Following on from middle school, I attended Lawrence Sheriff School, Rugby, right through from the ages of 11-18, including my GCSEs and A-levels. Noteworthy elements of my time included two Rugby tours to Ireland, being a prefect (the joy!) and obviously all the standard stuff that you get up to at secondary school/college.

After my GCSEs, I knew that I wanted to go on to do maths at university and took on the challenge of doing the Further Maths course, in addition to French, Chemistry and History (which I only took for the one subsequent year). During this time, I was also working Saturdays in a sports shop in Rugby's town centre, earning a few pennies and picking up some useful lessons in life!

 
A couple of years (not to mention, many exams) later, I was on my way to Warwick to study maths, on the four-year course of UCAS code G103. How do I know it was code G103? Well, the following little video is to blame. Produced by PhD students during my third year, it reflects the trials, tribulations and variety of people and tasks in a maths degree, bringing out the lighter side of the Warwick course in addition to some home truths (especially about 1st and 2nd year assignments!) but at the same time giving prospective students an idea of what goes on in the Warwick Mathematics Institute.

One of the things with which I got involved within the department, was the Student Staff Liaison Committee - a gathering of students and staff who worked together to improve the undergraduate experience, as well as to help the department with any issues that it had. During the fourth year of my degree, I was the main representative for the year, resulting in (as first port of call) liaison with many members of my cohort, private feedback discussions with individual lecturers over any issues raised, raising of more general issues in the SSLC meetings, etc.

But it wasn't all fun and games and war-zones in support classes. The degree was highly enjoyable and more diverse than any non-mathematician could ever imagine a maths degree being. Amongst other things, I studied Group Theory, Knot Theory, Population Dynamics, Fractals, Fourier Analysis, Measure Theory, Differential Equations and Topology. For those who're wondering what any of that means, then here are some brief notions, with a visual example for each:

• Knot theory is the study of tying knots, including how you can tell two knots apart, even if seeing from a different angle, or with different tightness of know etc. The knot shown is a trefoil knot, taken from http://www.math.cuhk.edu.hk/exhibit/.
• Differential equations study the changes of values (eg: temperature or height) as some variable (eg: time or space) is altered. The figure shown below is the Lorenz attractor, the chaotic solution curves (also known as the butterfly curvess) to the Lorenz equations. Image from http://detritus08.wordpress.com/2008/03/26/strange-a-tractor/.
• Fractals are shapes that, no matter how close you zoom in on them, have a complex structure (whereas if you zoom in close up on a circle for example, you just end up with a line). The image shown below is of the Mandelbrot set, a set of points within the complex plane, bounded under mappings. Taken from http://plus.maths.org/issue40/features/devaney/mandel_fig3.gif.
• Topology is the study of objects, so as to say that a cube is just a sphere with corners, whereas a torus (think ring-doughnut) has a hole through its middle and so is different. The image shown is of a Klein Bottle (from http://www.maa.org/CVM/1998/01/sbtd/article/tour/klein/klein.html) - a 4D object which can only be visualised in 2D or 3D by passing through itself.
  

   

The final year of my course included a project on a topic satisfying the title: "Maths in Action". My topic of choice for this project was that of DNA Sequencing. This included the study of sequence alignment, from basic concepts such as nucleotide/residue scores and alignment matrices, all the way up to BLAST and FASTA algorithms, as well as some consideration of Hidden Markov Models, for determining likelihoods, such as with CpG islands and coding/non-coding regions of DNA.

It was during the process of carrying out this project that I began to truly appreciate the importance of mathematical biology. I had previously studied population dynamics for ecology and epidemiology, though without appreciating what terms used really represented. Through my fourth year project, I was able to see that the mathematics and the biology should come together, not only for representing the information, but enhancing the topic as a whole. Consequently, I chose to apply for this MSc and PhD course at Warwick's Systems Biology DTC, enabling me to take this interest of multidisciplinary science further.