In engineering, the girls are scarce.

Mechanical engineering is down. Way down. Once at a booming 15% female population (1996 first year population), our numbers have dwindled to 6% (2006 first year stats). You know things are bad when even the computer engineers have more girls.

My class has six girls. Though, not going to lie, we're a pretty normal bunch (no unibrows, fairly fashionable attire, neutral or agreeable scent) I guess we've become old hat. My salad days of enjoying a near monopoly on the guys in my class seem to be over. I was recently described as "one of the guys" which I took offense for a second until I realized the veracity of the statement.

We got about 8-10 new guys in the class- those who failed out last year and have been given another chance by being allowed to join my class. Now who fails 2B? The dumb ones all fail out in first year, so if you make it to 2B you've got smarts. You can really only fail if you party too much to study. And if you party too much you're probably decently good looking or at least fun to hang around with. But did these 8-10 probably good looking definitely fun guys sitting in the back of the class capture my attention? Negative.

WE GOT A NEW GIRL YESTERDAY. She entered with a guy and sat in the third row. The class erupted in whispers. Now I personally thought she looked a little skankalicious but that distaste was ebbed away by the fact that we have A NEW GIRL!! Pretty much everybody was starring at her. My friend Mike pointed out that I was more interested in the new girl than any of the American Eagle boys in the back row... and that's when I realized I might as well be labeled "one of the guys" for all the inter-class dating I am interested in. Anyway, The Girl then she checked her time table (frosh, since clearly nobody other than first years carry around a print out) and embarrassingly got up and left with the guy she came in with. That's right, she was in the wrong class.

One of my class makes stood up out of his chair and shook both fists disparagingly towards the heavens.

We all returned to the hum drum of thermodynamics or whatever with a collective sigh. BUT then today we got ANOTHER GIRL! And she doesn't look skankalicious! In fact, she looks like a potential candidate to fulfill the "Lisa's friend that is a girl and lives in Waterloo and isn't graduating this spring" role! The fist waggler from yesterday confirmed that indeed, she was looking for ME 222 (I guess he didn't want to open his heart too soon this time). She is! Alrighhhht! New girls!