STEM Major Wants to Remind You He Doesn’t Care About March Madness
“March Madness? Yeah, I'm already experiencing it.” This was the response given by FSU sophomore (senior by credit) and proud STEM major Irwin Schmeinstein when asked by a friend if he was following the annual NCAA basketball championship. “I'm going MAD taking 27 hours this semester and trying to decide which four majors I want a degree in, because I'm an overachiever and bury my insecurities in overworking myself and using frantic, run-on sentences to say I'm better than you. It’s been a lot of hard decision making, but of course, my final four are Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.”
Schmeinstein’s friend, sociology major Francesca Deligno, immediately regretted inviting him to a viewing party of Tuesday’s final showdown between Gonzaga and North Carolina. “That kid needs to get out more,” she commented, shoving three and a half pounds of unfinished assignments under her area rug. “He almost never has free time, and he spends what little he can scrounge up throwing garbage at all the social science buildings, accusing them of being fake news. There have been rumors circulating of him taking up a new hobby of pitting 32 of FSU’s majors against each other in some sort of fantasy tournament where every liberal arts major is immediately thrown out in the first round.”
Sometime in between his Advanced Programming class and Technojargon Engineering Lab, Schmeinstein found the precious seconds to explain the rumored bracket. Just past the secret door behind the bookshelf in his 2x2 (which his roommate doesn’t know about), and down the medieval looking spiral staircase lies his secret lab, wherein he keeps the fabled diagram. Typically uninterested in sports, Schmeinstein kept his academia bracket under wraps before revealing his inspiration for this extremely bizarre and huge waste of time project: watching FSU’s overzealous student athletes choke, when he accidentally caught a glimpse of the FSU-Xavier game on in Dirac.
“Alright, none of you can make fun of me for this!” Schmeinstein complained, while throwing on his cloak and proclaiming himself “Diracula.” “You love constructing prediction diagrams based on lateral braces, or ‘brackets’ as you mathematically-illiterate peasants call them. So why can’t I have fun every once in awhile without everyone calling me a creep? So what if I created a D&D style RNG strategy game where only the strongest majors survive? I’m preparing everyone for the REAL WORLD! Every major with an accompanying default career will never make it to the finals. What are you gonna do with your English degree? Teach filthy adolescents?” scoffed Schmeinstein. He then worked diligently to remove the oxygen supply from the flame that engulfed his dork-cloak when he bumped into a Bunsen burner in his mad scientist laboratory.