In 2001, The Oredigger published an article emphasizing this hypothetical “Curse of Mines,” to which I scoffed at and read skeptically – as who was I to believe that my classmates and I were cursed? The author back then probably just had taken a rough heat transfer exam and wrote it out of spite. But, perhaps it’s the Halloween season talking or perhaps it’s something greater, because as Mines students, at a closer glance, we have carried on this curse into present day. To tell you the truth, we fall victim to this misfortune as soon as we walked into our first calculus class.
Don’t believe that we all have been inherently cursed since we began our time here? That we’ve been doomed since the very beginning of freshman year?
Imagine this: you’re walking to class and you completely lose your balance in front of a significant portion of people walking in the same direction as you. One person makes the comment, “The coefficient of friction must not have been high enough to resist his accelerating motion in the x and y direction!” Now, if you can’t imagine anywhere else that could have been said aside from Mines campus, or even better, you understood it, you are already displaying signs of the curse. The curse has transcended even the basic human level of concern that could have been expressed and now simply lies dormant in our brains, waiting for activation.
So, what can we do to fight this curse? Is it even worth fighting? It seems the hypothesis set forth to future Mines students was ignored as we have let it persist and define our social interactions and conversations. Here at The Oredigger, we have some tips for you.
1. Don’t talk about Newton. We understand our homeboy Isaac was pretty awesome, but just because we can apply an outside force to a conversation by mentioning him, it does not mean the magnitude of force or the direction of the conversation will change in our favor.
2. Realize The Curse manifests in different ways in different people, especially different majors. ChemEs may want the flow of a particularly viscous conversation to speed up with an influx of thermal energy but a physics major may want to isolate a particular reference frame to establish a system for the problem within the conversation.
3. Get off campus. Once you leave here, The Curse will begin to dissipate, slowly but surely. You will be annoyed by some people’s complete disregard for basic algebra, but that’s what the real world is like. It may be scary, but taking a step into the world of unsupervised, every day engineering is good for us and may even help us figure out how to communicate in some other form than engi-nerd speak.
4. Seriously, don’t talk about Newton. He’s been dead a while, and we need to pretend we have some friends whose hobbies don’t include discovering Calculus.
We believe in you Orediggers! Go out there and fight the curse – or don’t and live blissfully in your world where Sir Isaac Newton can be your BFF. [I hear he might have good discounts on a new iPhone because of all the Apple research he’s done.]
