Bella attends her classes with faultless punctuality, every time. She sits in the second or third row on an aisle in the middle section of seats, in the classes that take place in big auditorium lecture halls like the main section of Bio; she's willing to put herself closer to the professors in smaller classes like OS and of course her flute chair (third; she hasn't been quite ridiculously showoffy enough to climb beyond yet) is assigned. But right now, she is in Bio, learning tidbits about auxin and tropisms that the textbook didn't cover fully. She's running at about one and a half speed, just enough that she can trivially listen to and process the lecture against her memory of the text while also permitting some mind-wandering. She liiiiiikes her cognitive speedup power.
She doesn't know who this new person is. Maybe she was sick a lot before, or just not very punctual, or she only just added the class? Hm.
Bella's wondering if there's any point to adding some kind of plant-related superpower. It's not really like she plans to take up gardening, but it could be a nice symbolic thing to grow a vegetable to be the size of a house or something, after she's taken over the world sufficiently to make public appearances and wants to roll out programs to end world hunger or something. She notes the other student's behavior with a small fraction of brain.
"Uh, yes," Bella says, and she repeats back a simplified paraphrase - she's not "out" as having an eidetic memory like Alice is. "It's weird that they generate their own herbicides. Although I guess there's probably stuff in human bodies that would kill us if you dumped a bucket of it on our heads."
"Plenty," she agrees, smiling. "The human body is a complicated and delicate machine. It's possible to have a fatal overdose of anything from chocolate to water. Thanks, by the way. I'm Bridget. I make it a policy to have at least one friend in every class; would you like to be my Biology friend?"
"Maybe? I'm not sure what you're thinking of. It's not exactly special; only the first chair per section does anything that everyone else doesn't. It sort of means that they think I'm not quite as good as the occupant of second chair and a little better than the occupant of fourth chair."
The music building is a ways away from the science area. They are about halfway there.
Her lab section meets the next day. And who should be there but Bridget. "Hi. Are you just hanging out or are you going to do the lab?" Bella asks her.
This is only somewhat better than high school. Maybe there can be interesting conversations to accompany boring lab, and Bella can run at 1x, and she will be only a little bored.
"In my admission essay I wrote something about how I wanted to be a medical researcher maybe because I got hit by a car this one time," Bella says. "I'm not actually as sure as I made myself sound, though. I certainly didn't have a kind of research picked out."
"I know the kind you meant. I'd probably call them 'fascinating' instead though. If you do them right they shouldn't be exciting - an exciting particle accelerator might irradiate you or turn itself on unexpectedly or something. A well-designed particle accelerator should be pretty stable and, except for whatever experimental results you're gathering, predictable."
"That's probably why there are so lamentably few replication studies done," says Bella. "It's a real problem, actually - the people qualified to redo studies aren't interested, so they don't, so we go by old results that one study got one time, and for standard p-values that means that one in twenty results we're relying on is just wrong. Coincidence." She looks at their lab experiment with a small sigh. "One thing I can say for this kind of silly make-work is that if it turned out these dialysis membranes didn't consistently work as advertised? Some undergrad class would've noticed by now."
"Sure, but then the idiosyncrasies of your particular accelerator could still throw you off. If you're, I don't know, too far north or there's a little scratch in one bit of the machine or you're using different software to run it or it's too sunny out. You want someone in Switzerland or wherever to help you."
"Math and computer science—although not as common as it should be, if you listen to some of the computer scientist mathematicians I've known. Math and physics. In general, any two fields that are either closely related or directly useful to each other. If I could go back and do my education in a sensible order, I'd do math and physics instead of physics and biochemistry as my undergraduate majors. But then, if I'd done that in the first place, I wouldn't be here trying to find out if I really want the rest of that medical degree, because I would never have started it."
Bella doesn't really need to do any studying, between eidetic memory and cognitive speedup; no one is expecting original insight from a freshman and she's not trying to stand out that much. She'll let Bridget steer the study session as much as she can without being conspicuous. (Having a study session at all instead of just hanging out with Bridget recreationally is also to be inconspicuous. It helps a little that Janine's going to be around to witness the "studying".)
"They're different from mine. I left high school early; I tested into an advanced programming course; I'm just about the right qualification level for this one but it's moving a little slowly and I'd be terribly frustrated with it if I didn't have other classes and stuff to keep me busy. I'm impatient. I can learn fast, so why shouldn't I?"
"Recalcitrant electrons," says Janine.
"...I think that's a what, not a how," says Bridget. "And also possibly more information than I needed."
Janine giggles. "Homework," she clarifies.
"Whew."
"No, I think this is just me making a silly mistake I haven't found yet," says Janine.
"Yeah, that happens too."
"That's actually one of the reasons he goes by that name, if I recall correctly," says Bella. "He's - hm, I don't think I actually have any picture of him handy, I should fix that for just this sort of situation. He's tall and he's got wavy brown hair just shy of shoulder length and he makes extremely distinctive facial expressions that defy verbal description. He sews dresses and bakes."
[I'm straight, Alice. I guess she's kinda nerd-pretty? Glasses, brown hair, doesn't dress like she expected to leave the house on any given morning?]