When graduate students go bad.

[JVS]

I was at the bar with my friends last night and the topic of the Friday afternoon number-theory beer, or as I like to call it "Number beery" came up. One of my friends remembered that last spring an e-mail had been sent out to the list of participants requesting that behavior be toned down a bit. This situation was brought about by the tendency of some students to show up an hour or more before the stated time of 5:30pm. In fact, since this bar offered a $1 T-bombs on Fridays (a mixture of Red Bull and Cyclone brand rum), students often used this as an opportunity to get drunk cheaply. Problems arose when professors and post-docs would come to shed light on number theory, but found only tables of drunkards. Even so, the topic of conversation tended to stick to math until after the serious people left. The drunkards would then stay there until near midnight. The email was sent out after two particularly strange events. First, an exchange student from Bulgaria accidentally spilled beer on another bar patron and nearly got the number theory group into a brawl. Then once a student invited some homeless biker guy to come along. This biker kept calling one of the older members of the faculty 'Pops'. Anyway, I thought I'd share this story with the lounge.

[JVS]

1. Shit. I figured you guys would eat this up and tell similar tales.

[evlbstrd]

2. Don't drink and discuss math?

[JVS]

4. I thought the moral of the story was not to set up semi-serious...

academic events at bars on Friday afternoons, especially not bars with good specials.

[tigereye]

16. is this really anything new?

I seem to remember lots of these types of things in undergrad and grad. But then, I was an English and counseling student. ;)

[alarcojon]

6. Don't drink and derive?

[evlbstrd]

7. Excellent!

[seemunkee]

3. I drink alone, but that drunken math discussions sound fun

[JVS]

5. Yeah, but when the math stuff was done was when the fun really started.

[hunter]

8. What about the naked people?

That's how these things always ended when I was in college.

The best one I ever went to was in San Diego, it had something to do with keeping electronic equipment alive in marine environments. The bar closed and a few of us wandered over to this grad student's apartment. I don't remember exactly how I got there, but I woke up on her floor next to a big ass motorcycle.

[JVS]

9. The math department suffers from an acute shortage of females.

Thus nakedness really doesn't come onto the agenda.

[hunter]

15. That's why I changed my major from engineering to biology...

I was in an electronics class, and there were two women and maybe thirty men. One woman dropped out the second week because all the guys talked about was cars. They actually talked about women too, but not when the women were around. The other woman could talk about cars.

I changed my major shortly after that. In biology women outnumbered men.

[JVS]

18. I switched to German

We have 18 Grad students. 5 men

[Runcible Spoon]

12. LOL! Ok, I'll share a story...

mind you, I wasn't at this particular field school, but I've heard from several of the grads who WERE there that this actually happened. Apparently a bunch of grad students were on a field school to Belize, doing an archeological dig. They caught wind of this ancient indigenous ritual, a ritual so sacred that it had never before been practiced by the White Man. SO one late, dark night, they gathered together the necessary material elements to conjure the ancient magic: tequila, and a funnel! The first initiate was a young woman, 24 years old. She slowly lowered her skirt to reveal her buttocks. Two other young grads volunteered as neo-shaman, and inserted the funnel into her rectum. Down her ass slid about 4 shots of tequila, thus initiating her into the sacred ritual: Belizian Tequila Enema! Needless to say, they all discovered the origin of the condition known as "Montezuma's Revenge" the next moring! :evilgrin:

[JVS]

13. Wow. And I thought we were degenerates!

[Runcible Spoon]

14. nobody ain't got nuthin' on the anthropologists!

'nuff said. :evilgrin:

[Runcible Spoon]

10. blah! We make a rule NEVER to talk shop whilst imbibing...

inebriating substances! that's like a mechanic taking a lugwrench to his wife's nipples during sex. Some things are sacred, beer being one of these things! I firmly suggest you adopt this policy! I mean, once we grad students get going, it can get pretty wild. PLUS I play rugby so between my choice of sports and my academic career, I'd say my liver gets a pretty good workout on those afterclass friday social hours.

[JVS]

11. Well for number-theory beer, the whole point is to discuss math over beer.

On other nights when we congregate the rule is, math may be discussed but books and papers are not to make an appearance.

[tigereye]

17. I love the image, though,

of you folks drawing drunken equations, kinda like the physics folks.