Home-Office - every day

HOME OFFICE - Aleksander Mæland Munkejord EVERY DAY Translator Ragne Kyllingstad Journalist

We’ve had a ban on visits for weeks, and the climbing hall has been closed for about fifteen years, I think. A friend just told me (over zoom, of course) that she believes no generation of students know the Åsmåsan, Nordskogen, Pentagonskogen(sigh), Syverud and the rest of the groves around the university, as well as we do.

For academics and university educated pencil-pushers, the home-office is no new phenomenon. But we have empirical evidence that NMBU-students like it the most with crammed lecture halls and sour thermos-coffee at Sørhellinga. What do the students do when the entire university relocates into their tiny dorm rooms?

In what I can reveal is actually my own old room at Pentagon 1, we find Nisha Jha. She is an international student and came to Ås roughly two months ago. From her desk she can see all of Pentagon. She has decorated her office with art and memories from home. They say every house has its smell, except one’s own. But Nisha can describe in detail how her room smells: “[…] canvas, papers, acrylic colors, poster colors and gel pens. And also, I have my small corner of temple, where I have incense sticks. So when you enter my room, you can see happy me with art goodies scattered and also the chocolate wrappers”. The image in the windowsill behind the PC is also homemade. It represents her vision for the year: northern lights and ice cream in hand.

At Eivind Toft’s place we find three screens, two brass colored wind instruments and a homemade pull up-bar. Each element represents a key part of Eivind’s pandemic-affected day-to-day life. Between the Zoom-lectures he can get a good blowout on the tuba, and as he says: “People would have frowned if I did that in a reading room at TF.” There’s always something good in a situation. Eivind can report of great skiing conditions in Drøbak, which for him has been a natural breather from the studies.

Hilde Petra Gottschal knows how to take care of herself when stuck at home. At first glance around the room we find oxygenic plants, an extra PC-monitor, and not to mention, a proper office chair! The observant one will also notice several signs that we are dealing with a tea-drinker. When motivation is hard to find, Yogi can be a good companion, and Hilde reveals that there are many notes like this to find, if you care to look for them.

Kristiane Holter invites us to a tidy desk with lots of natural lighting. The pictures on the wall reminds her of bygone days where humans could hug. She mentions that for her, the Zoom-lectures make her day more efficient: The lecture is enjoyed in her bathrobe and can even be combined with breakfast. As a student of landscape architecture, it has been a challenge to relocate the project courses into the dorm room, with all that entails: cardboard, paper, tape and drawing materials scattered all around the room.

At Anders Øfstaas’ place in Østerdalen, the situation is different. Here, the office itself only takes up a fraction of the view, the rest is reserved for hiking and hunting. He reports of 20 below on the thermometer, and one of the things that motivate him to get up in the morning is firing up the wood stove, and coffee. He also mentions Radio Rock on the DAB-radio as a motivating factor.