Arriving to Brighton I was greeted with simple but tasteful architecture of the train station, later I've discovered that almost all buildings in the city were not higher than 3 floors, it surprised me because in Ukraine almost all building, especially those meant for living quarters were at least 10 floors high and erect using distasteful soviet-era style. Needless to say that Iwas pleasantly surprised by Britain as a whole and Brighton in particular.

   The initial objective of my arrival was to get skills needed to work as a software developer but soon enough I've realised that I'm truly passionate about engineering, after coming to this conclusion I made the decision to change the subjects I'm doing. I was struggling for a long time to decide which field of engineering I am interested in, after hours of research I selected civil engineering.

   I hope that all the hard work I'm doing now will pay off and I will be able to work as engineer.

  There are many differences between education in Ukraine and United Kingdom, mainly the attitude of the teacher. In UK most teachers are enthusiastic about their job and want to make the lectures interesting whereas in Ukraine teachers do not care about anything but their salary. Workload in Ukraine is also much higher then in United Kingdom, during my last year of ukrainian middle education I had to do 23 subjects, including double maths (as 2 subjects: algebra and geometry), physics, chemistry, biology, geology, geography, double history (history of Ukraine and of the world), literature, law, etc. In Ukraine students have 8 lessons a day 5 days a week or 7 lessons a day 5 days a week with 5 lessons on Saturday, Ukrainian students also get homework everyday from all subjects, adds up to 8 pieces of homework each eve after 8 hours of studying. In UK it is much easier to study.

        Ukrainian classes are usually separated in groups of 30-27 people, students change groups, majority of the group that started studying in the first grade will graduate together. But real friendships appear rarely which may seem strange, meaningful friendships form rarely (i myself only have one school friend) and it is all because of morbid environment full of animal-like aggressive behaviour which only adds up to stress created by overwhelming workload, not to mention that with the amount of work on an average day, an idea of meeting people outside the class seems ridiculous. From my experience in UK people are usually friendly or neutral to each other, I have friends to hang out with outside of class, even outside of school who I met while volunteering in Brighton.

      The hardest topic in physics is quantum physics by far, mainly due to the fact that our sad monkey brains seriously struggle when it comes to understanding concepts that seem abstract for example quantum foam, hawking radiation or any principle of quantum mechanics, yours truly is guilty of suffering from the same issue. This is the topic where I have the least understanding, that is why I attend lectures in the University of Sussex. 

      Now, talking about how physics is taught in Bellerbys. Our teacher puts a lot of effort into trying to teach me and my classmates just how important it is to manipulate symbols and not numbers, not many students appreciate his advices, overall all teachers is physics department are real professionals with great career records and I am really grateful to be taught by them.
https://sites.google.com/a/hsd.k12.or.us/mrphilhiscience/home/physics

    I generally don't face any challenges, the biggest one is to force myself to attend the class and keep doing the homework knowing that I will not gain any new knowledge or skills. My English is not perfect in many ways still: for example I could definitely benefit from getting rid of my accent and improving my essay writing skills on a more advanced level then we do in class. 

  I do not have much to critique the teaching technique of our lecturers for, but there is one thing: during the exercises that involve team work and discussion I am paired with several people from the same country who, due to poor knowledge of english prefer using their own language, it is perfectly understandable but I still feel excluded from the conversation. Probably the only reason for me to keep going on english lesson is that it is easy to get ninety to ninety-five percent on english exams with little to no preparation, also english lessons are compulsory so it is not like I have a choice
https://themindsjournal.com/narcissist-just-self-centered-4-ways-tell-including-one-core-difference/

     Everything we are taught in CIT class seems simple, excel as a tool is surprisingly complex and well thought-out which makes it fairly easy to use. We are given a reasonable amount of creative freedom when it comes to blogs which makes it not as boring as it could be, but learning journals... they are just rubbish, I don't gain any knowledge from writing them nor do I improve my essay writing skills because there are virtually no standards when it comes to writing it, the lack of evaluation from the teacher makes me feel like the quality of the journal makes no difference, I can probably put the f word somewhere here without the teacher noticing. Lucky I only have to write six, five of which are done.

     I would like to know more about excel since the assessment on excel is supposed to happen tomorrow, we were expecting to have 2 lessons to practice but we didn't, so we probably lack the knowledge in some areas which will make the assessment much harder
https://www.randallreilly.com/3-ways-to-keep-a-white-paper-from-being-a-waste-of-time/

       Physics is definitely the most difficult of all due to the way physics exam papers are structured, it makes scoring a grade above 80% impossible without a flawless knowledge and perfectly refined skills, and even then it will be very easy to make and difficult to spot a mistake. Maths is separated on Pure maths and mechanics. Mechanics it quite simple if you put some effort into it whereas pure maths is more difficult due to the sheer complexity of the theories covered, especially during the second pure maths module. English is easy, I'd even say boring, for example I got 90% challenge grade taking in count that I haven't done any english homework in 3 weeks and periodically miss lessons. I gradually put less and less effort and get such high marks in response that I'm just getting bored of it all. Lastly, CIT. It may be fun, sometimes it is boring, I like writing stuff in the blog but I don't enjoy writing essays.

        Through out the year I've been noticing certain little things about myself that help me study more efficiently. For example that I tend to be more creative at night hence why I write my essays at night time, but I am more concentrated in the morning hence why I try to do my maths and physics earlier in the day. I've learned more about good ways to revise before the exam and the best way to organise my notes, which handouts are worthwhile and which deserve to go through the shredder immediately, needless to say that this helps me to keep my room clean and organised.

        The main challenge that I have faced so far is writing a personal statement. I usually don't think much of my achievements and a lot of my mistakes so it was quite hard for me to pinpoint the things I'm good at, for me the hardest thing with personal statement was to start. when the University of Bath asked for a second personal statement I had no idea how can I put everything I'm proud of on the paper again, but then it turned out okay. Second biggest challenge was to start solving physics problems correctly. Them physics problems are often hard to solve because the solution is well hidden and will only become visible when one starts twisting the formulas and merging them together in certain ways. It took me several months to understand. This is the major difference between the academic technique needed to solve physics problems and maths problems.  In maths you must know a certain way of solving a specific type of exercise from the student book whereas physics gives you a chance to find it yourself. 

          Last year I thought that health and academic performance are largely disconnected mainly because I didn't want to busy myself with improving my mental and physical health so I altered my opinion in this way. This year I have discovered how much easier it is to study when my physical health is at the decent level. My mental health has also improved quite a bit which helped me a lot through out this academic year, mainly I've stopped missing weeks of lessons because of it. I believe that i was able to improve my mental state because I found some good friends both in and outside the college, the main thing that helped me was "NCS" which stands for national citizen service, basically a 3 day trip to a camp near Devon where 22 people, myself included, did all sorts of fun activities and after the camp we worked together on a project to help homeless people. Needless to say I found a lot of people who i can, without a doubt call friends. As for relationships I've built with my classmates, it is not much, half of my class speaks in one language, half in another language, the don't normally speak english at all which makes me feel a bit excluded, needless to say their english is not good so say the least to communication with them is far from pleasant, luckily I still have my NCS friends. Most of the teachers are happy with me and I'm happy with myself.

https://medium.com/academia/how-do-people-find-your-papers-academia-edu-introduces-a-new-premium-feature-8b221176f57f