The Epicness that is LTH

The engineering college at Lund University, LTH, is a very special place. I always get the feeling that the students are the ones who own it, and not the professors or administrators. Each department has a student group called a 'sektion', that takes care of student life in that department.

D-Sektion (dator = computer) has a pub on campus called Idéet:


The feeling towards alcohol is much more relaxed here. The drinking age is 18, so *everyone* can drink, and it's pretty much a normal part of everyday life. I recently took part in the Nordic Collegiate Programming Contest (my team beat out all of Iceland, BTW), and after the contest they gave us beer and sandwiches.

One side effect is that students often throw parties on campus. It's a great feeling to actually go out to a party that's in the same building where you take classes.

I'm sure this was on campus somewhere:


Tidbits

I have a pink jumpsuit. Each section has their own color, and students have jumpsuits of that color. D-Sektion (dator = computer) used to have brown jumpsuits, but that didn't work out, for obvious reasons. We eventually asked for another color, and got pink. We wear our jumpsuits to most of the student parties and events. D-Sektion's mascot is the Pink Panther.

They are good for dancing:

(Joel is in orange for fysik)

I know a bunch of songs, all in Swedish. Most of them are about how great D-Sektion is. For example: "Dator, dator, vi är LTHs elite, alla andra lukta skit, a ha ha ha ha!" which translates as "CS, CS, we are LTH's elite, all the others smell like shit, a ha ha ha ha!" Oh, the poetry.

LTH's elite:


I have swum in The Lake The Lake (sjön sjön), the filthy pond in the middle of LTH. This was part of Nollning.

There's a tiny island in the middle, The Island The Island (ön ön--trust me, i works better in Swedish):


Nollning

The first 6 weeks of the year are called Nollning, which is basically the freshman integration period. The best translation of nollning would probably be hazing, except that it's all extremely friendly, enormously fun, and the upperclassmen go to great lengths to help the new students integrate and feel at home.

Even though I'm not a real nolla, I took part anyways. The first thing that happened was the upperclassmen thew silly pink baseball caps at us. We were then instructed to wear these hats at all times.

Then they taught us to count to 4 in binary, (which has been a long time coming for me, let me tell you):


and showed us the punkt formation and associated song, which we had to perform many times over the coming weeks:


My favorite part of nollning was probably the Regattan. Basically, every section builds these floating things, often confusingly referred to as 'boats', and floats them out onto Lake Lake. Eventually a cannon goes off, and they do their best to destroy each other's boats.

Last year's Regattan:


This year's was *unbelievable*. The PhD students built a huge styrofoam replica of Lund Cathedral, complete with towers that they could move up and down. Huge is an understatement, I think it was easily the size of the a school bus. It was obliterated almost instantly when the cannon went off, but it was an amazing sight, even as it was being gleefully torn apart by some civil engineers.

Nollagasque

The culmination of Nollning is the Nollagasque, a big dinner party where the nolla finally get to ditch their retarded pink caps for proper Swedish student hats (mossor). A student's history is told by the rings (spegat) hanging from the tassel of his mossa. Mine has one pink spegat, signifying a year studing computer science. Nollagasque was epic beyond measure!

Here's one of the last pictures of me in my nolla keps, before becoming a real Swedish student:


A fancy dinner in Kårhuset, replete with comically slow service:


And here I am, not only a nolla no longer, but also enjoying delicious meat with farsan:


You're supposed to burn your pink keps when you get your real mossa, but I saved mine...



Don't tell anybody :-)