On Thursday night, I spent time in the basement of Hawthorn Hall, a freshman

engineering dorm, to observe mechanical engineering students. I sat and watched but I also tried
to talk with people about why they want to be an engineer. Its definitely a stereotype that
engineers seem to be very introverted, but most of them are not and happen to be extremely
social. However, what is common around most engineering students is that almost all of them
seem to be perceiving and putting immense amounts of thought into what theyre seeing, saying
and doing. The conversations with mechanical engineering students usually somehow ends up
heading in the direction of cars and trucks, but I found out a lot about other types of mechanical
engineering like, biomedical and energy. The students who dont want to go into the automobile
side of mechanical engineering tend to stay away from the people who do, because conversation
about interests is usually hard to make. A student who is say into biomedical and wants to work
on prosthetics might not know much about a 71 Chevy Chevelle, and so thus little groups tend
to form within the subculture of Mechanical Engineers. Also a major split that is noticed is the
line with female and male that causes tiny cliques to be formed. Females tend to form groups
when theyre outnumbered, so I noticed that most of the females had at least another woman
with her to talk to within the groups of boys around her.
I think the main things that could pull the community apart are lack of socialism,
different motives, different interests and genders. Having a lack of social interaction pulls a
community apart in obvious ways, because lack of social interaction means having a lack of
community. Different motives make a huge division in the community because students who are
in it only for the money and students who are in it for the passion have conflicting views on
almost everything. Having different interests just forms a barrier in conversation that is hard to
overcome, especially among a group of people that are typically very well spoken and try to

think before they speak. Lastly a final thing that divides the community is gender, primarily
because this is a male dominated area of study and profession, the females tend to be either
intimidated or seen as intimidating.