College AU meme [open]

[foepas]

Pick one of my characters and I'll toss a college au scenario at you! I've got some rough descriptions below.

Alec: prickly as can be, likes to pick verbal fights with people stronger than him to show he's smarter, not really concerned with his own safety. Double major in mathematics and astronomy.
Annabel: cheery but socially awkward, prone to babbling. Kind of the mad scientist type. Major in biomedical engineering.
I-No: the bitchiest mean girl, she's loyal when she considers her loyalty earned but she's capricious and enjoys causing others pain. Major in business.
Ky: incredibly earnest, religious, repressed. Army ROTC participation and major in political science
Nyxnissa: practical and prone to arguing with people in a way to try to get them upset, although she doesn't really enjoy that, just can't help herself. Major in mechanical engineering.
Sol: grouchy, not very talkative, lazy but really smart. Major in physics.
Valentine: much more interested in drinking and partying than college classes, in fact pretends to be less smart than he is. Audacious and outrageous. Major in LGBT studies, as much to piss off his conservative father as anything else. Minor in business, because otherwise his father won't pay for college.

Comments

[betterthananetdrama]

"Wow... that sounds--" Ridiculously over complicated? "--interesting!" Yes. She'll go with that. Who knew classes on talking would actually be so out there.

"Robotics, probably," Iko grins, "Cinder- she's my roommate, and she's usually in this class, you should so talk to her next class- is way into the mechanical side of it. But so much of the programming is so boring. Have you seen anyone trying to give a robot a decent personality?" Ok, so that might be a touch of computer science in there too, but whatever. "And fashion's mostly making and learning how to design clothes and stuff like that. Probably some marketing stuff too, I guess."

[tothealtar]

If it had just been about talking, well, Kai isn’t arrogant enough to say that he wouldn’t need that. After all, there’s still a lot he doesn’t know, and oration can be an art as much as a skill. But still, if that’s all it were maybe there wouldn’t be so many damn prerequisites. Kai is pretty sure that he’ll still be taking prerequisites in five years. At least, it feels like that, sometimes.

“I can’t say I have. But I can’t see any reason they couldn’t, and there’s some work in ai development, isn’t there?” And wouldn’t that be the only reason someone wanted a computer to have a ‘personality’, rather than just reciting facts or performing a function?

[betterthananetdrama]

Iko waves her hand. "Yeah, I guess. But a lot of that stuff's still years away, right? And personality wise, super basic. Just knowing how to be polite and actually respond to questions and stuff." Gosh, Kai. Maybe she just wants to let a computer have a personality because it would be cool.

[tothealtar]

“What kind of personality would you want to have?” Kai can hardly be helped if he’s got pictures of doomsday robots and computers turning on people running through his mind, right? It might be cool, but it might also be dangerous, and Kai thinks he’d hardly blame them if they decided the logical thing was to destroy all humans. It would still be super-upsetting, though.

[betterthananetdrama]

"Something cheerful! And polite. That's important, if you're a computer." She probably means if you're dealing with computers, because IT people have to put up with a lot of shit, right? "And I think it would be really cool if they were able to have their own opinions on things. Like deciding their own favorite colors and music tastes and stuff like that!"

[tothealtar]

“That just sounds like we’re training them to be better for customer service?” Kai isn’t sure how he feels about that. It seems like it might be immoral or something to program an artificial intelligence to be polite or cheerful just because that makes them easier to work with. On the other hand, won’t every aspect of the personality actually be chosen, and it’s not like someone is going to choose to make the ai grouchy.

[betterthananetdrama]

"Why would we do that?" Clearly, they're not on the same page here. "I just mean making them be likeable! It would kind of suck to have those computers and robots you see in sci-fi that want to destroy everybody, right?" Long story short: Iko is not thinking about how these computer personalities would improve a function or a job. She just thinks it sucks that they're caught being so boring.

[tothealtar]

“Umm, I guess?” He really hasn’t had to give all of this very much thought, and Kai isn’t sure how to respond in the face of her obvious passion. Clearly he should probably concede to her opinion, since she’s thought much more about it, but it doesn’t really make sense to him. “Maybe we should start to work on our assignment.” Because that’s probably a more effective use of their time, or something.

[betterthananetdrama]

"Oh." Shoot. Right. That. Though they've probably wasted most of the assignment time talking, which is totally fine by her. "Yeah, ok. ...What exactly are we supposed to be doing with this?"

[tothealtar]

Kai makes a slight face, wrinkling up his nose. "We should be discussing the reading." He doesn't really know what he has to say about it, though. "I thought it was...interesting?"

[betterthananetdrama]

"Um... yeah. It was. Interesting, I mean." Iko may or may not have actually read the assignment. "...Well, that was a good discussion! We should do something else now."

[tothealtar]

"We should probably talk about how it relates into the themes of the semester," Kai says, because he wants to do well it this class. "Or well, did you like it?" A shrug. "I didn't really."

[betterthananetdrama]

Iko sighs. Of course he wants to actually do it... but the thing was so boring she didn't even make it past the first thing. "No. Not at all. It was so dry, why do we even have to read stuff like that?"

[tothealtar]

"I guess it's to expose us to things that we might not read on our own?" He gives her a half-smile. "That certainly seems to explain this, right?"

[betterthananetdrama]

"Doesn't really make me want to read stuff like it, though." Iko shrugs. She's not thinking up another reason, though.

[tothealtar]

"Maybe not this reading, no. But maybe they'll get better, later on." Kai had meant to say that maybe they'd pick ones that appealed more to her, but no, he thinks this reading was pretty bad.

[betterthananetdrama]

Well, at least they agree on that much. "I hope so... d'you think it's all going to be older stuff?" She would totally read more if books were like gossip sites. Romance novels. Those are totally her thing.

[tothealtar]

“Probably. They likely think we need to be more cultured, and the backbone for most culture was formed a while ago.” Right? It makes sense for why they’re always reading those sorts of books and poems, at least, even though there have to be meaningful contemporary things too.

[betterthananetdrama]

Iko frowns. "That doesn't make any sense. Culture doesn't just show up and then stay that way forever. The culture now is different, right? We sure don't go around talking the way these people do." Iko might be thinking of the word culture in a slightly different context, but she has a little bit of a point in there too.

[tothealtar]

“You’re right about the details.” Kai’s nose wrinkles a little while he tries to think through the phrasing of what he feels, that she’s misinterpreting the whole picture. “But we’re surrounded by the modern, right? This other stuff is how we relate to the older generation, and to each other on another level. Even if our culture is evolving, maybe older works are still part of that evolution.”