tim’s wardrobe by Waly N. '24

I’m going to pretend I have not been AWOL. Life updates shall come in another blog, so for now, let us get on with the content.

Each class year at MIT has an elected student council, which plans events, creates merch, and does general stuff for the class. I, for some reason, ran my first year and have been on my year’s class council since. It has been, for the most part, a good time, but sometimes it can be a bit tiring. Some weeks, there is a lot of work to do and at times, people (students and real adults) can be hard to deal with, especially since it is tricky to satisfy everyone in a class of over 1000 students o__o. Despite the lows, it does feel fulfilling when people say they enjoyed an event we spent months working on :)

On Class Council, we tend to have a signature event each Fall and send out an email to our class informing them about logistics, tickets, and whatnot. We could have made the email a basic FAQ type of email, but we wanted it to have a little bit more charm. A little more spice to it.

So, back in sophomore year, I thought it would be cool to create a rendition of TIM the Beaver for our signature class event, Twenty Fourmal. It seemed like a fun side thing for me to do and also a way to promote the event. I wound up drawing an extremely formal, posh TIM the beaver. Our event vibes were more semi-formal than super-formal-tuxedo-3-piece-suit-energy, but he seemed fitting, especially with his monocle. For some reason, the quality of the photo got absolutely murdered, so believe me when I say it definitely looked better at some point in time.

We started off the email to our class with…

“TIM the Beaver sat at his desk, looking at all of the MIT classes, waiting for one that would cause a spark in his eyes. Then came a class, a class like none he had seen before. The Class of 2024. Upon realizing he had yet to meet the class at an in-person signature event, TIM let out a soft ‘Dam’ and knew he had to meet such a distinguished group. He headed to his desk, and started to pen a letter…”

I also drew TIM wearing a black dress, but we winded up just using a monocle, a top hat, 1800s-era TIM instead.

After doing it once, I drew another TIM the following year for Oceantation, an event we had at the New England Aquarium. Normally, classes have a first-year orientation event at the Aquarium but… COVID. I had recently watched Aquaman on a plane, so I could only think of Jason Momoa for inspiration.

This year, we held our last signature event, which was Disorientation. It’s a tradition for seniors to return to the place where they went for orientation for a night of fun⁠01 read: Drinking and dancing. Typically, this place is the New England Aquarium, but we for 💫reasons💫 held it at the Museum of Science instead. Someone on class council had the idea that all the members should wear dino onesies to the event for recognizability, so TIM also was wearing a onesie. I meant to make it the same color as the ones we wore, but I didn’t get the chance to.

To make these designs, I played around a bit with Adobe Illustrator. I first removed TIM’s shirt⁠02 scandalous, I know to create a simple TIM template I could use to create designs. This means I basically had to strip TIM down to a cursed, naked state. After being mentally scarred, I gave TIM some new drip that fit each event. Luckily, this TIM did not have to go through licensing because I may or may not have violated a design rule….

But we’ll ignore that. To be fair, I never did change the graphic on his shirt, I removed the shirt to begin with. His outfit was not only respected but actually upgraded, case closed.