The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell, Fall 2014 edition

In an effort to get caught up with my usual end of semester posts, I started thinking about what exciting things I did in the past semester . . . and I couldn't come up with anything. Well, not totally nothing, but not much. I spent a good portion of the semester in class, at office hours, working on problem sets, and generally not getting enough sleep. There were, however, some less mundane events. Here they are.

1. Intramural soccer – I played intramural soccer for my dorm again this fall. For whatever reason, interest in playing for the team was drastically less than last year, and at our last game, only three members of our team decided to show up. After we forfeited, we were initially going to combine the two teams to scrimmage but we didn't even have enough players for that, so we played world cup instead. To play, you have a goalkeeper and pairs of players all trying to get the ball into the goal for their team. Last person to touch the ball before it goes into the net is credited with the goal. If the goalie saves the shot, he kicks the ball back out onto the field. As the teams score goals, they leave the field and move on to the next round. The last team who hasn't scored is eliminated from the game and a new round starts with the remaining teams.

I ended up with one of the players from my house and we started out by almost getting eliminated in the first round. Almost, because then we got the ball into the net and moved on. And kept moving on until we reached the final round. We began the final playing two on three but to make the teams even, we added the third player from our dorm to our team. We won, which was a happy end to a frustrating season. And then I went to office hours.

2. Ice skating – During finals week, the pep band and the men’s and women’s ice hockey teams hosted a charity skating event at Lynah Rink. Although I have spent dozens of hours in Lynah, I had not yet ice skated there. In fact, I had not ice skated ever before in my life before deciding that I could not spend another hour studying for my orgo final and that I should take a break by going ice skating. The rink turned out to be pretty busy, but it was a lot of fun, and I would go ice skating again.

3. Madison Square Garden – Over Thanksgiving break, I went to MSG with the pep band again, except we won this year. It was a come from behind victory and completely worth the nine hours on a bus.

4. Thanksgiving – Although I was abandoned stayed voluntarily at Cornell for the Thanksgiving break, I still got plenty of Thanksgiving food. For lunch, I went with people from my dorm to one of the North campus dining halls  where they were holding a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Later that day, a couple (ChemE) friends and I were invited to another (ChemE) friend’s dinner. They had cooked at least half a dozen legitimate dishes, plus dessert. All the food was great, plus I drank the most alcohol I’d ever had at once. A whole three ounces.

Then there were the usual ChemE happenings: We stayed in Olin past midnight working on problem sets (over five straight hours). We had a late night dinner in which we discovered that a dish called the triple crispy consisted of two plates – one was a plate of rice; the other was a heaping plateful of a variety of fried meat. We set record low means on our prelims and finals (41% on the orgo final). We ate, worked, slept didn't sleep, struggled, lived, and hung out together, and we’re going to do it all again next semester.