Club studies campus' connectedness

By Alexandra Comus Collegian Freelancer

Every student on campus is one degree removed from College President Larry Arnn, according to the Applied Math Club.

The Applied Math club’s newest project, Degrees of Arnn, seeks to determine how connected Hillsdale’s campus is. This project was modeled after the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” law.

The project started when senior Daniel Brand speculated that because Hillsdale was so small, if he did not know a person, one of his friends would.

Members of the club hypothesized that any individual on campus could be connected to any other by one mutual friend.

“About a month ago, we began to elaborate on certain questions to test this,” senior Jack Graham said. “For example, how do you

Survey from A1

“The GOP has low moral standing following COVID, and it remains in an identity crisis over Trump.”

Junior Avery Noel, co-president of College Democrats, said the 2022 midterm results revealed many Americans will not support Trump again, but he also believes the former president still holds strong tell if you know someone or not? How connected are two people through others on campus?” Graham asked.

The project’s results have been interesting so far, according to junior Lydia Hilton.

“We ran our first stage at a table in the student union,” Hilton said. “We had random people come up to us, and we would randomly generate 15 students from the school directory. Then, we had people go through and see how many people they could identify from the list by both name and face.”

Graham said one of the main challenges of the study has been acquiring reliable information.

“Getting the data has been the hardest part,” Graham said. “We have lots of ideas about what kinds of data we would like to get and what we would like to do with it once we have it.”

Participants in the De- support within the Republican Party.

“Many Republicans have expressed that they will only vote for Trump or someone endorsed by him,” Noel said.

“With that in mind, I believe he will be the Republican nominee for 2024 over Ron DeSantis but that he will lose to President Biden.”

President of College Republicans and senior Dan Harmon said he prefers De-