A new student admin system was introduced in UW about 4 months ago. The administration intends to have all registration of courses completed on-line by the end of the year. UW has yet to fully implement the system, but the new system has already caused a stir among some mathies.
The students of AM are not very happy as they think that they are now equal with Pure Mathies (as AM is now coded as AMATH). "We will be stereotyped as people who do nothing but long, winding work," said one short mathie majoring in applied math, "pretty soon we'll have to do proofs and we can't take that." The AM people fear that they may lose their "exempt from 8:30 classes" privilege as a result of the replacement of the abbreviation AM. Currently, some applied mathies are planning to send a petition to either retain the abbreviation AM or change it to APPMA. The organizer of the petition said that APPMA is a good choice because it can be interpreted as Applied Martial Arts and he has great faith that no one has the will to challenge someone who is a legend in the deadly arts.
The people in C&O are not very happy with the change either. In September, C&O will be officially renamed CO. From high-school chemistry, CO is a very undesirable compound — carbon monoxide. "Just think of what will happen if I try to date someone from Environmental Studies," said one self-proclaimed "pretty boy" in C&O, "They will think that I am out to destroy the planet. Who is going to want someone who is bent on world destruction?" If we write the "O" in lower-case, then we get cobalt, a metal that is not very high in value. "Comparing us to cobalt will devalue us greatly, we will only be on-par with those who are in software engineering (shorthand Se, or selenium), which doesn't exist yet," said one 4th year C&O student.
Oddly enough, there are people in math who wanted change, but didn't get it. For instance, the statistics department originally intended to change their abbreviation from STAT to something less intimidating, such as SIS, to curb the decrease of enrollment in upper-year statistics courses. The stat majors wanted the change because the fact that they are in statistics drive many away. However, the department later scrapped the idea after they concluded that the change may get stat majors into more trouble by giving the impression that mathies majoring in statistics are sissies.
However, there are also some mathies who welcome the change in admin system. A shy mathie in Operations Research wrote that he is glad that he won't be treated like an ore by CS majors anymore. He believes that the change from OR to OP will bring him a multitude of opportunity that he has not seen before, both professionally and personally.
Alliance of Mathies United by Silly Excuses (AMUSE) will stage a protest outside Needles Hall at 13:00 pm on July 13. "We will show them how powerful we are," said one member of AMUSE who wished to remain anonymous. It was later revealed that the member is a clown. According to mathNEWS sources, a wizard working for Microsoft, a penguin using Linux, and a spectacle-wearing ghost will also attend the protest. "We will do it the AMUSE-ing way," said the organizer of the event, an acrobat working for Adobe.
In related news, the number of incoming students demanding for entrance into the CS/Digital Hardware program has skyrocketed. This can be partly attributed to the fact that CS/DH students take a few E&CE courses, which will be renamed ECE in September. Rumours has it that the change gave the incoming mathies the impression that the E&CE courses are easy (which is, in some ways, true). However, the number of students enrolled in CS/EEE remains low in spite of the change.
Jason "the Screamer" Lau