Excavators were spotted in a blaze of mechanical fury early Monday morning by Atwater Kent¹. As any WPI veteran will tell you, this marks the annual reopening of the ‘paper pit’, the final resting place of many a MQP paper. In order to avoid tarnishing the university’s reputation, the pit was opened in 1971 — a mere year after the papers became a graduation requirement. After a request for comment, the Dean’s office wanted to assure students that papers that won department or university awards would be buried in a smaller, nicer pit.
Of course, this goes hand in hand with the annual ‘payroll exodus’. The bursar was awhirl terminating the Workday accounts for temporary workers responsible for making the senior class feel important. These employees are typically employed as actors to feign interest in the MQP presentations given by the soon-to-graduate students. This year however, the workers were remote as students gave presentations virtually. WPI assured the tenured faculty that the actors would still receive the same training as in years past. A thorough course in head nodding and affirmative grunting was conducted over zoom but remained unchanged.
[1] Atwater Kent is reportedly a building for ‘ECE’ majors, although this cannot be corroborated due to a lack of sightings. We can however confirm a lingering smell of burnt capacitors, body odor, and despair near the building.
