The IT Student Blog

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. -Winston Churchill

I believe this quote illustrates 2nd year SEM student Justin’s thoughts when he first heard about the coffee withdrawal. In my eyes he’s a faithful coffee drinker, but more importantly, he’s vary of the students well being and the university’s reputation. Over a lunch session on the 4th floor, the following scenario takes place:

If the mess in the kitchens is the real reason for the coffee removal, what if we remove all the cups in the kitchen? Another student excitingly and eager to assist in the situation consolidates with Justin. Soon, a wild lunch idea transcends into a plan of action.

The action plan roughly outlines like this:

• Inform others
• Move all cups
• Display a note

In the midst of the heat, not every student is informed (probably due to the eagerness of saving the coffee), but on the contrary every single cup, clean and dirty, is removed from the SEM kitchen. On Friday morning just before lecture time roughly 40 3rd year SEM students are somewhat upset when realising there are no more cups. Words are frown here and there, the faculty/administration mistakingly have to take a bunch of them, but all in all everyone quickly seems to adhere to the drastic change. Ironically, few students believes the chaos is caused by other students.

Revolutionary? A little. Best of all though, the SEM kitchen still shines! There is certainly a will from the students side to keep the free-coffee marketing advantage/luxury/right and this is a perfect demonstration of will. If the change persists, then I for one want to hear the bad excuses for not keeping the coffee.

A few weeks back I had the following conversation with an old classmate on Facebook about our free fuel, coffee:

E: Ursäkta?!?! Free?? Vilket uni går du på?? (Excuse me?!?! Free?? Which uni are you attending?)

Me: E, Yupp – free selecta-machine coffee! Det är nice, men som sagt… inget slår färskbryggt. (That’s nice, but ofc, nothing beats newly brewed)

E: Okej, jag sadla till IT uppenbarligen. I Örebro har de uttrycket “Ocker som i tolv spänn koppen”. (Okey, I should change to IT apparently. In Örebro we use the expression “Usury as in 12 kr per cup”)

Me: Å andra sidan kanske det inte smakar svart gift? (On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t taste like poison?)

E: Bekant med uttrycket “gratis är gott”? (Familiar with the expression “Free is good”?)

And then I realised I had just finished another conversation about how extraordinary it is to have free coffee available!

Over my two years at uni I have still to find one other university in Sweden which offers their students free coffee. Admittedly I often use it for bragging about ITU and it often feels like I’m pointing a finger in my opponents eye. While continuing to describe the luxury available to us they not too rarely end up convinced they should have gone into IT instead.

Now all this is going to go away. By 2010 there will be no more coffee advantage.

While I understand that universities should not be compared solely on their ability to provide their students with free coffee, it is one of those things that makes ITU special and somewhat geeky. By removing the coffee machines the university will loose one (out of several I hope) competitive advantages.

So what is the reason for this sudden change? Watch this:

Not a clean kitchen (by mett)

Evidently the administration/teachers/other staff, who also uses the coffee machines, are tired of finding the kitchen in this state. I admit, so am I, and many with me. So what’s stopping students (and staff?!?) to bring their own coffee machines? According to insurance (or safety) rules these are not permitted on the premises. Eventually, we’ll all have to pay for our coffee like at any other Swedish university. How boring.

Students, get your act together:

• put your cup in the washing machine after you’ve used it
• help empty a washing machine once in a while
• remind your friends to do the same

and together we can show the administration once again that ITU actually is a kind of cool place to study at.

Ps. I forgot to say thanks to those I regularly see cleaning up in the kitchen (they refers to both students and staff)

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!

Battery level low. Please connect to power.

Plug in yourself into a high speed port and sense the power rising slowly; turning your lights on again. Blinking, gradually increasing in brightness. You don’t have to do anything, except resting there. Feeling the fuels spreading. Everything starts to work again. The fragments of information left in your brain begin to arrange into ordered lists. Rapidly there is room for new knowledge. New space available.

Through the radiant summer glow. Melt your impressions. Get new inspiration.

New battery. Fully loaded.

Ready to get there again and face new challenges. Now even better. Faster. Stronger.

Work It Harder Make It Better
Do It Faster, Makes Us stronger
More Than Ever Hour After
Our Work Is Never Over

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.

Once in a while I usually find myself in a discussion about productivity. The topics covered so far is broad and it is everything from that nifty python script to what kind of programming fuel you should take. Another not so uncommon discussion is about work environment.

First, let me give you a quick description of the facilities we have at the IT-university which I must say are very pleasant. The university is located in the midst of numerous respectful IT-companies (such as Ericsson, Sigma, and Findwise to name a few). Nearby are also several upper secondary schools where I think Ester Mossesson’s gymnasium is the most visited one by university students as they have a bakery with awesome “fika.” University staff, students and faculty is housed more specifically in renovated buildings originally used for building ships and today owned by Chalmers and part of Lindholmen Campus.

Cafées are perfect for reading and writing blogposts

What about the inside then? In the case of the Software Engineering and Management programme all bachelor students are found at the top floor. Each year has their own “square” and a number of group rooms to go with them. We have our own kitchen with plenty of microwave ovens for everyone and not that many forks (I’ll give you the fork-story another day). Due to the “square” idea students work in an open environment with plenty of possibilities to exchange wild ideas.

Obviously, working in open environments have both its advantages and disadvantages. It is amazing how quick ideas are shared, spread and elaborated upon when so many active brains are in the same square! Lately, however, I’ve found myself distracted by the working atmosphere all too often. It is not so much about lack of productivity, more so it is my creativity which is hampered. And for those of you who didn’t know already, programming is a lot about creativity. Thus, in my case when creativity is inflicted upon my productivity level decrease.

So I started a social experiment with myself and investigated areas where I can place my self in a “creative mode”. It turns out that environment is closely linked with what tasks at hand. Here is a list of a few tasks that I commonly do these days:

• Managing my mailbox: train or bus (I’m not used to my current mail load so it tends to get messy once in a while)

• Writing blog posts: café or other public space

• Updating the project’s Software Design Description: kitchen table

• Programming: Norton’s coffee corner (a corner of our square)

So, the open environment, the square; what happened to that? If found it to be a corner stone in my day-to-day communication. An equally important but perhaps less obvious task which doesn’t always come for free.

I wonder what it would have been like without our squares? Do have other examples of communication squares?

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?