Rolex Opened a College—and It’s as Selective as Harvard

At lunch, other instructors had mentioned the hairspring, singling it out as the one component that took them years to truly master. Rabe described it as a Goldilocks problem: The watchmaker needs to cycle through too little and too much to find just right. There’s a fineness to some objects that can’t be understood by running the specs through ChatGPT. The watchmaker knows it is fixed because they feel it.

Toward the end of my day at the school, I veered into Kevin Tuck’s classroom. It was time for a group of students who had just received their white coats to size Rolex bracelets. The smallest of screws hold together each bracelet link, and a bit of Loctite sealant is further used to keep the screw from moving. You need a special heater, one that goes up to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, to break apart those glue bonds. But before you can apply the bracelet to heat, you need to make sure that the screwdriver you’re using to finally remove that screw fits its head tightly, without any wiggling.

Which is how I came to stand in silence watching Chris Rodiger, a 25-year-old painter, take one of his new screwdrivers and shave its head against a piece of marble stone. Back and forth, he traveled from stone to screw, each time hoping the tool wouldn’t wiggle. At one point Tuck came over to inspect Rodiger’s screwdriver. He looked at the tip for barely a second through his loupe before uttering one word: “More.” Eventually, after 15 minutes, the screwdriver tip fit snugly. Rodiger took his bracelet over to the heater, sat it there for less than a minute, and then unscrewed one link.

If I had to do that, I think I might’ve lost my mind. Hell, I couldn’t even remember to take gum out of my suit-jacket pocket before getting it cleaned—and had already resigned myself to buying a new one.

I exited Tuck’s classroom and got ready to leave. But as I made my way for the elevator to head back down to the lobby, Rabe pulled me into his classroom, parked me at his teacher’s bench, and handed me a loupe and a pair of tweezers. Then he put five tiny screws and a block of aluminum in front of me. Stack them, he told me.

I took a breath and tried picking one up. It launched right out of the grip of my pincers. “Here,” Rabe said. “Hold it like this.” He adjusted the tweezers in my fingers so that I was squeezing them at an angle, with the fulcrum pressed against my palm instead of sticking straight into the air. I grabbed a screw and placed it head down on the aluminum block. For another five minutes I wrestled with a second one until, finally, I managed to place the threaded end of the second screw atop the first screw’s flat tip.

Rabe congratulated me and gave me a small bag of Legos, a prize for my short stack. It was a Spider-Man figure. I put it together there and tucked it into one of the still-working pockets of my suit pants. When I returned home, I set it on the desk in my office. It’s not a Rolex, but it is my own personal monument to the satisfaction of organizing parts of my world. That the only thing that mattered was what I peered at through my loupe: a pile of screws waiting to be brought into order.