Stories From College Pt 4: Wily Hall

This one is not funny.

On the afternoon of October 16, 1996, I was heading back to my dorm after a long day of classes. About a block or two away from my dorm, I knew something was up. People were coming out of the woodwork from everywhere and gathering outside of Wily Hall. I went to my room and my roommate said that there had been a shooting. I lived in a 7th floor room and I had a great view of the situation. In no time, a SWAT team was on the scene. They sent guys into the building to clear all the students out. Meanwhile, a sniper set up on the roof of the recreation center. Eventually, the team shot a can of tear gas into a room. That was about the end of it. The team found the shooter, Jarrod Allan Eskew, dead from a self-inflicted gun shot.

It began when Eskew had been caught with cocaine by his floor couselor, Jay Severson. As the story went, Eskew went to his home in Crawfordsville to retrieve a gun. Neighbors claim they saw him put a gun in his trunk. Then he returned to Purdue and shot and killed Severson in his room for turning him in. He then went to his own room and shot himself.

Here is an AP article about the incident.

Stories From College Pt 3: Physics Class

I think I already wrote about this incident in a past blog post only in another form. So I'll write it differently so it sounds new. This particular story makes my parents REAL proud.

October 3, 1995

Only true masters of "Trivial Pursuit '90s Edition" will know what happened on that date. It was like any other day at college. I had to walk several blocks to class and I always had my walkman radio/tape player on me listening to the radio (yes I said TAPE, now get over it). The difference was that once I got to class, I kept one of my ear buds in and kept listening during class. This was one of the most anticipated days in 1995, I wasn't going to miss this just because I had class. I was paying attention in class and taking notes. But finally my attention was turned entirely to my walkman...

"We the jury.... find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder..."

Yes, there was no way after watching that train wreck for a year that I was going to miss that moment just because of class. It could have been worse, I could have skipped class entirely and watched it on TV. As it turns out, right after class, one of the professor's assistants wrote "OJ not guilty" on one of the overhead projectors.

Stories from College Pt 2: Seek First to Understand, Then To Be Understood.

That is habit #5 from the book "7 Habits of Highly Effective People". It was also the "habit" that me and my partner, Doug, had to do a presentation about in CIMT481. That class happened to be the "senior project class" for CIMT, but the professor also used the class to have us read this book.

Doug and I read our chapter seperately, then met up and put together our presentation. I found a Microsoft Word document the other day that contained my original notes from this presentation.

I led off by talking about "the five levels of listening". This speech was destined to be boring. Level one is "Ignoring - not really listening". Level two is "Pretending - saying things like 'yeah, uh-huh. right'". As I was going through this list, Doug kept interupting me. He kept telling me about something that happened to him on the way to class. I ignored him at first, but eventually I turned to him and reminded him we were in the middle of a speech and he could tell me after class.

The look on everyone's faces was PRICELESS! We all had taken speech classes before, but none of us had seen people get into an argument during a speech. Why was Doug doing this to me in the middle of our speech? Keep in mind also that everyone in the room knew each other and had been working with each other for years in the CIMT lab. So they were confused by Doug's behaviour, especially since he was usually a quiet guy.

I went on with my list, which eventually led into me revealing that Doug's behaviour was an example of what I was trying to explain. Everybody realized then that they had been had. The professor grinned and made a note on our evaluation. We got an A and he noted our effectiveness and attention-getting.

It turns out that groups after us also used acting in their presentations, but they all announced they were doing it before they actually did it.