Last Full Day at Columbia

Today was the final day of class for all of us so a bittersweet atmosphere permeated the proceedings. The entirety of our final class was devoted to presenting the projects that we’ve been working on this past week. These presentations went fairly well in my opinion; the groups worked together really well and the fact that the audience turned out to mostly be fellow classmates allowed the presenters to feel relaxed. It was interesting to see the wide variety of projects that the other groups had been assigned as they varied from using a bomb calorimeter to check the calorie counts of various foods, to observing the effects of salinity on coral pigmentation. Although it’s always difficult to end things, hearing about all the different experiments that our classmates performed seemed like an appropriate note to end the class on.

After class wrapped up, I had my last meal in the dinning hall with a group of chemistry students. Once the final round of goodbyes had been said I went up to my room a took a nap for a few hours. There was a dance for the parting students which I attended for an hour or so although I’m not particularly fond of dances. On the positive side, I never fail to be entertained by the glow effect that backlights have on white fabric. After I left the dance I picked up some pizza and headed up to my room for my last night in the dorms. 

After I finish the blog I intend on getting a head start on packing up, and sleep is no longer of much concern as I’ll have plenty of time for it in the next couple of days. We don’t need to be out of the dorms until noon tomorrow but still need to wake up at a reasonable time because the water in my dorm will be shut off after nine.

As I sit here at my desk I realize that I’ve really grown used to Columbia in the last three weeks. It certainly doesn’t feel like three weeks have passed since I arrived, although I’m having difficulty in deciding whether it feels like more or less time has passed. On the one hand, it feels like I’ve spent months here and I don’t mean that in a negative way, I mean that I’ve really gotten used to it here. On the other hand I feel like my time here has simply flown by and I’m left wondering where those three weeks I supposedly spent here have gone. I’ll reflect further after I get back but before I go I’d just like to reiterate my sincerest thanks to everyone who’s made my attendance here possible. I’d also like to apologize for the quality of my blog posts as I realize that they’ve often been very choppy in terms of sentence structure and just unclear in general. Please don’t take them as indicative of the general quality of my writing, but rather the effects of sleep deprivation on writing.