Why did I come to RPI? For the tuition, the lack of females, or the booze? No! The simple fact of the matter is that I came to Troy to experience the full fury of the legendary upstate New York winter. The never-see-grass-from-November-to-May kind. The kind that smothers the roadways in snowdrifts so massive they can bury a man and sends thousands of motorists into life-threatening tailspins with ice storms that make the doomsday scenario in The Day After Tomorrow look positively tropical in comparison.
And I have been sorely disappointed. This winter, according to the National Weather Service, is the wussiest winter ever recorded since the NWS began measuring such things in 1848. The weak snowfall and pathetic ice have not lived up to my expectations and as such my academic experience at RPI has suffered immeasurably. I demand that this administration take the focus off of biotechnology and EMPAC and the thousand other vanities it has plunged into in the past eight years and return to the basics, to what makes this Institute one of the best in the world.
This administration needs to start caring about the weather, and it needs to focus on making it as horrendous as possible. They’re already off to a decent start, in that they’ve been pretty lax in clearing snow or salting things down, but much more needs to be done. Without massive blizzards and ice storms we cannot function effectively as a student body. We can’t create obscene snow sculptures of male genitalia if there isn’t enough snow to even make a decent snowman. We also can’t appreciate the spotty salting and sanding job all across campus if there isn’t even enough ice to slip on. And how are those of us with light skin supposed to maintain our pasty white complexions if there’s actual sun outside, and the temperature is so mild that we can actually stand to be outdoors for short periods of time?
This is absolutely ridiculous, and since we all know that the administration is in charge of everything on campus—the weather especially—it’s high time that someone takes responsibility for this mess and takes steps to resolve it. The ground better be whiter than Al Pacino’s desk at the end of Scarface, and it better be so freaking cold that my breath freezes in my throat. I expect nothing less from a world-class institute such as RPI.
