The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things that Have Happened to me at Cornell, Fall 2012 edition

In no particular order:

1.  Interfellowship Minute to Win It, followed by a visit to the Johnson Museum:  I may or may not have gotten back to my dorm at around one in the morning, but anyway . . . Minute to Win It was a fun opportunity to ruthlessly compete against hang out with some of the other Christian fellowships on campus.  (Besides, AAIV won.)
2. Tour of McGraw Tower (the clock tower):  As part of my ENGRG 1050, we took a guided tour of the clock tower, which included getting to see the practice chimes, the unofficial clock tower history museum, the actual chimes, the bells, and the view from the top of the tower.  On top of everything else (literally and figuratively), at the end a couple other people and I got to manually play the hour bells that sound, usually automatically, every quarter hour.  We each got one note and were supervised the entire time by a chimesmaster, because to actually get to play on the chimes, you have to audition and commit to playing a certain number of concerts a week.
3. Cornell vs. Clarkson, men’s hockey, W 3-1: Cornell closed off the first half of its hockey season with a pair of 3-1 wins over Clarkson and St. Lawrence University.  As part of the pep band, I decided to play at both games (because I have nothing better to do with my Friday and Saturday nights).  The Clarkson game was especially memorable because Clarkson brought their own band, which is always fun.  Also, we had some Cornell fans in section O, the “away section,” who brought signs to hold over the Clarkson band’s heads reading “Old guys say” and “Losing band.”  In addition, there was a fight, a Clarkson player was kicked off the ice, and 50 penalty minutes were divided up between the two teams.  And of course Cornell won.
4. Visiting the Olin Hall distillation column: You know Cornell is an exciting place when an event like this is mentioned in a list of fun college activities.  But after around four months (okay, more like a few weeks) doing McCabe Thiele analysis on distillation columns in Intro to ChemE, this was an opportunity to see a real, live distillation column, run by real, live ChemE seniors.  To get to this exotic location, we had to go down two whole flights of stairs in the same building as the classroom we were having our calculation session in.  Dangers included getting hit by the door as it closed and tripping over the stairs.  Back to the actual event . . . we did get to see the distillation column in action, which was nice after all that time spent drawing operating lines and labeling the equilibrium line. 

Honorable mention(s)

• Cornell vs. Harvard, men’s hockey: The only reason this wasn't more exciting was because we lost. Other than that, there was fish throwing and Lynah Rink was absolutely packed, which made for an intense fan experience.
• Intro to ChemE design competition: Because who doesn't like spending five hours on a Sunday night smashing F9 in Excel and yelling at your ROI to go up?  (To explain for those unfamiliar with the design competition – we were given a process with certain parameters and told to maximize the ROI for one year.  In order to easily change any of the variables, we used an Excel spreadsheet to chart the process and mathematically link the products and reactants before and after reactors, separators, etc.  F9 performs a set number of iterations; holding F9 will perform iterations until the process reaches steady state.  At that point, we could calculate our ROI.)

And thus I have convinced everyone of what a thrilling place Cornell is.