SNOW HOW Detroit Free Press, Sunday, November 27, 1988 Michigan Tech lacks social life but snags jobs by Neal Rubin, Free Press Staff Writer HOUGHTON - At the table, they're talking shop. In the booth, they're talking shopping. "I don't know," a woman tells her friend. They're tucked out of sight at the Library bar, walking distance from Michigan Technological University even in the early November chill. "I just don't know how long I can live without malls." Snatches of conversation from a group of eight drift across the room. "But that means your program's not logged off." . . . "You just better hope you know the operator." Waiter Chris King nods toward the larger party. "They're all engineers," he says. "I can tell, because they were making jokes about formulas." One man's voice finally drowns out seven others: "It's an IBM. Why can't I run IBM programs?" His friends dissolve in laughter, and King shrugs. It's another language, another world. It's the future, and it starts - of all places - in frigid Houghton, the gateway to Ripley and Dollar Bay. As the presidential candidates spent the fall trumpeting their commitment to the technology race, the 6502 students of Michigan Tech crouched in the starting blocks. Tomorrow's leaders are sequestered here today - studying, staring glassy-eyed into computer screens or hurling themselves down snow-packed hills atop cafeteria trays. Some 430 hardy survivors of the Halls of Icy graduated Nov. 18. The rest remain, stranded atop the UP in the breathtaking copper country of the Keweenaw Peninsula, to face blizzards, boredom, and Biochemical Processes. 'CM450 Biochemical Processes. A discussion of biochemistry fundamentals and the basic techniques used for analyzing and designing biochemical processing systems.' A few quick keys to understanding Michigan Tech: It's not easy to get in. It's not easy to get by. It's not easy to get out, either by graduation or, some of the time, by snowmobile. Houghton shoulders 250 inches of snow per year. Come winter - and it comes early - 20 degrees rates as balmy weather. "After a few years, it's supposed to get better," says Graham Hess, 20, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering. "I'm still waiting. Especially with an 8a.m. class. You start scraping your windshield at about 20 till 8, and then you pray the car starts." At least hess, who hails from Dearborn, had been snowed on before. Winter came as news to Steve Gamm, 19, a sophomore from Tampa, Fla., who had never worn anything heavier than a denim jacket until last year. Gamm, the sun of a Tech alumnus, moved out of a newer dorm into stately Douglass Houghton Hall this fall because it's just a sprint and a slide from the two building where civil engineering majors have the most classes. He and his roommate have hunkered down for the season with two television sets, cable, a VCR and a tropical fish the size of a brook trout. "It's kind of nice being up here," he says bravely. "You get used to getting sick every time you come back up here. You soften up when you go home, I guess." EE340 Introduction to Distributed Parameter Networks. Study of the propagation of high-frequency sinusiodal waves and pulses on two conductor transmission lines. Transmission line parameters and the telegraphers equations are derived from Maxwell's equations. The tassels behind the bar at the Douglass House Saloon dangle in testimony to the rigidity of the Tech curriculum. They came from the mortarboards of students who needed 10 years or more to graduate. Almost no one finishes in four years. Tech Staffer Mary Cruickshank, 27, has one friend who pulled it off, and she recounts his social life in six words: "He skied. A couple of times." Tech is a grind, and students take inordinate pride in the difficulty of the curriculum. Yet, they don't like being labeled drudges or worse, nerds. "There's a difference between a nerd and a geek," explains Cruickshank, a systems operator. "Geek" is both a noun and a verb at Michigan Tech, and applies to someone "hunched over a keyboard in a dark room. They call it 'geeking out.' You'll see someone walking down the hallway with a bunch of papers under his arm and he'll say, 'I'm going to geek out. I've got a program due Friday'." A nerd is . . . well, a nerd. Which is a term the geeks might use for a liberal arts major, assuming they could find one. Only 33 inhabit the entire campus. Jennifer Hagy, of nearby Chassell, Graduated this month with a degree in scientific and technical communication, which to the engineers might as well be a fold dance. She wrote for the student newspaper, the Lode, and was a monitor in the liberal arts building computer lab, where a pterodactyl in an Oldsmobile cap hangs from the ceiling. "We get cut down quite a lot," says Hagy, 25, one of the 119 students in her field. "The engineers say, 'those are the people who couldn't cut it in engineering, so they went to the easy major.'" Junior Mae Tabata says the lack of emphasis on languages other than BASIC and COBOL is actually a drawing card for some unenlightened engineers. "It's kind of sad," says Tabata, 21, a transfer from Kealakekua, Hawaii, majoring in Computer Science. "I'm glad I took my English at the University of Hawaii. One person last year was writing a book report. I thought, 'Is this college English?'" Engineers are a conservative, close-minded breed, agrees Cruickshank, but there's a reason for it. "If they were adventurous and optimistic . . Well, the Zilwaukee Bridge was built by optimistic engineers." MY300 Fundamentals of Mineral Concentration. Brittle fracture, concept of particle size, properties of gas-liquid and solid liquid interfaces, sampling of particulate solids and mineral engineering calculations. Not that technicians are necessarily humorless. A popular T-shirt has a picture of the Zilwaukee Bridge on the front and a reminder on the back: "Not built by Tech engineers." Michigan Tech students have developed a sense of the absurd as a defense mechanism against incessant study and infrequent distraction. Snow Diving - off roofs or out windows - is popular when drifts pile two or three stories high against the buildings. Cafeteria trays become sleds for runs down the hiss behind the ROTC and the Forestry buildings. The Winter Carnival, built around the students intricate snow and ice sculptures, has become a tourist attraction - the next one is Jan. 30-Feb. 4. "Once we made a bobsled run off the roof of our house," says Erick Jensen, 25, a senior from Appleton, Wis. "Actually, it was the neighbor's house. You know those little plastic sleds? From the peak of the roof, we went off the front to the house and looped around the front yard." Jensen and his Delta Sigma Phi fraternity brothers used to build a bobsled run behind the fraternity each winter. "But every year, we sent someone to the hospital, so we kind of put an end to that." The up side of a Tech education comes near graduation, when recruiters are as thick as summer blackflies. The down side, for most students, comes every Friday night. In the old days, women were so scarce that the university had to recruit its homecoming queen from the local high school. In the recent days of 1973 to 1982, Tech instituted a nursing program, largely in hopes of luring more women to the campus. Today, in what passes for the golden age of socializing, women are still outnumbered 3-1 Tech men frequently wind up dating students from Suomi College, a two year school in neighboring Hancock, or from area high schools. Tech women - against all odds - frequently wind up eating popcorn and watching TV with one another. The reason, Tabata explains, is that Tech men are swine. "Half the girls here don't get dates," she says. "They guys think that the girls are stuck up. But that's because of the way they treat them. "They call the girls here 'snow cows.' They moo when women walk by." To senior Christoper Niemi of Spring Arbor, Tech represents "about a four-year hold on your social life, because there is none up here. "With this curriculum, I don't know if anybody could party a lot and get through," he says. "There's a lot of studying, a lot of late nights. But it'll pay off in the end." That's a common phrase, the common carrot at the end of the stick. "It'll pay off in the end. We can endure." Dearborn's Hess, for instance, knows that his tenure at Tech will set him up for what years of snow and study have made him crave the most: "A job. A job on the West Coast."