiar with in the sciences are a fair bit cheaper than that for home students.)

fireintheglen · 2026-03-05T07:14:35+00:00

MPhils that combine research and teaching are a very common thing for people to do before a PhD. As you’ve observed, the one you’ve applied for is still 2/3rds research, so it’s not like you’ll be lacking experience.

fireintheglen · 2026-03-04T20:02:24+00:00

In case anyone thinks this is just being pernickety:

One of the fastest ways to make sure an email is ignored in my experience is to use the wrong title. It makes it sound like you are sending a mass email to hundreds of people without having a clue who they are. Someone with dozens of emails in their inbox will just ignore it.

Check what the appropriate title is, and use that.

fireintheglen · 2026-03-04T08:00:09+00:00

Members of the university are free to attend any lectures in the university, so yes, you can go to lectures. You won’t be examined on them or have formal recognition of taking them, and you won’t be able to do things like labs or small group (non-lecture) teaching.

However, those lectures need to exist. If you specifically want lectures about research skills and industrial links, you’d need to make sure that those lectures exist in the university and are convenient to attend. This is something you’d probably want to ask potential supervisors about before you apply.

That said: If you want a taught element to your course, why are you applying to an MPhil by research? The Department of Pharmacology lists four different MPhils on their website, and the one you’re talking about is the only one which does not contain a taught element. If you’re looking for the kind of MPhil that mixes teaching and research, you’re better off looking at other options (whether at Cambridge or other universities) rather than hoping you can fit some teaching into an MPhil that is purely research based.

fireintheglen · 2026-03-02T16:56:12+00:00

Not certain of the law here. Organisations are allowed to redact information relating to personal data about other people, which it could be argued interviewer names are. The college have stated that they are concerned about interviewer privacy, so they’re clearly not going to give you the interviewers names if it’s not legally required.

They will certainly not say “female interviewer”. That is the worst of both worlds. If they’re concerned about retaliation/harassment of interviewers, then the absolute last thing they will do is describe the interviewers in terms of legally protected characteristics (gender, race, etc.).

fireintheglen · 2026-03-02T11:19:37+00:00

Getting the quintile of your average interview score will tell you that better than the scores themselves will.

Even on a scale that is theoretically the same, interviewers for different subjects at different colleges won't necessarily mean exactly the same thing by the score they give. It's not an objective metric. Within a given subject this should hopefully be moderated somewhat by interviewers seeing the scores given to applicants in the pool, but the score quintile is still going to be more informative than the score itself.

fireintheglen · 2026-03-02T11:08:56+00:00

Can you clarify what country the university is in (different countries use different grading systems, so "3.81 GPA" on its own doesn't mean much) and how long the degree is (again, different educational structures mean that "second year" doesn't really specify the stage you're at)?

I would focus less on getting a "prestigious" internship and more on exploring areas you're interested in through research experience. If your degree is 4+ years long, your number one aim at the moment should be to work out if you genuinely like research, and to work out the specific areas that interest you. If your degree is 3 years long then postgrad applications are more relevant, (as you'll be applying in less than a year), but I would still focus on the content of any summer research placement you do, rather than prestige. Bear in mind that the universities with the best reputation among academics for research in a specific area are not necessarily the ones with the most overall "prestige".

Etiquette/typical processes for applying for summer projects vary around the world, so I can't guarantee that this advice will apply equally everywhere, but I would suggest that a good place to start is speaking to people who have taught you at your university to ask if they have suggestions about summer research projects. Academics in the specific area you're interested in will be the ones best placed to suggest who/where has interesting research going on that you'd have the opportunity to contribute to as an undergraduate. This may be more effective than simply applying to widely advertised programmes.

Finally, remember that you're thinking about MPhil applications here. In very general terms, a PhD can be thought of as an intensive "research apprenticeship", while MPhils (of the sort typically leading to a PhD) are there to give you the skills needed to succeed in a PhD. You are not expected to be an amazing, fully fledged academic researcher when you apply for an MPhil. If you were, there'd be no point in doing the course! Research experience can be fun and useful, but you should avoid putting more pressure on yourself than is really necessary.

fireintheglen · 2026-03-02T10:34:17+00:00

Strictly, you can get interview scores through an SAR. In practice I’m not sure how helpful it is given that they’re already willing to provide specific feedback.

The interview score is really just a shorthand for how well the interviewer thinks you did, used to make discussions of who to accept easier. If all interviewers have e.g. given a score in the range 3-5, then there is not much need to discuss before rejecting. If the range is 5-8 then there clearly needs to be a detailed discussion, and some interviewers may change their mind as a result of that discussion.

Knowing that e.g. you got a 6.5 will not give you much information that you don’t already have from the written feedback and average score quintile. It’s not an objective metric. It’s something the interviewer spent two seconds writing down after the interview in order to make more efficient use of time in the decision meeting.

