I Love Mudders. And Planes.

I should preface this post with the following confession: I am a compulsive e-mail checker. When I'm at my computer I'll usually have a window open to GMail and I have this nasty habit of replying to e-mail as soon as I see it rather than waiting until I have, say, finished my homework.

With that in mind, consider the following. I sent an e-mail to the student mailing list (students dash L, we call it) asking for students interested in a glider trip with the aeronautics club next year at 22:30 on a Monday night. I had the good luck to send it right as the mailing list moderator was cleaning out his in-box so it got sent right away. Within 3 minutes I had 7 responses. 3 and a half hours later, in the middle of the night, I had 34 responses. One day later and I had nearly 50 responses. I did not expect this, but it is exciting all the same. The 3 minute one is really the important one.

As for the trip, well I'm taking over joint leadership of the Barnstormers (HMC's aeronautics club) next year and one of the suggested events was to schedule a trip for the club to go on a glider trip. We need to submit our budget proposal by Friday, so I needed to gauge interest: a 30 minute flight is about $100, we might get a 10% discount, people'd probably be willing to spend about $20 out of pocket and the club pays the rest if we can get our hands on the dough. Thus, it's just a matter of how many people are interested. With 50 expressing interest right now I figure we'll probably find ourselves with about half that actually ending up wanting/able to go depending on when it's scheduled.

Another thing to note is that Harvey Mudd College used to have an aeronautics program in which students would learn about aviation and eventually get their private pilot's license. Iris Critchell was the driving force behind the program, and she's still here at Mudd. Look for more about the Bates Program and Iris in upcoming posts.

~KMarsh