Anna: My Life as a Student

The alarm beeps on the offbeat of the wind chimes being blown about by the 60mph wind. It is only 5:15a.m. Time to jump out of bed and pull on three layers that are required to walk to the barn without freezing. The stars are the only lights on campus and mine are the first footprints to be made on the newly fallen snow. Inside the barn the calves moo in desire for milk and the cows udders are full and in need of milking. The crew trickles in slowly; yawning and wishing it were breakfast time but ready to work. By 6:30 all of the work is done and Pete the farm manager pats my back with his shovel-sized hand.

By 11:45 I close my physics book and trudge off to Molecular Genetics with Leslie Frothingham. Leslie hands eppindorff tubes to all seven of us and tells us to practice with them before we use them on the 200-dollar a vile enzymes that we will use to cut DNA. An Eppindorff tube is like a pipette but it can measures volumes that go as small as one millionth of a liter. My lab partner, Arran Bardige, and I feel cocky and decide that we don’t need any practice. We suck up five micro liters (The equivalent of a small water droplet) of the Hindi III enzyme and get ready to insert it into a mix of wheat germ DNA, Eco R1 enzyme, blue dye, and a buffer. We are successful and we next put the concoction in a centrifuge to spin it down and mix it up. We next suck this mix up, 15 micro liters, and insert it into a gel that we made last class. After we run electrical charge through it for about 45 minutes we will be able to see the DNA and where the enzymes cut it. But class is over and it is time to go eat some of J.D.s cooking.

After a relaxing lunch with friends it is time for my daily crossword battle with Tim Whittemore, a math teacher. Every day, at 1:00 we race to do the New York Times crossword and today, I win. Creative writing begins at 1:30 and Chris Bagg always starts class with a poem. Today’s is Beowulf. The edition he brought in is a direct copy of the old English and is completely incomprehensible. “Write a translation.” He says. We stare at him in awe and then go at it. None of the poems are coherent but they have brilliant phrases like Bubbling Bisons Meditate. By 3:00 it’s time to head back to my dorm and get my wraps for boxing with Harry. The weight room is above the barn and about a five-minute walk from main campus.

“Slip, slip, jab, cross, under, jab, hook, pull, cross, slip, hook.” That’s a common sequence of offense and defense in boxing and Harry is trying to make it natural and instinctive in us. We get conked on the head a bit and the mouth guards don’t taste very good but there is nothing I have found in sports that is comparable to the satisfaction of completing a sequence elegantly, fast and accurately. Not that I want to become a professional boxer or anything, but you can be sure that next year in New York, you will be able to find me in a small gym in the mornings, sparring with other amateurs.

At 4:50 it’s time to go to orchestra with Harry’s wife, Inès. I am all sweaty and am sure my stand partner Francisca (an assist student from Germany) is sitting far away from me because of it. We start to rehearse Mozart’s clarinet concerto and between watching Inès’ conducting and listening to the music I am sure that I want to join Columbia’s orchestra.

A quick dinner to give me sustenance and then it is off to blacksmithing. The forge is warm and I peel of my winter layers until I am in my Carharts and T-shirt. I pick up the half made axe I am making for one of my friends in a cabin and thrust it deep under the hot coals. The mettle has to heat up to about 15000 degrees before it is malleable enough to work with and in the mean time I talk to my teacher about WWII history and whether or not William the Conqueror was a brilliant tactician. After an hour and a half of hammering and shaping the blade my arms are tired and my hands newly blistered. I leave the forge content hoping that somewhere in Manhattan there lives a blacksmith, though I am not hopeful.

I reach my room at eight and do homework until ten or ten thirty. I take a quick shower and fall into bed with my muscles aching pleasantly and my mind sufficiently exercised. Though, I can’t seem to fall asleep right away. I think about next year and wonder if I will ever be able to enjoy doing such a variety of things ever again. I think not. Once at engineering school it will be all math and physics (something which I will love.) and some sports and music. All the rest of it? The farm, blacksmithing, poetry, working in kitchens, sing; I won’t have time or there will be no place. Putney has allowed me to try a myriad of activities and fall in love with almost all of them. I know now, better than ever through this where I want to concentrate but I also understand so much more about things I may have at one time or other found insignificant. As I finally fall asleep I just hope that after my schooling is over that I can go back to some of the things that I learned to love here at Putney.

Anna with friends at Snow Ball 2006