Get started on work

You go pick up your laptop and a few textbooks (these you had gotten right before moving in), and return to the hall lounge, taking a seat next to Griffin. Christina, on the side, is demolishing some guy you don’t recognise at ping pong, while Annalise stands close by, getting a little handsy with him between points. Tatiana, still reading in the corner, occasionally looks up when Christina talks smack with the guy, visibly unimpressed.

You open up your course pages and look at the pile of assignments that are due sometime in the next week. There are five courses, each with homework - General Chemistry, Microeconomics, Intro to Psychology, a Writing Seminar, and Multivariate Calculus.

They were right. You really are a bit fucked, and you’re thankful that you decided to get some work in right now. Though you had some spare time in the hospital to get started on your readings for the Writing Seminar and Intro to Psych, and flipped through the first two chapters of the chemistry textbook, you haven’t had a chance to tackle the problem sets just yet. Noticing that the Calculus assignment will be due in class tomorrow, you decide to work on that first, and take a look at the problems online. After a few seconds, you close it and try opening the page again, certain that you must be on the wrong page, but the same thing loads again.

What’s on your screen isn’t calculus at all, but rather something about sets and their properties? The assignment asks you to prove some statements, which you vaguely recall doing in a geometry class many years back, but you’re not really sure where to begin with these.

“You’re looking a bit puzzled,” Griffin says, as you mutter a curse under your breath. “What’s up?”

“Nothing, just this calc homework is looking a bit weird,” you say. “I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”

“Oh crap, you’re doing multi right?” Griffin says, and you nod. “Yeah, a bunch of the people in our hall that were taking that class were complaining last week. Apparently the math department is trying to make all their courses ‘properly rigorous’, so you’ll be learning to prove why calculus works or something like that.”

“Why the hell would I need to know that?” you ask. “I’m just taking the course because it’s required for some of the majors I’m interested in.”

“Yeah, that’s what others thought too. I think half of the people in our hall who were in the class ended up dropping out. There’s no shame in doing it.”

“I’m not going to give up my major over a little extra work,” you say. “But thanks for the tip anyways.”

You return to your assignment, reading through the class notes (which are basically just pictures of the whiteboard - weirdly enough, the handwriting seems to change quite a bit with every slide, and you wonder if your professor’s got dissociative identity disorder). As you start to get your bearings, and complete the first problem, Christina, a little sweaty, plops down onto the seat next to you.

“I heard you talking with Griffin just now - you’re taking multivariable calc too?” she asks.

“Yep, was just starting on the problem set due tomorrow,” you reply. “Have you finished it?”

“I’ve actually only done the first half, because the guy I was working with - Lucas - dropped out of the class,” she says. She’s still breathing a little heavily from the exercise, and you admire the way that her breasts heave as she talks to you. In fact, from the small nubs you see through her shirt, it looks like she’s either got no bra or a very thin one. “Want to finish it up together now?”

“Sure,” you say, and the two of you get to work. It turns out that, despite having actually attended class, Christina doesn’t have a much better grasp of the material than you, and it takes you the better part of two hours before you finally finish, even having copied the first half from Christina’s solutions.

With that, you look at the clock and realise that it’s starting to get late. You say goodbye to the others in the lounge, and decide to head up to get some rest.

Griffin +5
Christina +5