Engineers Week! Some cool links and a more doubtful retrospective

I am terribly neglectful of my role as engineer on this blog - I COMPLETELY FORGOT about E-Week, that's National Engineers Week to the rest of you.

Peggy at Women in Science and SciBling Zuska have written good posts about it, so go read those for your fill of E-Week Goodness.

I confess though, that E-Week simply reminds me of some very peculiar activities that those at my undergrad institution engaged in. A lot of drinking, I mean a LOT of drinking, and most of it was even legal. A broomball tournament amongst teams with names like "Choked Flow" (I think that was a Chem Eng name. Those were the men's teams; the women's teams were more like Sesame Street characters, I seem to recall). Ambulances were regular visitors to the broomball rink on the main part of campus. There were huge complex multiday scavenger hunts. Even more drinking.

These kinds of events were reasons I didn't want to be in engineering. In fact, it's arguable that any of this even was "engineering." Perhaps if I had gone to or participated in some of the kinds of activities that Peggy and Zuska describe, I would have been more of a fan of E-Week. But it's clear that E-Week is a significant series of events for engineers to work on constructing their own identities as engineers.

Do you remember E-Week on your undergraduate campus? What things did people do? Was there any engineering involved? Was it accessible to and fun for all, or just the people who liked drinking, or were okay with weird sexualized-yet-impotent-esque competitions? Do share.

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I don't know if it's related to E-week, but I know that tomorrow the SWE group on campus is hosting an engineering day for girls. They host events like that a couple times throughout the year, and it seems like it would be fun. I know there also used to be frequent MatSci broomballing trips, also unrelated to E-week, and I am pretty sure drinking was not involved.