fricative

Current Mood: worn out
Current Music: "Four Sticks" by Led Zeppelin

My roommate John thinks it's hilarious and awesome to catch me in the middle of rocking out. He'll wait until I've got the music cranked up way loud and try to listen for either a familiar part or some sort of extended guitar/drum/synth/vocal/instrument solo and try to poke his head in time to catch me doing the duck walk, or being a Juke Box Hero, impersonating George Oscar Bluth, or even just practicing some of my favorite notes.

Nobody in the apartment challenges the airwaves when I want to rock out, so I'm only happy to oblige them with a little entertainment.

~

Anyway, speaking of John (the Purdue Nuclear Engineer, or "Nuke" as campus slang goes), he shared with me a little concept the other day that I thought was interesting.

Engineers travel in little packs around campus. Starting off from about 3,000 Freshman Engineers, the experience of college begins to whittle down the numbers as a number of factors take their toll:

Classes.
Homework.
Exam.
Beer.
More homework.
Harder Classes.
More homework.
Partying.
More homework.
ENGR 106, PHYS 152, and/or MA 162.
Motivation, dedication, weather, expense, drive.
More homework.

At any rate, those who survive Freshman Engineering select their professional school (1 of 13 specific majors, be it Civil Engineering, or Aero, Nuke, Bio, Ag, ME, EE, etc.). From there, the process continues, and more people switch, drop out, fail, decide this isn't for them, and so on.

Eventually, all that is left is a core group of Juniors and Seniors that make up each school, the size of which is fairly constant. Aero and Nuke, for example, have about 100 students. ME and EE (more popular), each have closer to 1,000 students. Most engineers have a close group of friends that they've known since Freshman year, typically through a learning community (a residence hall floor of all the same major), but also through clubs, class, and other such "social" outlets.

Typically these small groups (~5 or so) have mostly the same classes, and even living apart, will travel across campus to the other residences or during mealtimes to work on homework. All alone, these assignments can be daunting, but somehow as a group the hours and hours of work seem not as bad. Sometimes it's the jokes, sometimes it's the formula you can't figure out, sometimes it's somebody else pointing out the radius, not the diameter is the term taken to the fourth power in the intertial moment of a purely loaded beam. Dumbass.

At any rate, I'm very thankful and grateful I've found my little group of engineers to work with. The bonds forged over projects, painful tests that just weren't fair, the informal tutoring when one person "gets it", and such- there's a sense of camaraderie that is hard to describe. My current group includes Andrew Mizener, Karen Hadsell and Diane Barney, sometimes with Alex(/Jeff) Webster, Jack Yang, Jim Tancred, Brian Downard, Mike Waters, and others. Plus of course John helping me with whatever course I have trouble with. It makes the 100 or so students in Aero seem like a slightly less imposing group with some smiling faces. Thanks guys.

Anyway, I know I'm rambling, but I was going somewhere with this...

Oh yes! John has his own group of Nukes. I know most of them, and some were mentioned previously. As is typical of engineers, they've all got busy schedules with loads of work, projects, exams, etc., and looking too far ahead can be just darn depressing! So they've come up with a very optimistic little phrase that I think I might try to adopt, called "The Three Day Forecast". Similar to weather forecasting, it's simply asking another engineer what the next three days will be like, in a short summary. That means that Friday almost always looks great, and I'm fine with that.

Three Day Forecast:
1) Class, Class, Lab, Lecture, Guitar Hero with Greg, Homework
2) only 1 class, because my early class was cancelled!, and a SoF Show (11pm, Co Rec East/West Gymnasium)
3) work 12-8