Here we are, the final issue of the term. I briefly considered doing this article about the best school of them all, Waterloo, but then I realized that the people who read this paper would actually be in a position to fact-check me, and I certainly don’t want that. I also considered escaping from the continent, unlike my real life travels. But instead, I ultimately decide to use a slightly more objective selection process. So this issue we are looking at the California Institute of Technology, located in Pasadena, California since it was named the number one engineering school in the world (and the number one university in general, for that matter) in 2014 by the Times Higher Education weekly higher-education publication.
Caltech is a proud and noble school, and has racked up numerous achievements since its establishment in 1891. Among its alumni, and current and past faculty, Caltech boasts 31 Nobel Laureates. It is a highly competitive university, and only 529 of the 6524 applications received for this year were accepted. When factoring in the number of students who declined their offers, the class of 2018 currently contains 249 students.
For a university of such a small size (the entire undergraduate and graduate population being around 2200 in 2010) Caltech has an enormous amount of history and tradition. One is the Milikan pumpkin-drop experiment. Students take pumpkins to the top of the Milikan Library, the highest building on campus. They dip the pumpkins in liquid nitrogen and toss them off the side to the ground below. Observers ten stories down watch the pumpkins smash in the hopes of seeing a small flash of light; it is alleged that during the impact the pumpkins are ripped apart with such ferocity that chemical bonds break, producing visible light in a process known as triboluminescence. Another, slightly less scientific tradition is ‘Ditch Day.’ Originally a day when the seniors would collectively leave campus and skip class, it has become and unofficial holiday where the faculty cancels all classes. Following in the traditions of old, in which the seniors would protect their vacant study rooms from lower years with locks or piles of bricks, the ditchers now leave puzzles and challenges to distract the other students from getting up to any nefarious activities. This is a nice change from a lot of the other universities we have seen so far, where the upper years are the source more of trouble than of entertainment to their inferiors. However, their kindness is not well rewarded, as any seniors found on campus during Ditch Day are duct taped to a wall to make sure they cannot leave at all.
There are quite a number of other amusing traditions practiced by Caltech, but I must forgo talking about them to focus on the quintessential element of all engineering university traditions, the pranks. Caltech has some of what I feel are the most innovative and clever pranks we have seen so far.
Let us start with the ongoing prank war between Caltech and our old friend, MIT. The two institutions have a lot in common: they both have a beaver as their mascot, they are both premier universities with impressive world standing, and they both have a long history of pranks involving football fields. Generally, a bout of pranking will start when one university does something to the other, and the other responds by ramping up the challenge. For instance, Caltech students once handed out T-shirts to incoming freshmen at MIT which read ‘MIT.’ Unknown to the recipients of the gift, there was also a message on the back: ‘…because not everyone can go to Caltech’. In a somewhat classic response, MIT stole the 130 year old Fleming House cannon from the Caltech Campus and trucked it all the way back to the east coast. Caltech replicated the spirit of their shirt prank earlier this year, when they handed out mugs to visitors during MIT Campus Preview Weekend. While cold, the mugs displayed the MIT logo; once they were heated up by being filled with coffee, the mugs change color and displayed ‘Caltech: The Hotter Institute of Technology’.
Caltech continues their tradition of innovative pranking in their aforementioned football schemes. They have thrice pulled pranks at the famous Rose Bowl Game, which is a football game played to celebrate every new year at Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena. In 2014, students erected a ‘Pasadena’ sign on a hill looking over the stadium, then turned on lights in the sign which spelt ‘Caltech’ at half time. In 1984, a pair of students installed a computer to alter the scoreboard’s output, making it read “Caltech: 38 MIT: 9” to promote these two universities the Caltech students felt were overlooked in athletics. But the greatest prank—known now as the ‘Rose Bowl Hoax’—was pulled off by a group of daring Caltech students in 1961.
The cheerleaders for one of the participating team of the 1961 Rose Bowl Game, the Washington Huskies, had planned a card-flip display as a half-time show. Over the course of several months, a group of Caltech students used espionage to determine the inner workings of the show. They broke into the cheerleaders’ hotel room before the game and stole one of the instructions which were given to each of the sign flippers. From it, they created their own set of instructions, then stealthy replaced the real instructions with the Caltech version. The next day, when the show was performed, everything went perfectly until the last few flips. On the 12th flip, the Huskie logo had been subtly changed to a picture of the Caltech beaver, but no one notice. On the next flip, the word ‘Washington’ was displayed backwards, but the cheerleaders assumed this was a mistake in their instructions. The final flip revealed the word ‘CALTECH.’ It has gone down as one of the best, most well-orchestrated pranks in history.
This ends our world-wide adventure to explore the amazing and complex world of engineering student culture. And by world-wide, I of course mean North American. And by North American I of course mean a small subset of the countries within North America. But even with this hugely reduced scope, I haven’t been able to even start to cover all of the traditions celebrated and pranks pulled by engineering students over the years. So take a look around; there’s lots more to see. Who knows, maybe one of the daring stories you find will encourage you to pull a prank of your own.
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