College Connections

I love making connections between things that wouldn’t normally seem to fit together. At school, I work as a professor’s assistant for a program called Freshman Interest Groups (FIG). Each FIG contains two academic courses, and one weekly class that ties it all together. This course is called “College Connections,” and it is a place for the freshman students to gather with their FIG professor and me to discuss college life and do activities. In this class we often encourage our students to make connections between their classes in order to gain a more well-rounded academic experience. This can be hard sometimes, as student’s don’t often see the point in taking courses that don’t relate directly to their major, and cannot see how political science relates to folklore, or how human physiology relates to journalism. But being able to make these connections is super important and allows you to expand the way you think about the world.

I am an advertising major and for some reason I decided to take a physics class for my last science credit. I have definitely been struggling with this class as I am not a “math and science person.” I often wonder why I even considered this class as I read endlessly about velocity and torques. I’m an ad student after all! Physics has nothing to do with advertising! Right?

Right?

While taking a break from studying to watch some TV, I came across this Adidas Boost ad. The ad depicts heavy, metal balls dropping onto three surfaces: a concrete floor, a mat of Adidas’ new material, and the competitor’s. As the ball collides with Adidas’ cushioning, it bounces up and down, while the other two balls just hit the floor. Now normally, this ad wouldn’t have gotten much of my attention, if any. Your shoes are great, whatever. But what struck me about it was that just a day before we were learning about collisions and bouncing. And then there physics was, infiltrating my advertising major world. Seriously, this ad could have been one of the examples from the textbook.

Connections! 

Here is the commercial so you can see for yourself: