Everyone in university has important details to keep in mind, be it the date of the next midterm, your next enrollment window, or the details of the study session that you just went through. For me however, I like to tell people I’m a pretty simple person. So I used the following picture to describe the things I personally keep in mind while at school.
As you can see, its pretty simple. Four boxes for the four major pillars that keep me going. There is a hierarchy to this image in that like in all things, studies should take priority because that is the reason you’re here at UCI after all. Studying itself is important to me because its like the key that will open up doors for you in the future. I like to think of studying as a way to make that key unique so that the doors that become available to you are ones that will fit your key. Thus, studying takes the highest priority in my mind.
Next on the hierarchy is socializing. This is also another important aspect of college like and is especially important for me because its friends that you learn which professor to take, what is most likely going to be on the final, and if the class is enjoyable or not. I used the logo of an app called Discord because that’s what my friends and I usually use to communicate albeit playing games together or just having a conversation. There was a recent series of events that really made me appreciate having friends in university that I will get to later in the post.
Down the hierarchy is food. Despite hearing some dorm mates complain about the food here, I feel like it was strictly better than what I was eating in high school so I’m not complaining. That being said I put food in my brain because there’s no better feeling than just sitting down, eating, and just talking with friends or studying. I often see people in the Anteatery studying because it has a moderate amount of noise that for some people helps them concentrate. On top of that eating food also keeps you alive so that’s also a nice bonus.
Lastly there’s arguably the most influential aspect of university life, sleep. The photo is also extremely accurate of what goes through my head whenever I head back to the dorm. The question is no longer “what time should I sleep” it has evolved to become “how long can I get away with sleeping” because at UCI, there is always things to do. Sleep is important because simply if your tired, your not learning and that would be detrimental to the most important part of this hierarchy.
Now, for that story that made me appreciate friends. This actually happened yesterday while working on a project for my BIOSCI 9B class that I took with a few of my friends. Being an online class, we didn’t need to go anywhere for our lectures but that’s besides the point. This project is essentially just to create your own food experiment and write a report on it and turn it in. Simple right? That’s because it is. My friends and I decided to extract red cabbage juice and utilize its sensitivity to pH to show the effects of making pancakes with different ingredients. We didn’t foresee the effect of boiling the cabbage which ended up causing the first and second floor of the dorm to smell strongly of cabbage. That was also the night that we learned that cabbage is not popular with the other people in our dorm. We had a lineup of ingredients to mix in like bananas, pineapples, almonds, and the strangest one, baking soda. The whole experiment was going well up until the final portion of the experiment. That was when someone in the group thought it would be a good idea to eat the pancakes that we made. Looking back, 3 of the 4 pancakes that we made were actually pretty good except the baking soda one. I can still taste it just typing about it. It was the unholy combination of way too much baking soda and pancake mix. Now you may be wondering why use baking soda? It was because there was no fruit or vegetable that we could think of that was basic enough to change the color of the mix. Almonds came close but the amount that we needed to even change the color slightly made it so that the pancake ended up being a brick rather than a pancake. Now back to this horrid creation, when you chewed that pancake, you could feel the granules of baking soda between your teeth. It was also beyond bitter and just overall an unpleasant experience. Sadly, one of the members of the group took the worst of it as he ended up having to run outside and throw up around a total of 8 times. So, for future reference, never use baking soda in pancakes or if you do, don’t eat it.
Zot On!
-Josh