Dice night

We have a bar on campus. It’s run by and for students, and I wasn’t actually aware of it before this semester. Which is weird, because they have really cheap beer.

You’ll rarely see people buying rounds in Norway, simply because beer in pubs is so insanely expensive. A 0,4 L glass ranges from £3,57 to £6,63 (and maybe even beyond), so if you bought one for each of your friends, well, you’d be pretty broke pretty damn fast.

In our campus bar, however, you get a 0,33 L bottle for £1,63. And yesterday night, you could get it even cheaper, if you were lucky. It was dice night.

Dice night is based on a pretty simple concept: you throw three dice, and whatever they show, is whatever you have to pay. It was loads of fun, but the danger of cheap beer when you’re used to high prizes, is that you drink more than you normally would have.

Which I think is why my head feels a bit tight today.

What? A life outside school?

Last semester, I experienced a couple of months where I didn’t really know any of the people I was studying with. The people I got to know during last year’s Mentor Week had all gone off studying Geology or Biology, and I rarely saw them around campus.

Then I got to know some people during labs, and things got a lot less boring. But I had developed this idea that campus was solely a place for study and lectures, and not somewhere to, possibly, have fun and be social.

Now I’m slowly trying to eradicate that idea from my mind. Today I had my first lesson with the Student’s Fencing Club, and tomorrow I’m going to a meeting to see if I can join the Chemistry Student Group. They need someone to fix up their website, and while I’m not exactly an expert, I think I know enough to take up that job.

Now to get time to actually study, when I’m also (still) looking for a part-time job.

Le sigh. Maybe I should try this going-without-sleep thing.

The woes of Chemical Thermodynamics

Y’know, while it’s fun to throw around words like isenthalpic and isochoric, I wish I had more than a fleeting understanding of what they mean.

Then again, as the CHEM210 professor quoted yesterday,

“The first time you read thermodynamics, you don’t understand anything. The second time, you think you understand it. And the third time you realise you haven’t understood it anyway, but the symbols are now so familiar, you’re not really worried.”

Tempus fugit

Or time flies, as we say.

I’m back in Bergen. Actually, I’ve been back for almost two weeks. Last week was spent juggling the responsibility of being a mentor for the first year students, with trying to find a part-time job. Being a mentor is not supposed to be hard. You’re just to lead them around on the different happenings, and try to encourage them in getting to know each other. Oh, and take them out drinking every night. Despite skipping my mentor duties Thursday and Friday, I was exhausted by Saturday, and once again missed the big SCIENCE PARTY.

Sounds like a right bottle of fun, eh? But actually, Mentor Week shows that Science students aren’t the dull geeks people like to stereotype us as. At least, counting by the amount of first year students in my mentor group who took their clothes off for extra points during the Saturday competition… All the nudity had me in a state of perpetual shock.

My boyfriend calls me a fifty-year-old librarian every time I pretend to be mad at him. During that competition, I felt very much like one. A prudish one, at that. I was just so worried that the mentorees were being pressured into doing stuff they normally wouldn’t, due to a mixture of peer pressure and alcohol. I still kind of am. I guess that makes me a dull geek?

Mentor Week was a lot of fun, though.

This week my studies started up with a bang. And with that, I mean something like a smack straight in the face with my two-ton Physics book. You know those sentences that pop up on TV and the like, often read from a heavy science book and supposed to illustrate how difficult a subject is?

Yeah. My Physical Chemistry book? Exactly like that.