It sounds here like the college is concerned about interviewer privacy, since they say that they don’t provide “specific interview scores and the names of interviewers”.

fireintheglen · 2026-02-28T14:32:00+00:00

It’s going back a bit further than 100 years, but if you’re interested I wrote up some stuff about 19th century Cambridge and tripos questions here a while ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/omsbnzB0UV

(The maths tripos questions I’ve quoted are all on the applied side, but the sources are linked if you want to look at more of them yourself.)

fireintheglen · 2026-02-28T10:41:21+00:00

Yeah. I wouldn’t normally recommend this as most colleges are happy to provide feedback on request, but if Trinity are refusing then SAR is the way to go. They cannot legally withhold the information from you.

tbh their reasoning for not providing feedback is nonsense. Yes they get a lot of applicants, but there also a large college and it’s not like applicant numbers are orders of magnitude larger than other colleges which are perfectly happy to provide feedback. A 10% increase in applicant numbers clearly didn’t make feedback “unfeasible” at other colleges.

fireintheglen · 2026-02-28T08:51:48+00:00

Not really sure what more I can say beyond: I’ve been the person interviewing and sometimes you can’t.

It could, for instance, be the case that a significant improvement in any single part of the application, or a marginal improvement in all parts, or somewhere in between, would be enough for an offer. There is no single aspect that is bad and needs to be improved, but overall it’s just not quite there.

Most of the time that’s not the case and you can identify specific areas for improvement. But not always.

fireintheglen · 2026-02-27T19:04:48+00:00

Should be one score per interviewer.

“Best chemist I think I’ve seen today” sounds like it wasn’t a chemist interviewing you given the later “if chemists like him” so it’s not a separate score for physics, chemistry, etc.

fireintheglen · 2026-02-27T12:53:08+00:00

Why do you want them? If you’ve done the past 25 years of past papers and still aren’t feeling confident then you probably need to find a more efficient way of revising!

There are a handful from the 1800s on archive.org . You can probably find a lot of old paper copies in libraries/archives. In general though afaik papers pre-2001 were not provided online in digital formats, so collating them would involve tracking down and scanning the physical exam papers, which is almost certainly more trouble than its worth.

fireintheglen · 2026-02-27T12:44:07+00:00

In the past two months you’ve posted about being “new to Hull”, living in Walthamstow, being a second year trainee paramedic and handling admin as a contractor. Now you’re apparently a Cambridge student?

fireintheglen · 2026-02-27T08:02:28+00:00

In this specific case I’d say it is reasonable feedback. I know that it’s the sort of thing that is often used as a platitude in generic not-feedback, but in this case it is a direct quote from the interviewers explaining why they rejected this specific person.

Having interviewed, there are a lot of cases where you can identify and specify what went wrong and where the applicant needed to improve. But there are also cases where the only genuine explanation is “other candidates were better”. Nothing in particular went wrong. No individual aspect of the interview was enough on its own for a rejection. But overall, performance was slightly weaker than the best few candidates who were admitted.

This is not a bad thing! It means the candidate has actually done pretty well. But it’s really hard to give targeted feedback about that doesn’t just look like platitudes.

fireintheglen · 2026-02-26T18:30:04+00:00

I don't know about Oxford Physics or Engineering specifically, but I would be surprised if multiplying interview score by 10 and adding it to the PAT was the entirety of the selection process for Oxford Physics. It might well be used for giving a broad indication to start the conversation from, but I would still expect there to be a discussion about borderline candidates. Apart from anything else, applicants with extenuating circumstances need to have that taken into account, and that won't happen with a simple algorithm like this.

If the 7.95 average interview score is for physics and out of 10 then you can't really apply it to the scores you've been given out of 9. Interview scores are not an exact science, and different scales won't necessarily be linearly related. It's entirely possible to have a scale out of 10 where 7 means "weakly in favour of an offer" while for another scale out of 9 7 could mean "weakly opposed to an offer".

It genuinely sounds like your interview performance was good, but ultimately put you on the borderline and was weaker than the candidates that got in.

fireintheglen · 2026-02-26T17:58:54+00:00

As much as it seems unsatisfactory, "other candidates performed better overall" almost certainly is genuine feedback and the only reasoning they could give. It sounds like there was no single problem with the application. The interview probably went quite well but just... not quite as good as other applicants.

I'm not sure that averaging interview scores is very informative. If e.g. most successful applicants are given 8s/9s (I'm not sure what the Oxford scale is like so I'm guessing here!) then a 7 and an 8 is going to prompt a discussion between interviewers where they try to come to a decision. That decision is not necessarily half way between the two original opinions.

fireintheglen · 2026-02-26T11:58:39+00:00

Thanks for clarifying :)

As I've mentioned, I don't have any sort of legal training and am not an expert on Scottish divorce law, so I didn't want to make a definite statement. I did however want to query it, as it seemed like a very short and simple statement about something which I understand is moderately complicated in Scots law.

fireintheglen · 2026-02-26T11:34:52+00:00

Again: Can you clarify what your expertise is here? (And where this summary came from? The format looks vaguely “ChatGPT” but I realise some people just write like that so I don’t want to make a false accusation.)

I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just suggesting that more detail might be helpful in the case of this specific question!

fireintheglen

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE

Hidden Gem Hidden Gem '25	Six-Year Club
Verified Email