Tucked away between the fraternity houses and graduate student housing in Russell Park are the two Davis Campus Cooperatives. They’re big houses, with 10 bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen. The residents in each house work together to share chores, cooking duties and the rest of what it takes to run a household. Each house develops a personality of its own that attracts like-minded residents, and one of them has come to house all bio-sci majors. It happened by word of mouth—a few bio students lived there, who recruited more bio students, and so on. Last year they recruited me, too.

At first it seemed weird. There were nine people to get to know, and all of their friends. That’s a lot of names and lives to remember. But on the other hand, that’s a lot of bio majors.

I had never thought about the raw power of sticking together so many bio majors in the same house. Everyone has the same classes, has had the same professors and is trying to fulfill the same requirements. Last fall five of us took the same class. You could miss half of your classes or sleep during them because chances were, one of your housemates got the notes.

We could even use all those biology jokes that no one else would understand, like “What should you say when you brush up against a fern? Sori.” (Well, they got it.) Sometimes I would come home and find the structural formula for mescaline or Vicodin drawn on the whiteboard. One time, the vowels had been erased from every word on the board. “Vowels are an abomination!” said our biochemist, who liked to defuse religious disputes predicated on “it’s in the Bible” or “it’s not in the Bible” by pointing out that there were no vowels in the Hebrew version of the Bible.

But living with a household of science majors could also be a little disconcerting. Here are future scientists, doctors, a dentist, pediatrician, microbiologist, all trained to believe in honesty and full disclosure of data, but dirty dishes went unclaimed, and personal food was known to go missing.

On top of that, most everyone performed really well in a lab, yet nobody seemed to know how to cook! For the first three months, I kept getting asked, “How did you make that?” “It’s easy; just follow the protocol,” I’d say, pointing to the recipe. Then I would pour some lemonade out of a huge Erlenmeyer flask into a beaker.

And then there was finals week. It was hard enough getting things done the rest of the quarter, with 10 students, all studying hard for their degrees, putting in many hours at jobs and internships, and with social lives on top of that. So during finals we suspended chores. But one week was all it took for pure chaos to reign. Yeah, biohazard. We once opened up a petri dish for half an hour in the kitchen just to see how many different bacteria we could find floating in the air. You don’t want to know.

True, we had some end-of-week messes, but our co-op was where all the fun happened: movies, parties, late-night theorizing. The co-op next door was always quiet and convenient for studying. After finals in the spring, prospective residents toured the co-ops, and they all wanted to stay in the other, cleaner one. But we’ve got this place looking shipshape again. It’s never been official, but as far back as anyone’s stories go, this house has always been a bio-sci co-op. I can’t wait to see who ends up here this year.