Engineers can dance; they just choose not to. Maybe it is because they spend so much time sitting while doing their calc homework that their feet do not remember how to move anymore. Maybe instead of watching Footloose they watched Three O’Clock High as a child. Maybe they worry that their left-brain dominated thinking will result in two left feet on the dance floor.

All of those hypotheses could be true, but I believe that the dancing deprivation at the School of Mines can be explained via this equation with the accompanying x-y plot:

f(dance)= d(boy-7girl)

where:
dance = any integer
boy is a constant that = 7
girl is a constant that = 1

(7:1 is the current boy:girl ratio at the School of Mines. See *** at the end of the article.)
and:
f(dance) represents the number of dances students will attend
dance represents the number of dances hypothetically held

Therefore, no matter what number is chosen for dance, the function will always = 0, as represented by the graph to the right.

One thing is clear: the School of Mines will perpetually suffer from a lack of dancing unless a solution is found. The only university-hosted dance during my time here so far was a “Welcome Week” dance for freshmen in September 2008. The dance was a moderate success, but only because the fire alarms went off in the dorms and the students had nowhere else to go.

After spending months analyzing such things as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Gibbs free energy, I stumbled upon a solution while listening to Relient K’s song “Sadie Hawkins Dance.”

There is a way f(dance) can be > 0 thanks to the discovery and consequent introduction of the Sadie Hawkins dance factor(“s”).

Of course, after the Sadie Hawkins dance factor was added to the f(dance) equation via addition (eq. 2), the khaki pants variable had to be integrated into the dance productivity equation (eq. 3) to determine how many dancers could possibly show up based upon the current male student population.

Now I’m not saying that everyday should be a collegiate rendition of High School Musical with Troy Bolton dancing around the quad (although I wouldn’t mind). What I am saying is that the university, and especially the students themselves, could really benefit from some healthy, endorphin-increasing movement.

There may be some mathematical flaws in these equations, but the School of Mines student body is much more difficult to calculate than rocket science. Anyways, instead of trying to rework these equations, hopefully students will start rockin’ out to some sweet tunes (but not on iPods- that encourages antisocial, individualistic listening).

Students! It is time to get up from those homework desks, wiggle awake those sleepy feet and become foot loose.

*** The school’s website says the boy to girl ratio is 2:1, not 7:1, but they also say that there are 606 girls at the school. Show me 606 girls who attend the School of Mines and I’ll show you a dinosaur ice skating hand-in-hand with a llama (in other words that is an absurd and highly unlikely statistic). I have had classes where I have been the only girl… so 7:1 seems like a fair ratio to use. However, if we wanted to use the 2:1 ratio, we could just tweak the coefficient in front of “girl” in the equation so that it is a 2 instead of a 7.

According to Relient K, there’s nothing better than going to a Sadie Hawkins dance dressed in khaki pants (oh oh oh). Could that be the solution to the deprivation of dance at the School of Mines?