So Iowa was a scientist before being a battleship?

I enjoy glasses Iowa better

I like how this portrays Iowa as not being a total fucking idiot.

Wait, Professor Sheldon?! Ooh boy.

Hnnnnng, pre-shipgirlglasses Iowa...

K9Thefirst1 said:

Wait, Professor Sheldon?! Ooh boy.

Bazinga.

She does looks good in that kind of attire.

oberstleutnant said:

So Iowa was a scientist before being a battleship?

cal-tech means she was heading for either engineering or physics, so, the hardcore science.

cd_young said:

cal-tech means she was heading for either engineering or physics, so, the hardcore science.

doesn't this also mean she was going to be broke? caltech is in california after ll

Unlucky.Dice said:

She does looks good in that kind of attire.

She'd hate it, though, if she were actually there. Long-sleeved *flannel* in Southern California? Ick. You'd roast yourself in summer, and you'd probably feel too warm even in winter. I'd bet she'd prefer a loose comfy T-shirt. :D

Apologies, but I'm going to babble on a bit in this post in several comments, even though it doesn't fit my personal headcanon at all. Caltech was my undergrad school, so I find the idea of Kancolle Iowa starting as a Techer to be funny as hell. :)

The Sheldon reference doesn't do much for me, though. Sheldon's an entertaining character, sure (though I think he'd be a *wretched* professor--maybe that's the joke and I just missed it), and Big Bang Theory is a popular comedy, but from what little I've seen of it (it never really grabbed me), it's just not a comedy of Caltech life. For one thing, the characters are almost all post-docs, who have vastly different lives from students, and from reading up on the show to see its themes, it seems to be much more about modern "general geek" culture than about anything specific to life at Caltech. Though some of this may just be me being too old.

This is dating me, but for a silly satire of Caltech and its undergrads, the 1985 movie "Real Genius" is a lot closer to the mark.

cd_young said:

cal-tech means she was heading for either engineering or physics, so, the hardcore science.

Not necessarily, though I agree some form of engineering seems the best bet for a techie undergrad whose career plans include becoming a warship incarnation. :)

I still think an Annapolis cadet would have better chances. ("Wait, you mean I have to actually *sail*, *shoot* and get *shot at*?! I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT SAILING OR GUNNERY!!") :D I'd expect her to at least be ROTC, though Caltech has no Navy ROTC program--not exactly a surprise, being maybe an hour's drive from the coast at the best of times. (With how god-awful L.A. traffic is these days, that could easily be more like two or three hours in reality. :( )

Anyway, Caltech is also big in, among other fields, the biosciences and the geological sciences. That last field was why I went there. Their geological and planetary sciences division is arguably the best in the *world*, and their close association with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech runs, sure helps if planetary science is your thing, as it was for me back then. (Feels like a lifetime ago now. Life happens. *sigh*.) So not necessarily "hardcore sciences", though Caltech's standards are high enough that pretty much *any* science there should be counted as "hardcore", or at least treated with a *lot* of respect.

A lot of Caltech undergrads do come in expecting to be physics majors, but they find out pretty quickly that they had better come up with a Plan B. Back when I was there, Caltech's physics department expected their physics undergrads to be in training to become honest-to-god research physicists, not merely to use the major as a general foundation for their scientific training, like many people do. (There's nothing wrong with concentrating in physics as a foundation for your academic training, since the perspective and habits of thinking you learn can be quite useful in many other technical fields, but that's just not what the Caltech physics department was looking for in their undergrad students.)

That department attitude showed clearly in the fall midterm for the sophomore physics course for physics majors (as opposed to the equivalent course for everybody else). It was a fucking brutal midterm, like no exam I'd ever seen, even after experiencing the shock of my first Caltech exams my freshman year. The score distribution had a blatantly double-humped curve. Everyone in the lower hump was advised to immediately transfer to the standard sophomore physics course for non-physicists, and that if they did so they would not be penalized for their low midterm score; their physics grade for the quarter would instead simply be based on their subsequent work and tests in the non-physicist course. Obviously that exam was intended as a "weeding-out" tool.

(In retrospect, the exam was probably probing whether you "thought like a physicist". If you just brute-forced a problem using the ordinary equations and techniques you'd learned, as was my habit, you *might* be able to solve it OK, but it would take much too long; or it might be too hard to tackle at all. Instead you had to learn to take advantage of features of the problem, like what symmetries it had, to simplify it or transform it into a more tractable form. I eventually learned that those were standard problem-solving tactics of real physicists.)

It took me a while before I finally noticed the subtle little detail immediately to the right of geek-Iowa's head in panel two. So I highlighted it; hope that's OK. Nice touch from the artist. :) Millikan is pretty much Caltech's central landmark.