The IT Student Blog

The coffee machines at ITU are always running warm. People seem to be drinking coffee all the time. Breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, evening meal, fika, night-coffee… 24/7, coffee, coffee, more coffee.

I belong to the smaller category of tea drinkers, who don’t understand why someone would choose coffee over a cup of nice-smelling tea. Actually, there are quite nice flavours at the uni, and of course I’ve tried all of them.

However, in recent times I’ve been quite tired and thought about the solution of having a cup of coffee.

Can coffee make wonders?

Well, to be sure I made lots of it.

The first sips were lovely. It felt like magic! The energy slowly came to me as the coffee spread throughout my body and brought every cell back to life.

Just because it felt so good, I ran to make another cup of coffee.

And another one.

But, when the black gold was all absorbed in my body I started to feel weird.

What the hell! When I thought I discovered the cure to fatigue, my hands started shaking. My face became white and I felt like I had fever. Warm, yet cold and very soon really sick.

The dark side of coffee! Obviously it’s a stronger drug than I thought it was. No wonder people get addicted to it when taking smaller doses. You guys who are standing in front of the coffee machine: BE AWARE!

Keep it clean around you. Clean spaces are good, because your eyes are more likely to stay on the task you’re doing. Having a mess around you will cause a mess in your head as well.

Drink water. Keeping your brain in a cool bath of fluids really helps it absorb more information.

Make it fun. Taking notes in coloured pens or listening to music can really help eliminating the dull atmosphere that comes with strict studying. Eating candy is also a good thing as you will associate your studies with something you like.

Take small steps. When there’s too much to do, it’s easy to just make it worse by not knowing where to start and thus lose control over the situation. When losing control you’re more likely to give up. But instead, try starting out taking small steps. You’ll then see that small steps take you far and in the right direction.

Try your best. If you think that you’ll fail your exam or what else it may be, you will do so. That attitude makes you give up already before you have given it a chance. But by trying you’ll always get nearer and nearer a pass. And even though you might fail the first times, you have gained knowledge during the way there and it will get easier for each time you try.

Some students at the IT-University never seem to run out of energy. They’re fully charged from early morning to late at night and work like there was no tomorrow. You imagine that most of them are busy chatting, as you notice the sound of high-speed typing fingers. They can’t be working… seriously. And it’s not that astonishing to stay alert while communicating with friends and loved ones over the Internet! So, you sneak behind their backs to get at glimpse over the numbers of messenger windows that are up on their screens, but what you actually see is lines and lines of code… Not really what you had expected! You start to feel slightly nervous and to ease your worries you inconspicuously search for the battery hatch on their bodies. But there are none to be found! The peculiar students ARE humans. Not robots or cyborgs or anything else.

So what in the world keeps them going?

Well, one qualified guess is the fuel they get from the coffee machines. IT-students can fill their cups with anything from the list below for free:

• Kaffe
• Mocka
• Choklad
• Cacao Crème
• Chocoffee
• Wiener Melange
• Cappuccino
• Café Au Lait
• Caffé Latte
• Macchiato
• Tevatten

One or more beverages in the list seem to increase your programming efforts. I don’t know which one yet. Do you?