Ode To Finals
By: Jennifer Herseim | Categories: Featured Stories
For many alumni it wasn’t during a ceremony that they became a true Yellow Jacket. It was earned mid-exam, mid-lab, or mid-project.
Perhaps you flipped through the test looking for the easiest problem to solve first and got to the last page without finding it. Or you took a fluids exam with a question that included parts A through Z. Or solved a three-stage compressor problem in the days before calculators using trial and error, which took 12 hours with a slide rule.
In many of these moments, Yellow Jackets are born.
Jim Nazzaro, EE 76, remembers an open-book take-home final with only four questions. “The professor said, ‘It’s open-book, but it won’t help you.’ And he was right,” Nazzaro says.
Nazzaro was a clever student and a bit of a prankster (he took a few trips to the Dean of Students’ office), but he remembers really hitting the books for one final for a course on pulse, digital, and switching that was taught by a visiting professor. “I studied the material, except for the last three weeks of the 12-week course, and the entire final was on the last three weeks!”
It wasn’t a test that showed Miriam Patton, ChE 76, the lengths that she would go to earn her Tech degree; it was a torrential downpour, the likes of which the El Paso, Texas, native had never witnessed before.
Patton was supposed to leave for her 8 a.m. physics lab when the deluge started. It was too late to take the bus and she didn’t own a car, so she took off running from Fitten Hall to the physics building.
“By the time I arrived, I looked like a drowned rat, but I was a sophomore then—not that kind of RAT (Recruit at Tech),” she clarifies. Only two other students showed up with her. Eventually a TA arrived to inform them that the lab would be postponed. This was before the days of cell phones or the internet and Patton assumed everyone would be there. “My parents instilled in me a good work ethic, but Georgia Tech really instilled in me a good work ethic,” she says.
After Patton’s first year, she and her classmates grew used to how much Tech demanded of them. “We used to laugh about the fact that we’d see pictures of Princeton’s campus and how beautiful and lush and green it was,” she remembers. “And we’d go, ‘Even if Georgia Tech looked like that, we wouldn’t have time to enjoy it because we have to work really hard!’”