Claustrophobia, Probability and Thursday nights by Sarp Sever

With around 800 people pressed into around 65.000 square meters, our campus often feels less like a  university and more like an elegant, slightly chaotic experiment in applied mathematics. The  experiment features a residential community, three academic buildings that double as housing, a quad that everyone must cross, and a population density that guarantees you will run into someone you  know within seconds of leaving your room. In a closed system like this, probability becomes the  architecture of daily life, rather than theoretical mathematics. 

The effect is sometimes claustrophobic. This is a low-entropy environment, where people and routines do not diffuse into city life where everyone has their own thing going on. When you step outside of your room, you enter a bounded micro-ecosystem, where the likelihood of encountering your ex, your tutor, or the person who you still owe that 15 euro Tikkie is basically 1. 

The lottery shapes everything.

Units do nothing but intensify that closeness. A unit is essentially a forced probability sample of six to  twelve individuals from (wildly) different cultures, majors and temperaments. Living together literally  becomes a Bayesian process: you start with assumptions (“physics majors use speed to study” or  “anthropology students light incense and a jonko”) and you update them as evidence accumulates.  With midnight pasta dishes, someone crying in the bathroom, and someone else blasting reggaeton at  8am, units are noisy, stochastic ecosystems with their own internal laws.  

Therefore, one could argue that the real force shaping campus experience might be the housing lottery,  which is a compact, sometimes emotionally loaded game theory machine. Four-person Tower units are high-reward outcomes, but you need tight coalitions to apply. Kromhout, with around 300 people and only six washing machines, becomes a living case study in queuing theory and shared-resource  breakdown. X and Y act as “suburban” clusters that are quieter and controlled while being emotionally  distant from the rest. And then there is Wall… Dense, windowless, suspicious rodent-student ratios, and that feeling that is only felt by those beta-testing human resilience. The lottery shapes everything.  

Even the social network obeys its own maths. Frats and sororities don’t dominate campus life the way  American Greek life does, but they form distinct subgraphs in the larger social network. They create  clusters of identity and routine and rumour. On Thursday nights, however, when the bar compresses  the entire population into a single vibrating node, these clusters dissolve; the network becomes fully  connected and anything that happens there is statistically guaranteed to ripple across campus by Friday lunchtime. 

Then there is movement across campus. The quad, for example, is an optimization paradox. One of the first things that puzzled me when I arrived was the lack of multiple routes through it. Then I learned  that social geometry here overrides well-established Euclidean geometry. The diagonal shortcut is physically shorter if you’re going from G to Newton, but most people avoid it because it feels uncomfortable to walk through that massive open space. You don’t feel at ease crossing a wide field of  pebbles, so you conform to the path that is less efficient mathematically, but more sensible in terms of social game theory. 

Still, something shifts as time passes. The claustrophobia begins to invert or intensify during the third  year. The low entropy that frustrates you becomes the force that has made your friendships intense. The random probability sample of your unit becomes the group of people you cannot imagine living without or the ones you dread the most. Even the laundry problem and mouse sightings become part of the mythology. You realize that the density is what gives the campus its strange and overwhelming  warmth.

It turns out the campus was never a maze to escape or a paradise to cling to; it was a long and messy game with imperfect information.

Towards the end, you start appreciating the things you used to mock all the time. The compressed drama of Thursday nights, the mysterious sightings of rushies doing some random shit, the social gravity of  Luna and Allure, the controversial warmth of Primus boys, the “alcoholic” chiefs of the bar in a tree on a Tuesday at 5pm, and ABP hotboxing a tower unit on 4/20… The clusters never disappear, but your relationship to them softens, and they become part of the texture of the place rather than its walls.

 It turns out the campus was never a maze to escape or a paradise to cling to; it was a long and messy  game with imperfect information. We play our strategies, revise our assumptions, and change our  alliances. The state of equilibrium or chaos we reach in third year is about finally understanding the system. Once you understand a system this small, yet powerful, although it might be scary sometimes, it is impossible not to love it a little and crave the days in the future when you will laugh about it all.