Simply brilliant

Aside from the beautiful campus, maybe the best thing about IU is the general "Midwesternliness" of the people here. I'm from Indiana, so it's a trait I thought was universal before I came here. It's not. And in my opinion, the best quality of the multifarious "Midwestern" trait is the knack for finding simple solutions to big problems. \nThe new printer release stations at the Herman B Wells Library are maybe the best example of this. They're totally easy -- you tell your computer to print, you walk over to the printer and put in your user name and password, and then the computer prints. And who hasn't accidentally printed 90 copies of a document? I accidentally used most of my printing allotment on one badly executed print job my sophomore year. The stations prevent this. They'll prevent a ton of wasted paper and save a lot of people a lot of hassle. \nBut I decided to test the stations. Printing a PDF document, as many of us know, is an exercise in saintly patience. We all know how PDFs print. They print one page, and then they stop. They print another page, and then stop again. This continues until the document is done, and the line forming at the printer is contemplating PDF-related homicide. \nSo, in order to test the stations, I told it to print a PDF. By the time I walked the 15 feet to the printer and entered my user name and password, the printer had already done its thinking, and it spit out my document without any fuss at all. \nAnother great -- and more personal -- example of this happened last spring. I was in the pharmacy at the health center, and IU systems had just started requiring the new student ID numbers instead of Social Security numbers. Of course, I didn't know mine. I figured that I would only be here another three semesters, so I didn't need to bother wasting my precious brain space on this new number. (I still don't know it by heart, by the way.) \nSo when I came to the window at the pharmacy and didn't know my new SID, I expected the attendant to groan and look it up for me. She did, but she also rummaged around in a drawer and found a small yellow sticker. She stuck it on the back of my ID card and wrote the number on it. The sticker is still there. That single act -- simple, kind and in the spirit of the Midwest -- is maybe one of the most memorable interactions I've had at IU. I had a problem, she had a solution, and that was the end of it. \nIt's a good policy. I know there have been treatises written on the value of simplicity and the practical application of Occam's razor-like thinking, but all this, in my mind, comes back to IU. \nAs I near graduation, I'm considering a lot of different paths. Many lead me away from the Midwest, but I'm hoping that if I'm lucky, the things that matter -- like remembering that sometimes the simple solution is the best one -- will stay with me.