London, England

January 15, 2007

London Calling

Getting Settled

WPI students completing London projects stay in a residence hall for international students known as IES. The dorm is a 10 story building with a great view of the city from the top floor. It’s located in the Borough of Chelsea, which is right in the middle of London. Chelsea is an upper-class area of the city. King’s Road, which runs right by IES, is lined on both sides by stores like Hugo Boss, French Connection, The Calvin Klein Underwear Store (I’m not kidding), and some of the most expensive Starbucks to be found anywhere. I’ve noticed that practically every brand tends to have a few store scattered throughout the city. Without exaggeration, a different Porsche drives past my window about every ten minutes, and I pass an actual Lamborghini dealership on my way to work – one of four in Britain. We’re very close to the tourist attractions for which London is renowned, and the prices reflect that fact. We’ve found that we can save money by going to a grocery store a bit farther away where the prices are more reasonable.

Luckily London is incredibly well connected. If you ever get lost, just find a tube station and you can use the subway system to move to any other part of the city. WPI subsidizes the cost of each student’s Oyster card, which allows for unlimited use of the subway and bus systems throughout central London. I keep the Oyster in my wallet and just put it up to the reader whenever I get on a bus or enter a tube station. The public transportation in this city runs like clockwork, though I have found the tube to be a bit more reliable than the buses. Double-decker buses are pretty exciting, though - I think so anyway.

Familiar Faces and New Friends

Last Saturday the rest of the 22 students arrived at the project center. WPI arranged for a van to bring the group arriving at Heathrow Airport on Saturday morning directly to IES. Everyone made it eventually, though their travels weren’t without misadventures either. A lot of the students had a tough time getting through customs two were actually detained and interrogated at the airport. There we plenty of stories to tell once everyone got together at IES. Additionally, everyone was exhausted. I almost felt bad for everyone arriving on Saturday and having to sit through orientation right away. At least I had the previous week to get over the jet lag.

The first thing that happened upon the group’s arrival was an orientation about the residence hall and brief meeting with our project advisors. Each two floors at IES have an RA, similar to residence halls at WPI. The rooms are singles or doubles, and each bedroom has its own bathroom with shower. Every three bedrooms share a kitchen with a stove, refrigerator, dishwasher, toaster, etc. There is also a common room on every floor. Overall the residence hall is pretty nice. There’s broadband internet for each resident and laundry rooms in the basement; it costs about $5 to do a single load. The WPI students are scattered across 4 floors, and there are plenty of other kids to get to know and make some interesting friends.

Our Project Advisors

After orientation, each project group met with the advisors who presented the plan for the rest of the week. They gave us information on how to get to our sponsor in London and let us know when we would be rehearsing and giving our initial presentations to the sponsors. There are 6 project groups here in London. My group’s sponsor is an organization called Carbon Reduction in Buildings (CaRB), which is a program run by the University College London (UCL). The other groups are working on projects for the Borough of Merton, The Museum of Science, The Tower of London, The Charles Dickens Museum, and the Borough of Westminster. Each group also has one or two liaisons, who are members of their sponsor organizations that act as a primary point of contact.

There are also two project advisors for all the project groups. The WPI advisors for the London project center this term are a statistics professor and a professor of English. Their role is to help us develop our project, help guide the groups to work smoothly, and ultimately grade the IQP. When they’re not assigning more work, the professors are in fact pretty personable. They invited all the students to their flat for dinner in groups of four. I had my dinner this week, and I thought it was a great opportunity to get to know the advisors I’m working with on a more personal and informal level. They hosted us with home-cooked Indian cuisine that was actually really good. We were able to talk casually and it was a nice break from business as usual. Each of the six groups has been meeting with them weekly since the start of the preparatory course (called PQP) in B-term. Now that we’re in London, we will continue to meet with them weekly along with our liaison. At this point in the game, though, each group knows the details of its project better than the advisors, and so their role becomes more of making sure that everyone is making good progress toward completing the project and challenging each group to do a good and thorough job. Sometimes it seems like they are asking a lot, especially when there’s a lot to get done. The project does count for three WPI courses, though, so it won’t necessarily be easy and at least we have someone pushing us along.

It's Off to Work I Go...

Doing the project is just like going to work every day; Monday was our first day. I take a bus to South Kensington Tube Station and catch the Underground the rest of the way. It takes about 45 minutes each way to get there, though at least one of the project groups has a longer commute. I believe that the shortest commute of any of the groups is about 15 minutes. My team’s place of work is a conference room in a small office building that belongs to UCL’s Bartlett Graduate School. There are six members of the Carbon Reduction in Buildings (CaRB) team that work there whom we’ve gotten to know over the past week. Our liaison, Harry, heads the office. While our introductions were formal, the CaRB team prefers being more casual and going by first names. Harry is a respected researcher who has been studying the building stock for over 25 years and has published many papers on energy use in buildings. Among the requirements for our first week was to give a formal presentation on our proposed project methodology to the members of our sponsor organization, which happened on Thursday afternoon. We had been working toward this presentation throughout last term, changing it as the project evolved. The presentation was attended by all the members of the CaRB team at UCL and our advisors, though several other researchers had been invited as well. There was a lot of pressure. I think we did well considering that we were presenting to professionals and PhD’s who regularly publish scholarly papers on energy use. After we finished the presentation, the CaRB members asked a lot of questions about the details of our work, some of which we could answer easily and others that had not occurred to us. The discussion lasted an hour and was pretty intense, though they weren’t necessarily doing it just to grill us on our background knowledge. They are genuinely interested in helping us do our project well because the work we are doing is very important to them and the effort to reduce carbon emissions. I could tell they were really interested as they tossed around ideas about the project. A lot of good suggestions emerged from the discussion.

