Welcome back to campus! Here to greet you is Issue 3 of The Iron Warrior. I hope everyone had a relaxing reading week and you have regained the energy to take on the rest of the term. To help ease the pain, we here at The Iron Warrior have put together a 28 page monstrosity of a paper for you to peruse at your free will. From our records, 28 pages is a first for The Iron Warrior since the 90s, so yay for that! This issue has a lot of Science and Technology content for your inner engineer as well as a full page spread on how to make your own Storm Trooper helmet; compliments of Jon Martin. My favourite article of the issue goes to ‘How to Properly Watch Star Wars’ by Meagan Cardno for her fascinating take on the unorthodox sequence to watch the Star Wars saga. Runners up go to ‘Student Unions Around the World’ by Caitlin McLaren and ‘Things to Do With Your Iron Ring’ by the Graduation Committee co-chairs. I’d like to thank my copy editors for their hard work over reading week as well as everyone who submitted an article. This paper is nothing without them!
A couple weeks ago, graduating engineering students, including I, participated in what is known as Disorientation Week. This week of events allows us fourth year engineers to celebrate our upcoming achievement: receiving our Iron Rings. As part of the Disorientation festivities, in the early morning hours of Friday before the Iron Ring Ceremony, pranks are traditionally pulled on campus. These pranks are completed early Friday morning to allow students on campus to see our masterful works of art later that day. From what I was able to see, this was a very successful pranking year. Each class was fully represented in their respective corners of engineering, from System’s Funhouse to the ECE sign on the E5 overpass. Unfortunately, to our distain, the University closed its doors Friday due to snow for the first time in five years. Was this a coincidence? Most likely. But you still wonder if a rowdy group of fourth year engineers running around campus was the final push to keep the doors closed. Either way, pranks were done, and very few got to see them.
To our luck however, such things exist as digital photography and the in-ter-net. If you are interested to see what your fellow fourth years were able to accomplish, take a visit to The Spirit of WTF (spiritofwtf.com). This unofficial Waterloo website created by Michael Overmeyer is a blog which chronicles the pranks which occur here on campus. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I encourage you to do so. There are documented pranks going all the way back to the 1960’s! When asked about why he started The Spirit of WTF, Michael responded:
“When I first came to Waterloo, I was told that ‘Waterloo is the MIT of the North’. I became very excited as I was enamoured by MIT’s cultural mix of rigorous academics and spirit of clever, playful fun. Once I got to Waterloo, it became readily apparent that this school’s spirit died a long time ago, and the marketing line I was fed was a load of crock.
After much thought, I decided that Waterloo needed a place to showcase the few pranks that do occur on campus, much like the IHTFP Gallery (hacks.mit.edu) does for MIT and SkulePedia (skulepedia.ca) does for UofT.
Perhaps by collecting and showcasing the handful of decent pranks that have occurred at Waterloo, it might inspire future students to leave their mark by pulling their own clever stunts, and a sense of school spirit might be reignited.”
This vision of Waterloo school spirit is definitely not uncommon amongst students. Anyone you ask will say Waterloo is known for its academics, co-op program, engineering (yay!), but never its spirit. You have to ask yourself, what went wrong? We are a young school not much older than 50 years. Should we not find it easier to shape ourselves into a spirited school unlike schools 100+ years old that are governed by tradition? When asked, Michael said it best:
“When Waterloo was founded, there was a sense among the academic community that universities needed at least 100 years of tradition before they could be considered rigorous. Waterloo’s founders were determined to prove this wrong, and when they went to create the first engineering curriculum, they looked at the hardest engineering program in Canada. It happened to be UofT at the time, so they took UofT’s course workload and upped it by 10%. Waterloo was going to be an academically rigorous school.
This mentality of ‘something to prove’ was pervasive throughout the beginning years, and once Waterloo was well established in the academic community, it continued. It affected the way the school marketed itself and handled issues that arose. Waterloo students would be 100% academically focused. Anything that suggested otherwise would be quashed. This mentality made it into the marketing image of the school. Whether you are aware of it or not, a school’s image is its #1 asset. At Waterloo, that image is well protected by a strong marketing team. For example, we see this mentality in the way that the administration handled the Formula SAE ‘bikini-gate’.
The second cause I see is the co-op program. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a wonderful program and I owe my sanity to it. But moving around every 4 months does not lend to developing strong ties to the school. Nor does it help student organizations and clubs to keep going. That constant shake-up does a lot to hurt school spirit.”
I completely agree with Michael’s points. Our lack of school spirit isn’t necessarily contributed by the students who attend, but to the way the institution we pay our money to chooses to run the great machine that is the University of Waterloo. I do think we are spirited students; we just need the right environment to let it shine. What we can do is support each other, and encourage each other to push the boundaries we call ‘rules’. This is what pranking is all about. It allows students to work together for a common cause whether it is to improve school spirit, or to pull off the impossible. We as the engineers hold this torch. From the moment we earned our hardhats in Frosh Week, we were told that “you will encounter many challenges, and in meeting them your intelligence, skills and persistence will be vital to your success.” Engineers have the mentality to pull off things of greatness, so for those just starting your years here at Waterloo, take note of the little pranks now, and strive to make them better! As Michael puts it, “[The Spirit of WTF] comes from the feeling that any good prank should evoke.”
For now, Michael and I are amongst those graduating this April. What becomes of The Spirit of WTF is still unknown. There is no one set to take over The Spirit of WTF going into the future, so the site will lay dormant from April on. To me, this is another sad death to what is, or was, the spirit of Waterloo.
Hopefully, in the next few years, the next generation of students will be able to learn from past mistakes and make a break though in school spirit. This leads into one of Michael’s other projects, the Warrior Wiki (warriorwiki.ca). This wiki aims to be the definitive guide for Waterloo history. Michael’s motivation behind this website is very profound:
“During my research for The Spirit of WTF, I read lots of Waterloo History. And in my readings, you see the same patterns appearing again and again. Student groups especially, making the same mistakes over and over. However, you can’t learn from the mistakes you can’t see, and I began to wonder about improving accessibility to Waterloo’s history.
Currently, most of the documents related to Waterloo’s history are accessible only through the Waterloo archives in the Rare Book Room of the Dana Porter Library. The archives are open 5 hours a day, 5 days a week. You aren’t allowed to take anything out of the room so you must do all of your reading during those times. Furthermore, there is no good indexing of the materials, so finding what you’re looking for can take many days, or be entirely impossible.”
For us students, we change and evolve according to what was done in the past; whether it was good or bad. If we never know what truly happened, then we are bound to make the same mistakes over again. Michael put it best: “You can’t learn from the mistakes you aren’t allowed to see.”
The Warrior Wiki team is currently using various sources of digital media to help populate the wiki. Although the University is unlikely to make their archives digitised in the near future, other areas including The Iron Warrior are being used thoroughly to populate the Warrior wiki webpage.
There are many people currently helping make the Warrior Wiki possible, including students, alumni, faculty and staff. The team is always looking for more people to help make Waterloo history more accessible, so if you are interested, be sure to email thewarriorwiki@gmail.com. Be a part of the change, and let’s try to learn from the past to hopefully make Waterloo the spirited school it once used to be!
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