Lame-Ass of the Week: Frederick von Spark

By Brent Zundel
For the MSU Exponent
March 29, 2012

Note: This satirical student profile originally appeared as part of the Exponent’s annual April Fools’ Day edition, the Excrement.

Name: Frederick von Spark

Hometown: Miles City, Mont.

Major: Mechanical engineering with a minor in mathematics

Occupation: Engineering student

Hobbies: Vector calculus, binary code, stamp collecting, Minecraft

Why did you move to Montana? I was born here.

What is a day you’ll never forget? I won a 17-hour game of Risk about a month ago.

If you could do anything for a day, what would it be? I would invent a new drug that would make it so I don’t have to sleep and could then work for 24 hours straight.

***

Frederick von Spark is a mechanical engineering major with a minor in mathematics who is currently on track to graduate this spring, after only four years. A quiet, awkward 22-year-old male, Spark explained that he managed to graduate in only four years by taking an average of 23 credits a semester and shunning “superfluous” campus involvement like “socializing, talking to girls and getting eight hours of sleep a night.”

His idea of a good joke is working with the civil engineers in Tait Lab instead of the computer labs in Roberts, where most mechanical engineers while away their days.

He claims he’s spent so much time in front of a computer that he can “fall into a catatonic, open-eyed sleep” with the soft, phosphorescent light of the computer lulling him into “a strange state between waking and sleep.” AutoCAD, he claims, is the most soothing program in front of which to fall asleep.

Spark often spends time coming up with “practice” differential equations problems that he completes for fun. There are no significant others in his life and he says he’s never kissed a girl. “Although, I was walking in the SUB one day and it was really crowded, and I accidentally grazed this one girl’s boobs,” he said. “So, I’ve practically been to second base.”

Spark’s biggest hero is MacGyver, and he has three cats named after scientists. He once actually performed Schrodinger’s cat experiment on Archimedes, his orange tabby, but was forced to stop midway through the process when his neighbors called the Bozeman Humane Society. “I would have really liked to see how the experiment turned out,” he lamented.

While not technically opposed to human interaction, Sparks admits he does not do a good job interacting with other humans. He’d like to work on it, though, and asked that if anyone recognizes him during the weekly trip in which he leaves the engineering building complex to shower, they say hi to him.