Invasion of the Summer Students
I blog to you today from my desk in lab as I wait for a centrifuge to become available. I, and many of the other bloggers, have been busy for the last several days and are now just settling into our summer jobs. Here’s what you missed: complete chaos. Shortly after commencement, all students leaving campus for the summer had to move out of their rooms and put anything they were not taking with them into storage. All students staying on campus for the summer had to move into their summer room assignment. Of course, if you’re moving into a new room, first someone else has to move out of it, and that person might have to wait for someone to move out of their new room, etc. This results in everyone moving all of their belongings into the hallway, like this: All of my worldly possessions, minus my keyboard, guitar, and pet snake’s terrarium.Now, I was lucky enough to be the only person piling stuff in this hallway. Some of our hallways were practically floor to ceiling with stuff. It’s kind of frustrating, but there’s just no other way to do it in a college dorm, and it could be a lot worse. Caltech is probably one of the only places where I could leave my keyboard, guitar, macbook,wallet, ipod, phone, etc. chilling in the hallway for hours without worrying about someone walking by and stealing any of it. The honor code: it works, and it is awesome.
In addition to moving into a bigger room this year, I got this as a bonus!
Caltech has a mural policy that allows students to paint murals in the hallways and in their rooms(although for rooms you have to pay a fee to cover the cost of painting over the mural if a future resident does not want it). With my new room I inherited this mural painted in 2006. It’s an album cover for the punk band Operation Ivy, whose music I have yet to listen to, but I think I need to so that I may fully appreciate the art.
Eventually, all of us got settled into our new rooms, and then the invasion began…
SUMMER STUDENTS!!!!!!! To be fair, the Caltech SURF students (barely) outnumber the visiting summer students, and a lot of the summer students are cool people. I even have a friend here this summer who I met when she was SURFing last summer. Now that we’ve all been through check-in and safety training, we’re settling into our labs and getting down to work. Speaking of which,the centrifuge is now available, and I must get back to my experiment. So long for now! Pixie
