It is really hard to put into words how awesome my experience at Purdue was, and I've been racking my brain trying to come up with a way to write this post. College is full of high-entropy moments, but it was defined just as much, for me, by the traditions that made it so hard to say goodbye. Here are a few! 1
It's 9 AM; I sprint to the shower. On the way, I bang on Leon's door loudly to wake him up. Ram freshens up as I get back. We run down the stairs and across the street to Earhart to (barely) catch the bus.
We try our best to convince Tejas and Sahir to stay, but it doesn't work. Five of us somehow fit on the futon in Joey's room, and the first hour is spent picking the horror movie itself. After a couple of movies, it's 3 AM and we're scared to walk across the hall back to our rooms.
I (unintentionally) wake my roommates up as I shower and get ready for my 7:30 AM math recitation in the morning (thankfully my first and last 7:30). I take the Silver Loop when it's dark out and reach the Physics building half awake. After an hour, I walk to Lawson where I get some breakfast and fall asleep on the side chairs.
It's Sunday morning; the floor is mostly silent -- Atharv, Tejas and I are the only ones awake. We gradually wake everyone up as it's Hillenbrunch time. A few of us stand in the long pancake line while the others find a table in the middle of the chaos.
We walk past Shreve and the IM fields, and take the back entrace to the gym. We do our (goofy) workouts, then head to Wiley for some chicken parm. More often than we'd like to admit, we catch the bus back instead of making the ten-minute walk.
I hurry over to the dining court to meet Soham and Visv. We discuss new ideas for our project and what all we wanted to get done today. We get the room in Krach behind the front desk and lock in.
Sahir and I get Chick-fil-A from downstairs and bring it up to the lounge. I grab a few extra sauces and add them to the tower on our windowsill.
We walk all the way to River Market to hang out at Atharv's apartment. We usually grab dinner and play poker or watch movies. Sahil, Sahir, Ram, and I make the freezing 2 AM trek back to campus.
I grab Windsor on-the-go and head across campus for my meeting in Lyles. The building is tucked away in the far corner of campus, and my desk is in a windowless room at the very end of it. I spend a while yapping with Afagh about progress and new ideas, then switch contexts and hurry over to MJIS to tell Marco about my latest experiments.
Leon and I print around hundreds of BoilerClasses flyers and split them between us. We spread them aggressively across busy hubs across campus: the underground Hicks library, Stewart center, staircases in residential halls, and even bathrooms in WALC.
It's a weekend morning -- I wake up earlier than usual and head to the gym. On the way back, I stop at Ford for a takeout box and bring it back to Cary just in time for the Chelsea game. I spent the next couple of hours eating and yelling at my monitor (and maybe Ricky and Allen over text).
I plant myself in Lawson commons with no real plans to leave. Some combination of (Soham, Ricky, Leon, Ram, Dwijen, Harmya) usually come hang out and get some work done. Whenever I need a break, I wander around and inevitably run into BoilerMake friends or people from 381, stopping every few minutes to say hi.
It's 10:30 AM, I'm in line waiting for Ford on-the-go to open while my optimization class has already started. I grab a sandwich, yogurt, some coffee and bike as fast as I can to Lawson. After class, Harmya and I sit in the glass rooms at the back to procrastinate on homework and work on Tensara.
I finish up my stuff and bike from Lawson to Winifred to see Anika. We take a walk around and gradually go back home.
- This is a live list -- when I wrote this, I definitely missed a few things (out of pure oversight). I'll add stuff here as I remember! ↩