Welcome to the Random Student Interview. Do I know you?
- Illustrations by Megan Mulholland
Hey! How’ve you been?
(Woman keeps walking)
Hey! Haven’t seen you in a while!
Umm …
Do you know who I am?
No. That’s why I wasn’t stopping.
Well, I don’t know you either. I just wanted to know if you wanted to do the Random Student Interview.
Maybe. What’s that?
It’s a really fun thing to do for three minutes. Like sex.
OK.
Cool. So what’s your name?
Mikaela.
Year and school?
Senior.
In LSA?
No. Engineering, actually.
Oh cool! Girl in Engineering! I’ve stopped a lot of people and I haven’t gotten that yet. Do you get people freaking out a lot?
Some people don’t believe me.
Good thing? Bad thing?
Both, I guess. When it’s in the context of: ‘There’s no pretty Engineering girls,’ then, you know.
That’s a good thing, then!
But when people think that I’m not capable, like, ‘Oh, you’re an engineer?,’ it’s kind of offensive. It’s a mix. Sometimes more good than bad.
OK. That’s fun. Did you really think I knew you from somewhere? When I first stopped you?
I thought that at first you might’ve thought that you knew me, but I was pretty sure that I didn’t know you.
OK. OK. I was going to take it a lot further, but I couldn’t follow through.
What were you going to do?
Well, I could tell you were going to leave, but I was going to ask you about someone specific as if we had a mutual friend or something and just see how long you’d talk to me.
Oh.
And if you would’ve been a guy, I could’ve said something like: ‘Hey, why didn’t you ever call me back? I thought we had something special.’
Oh gosh.
Yeah, but everyone probably would’ve just crab walked away like you wanted to.
Probably.
Go ahead and do that now.
– Mikaela is an Engineering senior.