Wasting Time by Animal Liberation Orchestra
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/alo2006-05-04.flac16/alo2006-05-04d1t03_64kb.mp3]
First semester of Freshman year, we had a class called Intro to Engineering, which was a one credit class that didn’t really tell us anything worthwhile, and generally wasted our time. I think the idea behind it was to expose engineering students to everything the school of engineering had to offer, but most of us were decided on a major, and didn’t really care what else was out there. So we ignored the class, and just went with it as much as we had to. The class never really required much of us, just attendance and a project at the end of the semester.
The project was to reverse engineer something. Anything really, but for sanity reasons we were advised to keep it simple. Ryan and Ryan had decided on reverse engineering a skateboard, and Eric and I had decided on a microscope. I remember a few weeks before the end of the semester the Ryans had a skateboard in their room, and they were working on that project.
Eric and I had planned on doing something similar, but we had a hang-up. It turns out neither of us had a microscope, and we didn’t want to buy one. So we started asking around, if anyone we knew had a microscope. It turns out Joe had one, and he was awesome enough to take pictures of it, and send them to us. So we included pictures of a microscope we didn’t have along with a bunch of other stuff we didn’t really know (there were a couple random physics equations we included because we figured they were appropriate). In the end, we completed the entire project without ever touching a microscope, or really knowing anything about one.
In the end, we got a D-, which was a higher grade than nearly everyone we talked to. Even the Ryans, who spent more time on it and had a physical object to work with did worse, and we couldn’t have been happier. I learn such great things in college.