Tag: Ask-the-Students

Image: © geralt, Pixabay License, Source.

MUSE asked students to anonymously submit their opinions on which UNIL faculty or department is most likely to survive a zombie apocalypse. Here are the answers we got from them and I can tell you that there are great ones ! Enjoy! (And maybe you should think about it too… Just in case…)

Answers

The med students’ ego alone would help them last a while. They would survive on sheer self-confidence lol

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The students in Cinema, they’ve probably seen all kinds of zombie movies tbh, so they’re definitely prepared. In second place I would put the students in the Faculty of Biology and Medicine, maybe they can come up with some sort of cure? Also, maybe people in Linguistics could find a way to communicate with the zombies! (I think I might be going a bit far) I would also like to add the honorable mentions of who would NOT survive the zombie apocalypse: students in Law and Criminal Justice (do I need to explain?), and students in the History department (I’m not sure how knowing about old coins, texts and buildings is going to help them). However, and this is my conclusion, I think that if students in Arts were stuck in the Anthropole during the apocalypse, you’d just find them chilling in the cafeteria with a coffee :)

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As a new Faculty of Arts student, I don’t know a lot about other faculties, but I do believe the ones with a better chance of survival would be the ones with the building that can be more easily turned into a survivalist bunker. That being said, the Anthropole would be the first to fall, too many entries, too long to create a flanking team, too many windows that can easily break. The winner would then be the Biophore (and therefore what I suppose is the biology faculty). The square building is easy to patrol around, the scaffolding like structure is perfect for high ground defence, not that many entrances AND they have all the equipment (and hopefully knowledge) to study the happenings. They would just need to put their adversities apart and try to organize a perfect equalitarian anarchistic community where each one could use their talents for the best. That’s my bet.

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I would say the Philosophy section, if these guys are not afraid of Kant then what a few zombies could do against them ?
Also, have you ever read Hegel ? Anyone who has the dedication to try for hours to understand his writings must have the patience and resources to find food and shelter through the apocalypse as well as the meaning of life…

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• Med school students are already quite similar to zombies so they wouldn’t really perceive any difference
• Biology students would probably attempt some shady experiment on a few captured zombies in an attempt to identify the cause. Plot twist : it doesn’t end well for them.
• HEC students would be too drunk to fight back and gradually succumb to the plague. Maybe organize regular burials for their fallen comrades during which they would party even harder.
• Students from the Faculty of Forensic Science would react quickly to the plague and organize a bastion of resistance hand in hand with the students from the faculty of social and political sciences, the students from the department of theology and the ones from Law school. With time, different enemy factions emerge within the bastion based on the students’ self-assigned Hogwarts houses and a civil war breaks out, causing them to retire into separate headquarters from which they lead a war against each other while defending themselves from the tides of zombies harassing them.
• While engaged in the civil war, known by many as “The Sorry Chasm of the Dorigny Faculties”, the survivors from the Faculty of Theology develop their own cult which is centered around the worshiping of comparative linguistics between languages, the consumption of mate beverages, and insomnia. The other faculties quickly catch up on this new religion.
• Students from the Letters faculty initially get lost within the maze of Dorigny buildings (rendered even more confusing and twisted by the end of the world raging everywhere). After a while, some of them appear as wise hermits who mysteriously roam within the ruins of the academic campus in a search for existential purpose. Other students refer to them as “bookworms” and look at their frenzied peers with a mix of curiosity, awe, and distrust.
• It is rumored that Unil had a faculty of geosciences prior to the apocalypse, yet most would ditch this assertion as a mere urban myth.
• Although leading the resistance against zombies at the onset of the apocalypse, what happened to Unil teachers after the “Reprography incident” is anybody’s guess, really…

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The biathletes. Cardio to run. Skills to shoot.

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Benjamin Pickford. He apparently does a lot of cycling and could ride away quickly into the mountains.

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Boris Vejdovsky. He would start lecturing and hold the zombies enthralled.

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Anyone with a lockable office door… for a while….

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Cinema students, obviously. I mean, most of us are prepared for any type of scenario (+ as most of cinema students have terrible daddy issues with Pedro Pascal, you can be sure that we’ll be ready in case of a ‘Last of Us’ type of apocalypse)

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Lettres, ’cause they would barricade themselves in Anthropole using books… they might as well be useful for something !

