1. Even when the tea is free, people will reuse teabags when the tea is a floor down but there’s a hot water dispenser right down the hall.
2. Mountain Dew is, in fact, the breakfast of champions.
3. The signs that say you can’t have beverages in the computer lab don’t apply after 8 PM.
4. There is no such thing as too much orange juice.
5. The only problem with storing beer in the office fridge is that you’ll inevitably forget about it for six months and the cap will get rusty.
6. Washing your coffee cup is optional.
7. Unless you take your coffee with cream; then it’s not.
8. Especially if you don’t empty your cup at the end of the day.
9. If that day is a Friday, then god help us all.

Doctorate qualifying exams. Imagine that grad school is like a fraternity; qualifiers is our version of a hazing. It comes from a somewhat bygone era when intellectual inquiry was the main reason people went to get graduate degrees. And maybe there was indeed such a time that existed when people didn’t mind taking 6 months off their regularly scheduled lives to complete a 12 page research proposal that they fully intend to never carry out. Or maybe professors just want us to go through the exact same hysteria-inducing pain that they went through half a century ago (ok, maybe just 3 decades).

Either way, I have 12 pages of science stuff to write over the next 3 weeks. I could try working from my apartment and inevitably get nothing done, I could go to the school library (which I adore and love to death), but all of those will probably get old after a few couped up days. So I figure that while I’ll go to the library in the evenings/nights, this might be a good opportunity to scout out all those lovely coffee & tea houses in the city that I would never go to otherwise once I’m full time in the lab.

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