Penn Offers New CIS Class for People Who Want to Set up Personal Minecraft Servers

With students everywhere anxiously waiting for the results of their advanced registration signups, the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences is looking to spice things up with a creative new class offering. 

The CIS 19X suite of half-credit courses have allowed countless budding programmers the opportunity to dip their toes into a language of their choice and this Spring Penn is going even farther in helping students acquire even more useful technical skills. The administration hasn’t always been the best at listening to its students, but in one elegant swoop Penn is looking to wipe away all the ill will it’s garnered this past semester by finally giving students what they want: a class that teaches them how to set up personal Minecraft servers.

The Penn experience is often characterized by stress and despair, but in a stroke of genius the Computer Science department has uncovered that the only thing people need in order to overcome Penn's all encompassing pre-professional culture and the myriad of mental health issues is the ability to construct their own 3D procedurally generated worlds, gather resources and build shelter with friends and strangers alike. The actual process of creating a server is a challenge that mystifies even the best engineers so Penn is providing a rigid learning environment that will teach even the least tech savvy students how to operate their own servers.

“I tried to follow this server tutorial I found online but once it started talking about jar files and downloading more RAM I got so overwhelmed that I blacked out,” Glen DaViglio (E ‘21) told UTB in an interview. Glen, a self-proclaimed Minecraft enthusiast, answered our questions while frantically mining for diamonds and fending off an approaching creeper in his sad, lonely single-player Minecraft campaign. “I feel like this class will help me figure out how to install all those cool texture packs I see in YouTube videos and also maybe hopefully help me make an actual friend!”

The course's capacity is currently set at 200 students and people of all skill levels are warmly encouraged to sign up, except for griefers. The official University news statement explicitly declares that "griefers can go fuck themselves."