Aside from the presentation, the whole first week was mostly settling into the project and getting familiarized with our work again after break. Monday through Wednesday was spent by going through our thoughts on what information we think should be collected and how we think we should go about gathering data. We also reworked our methodology paper and polished off the presentation we would give on Thursdays. We also bounced some ideas off our Harry and had some discussions with the other researchers to figure out what has already been done and how we can best suit their needs. We decided that street level observations would be the only way to cover a large number of buildings in the short amount of time we have. We will use binoculars and digital cameras to try to figure out what percentage of rooms in commercial buildings have lights on overnight. Personal interviews with building managers were bumped to be the secondary source of data. It will be difficult to find people who will know the information we’re looking for and be willing to share it with us. Still, that will be an important part of the project as it is really the only way to get any information as to why lights are left on. Also, we decided that it will be critical to conduct a small pilot study to test our data-gathering methods. We have a lot of buildings to cover in only a few weeks, and we want to be sure that we are getting good data before we get too deep into the research. So, sometime in the upcoming week we will conduct an observation of a small number of buildings to see if we can easily get useful data. If so, we will be ready to work out the details of studying all the buildings in our sample; if not, then it’s back to the drawing board.

We spent Friday going through existing CaRB data from recent studies they’ve conducted that are linked to our project. CaRB has already created a sample of buildings in which they have studied air conditioning use, and we plan to supplement what is known about those buildings with overnight lighting use data. This makes a portion of our project easier, as we thought we would have to worry about defining a sampling strategy on our own. By the way, it’s pretty typical for IQP projects to change once students arrive on site, but in our case only the details have changed and it works in our favor. On Friday we also had a meeting with Harry, some CaRB researchers, and a researcher from another university. At the meeting, Harry explained the data structure he is trying to get CaRB to adopt and which our project will test out. The data structure is a way of keeping track whether information that is collected applies to a set of buildings, individual buildings, portions of buildings, or the businesses that occupy the buildings. It seems like trivial detail, but will be critically important if we want to generate any useful data for our sponsor. One important requirement is that the data we give CaRB be as compatible with their existing data as we can make it. In any case, we were pretty productive on Friday, but the whole week was really spent by getting up to speed on CaRB research.

We are in London, After All

All work aside, it’s important not to forget that we’re in London, and we should take every opportunity to experience as much of it as possible. A typical day in London starts early, though it depends at what time each group has to be at their sponsor organization. While my group doesn’t have set hours to work, I like to get there around 9:30 am, which is when the other researchers arrive. We usually have lunch around noon and then continue working through the afternoon. By 5:30 or 6 pm we are pretty drained and ready to relax. We go home, cook dinner, eat, and get ready to go out. One of the downsides of London, especially at this time of the year is that it gets dark very early - by 4:30 pm it is almost night – and the sun stays pretty low all day. The other downside is that everything closes early. Many shops and restaurants are closed by 5 or 6 pm, even in the busy central locations. Museums close by 5 as well. Pubs usually stay open until about 11, but after that you’re unlikely to find anything open except a few nightclubs. The day seems even shorter because many places are closing just when we’re getting out of work. There are still theatres and malls that are open for a while, though. At least we have the weekends to enjoy ourselves and explore the city.

After getting out of work, a lot of the WPI students will go out to sightsee or hang out in a pub. Since we only have seven weeks in London, there isn’t that much time to mill about if we want to experience the city. I make it a point to get out every night and see something new. Even though the museums are closed, most of the famous landmarks are lit up very well. This week we saw Parliament and Westminster Clock (Big Ben is actually the bell inside the clock), the London Eye, the Tower of London and Tower Bridge, and Piccadilly Circus at night, and they all looked amazing. When we’re not sightseeing on the weeknights, we like to check out pubs scattered throughout the city. There’s usually a great, relaxed atmosphere where we can talk and hang-out. One night this week we happened to find ourselves in one of the local pubs during a football match (soccer game). The place was packed and everyone was glued to the television screens. Everybody gasped and cheered as the game played out, and when a goal was scored, the place exploded – everyone was up on their feet cheering on their team. Even for someone who isn’t a soccer fan, the experience was pretty remarkable.

Until next time,
Tom
London