My senior year, I watched the 2024 Tiger Burn from the far corner of the Blatt Field, standing next to a friend who'd helped me build models and run finite element analysis on the thing a few months prior — long before building even began. We'd spent hundreds of hours converting a student’s sketch into a matrix of stress loads and burn rates.
As we watched 32 feet of engineered lumber ignite in seconds — exactly as designed — he turned to me and asked, "Is that it?" He looked at me with a mix of disbelief and disappointment, as if the precision had somehow drained the magic away.
I didn't have an answer. Not one that would satisfy him, anyway.
I'd designed three Tiger Burns and served as vice president of American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the club that builds the tiger. I knew every bolt, every shear calculation and every safety factor built into that structure by heart. I could even tell you the exact moment the load-bearing members would fail under ideal combustion loads. I’ve given this tradition more of my life than I've given most relationships.
But I can’t help feeling that I’m watching a funeral for something that passed on long before the flames arrived. There was a time when Tiger Burn wasn't just a 15-minute bonfire with a DJ who thinks bland pop music is the greatest thing ever. It was a week of madness. Greek Life owned it, and they ran it like our team’s Saturday performance depended on it.
In 2005, they brought in Dierks Bentley — a major country artist playing a pep rally at a college that barely held 30,000. It was the kind of event that made you lie to your parents about where you were going, the kind of memory that gets brought up at weddings all those years later.
Eventually, control of the Tiger Burn event and the construction keys were handed to a university-run department, and, in 2003, it recruited the engineering students. The pitch was simple: make it bigger, safer and more professional. And we did.
What started as a 15-foot wooden cat became a 32-foot behemoth. I spent the fall of my senior year converting a beautiful sketch into 847 individual beam elements, running simulations until my MacBook sounded like a jet engine. I optimized the design to ensure safe collapse.
Yet somehow, standing there at Blatt Field watching my mathematical masterpiece burn exactly as calculated, I felt nothing. It was another engineering project I’d designed that just happened to be on fire this time.
The university takeover was likely safety-related, but what it won't mention is the cost. In 2019, it launched a crowdfunding campaign, begging for $12,000 to offset costs. The Greeks could raise twice that in a weekend, but their money came with strings: They expected input into the event.
So now we grovel at Student Government's feet for fireworks. For two years, I’d sat in funding hearings watching Student Government senators — most of whom have never swung a hammer in their lives — debate whether $3,000 for pyrotechnics was fiscally responsible.
When the Greeks ran Tiger Burn, the budget was their problem. They solved it because their social capital depended on it. Now, because it's official, it requires professional sound systems, insurance riders and a fire marshal.
We've reduced a century-old tradition to 15 minutes. Gates open at 5:30 p.m., a DJ spins pre-game mixes, a student reads a eulogy that sounds like it was written by ChatGPT and at 7:05 p.m. sharp, the tiger ignites. By 7:15 p.m., it's a smoldering pile.
Under Greek control, it started when it started and ended whenever they wanted. There was a sense that anything could happen, and that’s because it could.
The worst part is what this did to the engineers. We didn't sign up to kill the tradition; we signed up to build something awesome. But professionalization turned us into the fun police.
Every year, we'd receive brilliant, insane designs — tigers rearing on hind legs, mouths roaring flames — and we'd have to crush them. We converted passion into something that could survive a lawsuit, resulting in the same safe, predictable project every year.
So here we are. A tradition that started with students nearly rioting over a drawing is now so sanitized that we can't even burn a tiger without three safety briefings and a liability waiver. The university has it exactly where they want it — visible enough to tweet about, controlled enough to never surprise them and cheap enough to fund with pocket change.
But traditions don't survive on control. No, they survive on chaos and passion. And driving them forward is the kind of bone-headed, heart-on-your-sleeve commitment that makes a fraternity run a football through the night or convince Dierks Bentley to play a field in Columbia.
Tiger Burn doesn't need more engineers. It needs more students willing to stake their reputation on making it unforgettable. It needs more risk and madness, the kind that pushes people to do something a little unwise simply because it matters. It needs more soul, the kind that turns a tradition into something worth fighting for.
The university can keep the fire marshal and the liability insurance — heck, we'll even let them keep the engineers as consultants. The heart of this tradition belongs to the students who started it. It belongs to the students who are bold enough to believe that burning a 30-foot cat matters. It does not belong to the administrators who are only worried about what might go wrong.
Until then, I'll keep on engineering. Just don't ask me to feel something when it burns. I've already done the math, and there's nothing left to feel.
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