Libraries, late nights, and LOTS OF FUN

On Tuesday morning, roughly 20 hours after I handed in my masters thesis, one of my 8-year-old math students looked at me thoughtfully and said, "Are you wearing make-up?"
Me, baffled and feeling like a post-deadline zombie: "No."
Child: "Really? Because your eyes are purple."

Sigh. The brutal honesty of childhood. But I'm proud of my eyes' purple bags (especially if an 8-year-old fashionista thought I'd made them on purpose!) because they represent a long-lasting, challenging, and super-fun engagement with a stack of teaching manuals about how to teach science on the blackboard, written in the 1900s. These dusty books kindly let me massage them into a 14,871-word thesis over the course of four months, culminating in a goofy collection of blackboard-related quotes from the late 19th century and 15 pages of sample blackboard drawings from the teaching manuals.

But of course, as for any long-term endeavor, the journey matters more than the destination, and my four months (really only two, since the term break happened in the middle and I did more traveling than typing...) of research, reading, writing, and re-writing were an absolute joy. My great friend Rike (Ree-ka. German.) was working on her thesis too, and we holed up in the tiny Clare Hall library for days on end, wrapped in wool blankets (Clare Hall turns off its heat in April. Seriously.) and surrounded by books and papers and random friends we managed to convince to join us in scholarly silence. Rike and I really moved in, bringing tons of (forbidden) food and coffee into the library and stacking sweaters and scarves on the table. We commiserated about low word counts, distracted supervisors, confusing books, and the inadequacies of the English language (Rike more than me on that one. Can you imagine writing a thesis in your second language?!). We took breaks to watch EuroVision and Britain's Got Talent. It was SO FUN to share that intense focus, regardless of the fact that she was studying the linguistics of second language acquistion and I was studying hundred-year-old blackboard manuals.

When I couldn't take our little library anymore, or when Rike had something to do and couldn't come, or when I had a meeting with my supervisor, my laptop and I would trek to my department's library. There I shared the same commiserations with my coursemates, who were studying everything from Darwin's religious beliefs to the history of back pain to the history of counting to the ethics of recruiting women as egg donors. No matter the topic, we all needed support, sympathy, coffee breaks, and advice (e.g. "What's another word for 'therefore'? I've used it four times in this sentence..."), and doing seemingly solitary work in a social (though silent) environment makes it so much fun. We even took over a seminar room in the department, so that when the library closed at 5:30PM we all trooped down to the seminar room, waved at the professors as they left for the day, and hunkered down to write until the wee hours. The spooky feeling of being in an ancient building at night bound us together and heightened our sense of community as a class (although honestly I'm not sure that staying late heightened our word counts... we did a fair amount of goofing off too.).

Now comes a week of rowing (May Bumps (which happens in June...) continues one race per day til Saturday), followed by a week of partying (May Balls (which happen in June...) are humongus end-of-the-year parties held by each college, with formalwear and fireworks and lots of alcohol). Cambridge seems to follow a "work hard, play hard" lifestyle, and I feel so lucky to get to share both work and play with the amazing people here.