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I think the Archaeology students could have a very strong potential! Indeed, their sharp little tools could be used as deadly weapons. In the same way, the habit of some history of art teachers to stick a knife in the heart of their students for not being good enough could turn to their advantage in such a situation. And let’s not forget theatre students who would be able to make great zombie impressions and, thus, be accepted as part of them.

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*Language errors have been edited for clarity

Image: ©️ Montage put together by Lex Rodriguez with “Day 23 – Exam hall” by jackhynes is marked with CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. and “(245/365) Mwah shhh ponder” by Sarah G… is marked with CC BY 2.0.

Ever (gasp!) cheated on an exam? Ever seen someone else cheat? Or did you ever fail miserably and dramatically at an exam? You’re not alone! UNIL students tell us all about their scandalous secrets and epic fails surrounding their past exams. Don’t tell anyone!

✍?
“For some reason, when I was a kid, my classmates always thought I was really good at tests so they always wanted to copy my answers. However, growing up, I very quickly developed a very adult-looking and not always very legible hand-writing which prevented others from copying my answers and these kids had the AUDACITY to ask me to write more legibly so they could copy my answers. Shaking my head.”

?️‍♂️??
“Not me but a friend, who cheated on a German written exam so hard that they got a team of friends to help them: They wore long, baggy clothes under which they had set up a receiver for an earpiece (FBI-style), as well as a concealed camera which could capture images of the test sheet. One friend would get a streamed video of the camera’s feed and work on answering the questions in German. Another friend worked with a microphone to transmit the answers to my friend who would then copy them out. Two other friends were there to stand watch and make sure that the relay team wasn’t found out by the examiners. They ended up passing their exam :)”

?
“To this day after years here I still put my name where I have to put my surname and vice versa. But worst of all I put my student number where the teachers should put my grade”

??
“When i still was in middle/high school, the best strategy was always the post-it note on the chair, in between the thighs. Just slightly spread your legs, and poof, get all the knowledge you need.”

?✔
“My high school math teacher was too lazy to give us test sheets, so she’d always just tell us to bring a pad of sheets of paper. A few times we had to learn proofs of theorems by heart, so just copied those demonstrations on the last pages of the pad, and discretly check those out. I even once directly used a sheet with the proof pre-written and turned that one in.”

??
“I don’t know why, but during a preparation for my oral exam I found out that my phone was still in my pockets. I was prepared so I didn’t use it but I still sent snaps to all of my friends telling them about it. I was much more worried about hiding it once I entered the class LOL”

???
“I had my very first oral exam ever in 32 years of life this past exam session. I was really nervous for weeks leading up to it. The morning of the exam, about 10 minutes before go time, I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air on an Anthropole 5th floor balcony. I was nervous & distracted, & figured I should check to see if the door automatically locks from the outside after it was already closed. I locked myself out in the cold until the supervising prof came by and kindly let me back inside…. so beware of balconies with no ash trays!”

???
“I’m a nightowl, which means my alarms are set pretty late in the morning since I go to bed pretty late too. So, I had a written exam once starting at 8am. Around 10am I start hearing some Billy Joel music, and I was like ‘oh someone is listening to Billy Joel outside, NICE!’ and then it occured to me that it was my alarm coming from my phone in my backpack that was chilling against the wall x)”

???‍♂️
“I’ve always been terrible in maths. In high school the day I was going to pass my oral math exam I got to school early and ran into my maths teacher and the expert who was this little old man who seemed very kind. My teacher introduced us and told him that I was going to pass my exam with them later in the day, and I looked at the expert and told him ‘I’m really sorry for what you are about to witness.’ He laughed and with a sweet smile and look in his eyes answered that he was sure it was going to be okay and that I was just stressed out. I tried to explain to him that I wasn’t and that I simply already knew I was going to fail big time, and he wouldn’t believe me. Fast forward to my exam. It was going so bad, the little old man was growing more desperate and impatient and restless by the minute. He must have stood up 3 or 4 different times to come to the blackboard and correct everything I was doing wrong while growing frustrated at my lack of skills. My maths teacher was laughing the whole time. He knew how bad I was and I guess he was expecting this entertainement hahaha”

?❓❔⁉?
“During a written exam I once noticed another student acting a bit sketchy. I couldn’t quite figure out what they were doing and to this day I’m still not sure. They had a bunch of small cheat sheets, and they also seemed to be filming or taking pictures of their paper with a small device (it looked too small to be a smartphone, might have been an old timey phone or an iPod), while holding their exam sheet upside down for some reason (?!). They also kept looking around them which made them look extra conspicuous. An invigilator eventually noticed their strange behaviour. When I got out of the exam and met up with classmates I asked them if they had noticed and if they had understood what the heck was happening, turns out they were just as confused as I was :’) It shall remain a mystery.”

