A certain amount of apprehension

We had the departmental induction today. This consisted of the lecturer in charge of the MSc statistics programme, who will also be the personal tutor for each of us, talking a bit about the structure of the programme, what to do if we had problems, deadlines for choosing courses and so on, the Graduate Administrator for the department introducing himself, various lecturers introducing their courses to help us to decide which we wanted to do, a talk from a man from the library (very strange looking- I think it was his haircut which came from the pudding bowl school of styling, though he was also very very thin), and from a man from the careers service, and from a man from the language centre.

The most helpfull thing I learnt in all this was that in fact that project that I thought was compulsory is actually optional- you only do it if you want to convert to the Research programme. Not to say I necessarily won't do that, but it's nice to know I won't have to do it if I can't think of anything good or just don't want to do it- it was scaring me rather.

Sadly, the course introductions were in one way not so helpfull, though from another point of view they were very helpfull indeed. What I mean is that beforehand I just about knew what I wanted to do and afterwards I was thrown into complete indecision again. In the hope that it might clarify things by showing how hard I personally was likely to find the various options, I went to the library* after lunch to look at the set books for each course. They were all extremely frightening, and it was hard to say which were worst. But in the end I decided that Developments in Statistical Methods seemed to use harder maths than Non-Linear Dynamics and the Analysis of Real Time Series**- even though that 'Non-linear' in the name is a danger signal for me as it says 'hard maths that I can't do'-, and didn't sound as interesting from the presentation, so the current plan is to swap Developments for Non-Linear Dynamics, do the course which was my second choice after one whose timetable clashed with another course, and otherwise keep everything the same.

So at least I know what I'm doing. But I can't quite blot out the vision of those textbooks... Aaaaaaaarrrrrgh!

*Which I may describe more fully later, but I would just like to say here that I agree with the anonymous author of 'Candid Campus', a 'seriously irreverent look' at LSE in the most recent edition of the Beaver, LSE's student newspaper: 'Designed by Big Norm Foster as a paean to wasted space, the books are relegated to information vestibules in the corners of the gigantic emptiness, across which the screams of the failing students echo and bounce.' Its most dominant feature is a round free-standing staircase which must be ten metres in diameter, going all the way up from the lower ground floor. Where, beside the computers, so many books are squeezed into a small space that instead of having fixed bookshelves with spaces between, they've had to have sliding ones that can be moved by cranking a wheel on the side- there is only one space and you have to move all of the ones in front of the shelf you want so that the space comes between that one and its neighbour. Not that I've had to use them myself, but I've seen that kind of system before on TV, at a research library which hadn't wasted its space on giant staircases and just had so many books it really needed it. Of course, whenever the library is mentioned in the official LSE promotional material, they go on about how wonderfull the redesign was and how stunning it is now, casually mentioning Sir Norman Foster...

**It was also taught by the only one of the lecturers giving presentations whom I could barely understand (strong accent)- I was only getting half of every other sentence. Not perhaps a reason in itself not to take a course- after all, he'll be writing on the board, and there'll be a set text- but maybe one more factor to influence the decision