Students around campus

It's the second week back after the Christmas holidays and I've just noticed the difference: the undergraduate students are back. As a postgraduate, you sit in your little office every day, working away at some sums or other without the slightest idea of what is going on in the world around you except that which you can gleam from the BBC news website. On occasions, you hear someone walk past your door or overhear a conversation further down the corridor, but in general, that's it for social communication.

Until some strange things start to happen. These strange things aren't easy to place, though they do have some noticable perculiarities associated with them: at the end of every hour of the working day (between, say, 9am and 6pm) there is always a large number of people chatting happily away down the aforementioned quiet corridor; the queue at the shop grows longer; posters spring up all over campus advertising things that no postgraduate would ever be interested in; meetings with supervisors are interrupted by knocks on the door and talk of coursework; the common room is full of people playing on their lap-tops and discussing their marks from last semester's exams; all the computing laboratories are full; there is no coke left in the can machines; there are more people to generally get in the way...

...and it was only today I figured out that it was because of the undergraduates. I am yet to decide whether having them around is a good or a bad thing. On one hand, it does tend to make things a bit more exciting — it's nice to walk across campus and see people not worrying about their lack of results or someone who has obviously not slept for the last six days because of a looming deadline and a silly amount of coffee. On the other, though, it makes things a little more raucous and concentration becomes a very hard skill to execute properly. There's also the marking thing that can occasionally get in the way.

All in all, then, this point will have to remain undecided for future reference.