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.
I leave the CS 250 lecture in a hurry to get home. My algorithms problem set is due at 8PM, and I barely have enough time to solve the remaining problems (let alone write up a formal proof). I sit down and blast music in my ear, and try to get some thinking done (this was before reasoning models were a thing). Some weeks, I scrape together something coherent; other weeks, I can only apologize to the TAs who had to read it.
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.
We sit down for dinner at Windsor, Wiley or Ford; we have bundles of homeworks to do and I'm really hoping for it to be quick. Sahir (usually) pulls up the countries quiz and we prove to ourselves that we can still name them all (we did this a few days ago). We move on to other random quizzes and keep going down the rabbit hole until the dining court closes.
We're in the Frieda lounge in the middle of the floor, mostly people-watching while we wait for Leon and Ricky to walk over from Cary. From the window, we watch them make slow, steady progress toward us. Once they arrive, we make little progress on work and end up playing many, many games of GeoGuessr on the subscription I accidentally bought.
Allen and I spam-call Ricky from outside the Cary Southeast doors until he finally lets us in. We climb the stairs to his closet of a room, and we play FIFA until we’ve run our usual set of vocal stims completely into the ground.
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 Allen and Atharv over text).
I put on my $15 cleats and start kicking the ball around as people slowly trickle in. It feels like every corner of my college life converges onto one field -- Atharv, Zafeer, Lewis, and Sahil are here; so are Ricky and Allen. Richie from BoilerMake shows up, Harmya is around, and sometimes Visv and Soham pull up too.
We get our tickets just in time for the newly released horror movie to start; as usual, sitting next to Ram is scarier than anything happening on screen. After it ends, we deal with Sahil's bait and spend most of the walk back to Atharv’s place arguing about it.
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 Sunday, and homework grading is due tonight. I have 75–100 messy proofs to get through, each one somehow more ragebait-y than the last. I yell in the TA Slack and regret ever agreeing to grade homeworks weekly.
I pack up from Dudley’s student orgs area and walk over to the Knowledge Lab, where Anika is usually busy making something; I settle in nearby and interrupt her focus every five minutes with new forms of sheer stupidity.
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 long walk around campus with no destination in mind -- sometimes Slayter Hill, maybe boba in Chauncey, horticulture park, the VOSS model, or the engineering fountain. One of us (not naming anyone) gets cold, so we building hop home.
We grab Chipotle for dinner and carry it over to the 3rd floor in Rawls. We eat while playing Imposter, then convince ourselves that we also need boba before we can study. After a quick Tsaocaa run, we come back and focus for the next few hours. Later, I make the quick bike ride down Pierce Street to see Anika.
The only message in the group chat is “Stew”. I head to the third floor of the Stewart Center. One by one, everyone starts showing up until the table is suddenly full. That becomes our hangout spot for the day. It's equal parts lock in and equal parts uselessness.
Soham and I bike to class in the morning. We spend most of it talking about new features for Tensara, then settle in at Dudley afterward to work on them. Ricky meets us at the Starbucks on the way to Stew and we also spot our favorite professor around.
I make my eggs in the morning and pick up my bike from Hub. I make the quick ride over to Anika’s apartment before heading to campus. She’s usually in the middle of Choccotini stuff, but somewhere in the chaos asks if I want coffee. I say yes, hang around for a bit, and eventually realize that I'm late for my meetings.
I bike over to Rawls and help Anika set up the Choccotini pickups by the windows. Lots of people stop by -- customers, BoilerMake friends; I try to make myself useful while she remembers every order and somehow has a full conversation with each person.
I pack up in Lawson late at night and bike back to Anika’s apartment, trying to beat my PR each time (my best was around six minutes). Granted, most of these attempts happened around 3 AM, when there were no cars or pedestrians to stop me from jaybiking -- but I’ll take it.
Before leaving Rawls for the night, I fill the Slurm queue with as many experiments as I can think of. I wake up the next morning to a wall of completed jobs waiting for me. Most of the results are useless, but at least I now have several new plots to stare at all day.
- 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! ↩