MIT was an eye-opener, academically. You showed up as a hot shot Salutorian from your high school and got a rude awakening when you found that all your classmates were Valedictorians and you are graded on a curve. It can be a tough place — if you take it seriously.

P1, P2, and I decided to see every movie playing in Boston over the Reading Period just before final exams for second term of freshman year. We were all Physics majors because we didn’t know any better. P2 flunked Chemistry, which is forgivable as a Physics major. P1 flunked Physics, which is not so forgivable. I flunked them both, which was unforgivable for any major. (Curiously, P1 and P2 both went on to get PhDs in Physics.)

One thing we learned early on was that a good story was worth a good grade…

We wanted P3 to go out drinking, but he had a quiz the next day. We promised we would come up with a good excuse before the evening was over. P3 foolishly took our word because we were Responsible Upperclassmen. Surprisingly, we did come up with a brilliant strategy. As good engineers, we made a fake cast for his forearm with hidden catches that allowed it to be removed. We added enough dirt and cute, multi-colored signatures to make the cast convincing. It worked like a charm and P3 got to take a make-up exam.

Unfortunately, we did not think things through at 2 AM after an evening of debauchery. We forgot P3 would have to wear it to class every day for four weeks or so. That wasn’t a huge problem, but P3 woke up with a hangover one morning and put the cast on the wrong arm. (P3 used his MIT education in metallurgy wisely. If you google him, you will find about 1500 hits that all say something like, “P3, legendary rugby coach, said…” Among other things, P3 almost single-handedly got women’s rugby into the Olympics. He now tours the world with a bevy of young babes doing rugby tournaments while his wife, P3A, is home knitting.)

P4 was a fine Aeronautical Engineer but he didn’t do Humanities well. One night we wanted him to go out for a few beers, but he had a theme due the next day. I volunteered to dictate the theme to him since I generally aced Humanties because of my genetic gift for bullshit. Since his Humanities grades were abysmal, he figured he couldn’t do worse and agreed. Alas, the theme was on Hegel and I hadn’t gotten to Hegel yet in class. So I read five pages of his book and started dictating. Half an hour later P4 had his 1,500 words; after another half hour to clean the paper up and type it, P4 was out drinking. P4 got a B+, his highest grade ever on a Humanities theme. Personally, I felt the Prof really missed the point. (P4 ended up a VP at a Fortune 500. Clearly, Humanities was not a major concern at that company.)

[ed: The Twit also insisted that I expunge a marvelous story about how P4 managed to get poison ivy everywhere on a PK picnic.]

P2 had as much difficulty with Humanities as P4. Unfortunately, his story wasn’t good enough when he got back a Humanities quiz with a grade of 1, presumably for spelling his name correctly. It seems there was a question requiring a discussion of somebody’s dialectic and P2 read it as ‘dielectric’. Only P2 could make that kind of mistake because he was always a little out of phase with the universe the rest of us lived in. He once sent the IRS a letter that went something like, “I lost my W2 forms this year and I forgot to file my taxes last year. I think I owe you a little money this year but you owed me a little money last year. Let’s call it even.” P2 never heard back, and I would bet there is an IRS agent in a rubber room somewhere.