Though I am home now, I was on Pomona’s campus over the summer in the Summer Undergraduate Research Program, or SURP. I was doing physics research in Professor Whitaker’s Bose-Einsten Condensate lab (essentially, a lot of lasers). But that’s not the point of this post.
The point of this post is to celebrate and remember Big Shirt Wednesday.
I am not a Physics major. I only took one Physics class during my first year. I really didn’t know anyone (Professors or students) in the Physics Department.
But, over the summer, stuck in the basement of Andrew/Millikan, I met some really awesome fellow students. Embarrassingly enough, when I talked to my friends about them, I called them “my physics boys.” Because that’s just the kind of person I am.
Since both I and a fellow Physics researcher work with lasers, and when our respective advisors ordered new ones, we received free laser company shirts. Both were very very large to fit any and every recipient.
We agreed to both wear our too large shirts the next day, which happened to be Wednesday. We deemed it “Big Shirt Wednesday,” and expanded our inclusion to anyone who wanted to join. For the next 3 weeks or so, we got more and more people working in Andrew/Millikan to participate. And we always had the most fun on Big Shirt Wednesdays. One time, we randomly decided to go to In N Out for lunch (which I guess is a pretty frequent occurrence for Pomona College students).
Another, I went to see the indie film, “Shut Up and Play the Hits,” in theaters for its one night only by myself. My friends went to this place called “Sky High” that is just filled with trampolines and all you do is bounce around and practice tricks and play dodgeball on trampolines.
We always did wonderful random things on Big Shirt Wednesdays, originally brought together by our Physics research. I hadn’t known any of these people before summer, and now some are included in my closest friends. And now, on this Wednesday, even though I am 1,200 miles from Pomona, I am wearing a big shirt.