?
“It’s always a kinda funny when you meet a classmate for the first time at a department-wide end-of-year exam, and you had never seen them at any of the compulsory courses in the department. How did they manage to get a better grade than I did when they hadn’t ever turned up at any lecture or class?”

?❌?
“So I turn up at this written exam, super stressed out because I know I haven’t memorised everything well enough. When I walk in the class everyone but me has big binders on their desks, and I notice they’re not putting them away when the exam starts. Turns out it was an open-book exam and I managed to miss the information, so I turned up with nothing but my pencil case ? (spoiler: I did not do well at that exam)”

??
“So for the maturité end-of-year exams we had all the 4-hours written exams in the span of a week (maths, French, English, German, option spécifique) and they all started early, and that meant I had to get up at 6 am to get there on time. My sleep schedule being terrible I never managed to get more than 5 hours of sleep for the whole week, and sleep deprivation causes me to fall asleep anywhere.
Long story short I feel asleep face first right on my table at each and every one of my written exams. An invigilator once came to check up on me, they were scared I had fainted or something. But I was just taking an accidental power nap, oops.
I passed all my exams nonetheless, so next time you find yourself nodding off during a long written exam, consider taking a quick lil power nap ;)”

??
“I fantasize about getting really, really high before an exam and acing it.”

??
“A cute anecdote: I was asked on a date after the exams in January by a guy I met once before and who was in the same exam room. He found my email address and emailed me right after the end of the exam. And now he is my boyfriend.”

*responses have been edited for clarity and length

Image: Construction de l’Anthropole, mai 1986. (Henri Germond © BUD), source.

In an effort to bring our dear campus closer to students, MUSE went on a quest to gather all the craziest, weirdest conspiracy theories about our beloved building, the Anthropole. Why was it built this way? Is it haunted?

We sent out a form to compile the rumours or made up stories about the Anthropole, and the replies did not let us down. Thank you to everyone who participated. Here you go ?

Rumours and fiction about the Anthropole

It was built this way to prevent students’ revolts.

The side stairs were used to play hide and seek.

The architect had a stroke while drawing the plans of the building.

I do wonder the number of people who had sex in the building…

I LOVE to think that at night there’s a ghost, the ghost of the faculty of Arts roaming in the floors (just like Helena Serdaigle), she likes to wander outside with the sheep as well. That’s why everybody likes the sheep. Also, she doesn’t like the students coming from EPFL, they don’t feel at ease in Anthropole and avoid coming :-)

It was built this way so people meet other people in a “random” way.

Breaking News: People were secretely scared of Anthropole, that is why They created Covid so students were allowed to have online classes which relieved so many.

The statues are actually people who worked on building Anthropole and who fell into fresh concrete.

This isn’t a rumour but there are showers in the basement and people totally have sex there.

The stairs move and change their pathways from years to years, just like in Hogwarts…

The architect had a stroke while drawing the plans of the building.

I’ve heard that the Anthropole was built like a labyrinth to avoid big crowds. There isn’t enough space to gather lots of people at the same place and theoretically you shouldn’t be able to make a revolution, lol. And there’s a bloody experimental lab in the basement, the place is scary and who knows what they’re doing down there.

You cannot go there between 1 and 1.30 am, I mean around the building. It’s just a rumour, I don’t know why…

The stairs were built that way so people would meet there and socialise… They must have forgotten about silently taking the lift.

It’s actually pretty much confirmed, so not technically a rumour but a fact. I heard that the way the Anthropole was built was to avoid student riots. For example the many different entrances means that one can’t block one entrance and keep people from going in, also the fact that the bathrooms are small means that students can’t meet in big groups to secretly plan a riot. When I mentioned this once a friend told me that after 1968, for a while all student buildings where built to avoid student riots. Other rumour (that is more like a rumour this time) : that the ground 0 is infamous for people who want to go have sex in a hidden place (I bet other people will bring that up).

It was intentionally built so people got lost.

We experiment on innocent students in secret labs in the basement floor (the locker rooms are a ploy) and no one ever goes there.

It’s Hogwarts (editor’s note: I wish it was.)

The stairs move and change their pathways from years to years, just like in Hogwarts…