h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Have been watching the weather forecast in some trepidation all this week, as today was our Year 10 Open Day, and spending a whole day crammed in a meeting room with 80 Year 10 girls and 20 teachers is not my idea of fun! However, after a slightly cloudy start, the sun came out and it has been warm and sunny all day - showing off the College in the very best conditions - hurray!

They arrived at about 10 and we registered them, dished out College propaganda - oops, sorry! prospectuses, gave them drinks and biscuits, and got under way. I gave a short welcome talk, then we took them out to the sports field for a 'mingling' exercise so that they could get to know each other a bit (they were from 20 different schools, as far apart as Macclesfield and Bridport). This consisted of what EFL teachers know as 'Find someone who ...': each participant has a grid of 20-25 squares and in each one is written e.g. someone who walks to school/college, someone who likes Maths, someone who has a birthday in February etc. They have to get as many different people as possible to sign their names in the squares, and try and have a conversation with each one based on the statements. I always try to have some up-to-date cultural references, and this year I appealed to ML for ideas, so some of the squares had things like: ... is wearing skinny jeans/has brought their iPod with them today/owns a copy of 'It's Chico Time'. They seemed to enjoy it and it got them talking.

Then I gave a talk about the ways in which university is different from school, and how Cambridge University works (collegiate, teaching system etc). Then more moving about: my team of undergraduate helpers came along and took all the visitors, in groups, for a tour of the College and some of the Arts Faculty buildings, conveniently situated just across the road.

Next they had a science mini-lecture: a fourth-year Engineer talking about her final-year project (soil liquefaction and seismic behaviour of quay walls - much more interesting than it sounds from the title!).

After a break for lunch, when most of them also had time to sit outside in the gardens for a while, and one enterprising teacher led his group on an expedition into town to see a few more colleges, there was an arts mini-lecture, this time by a graduate student in Classics, who talked about her research on the myth of Endymion, linking topics in Classics, English literature, History of Art, and even Politics.

Then we split them into groups again and the undergraduates came back (to a different group from the morning) to run a question and answer session about what it's like studying at Cambridge. The Senior Tutor and I took the teachers off to a different room for our own Q&A: most of the teachers already knew quite a lot about the Oxbridge admissions process, but it was quite a useful session and some interesting points came up.

The final session was a quiz, in school groups, partly based on what they had been told during the day. A short pause while my assistant (a final-year student who was a great support all day) and I marked the quiz, then we gave the two winning teams some chocs as their prize and sent them all on their merry way.

Everybody seemed to enjoy it, the weather was fantastic, and I felt really good having got through the first event I've had to organise on my own (while my boss is on maternity leave). I'll have a day off on Monday to compensate for working at the weekend, but now I'm off to my neighbour's house to drink wine in her garden - cheers!

What a delightful entry. A highlight of my evening. Thank you.

dd x