Let It Snow
We were working to finish the last problem set of the semester for an engineering class that my entire suite was in. All eight of us living in Ruggles 6 were scrambling the night before to take the last derivative and to calculate the invested return in the last few problems. It had been snowing most of the day, but late into the problem set we got an email from the professor that class tomorrow would be canceled and the due date had been pushed back two days, to the last class before finals. We were ecstatic! Immediately, roommates started calling in Chinese food and booting up the Playstation to stuff our faces and relax during the storm before we would inevitably face the homework problems again. The truth is this could be a memory from any school in any subject, but the wall of our kitchen which we had turned into a white board filled with equations and variables said otherwise. There’s nothing like problem solving for engineers: bouncing ideas off of colleagues, challenging conventional thought and methodologies, plugging in numbers to make sense of the Mad Lib in front of us. The icing on the cake was video games and dinner together during the storm, after trying to go as far as we could in the set of questions. Looking out the window over a snowy campus, juxtaposed to the mess we had made in our living room was a beautiful SEAS moment. It was not a moment that any student could have, a moment that an engineer in New York City may be lucky enough to own.