I must confess that I owe Heather Bell an apology. After struggling through a trivial engineering problem set, it was I who had the audacity to exclaim, "That's it. I'm transferring to Trinity!" Unaware was I of the five majors required for each Trinity student.
Imagine the frustrations of first crafting a 15-page thesis on genetics, then poring over 350 cryptic pages of political theory, all the while wandering the hallowed aisles of Perkins searching for clues to unraveling the profound mysteries of modern aesthetics, and topping those labors with a heartfelt intellectual debate on the deconstructionist school of literary criticism! How could I have deigned to compare these gargantuan tasks to the trifling rigors of simple engineering theory and Newton's second law (F=ma)?
Believe me, my jokes will cease. No more misperceptions of Trinity as "the easy way out" shall ever emanate from my intellectually repressed Id. The cherished moments I spent frolicking in strain gauge transducer labs are but a pale shadow of the prolonged torment of delving into the bowels of Perkins armed only with a pencil, paper and an open mind. I have been advised of the error of my ways and stand humbled, faced with the conclusion that this inequity in the quest for intellectual Nirvana at Duke demands immediate amelioration.
I am willing to take the first step. Even as this apology exits my printer, I shall be on the road to intellectual enlightenment, for I shall be researching the abstruse conceptual backgrounds of Supercalifragilisticalism, the bastardized Nietzschian sister of existentialism.
I urge every conscious and self-respecting engineer to follow suit, for only through such selfless acts exhibiting our unwavering commitment to the cause of creating an intellectual climate at Duke may we all fathom the true meaning of the word "education."
Brian Dudenhoefer
Engineering '96
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