Not So Breaking News

Some people may have noticed that I call my blog Life of An Engineer, but my web address is lifeofacheme(.blogspot.com). The story behind that is that the address lifeofanengineer was already taken at the time I started this blog. I was very strongly considering ChemE, so I checked and lifeofacheme was available. However, I was still unaffiliated with any particular engineering major, so I didn’t want to call the blog Life of a ChemE to match the web address. I ended up deciding to take lifeofacheme as the address and use Life of An Engineer as the blog name.

Things have changed since then.

Engineers at Cornell enter unaffiliated with any particular major, which means that they take general engineering classes and aren't considered “part” of a major program yet. This continues for all of freshman year.

As soon as the sophomore engineers appear at Cornell for fall semester, they start getting emails from all sorts of engineering administrators. These emails contain things like important dates for course enrollment, special class information, and the words URGENT: ENGINEERING SOPHOMORES APPLY FOR AFFILIATION RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!  [It appears just like that. Really.]

By urgent, they mean that you should fill out the form and turn it in sometime in the next three months before winter break. In January, your major department will get back to you on whether or not you've been accepted to affiliate with them. At some point in November, I finally got around to filling out the affiliation form. [The thing that was holding me up was actually my advisor’s name. I had my advisor switched from freshman year and I admit that I didn't know how to spell his name.]

I turned in the form, and then a couple weeks ago I received an email. It’s official: I’m a member of Cornell’s Chemical Engineering class of 2016.

So it’s not quite breaking news since it happened about three years ago in news-time, but it is nonetheless news. Exciting news, because I have two and a half more years of ChemE, and who wouldn't be excited for two and a half more years of distillation columns, mass balances, and process flow diagrams?

Olin Hall, home of the ChemEs and where all the fun takes place