JS

JS Labs are by far the best labs in TP; they're much more challenging and interesting, and you learn a lot about the topic in question when doing the experiment/report. There are fewer reports in JS Labs, so they are worth a lot more than in the previous years. Somehow I've been doing better in these than the SF labs, hopefully I can keep it up. JS labs are marked pretty inconsistently, it really depends on who your lab instructor is. If you can help it, try and do experiments that your instructors aren't experts in; it'll make a huge difference to your marks.

Ising Model

For the JS Computer Simulation module, the grading is based on a project on the Ising model that you do over Christmas. This year it was an open ended project and we were free to investigate whatever we wanted with the Ising model, so my report ended up being a bit long. I used multiple computers to run a large number (~10,000) of simulations and took averages to get smooth curves (otherwise they have a lot of fluctuations in them due to the random nature of the system). I didn't do as well in this as I'd hoped, but I think I know where I went wrong: I did a lot of different things with my code and got nice results, but I didn't go into enough detail about the physics and the statistical analysis of the simultations.