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Feb. 15, 2012
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Blood, sweat, and gears

Ravanne Lawday, Gateway Staff
Josh Schmaltz, Gateway Writer
Jan 25, 2012

If there’s one thing that a total outsider can take from this year’s Geer Week, it’s that nobody can imitate Horatio Caine, the one-man murder solving genius from CSI: Miami, quite like the members of Engineering Physics.

This year, the Engineering Physics team took on a pop-culture approach to the week-long competition between engineering departments, selecting CSPsy as their theme for the week, working it into two different activities the engineers compete in during the week. The name is a play on the popular Crime Scene Investigation shows that replaces the I for the Greek letter representing “Psi.”

The returning Geer Week champions are one of the smallest departments within the Faculty of Engineering. With a mere 67 students, the tight-knit Engineering Physics club managed to come out on top last year, and everyone is gunning for them in 2012.

The week kicks off with a sort of pre-event, a chance for everyone to mingle before the real competition begins. The Country Crusade is a tradition for everyone in engineering to enjoy. Adult beverages are imbibed and new friends made. While they may not openly admit it, it embodies a lot of what Geer Week is about.

All of the engineers, along with their friends from other faculties, board a bus and head out to a bar in a small town. The goal is to drink it dry, depriving the other patrons and the community of alcohol. So it combines the first big part of Geer Week, camaraderie, with the second biggest part, open competition.

“We don’t know where we’re going. Only two people that are planning the event actually know the name of the town we’re going to,” says Engineering Physics Geer Week co-ordinator David Drieger.

The official part of Geer Week commences with an actual opening ceremony, followed by a tug-of-war tournament between the 10 Engineering faculties. Six hours after the opening event, teams head over to RATT to wrap up the opening day by embarking on a city-wide scavenger hunt.

“The lists are usually gigantic,” explained Joel Freund, the PR Rep for EngPhys. “They usually take up about three pages. It would be impossible to get all the items.”

“You only get three hours to go out and get as many items as you can and return them,” Drieger added, “there’s always a huge variety of random things on the list, like garden gnomes and pictures of your team inside a sex shop.”



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