<p>Julia Zarina: The end at last</p>
<p>I think about time almost constantly. It’s a strange concept to me, as both a hard science major and a human with limited days here on Earth. With a significant milestone for many of us coming up next week as winter graduation takes place, I’d like to trick the kind and smart editors of The Michigan Daily into thinking this paragraph is the beginning of a serious and thoughtful reflection on some pressing political issues we’ve experienced in my time at school here.</p>
<p>Now that they’ve stopped reading and/or slipped into an irreversible coma due to boredom, I’d like to use the rest of this final column as an opportunity to reflect on and attempt to explain a few things unique to the University of Michigan that defy our human understanding and challenge us both as engineers and as philosophical beings.</p>
<p>Without further ado, I present to you: a freshman engineer’s survival guide to the supernatural phenomena of North Campus.
The dark navigational sorcery of GG Brown</p>
<p>Welcome to college! It is your first day of class. You stand anxious and excited in the middle of the North Campus Diag, backpack strapped on tight, class schedule clasped in hand, and notice that your first discussion of the day — the first day of the rest of your life! — is located in a building called GG Brown. Cool! You casually ask a passing upperclassman for directions to the classroom and are met with an empty stare and the echoes of a haunting response: “Any room in GG Brown can only be found by those who already know where it is.”</p>
<p>You are entering the Bermuda Triangle of North Campus, a building designed from somebody’s twisted fever dream of an M.C. Escher house; a labyrinth of rooms that appear to be numbered according to some obscure permutation of a Fibonacci sequence; and wall maps that have no building blueprint but simply say, “follow your heart.” Desperate to escape the maze, you sprint toward a faint glimmer of daylight, flinging open door after door in infinite hallways that lead back to places you have already been. Who knows how much time has passed for the ones you left behind? It could be days. Weeks. Millennia. Society as you know it may have ceased to exist. You have gazed long enough into the abyss for it to have gazed back into you and you will emerge with a renewed appreciation for the fleeting nature of mortal life.</p>
<p>Weeks later you’ll realize that this whole ordeal transpired in the span of 14 seconds when you accidentally wandered into a utility closet instead of a stairwell. This revelation will leave you equally, if not more, perplexed and terrified.
The localized space-time anomaly known as “syllabus week”</p>
<p>Ah, syllabus week. The leisurely five days revered by all college students for the inclusion of stimulating class activities that include hearing about every degree your professor has ever received or contemplated receiving and doing absolutely nothing else. In engineering, it’s exactly the same. Syllabus week is a joyous, pleasant walk in the park for literally seconds on end until it abruptly comes to a halt within the first three minutes of the semester.</p>
<p>After briefly recapping some previously learned technical material including, but not limited to, “shapes that are not triangles” and the song small children use to memorize the names of the 50 states, you will be launched directly into higher order differential equations with a force that defies any law of physics you have ever, or will ever, study in your time here. But the ego boost you received in those 30 seconds of finally understanding everything your professor was saying will sustain you well into exam week.</p>
<p>Exam week is another unusual instance of obvious space-time warpage on North Campus that Neil deGrasse Tyson should really do an investigative TV special about. Here, we experience a completely different kind of time warp wherein, instead of lasting a baffling three and a half minutes, the aforementioned “week” stretches from approximately the second week of school until four, possibly five, years later when you graduate.</p>
<p>The mystic inspiration of last-minute panic
It’s the beginning of the semester and you’re on top of your ■■■■. You’re proactive! You’re doing homework well in advance of the deadline! This is the year everything will be different! You’ve even read all your textbooks, which is no small feat considering reading is an extremely complex process that involves removing a book from its shrink-wrapped cocoon and exposing the front cover directly to light rays for the scientifically accepted maximum exposure period of 17 seconds before finding a permanent home for it on the floor of your bedroom where you will, ideally, never come in contact with it again.
For the most part, everything is going fine. Until suddenly, somehow, it’s three hours before your final project deadline, the code you’ve been writing for weeks is not, in any way, working, and you find yourself on the third floor of the Dude in a sleep-deprived haze, thanking automatic doors for opening for you. You will have no memory of who you are or how you got there but you will be propelled by a deep, caffeine-fueled impulse to find one, single open CAEN computer on this campus, goddamnit. Days later, your friends, concerned for your emotional and physical well-being, will find you in a whirlwind of graph paper and two-day-old pizza crusts, hunched over the pixelated light of a monitor, muttering in tongues and divining lines of code like the ancient oracle receiving a prophecy from some silicon-powered deity.</p>
<p>Your efforts will not have been in vain. You will most likely emerge from said endeavors with some kind of primitive but functional robot device — a five-day-old banana attached to a wheel — that looks like it was forged in the fires of a middle school science fair volcano and may be powered by human tears. Sixty percent of the time, it will work every time.</p>
<p>The inexplicable, logic-defying desire to do it all again
It’s some period of time greater than three but less than 12 years later and you finally did it. You’re graduating! You are 20-something years old in human years, which is approximately 48 years old in engineer years due to a non-trivial conversion factor caused by extreme sleep deprivation and abysmal diet. Industry-mandated engineering factors of safety at your next job are higher than your GPA and you’ve become intimately familiar with the best and worst crying spots in each campus library.</p>
<p>But somehow the only thing you want to do is go back to the very beginning and do it all again. As a senior graduating next week, I can report firsthand that it is a very real phenomenon that defies logic and understanding and one that I will have to leave to far wiser minds than mine to explain. If you figure it out, let me know. I’ll be circling the halls of GG Brown in my banana-mobile, looking for a wormhole to take me back to that first, anxious, excited day of freshman year.
So for today, goodbye. For tomorrow, good luck. Forever (until the ultimate end of exam “week” a.k.a. the end of time as we know it), Go Blue.
Julia Zarina can be reached at <a href=“mailto:jumilton@umich.edu”>jumilton@umich.edu</a>.</p>