Buddy really cemented his reputation as a doper supreme the following weekend. It was the long Labor Day weekend, and I don’t think he was straight a single minute. He wasn’t very straight the rest of the time, for that matter. On the plus side, we had absolutely no classes together.
That was very, very unusual at RPI. As a general rule, every freshman in the school had an identical schedule. Every engineer and every scientist took the same classes, certainly through the first semester, and almost certainly through the second semester. They didn’t really separate until sophomore year. Every single freshman would take Calculus I, Chemistry I, Physics I, and for the engineers — about 60 % of the school — Engineering I. Second semester was more of the same.
These classes were done in two parts. First you had massive lecture halls that held hundreds of students at once, where professors delivered canned lectures covering the week’s topic. Then, groups of up to 20 students would assemble at different times with grad students or more junior professors to review the topics and go over homework. This was where you would go for help if you didn’t understand the lectures or books.
The real fun came every Friday morning. Starting about three weeks after classes began, at 8:00 AM on Friday was the dreaded F-Test. F for Friday? F for Freshman? F for Failure? Nobody knew. It started with Calculus, the next week was Chemistry, the following week was Physics, and it finished with Engineering. The 40 % of us who weren’t engineers got a break that week. After the four week cycle ran its course, you immediately started a new cycle. It continued this way right up until the end of the semester, ensuring that every class had at least two or three major tests before the final. Since almost everybody in the school was required to take at least two semesters of these courses, the procedure continued in the spring.
It was actually funny, in a macabre sort of way. The freshmen dorms and dining hall would empty out at about 7:45, and the entire freshman class would begin a Bataan Death March style hike across the campus, generally using the Ho Chi Minh Trail, an asphalt pathway that connected the freshman quad with the main campus, so named because it was so cracked and potholed it resembled the heavily bombed supply line in Viet Nam. It was like a mass migration, lemmings’ marching to the sea, with the always remembered proviso that the lemmings ended up drowning at the end of it.
The only ones who got out of this were the ones who managed to test out in high school on AP classes. I was very, very different, in that even though I was technically a freshman and living in the freshman dorms, I was actually already taking sophomore and junior level math and computer courses. Nobody else in the freshman class was doing that!
Buddy went to his first round of classes, but then forgot to go to the bookstore and buy his textbooks. Of course, as his roommate, I could be expected to loan him mine. I mean, what are roommates for, right? By Wednesday, he was asking, “Hey, can I borrow your Resnick?” A Resnick was our physics book, named after Professor Resnick, who wrote it.
I looked over at him from my desk where I was studying Finite Math. “Sorry. I don’t have one.”
He looked very confused at that. “You don’t have a Resnick?” He glanced over at the pile of textbooks on my bookshelf. “How come?”
“Because I already took Physics last year.”
“Yeah? Like AP in high school?” he asked.
I turned to face him. “No, like I’ve already taken about two years of college while I was still in high school.”
Buddy was quite perplexed at that. “So, if you’re, like, a sophomore or something, what are you doing here?” He waved his arms around, indicating Hall Hall and the freshman dorms.
I shrugged and smiled. “Buddy, I’m only 17. Where the hell else are they going to put me?”
It was like I was explaining quantum mechanics (which I had actually studied once) to an aborigine. We didn’t even have the same language. “You’ve been in college since you were 15?”
“Not quite. Just the last half of my junior year and my senior year, a little after I turned 16.” I told him how many credits I already had, and which courses I already had finished. He was still confused.
“So, you don’t take Calculus or Chemistry either?”
“Nope.”
“You mean, I can’t borrow those books either? I haven’t had a chance to get them yet.”
“Sorry.”
“You can’t give me your notes from the other day?”
“Ask down the hall. I wasn’t there,” I replied.
Buddy was starting to look like I’d hit him in the face with a two by four. “So, where were you?”
“Buddy, get real! I was taking different classes.”
“Like what?” He came over and grabbed up my Finite Math book and flipped it open. A string of calculus equations stared back at him. “What is this shit?”
I grabbed my book back and looked at the page. “That’s an explanation of Bayes’ Theorem.”
“Huh?”
I tried explaining the use of finite and discrete math as advanced set theory in applications of probability, but his eyes were starting to glaze over. “What, are you some sort of genius or something?” he asked.
I just laughed. “Go down the hallway, Buddy. Somebody down there must be able to loan you their notes and book.” I waved him away and went back to studying.
Eventually some of the other guys on the floor figured out what was going on with me and the advanced classes, but mostly they didn’t care. I did get asked for some tutoring help, which I was generally able to provide. Otherwise I just tried to be as normal as possible. Looking at people, with decades of experience, I was able to start making my own internal predictions on who was going to last and who wasn’t.
I had seen the same dynamic back when I taught at Mohawk Valley Community College in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I discovered early on that I was very comfortable in an academic environment, to the point that my mother used to joke I was a professional student. After I got my Associates in Computer Science from MVCC and my Bachelors from SUNY-IT in Rome, I taught for several years at night at MV as an adjunct. We had the same issue then, and among the teachers we called it Grade 13. We would see kids start college and thinking it was still high school and they could get away with the same nonsense they did the year before.
College is not high school! Most of the students are already 18, or will be in a matter of months, and the system treats them as adults. Nobody is going to call home and tell Mommy and Daddy that Little Johnny is skipping class or not doing his homework. Nobody cares! In fact, if Mommy or Daddy calls to ask why we flunked Little Johnny, we weren’t legally allowed to even tell them. Most freshmen courses have two intended effects, to teach the basics for future courses, but also to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. If a student complained that a teacher was tough, among the teachers it was considered a sign of prowess! I remember when students told some of the other professors that Mr. Buckman was really tough and strict, the other teachers all would smile and give me a thumbs up.
I could look around the dorm and tell who was going to survive and who wasn’t. I was not going to bet on Buddy making it. In fact, I wasn’t even willing to bet he would last until the end of the semester, or even the month!
I knew there was one set of classes I would be attending that Buddy wouldn’t be at. Monday morning I had my first muster with the ROTC class. It was time to learn to be a soldier. To be fair, it wasn’t that big an imposition. Being in ROTC meant you got to skip out on gym class. I guess the theory was that we would be drilling and doing our own calisthenics and running and didn’t need to do those things as students in gym class would. Academically, we had one class a semester in Military Science. Mostly this was military history and all sorts of stuff on leadership and management.