Duck And Cover Competition

If there’s one thing we Ducks pride ourselves on here at Stevens, it’s innovation. To help students show off their creativity and ingenuity, and also celebrate the school’s 150th anniversary, the Schaefer School of Engineering has put together the Duck and Cover: Make Your Fellow Students Duck and Cover Competition.

The school has called for students to group up and come up with innovative, patentable ways to make their colleagues duck (like Attila! 😉 ) and cover (like to protect oneself). We interviewed some of the contestants.

Randy O’Rourke entered the contest by himself. As a Texas native, he knows one thing that makes people duck and cover more than anything: tornados. “I like to take a little Texas with me wherever I go,” said Randy. “I keep my favorite Texan hot sauce, Tobasco, with me at all times in my pocket, even when I sleep. And last summer I caught this tornado.” He showed us a small vial filled with whirling winds he strung to his neck as a couture accessory. “It’s only an F3, but I think it’d be enough to scare these Yankees.”

For reference, an F3 tornado has winds between 158-206 mph. Typically, it tears the roof and some walls off even well-constructed buildings, overturns trains, and uproots most trees in a forest. We here at Off The Press can confirm we’d run to the nearest basement if Randy unleashed that one!

Twins Lucas and Liam Graham have a devious proposal. “So our mom works at Lockheed Martin,” Liam said, “and they actually have a contract with Thor. Y’know, the Norse god of thunder. And he said we could use his hammer.”

“Yeah,” said Lucas, who said he identified as the Loki of the two brothers. “We’re gonna go around and, like, smite people.”

Assistant Professor Sindri of the Mechanical Engineering department, the dwarf who initially blacksmithed Mjölnir (Thor’s hammer), said it was “one of the most fearsome and powerful weapons in existence” and “capable of leveling mountains” and “how did undergraduates get their hands on it, anyway?”

One senior design group thinks they might’ve one-upped the gods. Advised by Dr. Wellerstein, the group has been producing hydrogen bombs in the basement of McLean. Following is an interview we conducted with Jimmy Matthew, the team leader.

Off The Press: So have you successfully manufactured any weapons yet? Or are you still mapping the whole thing out in SolidWorks?

JM: Let’s just say we have enough firepower to wipe out the whole Eastern seaboard — and then some.

OTP: Wow. So where did you get the uranium?

JM: We actually used plutonium in addition to, of course, deuterium and tritium. Anyway, let’s just say I know a guy in Gear and Triangle.

Jimmy went on to say that they wouldn’t actually detonate one of the thermonuclear missiles on campus since students and faculty would be “completely and totally evaporated, like, instantly… like fwoosh, gone” before their basal ganglia could register there was a threat to duck and/or cover in response to. He said the team would consider detonating a missile “two, maybe three miles away” so everyone could feel the shockwaves and therefore a reason to duck and, if time allowed, cover.

Finally, the brothers of Phi Kappa Sigma are throwing their collective snap-backs into the ring. Arnold Davis, their representative, told us, “We actually had a lot of ideas bouncing around before we settled on this one: a school-wide limbo contest. We were planning on releasing a sentient cloud of mustard gas — we have a brother whose uncle works at Lockheed Martin — which would hover three or four feet off the ground. But then, some brothers and I were promoting our semi-annual blood drive, and boy, did we ever see people duck and cover.”

We polled students around campus, asking which group’s submission would make them duck and cover the fastest: the F3 tornado, Mjölnir, hydrogen bombs, or a plea for charitable donations. The results were overwhelming: 87% of students rated PKS’s charity work as the #1 most likely to make them duck/cover. Unfortunately, we had a low response rate for the survey as the vast majority of people ran in fear when they mistook our well-dressed reporter for a charity worker.

Jaqueline Garcia, one student we polled, said, “I just hate talking to people. Especially people I only, like, kinda know from taking Chem with them freshman year.”

Jaqueline ranked the hydrogen bomb as the least likely to make her duck and cover. She said, “Ugh, fear mongering over [thermo]nuclear strikes is so last century. Who are you, Cormac McCarthy? [sic]”