Last week we followed four North Campus frat guys into the quintessentially dramatic heart of south campus: a student production of a Shakespeare play.

Today, I’m going to switch things up and allow you the reader to adopt the POV of a theater student (that’s “point of view” for all you BME’s — and, that’s “Biomedical Engineering” for all you music majors), and see what happens when they decide to take Calc 214-1 for an Area II Distro.

  

So it’s the first day of class and wow, it sure is a hike from Jones Residential College to Technological Institute. Turn around, can you — is that — no, you can’t see that far, Annie May Swift Hall is nowhere in sight.

That’s OK though, because you had Intro to Psychology somewhere in this building last quarter. Calculus isn’t in the auditorium, though, and it takes a little while to find G68.

You may wonder, who the hell decided to make G stand for “basement,” when it should obviously mean “ground floor”?

(This clearly marks you as a foreigner here, by the way, for every true techie knows that deep underground beneath Tech is the real basement: A laboratory where “they” perform illegal medical experiments on monkeys. But it takes at least three quarters of Engineering Analysis class to discover this.)

So you’re a few minutes late, no biggie. As you climb over calculators, students and tablets of graphing paper to reach an empty seat, you notice a nerdy-looking fellow standing at the front of the room is going over the syllabus. And you wonder, perhaps this is the wrong room, and you’ve inadvertently walked into a graduate-level seminar conducted entirely in Vietnamese.

Nope. Welcome to Tech, Ionesco.

You spend the next 45 minutes in a translation-induced stupor brought on by having to simultaneously decipher the professor’s chicken-scratch hieroglyphics on the board and pick out variable names from his throaty, guttural “English.”

And windows — where are the windows? How can you be inspired by the “noises/sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not,” without a mother-lovin’ window?

By the time class is over, you’ve never been more ready to trash-talk a course in your life. But before you can recite the plot of Beckett’s Godot, the other students have packed their bags and left.

Is this what it’s really like, you wonder? Are the rumors true? Are techies really this anti-social?

Well, it’s hard to say. What you don’t realize is that the rest of these kids have three more classes today before going to a six-hour lab, and 10 minutes gives them barely enough time to grab a Pepsi from the vending machines.

So you decide, “Screw this. Who wants to take a class in which you’re the only kid without a black North Face fleece, anyway? Better to take a class like Analysis and Performance of Literature, where you’ll be safe.”

That was a close one.

Neil Flinchbaugh is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected].