MANDATORY

In undergrad, I helped organize events for our Biological Honor Society, TriBeta. One of these events was the Chili Cook Off, and to get people excited about the event, I created a ton of flyers that made the event seem mandatory for select groups of students who might be Biology majors:

MANDATORY for all students enrolled in Physics 101 who would rather not be.

MANDATORY for all students going abroad to either Uganda or Costa Rica next semester.

MANDATORY for all students who know what Isoamyl Acetate smells like.

MANDATORY for all students who are Nolan Sheppard.

One of the fourteen or so different flyers I made caused a lot of problems, however. It read:

MANDATORY for all pre-med students.

The professor who organized TriBeta got an angry cease and desist e-mail from the women who organized the pre-meds. The reason? She was getting a lot of e-mails from freaked out students asking whether or not they had to attend. A lot. Our professor told us to immediately remove the flyers. I was saddened. If people had just been logical, they would have realized that not only did it make no sense for TriBeta to have the authority to interfere with pre-med going ons, but that the high variability in the signs would suggest that there was no way the event could be mandatory. Sarcasm in print is hard to understand, yes, but it should be easy to understand if you get a lot of helpful hints. Or even if you just think with a discerning mind. I wanted to scribble on the flyers, "Relax STIFFS!" Thankfully, I did not. I just removed them, defeated.

Later our professor told me that he thought they were very amusing, but, leave it to the pre-med students to be driven into a tizzy by clearly humorous signs (he was an ecology professor).

I now go to medical school, and these people I am surrounded by, many of them behave with the same freaked-out tizziness of the pre-med students from my young adulthood. It is hexing. But also pretty funny. I wonder if I could increase readership by putting up signs around Rosalind Franklin University that read:

"LESS THAN CLINICAL" is MANDATORY READING FOR ALL M1s.