A few years ago, DePauw senior Molly Keller spotted her best friend from sixth grade-not in their shared hometown, but in Paris, France, at the Louvre.
Last year, a woman stopped junior Camron Burns during the intermission of a DePauw Theatre production.
"She asked if I was Camron Burns, and I said 'yeah,' but I'd never met this woman before in my life. Then she said, 'I think my daughter played youth baseball with you.'"
In the small town of Greencastle, Ind., a little over ten years after sophomore Brooke Addison and Burns had played baseball together in Louisville, Kentucky, Brooke's mother had recognized him. The childhood teammates both ended up attending DePauw.
What a coincidence.
There's something about serendipitous events that stick with people. The randomness of the event, the unlikeliness that things would unfold in the way they have: it's one of the reasons that coincidence stories seem so magical.
"Coincidences are the combination of two events that are completely unrelated. They make people ask, 'how could this happen?' It almost seems, in some ways, like a little miracle," Scott Ross, Chair of the Psychology Department and Professor of Psychology here at DePauw, said.
The coincidences students on campus and graduates of DePauw have experienced are varied. Many are related to jobs, while some, like Burns', are of the "isn't it such a small word?" variety. There are even coincidences that are based on romance. While the coincidences themselves may be different, those who experience them have all been struck when it's their turn to experience a coincidence first hand.
Ross says that feelings toward coincidences can vary according to one's understanding of psychology. For example, a fringe psychologist, Carl Jung, who did his research in the 1920s and 30s, has a very different view on coincidences than most modern psychologists.
"Jung actually believed that some things happened because, within the universe, they were meant to happen," Ross said.
Jung had himself experienced numerous coincidences that made him more open to the idea of the universe as a force in the lives of ordinary people.
"He was on a train traveling through France or Switzerland and he had this experience of feeling like he was drowning," Ross said. "Jung later found out that during the same twenty-four hour time period a relative of his had actually drowned."
Jung's theory is based on the idea of "magical thinking," or that psychic phenomena really can occur, but that they are more likely to occur to people who are open to these events. "Magical thinkers" believe that the universe itself has had something to do with the creation of these seemingly random events.
"If they're more open to noticing those things then they're probably going to be more open to interpreting those things as having meaning," Ross said.
Sophomore Stephanie Aanenson, may well be one such person.
In an email, Aanenson told the story of she and her boyfriend. While they were both from Minnesota-coincidence number one-the couple didn't meet until they had arrived at DePauw where, in coincidence number two, they realized that both Aanenson's boyfriend and her father had attended the same high school.
It's coincidence number three, however, where things really get interesting.
As Aanenson and her boyfriend were driving through his town one day, he pointed out the hospital where he was born.
"I was born in the same one," Aanenson said. "Our birthdays are five days apart, and his mom had a C-section so it turns out that the night that I was born, he was still in the nursery. So we may actually have been in the same nursery when we were born."
Aanenson believes while these are definitely coincidences, it does not follow that they are accidental occurrences.
"He's my best friend and we are just so similar because of our upbringings. The coincidence is just too hard to ignore," Aanenson said.
In a "This American Life" story entitled, "No Coincidence, No Story," the writers focused on coincidences that have taken place all over the nation and what they have meant to people.
A particularly striking coincidence on this radio show also involved romance.
In this story, a man and a woman, Steven and Helen, met, dated and got engaged. Soon afterward, they held an engagement party where their families met for the first time. Helen's mother looked at a picture of the Steven's father with shock: Helen's mother and Steven's father had almost married in their home country of Korea, but in the end Helen's parents would not allow it. The couple now feels that they have in some ways been brought together in attempt by the universe to make amends.
However, Pamela Propsom, Kenneth S. Wagoner Professor of Psychology, is able to discount this coincidence, and most, through the use of math.
"People don't have a very good understanding of probability. We underestimate how common joint events are," Propsom said.
Propsom cites Stanley Milgram's study on what is known as "the small world phenomena." Milgram took two people from cities across the United States, and told them to get a letter to each other using only their acquaintances. The study found that on average, it took between five and seven links to get this letter any place in the country.
"You've heard the phrase 'six degrees of separation'-this is where that came from," Propsom said.
Two DePauw graduates, Jillian Irvin '09 and Ashley Baxtrom '07, accredit their jobs, to coincidences and, more specifically, to the "small world phenomena."
In the summer of 2011, Baxtrom was surfing through LinkedIn. As she neared the end of her masters program at NYU, it seemed to be time to turn an eye toward- the job market. Baxtrom soon noticed that her old internship boss at the World Food Programme in Rome was also in New York, so Baxtrom contacted her and they met for dinner. They stayed in touch, and Baxtrom's old boss became, in effect, her mentor.
"She called me at the end of June and said, 'look, I know you're looking for a job right now and I can't pay you anything, but would you be interested in just coming in and helping with this project I've been working on?'" Baxtrom said in a phone interview.
Baxtrom started at the United Nations the next week as an unpaid intern. Today, she is a full-time employee and still works under her boss from the World Food Programme.
"Now my boss is my boss again," she said.
Irvin acquired her current job in Los Angeles through the random arrangement of phone numbers. When Irvin called the office of her potential new employer to follow-up on her recently submitted resume, the receptionist picked up in astonishment-she and Irvin shared the same area code of a small suburb in Chicago.
"It was out in Los Angeles, so seeing a Chicago phone number doesn't happen that often," Irvin said in a phone interview.
At this point, Irvin says the receptionist must have "felt connected" and blindly transferred her back to the person she needed to speak to, without any further qualifications. According to Irvin, this almost never happens.
"I ended up getting super, super lucky," Irvin said. "All based on a pretty random coincidence."