The thing with being an engineering student is that your escapades around the campus start being the ones that entertain everyone else. I mean, only one out of four of my subjects are engineering and already I've got quite a few weird stories to tell.
The thing with being penniless students with no proper equipment is that we have to improvise. And sometimes that looks weird. So if you had happened to be walking by a certain stairway in the engineering area of campus you may have been met with a strange sight. My group wanted to measure the spring constant of a spring which involves putting weight on one end on the spring and measuring how far it stretches. Except all we had to use was the stuff in our houses so we brought a bucket, measuring cup and some string. So now we had to tie the top end of the spring onto something. We looked around, and the only thing we could see was the stairs. We spent a good half an hour pouring water into a bucket tied to a spring tied to stairs and taking measurements. Plenty of people saw us, some people even went up those stairs, and didn’t even react to what we were doing. Makes me wonder what counts as weird in the engineering faculty.
The reason we needed this spring constant was for our project which was tennis ball flinger, which needed to fling a tennis ball 10 metres so it would hit a target 1.5 metres off the ground. So obviously we could not test this thing inside, which called for more public demonstrations of undergrad engineering. Like, using a footpath as a firing range. Because obviously footpaths are just waiting to be made into firing ranges.
Before you think it’s just my group that’s weird, it’s not just us! To date I have witnessed the civil engineering kids carrying around LOTS of long sticks made out of newspaper and sticky tape (to make into mini bridges of course) and some aerospace eng people throwing paper gliders in the foyer of one of the science lecture theatres.
So that might be why when my tennis ball flinging machine group was carrying our machine along with a 12 litre container of water to the testing site, people asked questions and looked at us weirdly around most of campus but when we got to the eng section of campus, no one really cared except to comment that it looked cool.
Oh and also our lecturer shows us videos like this one:
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