The focal point of this year however, was the Chemistry Ball. Held at the Roman Baths and Pump\u00a0Rooms, the night promised panache, class, and the opportunity to see our lecturers unleash their\u00a0inner party animals. For the weeks building up the Chem Ball, I could barely contain my excitement!\u00a0Little did I know that the Ball was going to very much shape my second year experience at the\u00a0University of Bath, for this was the night that inspired me to run for the Chem:Soc committee.<\/p>\n I didn\u2019t have much time to mull this over \u2013 elections were in the weeks following the ball. This was\u00a0probably a good thing because elections are stressful, and your irrational mind tells you that nobody\u00a0will vote for you. I ran for the position of treasurer, faced with opposition, and decided to go full steam\u00a0ahead with the campaign. My friend chose to run for chairman, and we both went in blind\u00a0with nothing to go on but determination to help our fellow students find their feet as we had done\u00a0in the year gone by. You can see where this is going; we both won our positions!<\/p>\n So Project Chemball MMXVI was born. The first thing we did was book the Pump Rooms eight\u00a0months prior to the ball. Whilst we were looking forward to running all our socials, and providing\u00a0points-of-contact for our members should they need us, we did everything within our power to host\u00a0a party unlike one we\u2019ve ever thrown before. We thought we were being super clever branding the\u00a0ball with a Roman numeral trademark, linking the anno Domini \u20182016\u2019 with the BC world of the\u00a0Roman Baths. It was a project invested in by a curious cohort and executed by a strong committee\u00a0(seriously committee guys \u2013 you\u2019re the best).<\/p>\n My role as treasurer was hard. I was the right-hand (wo)man to the chair, and basically told him\u00a0what we could and couldn\u2019t afford to do. Getting my head around SU commission was tough; having\u00a0to negotiate with restaurants and bus companies was out of my comfort zone. We even haggled\u00a0with the Chemball caterers, something my meek conscience had never dreamt of doing. Everything\u00a0we did, we did with Chemball MMXVI in mind. It was not cheap, we knew this from the start, but\u00a0making profits on our welcome social, Bristol social, and Christmas dinner allowed us to\u00a0subsidise the ticket costs and widen the inclusivity of our highly-anticipated night.<\/p>\n 300 tickets sold to placement students, chemistry students, natural scientists, lecturers. The day of\u00a0the ball had arrived! I woke up and immediately started to document the progression of the day; the\u00a0morning in to afternoon, the afternoon in to evening. Lectures (really sorry) seemed to go on forever\u00a0\u2013 we were just too excited (and at this point, ridiculously nervous). I rushed home to allow a\u00a0shameful amount of time to get ready and then bundled\u00a0into a taxi with the rest of the committee to go and get the party started.<\/p>\n It was a damp night which wasn\u2019t particularly convenient for running around town carting speakers\u00a0from cars to the venue, but alas, we managed. Having chatted to our event managers and double\u00a0checked the quantity of champagne available, we were good to go. A queue started to form outside\u00a0under the sleety skies, and suddenly everything felt under control and almost serene. From there on\u00a0in it was relatively smooth-sailing. Conversations were flowing (as well as the wine) around the\u00a0steely green water, laughter was bouncing from ancient wall to ancient wall, and my heart-rate was\u00a0beginning to settle down. A black-tie event; I was overwhelmed with how smart everybody looked\u00a0and the efforts that were made. Not that I didn\u2019t think my peers were capable of scrubbing up well, I\u00a0just struggled to believe that they were doing so because of an event that I\u2019d helped to run.<\/p>\n At 8pm sharp, we were called to dinner. A delightful array of soulful food in the most elegant of\u00a0rooms. Towards the end of the meal, the chairman and I were allowed to climb up the balcony to\u00a0take some photos of the dining room. This didn\u2019t go unnoticed; suddenly the room started to\u00a0applause in the kindest of gestures and I was stunned with the alien notion of feeling completely in\u00a0my element (excuse the pun).\u00a0My experience with Chem:Soc, as horrifically cheesy as it sounds, helped me to find my place in\u00a0chemistry. It was a confidence-booster, a challenge, and a bonding experience with my peers. Yes, it\u00a0was irksome at times, it was tiring, and it involved playing \u2018mum\u2019 on nights out. Was it worth it?\u00a0Absolutely.<\/p>\n Everyone wants to find their crowd at university. Everyone wants to find people they identify with,\u00a0activities they love doing, events they look forward to attending. Some students will relate to course\u00a0mates, bonding over late-night revision sessions and that one unanswerable...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1064,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[450,198],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1506","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-students-union","category-undergraduate"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/students\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/students\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/students\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/students\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1064"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/students\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1506"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/students\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1506\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/students\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1506"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/students\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1506"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/students\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1506"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/students\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/81\/2017\/12\/ChemBall-2015.png\")
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