There's more to university life than just studies

By Tobi Bolanle

Be grateful to the students at Merton College, Oxford. If it weren't for them, the space-time continuum would be in serious trouble. And so would we. Fortunately, public-minded students at Merton, bent on saving the universe walk backwards around the college's Fellows' Quad, in the early hours of the last Sunday in October. This is their way of maintaining the space-time continuum during the change from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time. It's also an excellent excuse to drink as much port as possible throughout their reversed perambulations.

The second week in November is known as Raisin Weekend at St Andrews, the uni where third year students adopt first year students at the beginning of the academic year. During Raisin Weekend, adopted students show up at the homes of their "mothers" and "fathers" - at which point they're filled up with alcohol and dressed up in bizarre outfits. House parties break out all over town that weekend, and the festivities finish with a foam fight on the Monday.

Meanwhile, in the USA:

At the Massachusetts institute of Technology (MIT, to the rest of us) students' pranks, AKA "hacks" tend to happen under cover of darkness, leaving everyone there wondering how the hack was accomplished. One classic hack was to place a car painted to resemble a campus police patrol car on top of MIT's Great Dome Building.

Primal Scream can mean many things to many people: at Harvard University, back in the 1960s, it was a ten-minute screaming session the night before the beginning of exams. These days, it's not so much screaming as streaking, to the accompaniment of the Harvard University Band and the applause and cheers of onlookers, as students drop their drawers and run naked through the University.

The largest scavenger hunt in the world is organised at the University of Chicago, when teams of students have four days to track down random items and complete tasks that have been known to include "Get circumcised" and "Build a working nuclear breeder reactor". We're unable to confirm whether or not the circumcision took place, but two physics students did build a plutonium-producing reactor - in a shed on the university's quad.

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