A strange sight greeted any student who walked past the freshman quad this past Monday. Half a dozen guys, hundreds of USPS First-class Delivery boxes and an inevitably confused expression on every passerby's face. "What frat is this for?", "Are you protesting something?" and other similar phrases were being thrown around by the crowd of students walking to and from class. The response of freshmen John Halvorsen, Michael Tango and Michael Weinberg's was simple and reminiscent of the days of innocent childhood: "It's for me. We're building a castle!"
When I left my room in AMR II that morning, the quad looked completely normal: green grass being trampled by the people bustling about, rushing to get to class. I first noticed something was amiss when Halvorsen, who is in my Process Analysis class, entered the classroom wearing a suit of cardboard armor. It was a strange style of dress, even for Hopkins, and so everyone in the class assumed this was some fraternity initiation act. But the walk back to my dorm that afternoon showed that this was much bigger than any one armored student.
Twelve freshmen in total had decided to build a fort in the AMR courtyard, for no reason other than to have fun and enjoy the sunlight - no fraternity initiation, no protest over a social issue, no class engineering project. But one could easily be fooled, as the logistics of the event were well taken care of. Halvorsen says that he managed to acquire the 400 pounds of cardboard and transport it to the quad. He even talked to security beforehand about letting them build it and convinced campus authorities to let them finish their innocent engineering feat. It is hard to imagine that anyone would have the time or determination to build a 500-box, 10-foot tall cardboard fort in the middle of campus, but these 12 guys did because, as they said, it was the "best possible use of a Monday."
Despite its quirkiness, seeing this fort in the process of being built and the accompanying level of energy in the builders brings a smile to one's face. By all rational reasoning, building their "AMR III" was relatively pointless, a waste of time, energy and resources, only to have it fall apart within an hour due to its instability. But seeing Havlorsen in his cardboard knight and Tango in his Battle Pope costumes, dueling it out in front of their newly opened fort, certainly added excitement to an otherwise sluggish post-spring break Monday. Whilst everyone else was busy studying for midterms, writing papers or finishing problem sets, these freshmen showed to the rest of us that Hopkins students still can have fun, though in unorthodox manners.
A tour guide for a group of pre-frosh students who passed by while the fort was being built allegedly said "this is the fun that Hopkins students have on a warm, sunny afternoon." Is it an incentive for high schoolers considering coming here next year? Well, it certainly beats the stereotype that everyone spends warm afternoons in the even warmer C level of the library.
