The Spring 2025 semester comes with a lot of challenges. Perhaps you’re a first-year who hasn’t dropped pre-med yet and you’re staring down the barrel of another squadron of three-hour labs ready to annihilate you, or you’re a junior or senior starting grad school visits and realizing it’s much harder to do homework on a plane when you honestly just don’t care all that much anymore. Maybe you’re gearing up for frat rush season and can’t shake the feeling that you look too uncool at this steak dinner. (Likely, you have undiagnosed ADHD, anxiety, or depression.) In order to a-meliora-te all those ailments, a new augmentation for your daily to-dos may be the thing for you!
“We’ve started calling our new device the ‘Whining All The Fucking Time Pillow,’” Carlton Pishitsky, a senior Biomedical Engineering major at the University, said. “With the help of our P.I., we’re working on making the Pillow versatile enough to handle the emotional and physical weight of crying, pissing, and shitting as well.”
According to Pishitsky, who’s one of the lead team members for the Pillow’s surrounding senior design project, the way that it works is simple: if you need to fucking wail because you can’t take it anymore, the Pillow is there for you. Using methods reminiscent of what you wish you would receive from your long-distance, low-commitment partner, the Pillow has multiple functions.
Currently, the Pillow has three functions: Administering face massages using facial mapping analysis to perfectly relieve tension, an amplified muffling effect on your beleaguered scoffs and sniffles (through the use of studio sound design from an AME major on the team), and a self-drying mechanism that also acts like a heating blanket (according to Pishitsky, this mechanism was created specifically for those who realize all their to-be-patented Whining is, unfortunately, because of their unexpected period).
In the future, Pishitsky hopes that utilization of their contraption becomes common fare for the University — albeit, with further investment on refining the design from URMC once they graduate. “Come on, if pre-med students are this inclined to let out a big honking wail in the middle of Eastman Quad despite our intense social anxiety, actual med students can’t be that much better,” they said. “There’s a world where you really can Whine All The Fucking Time, and it could be here. Now that’s Meliora to me.”
