#SummerInIthaca2015

It was the hottest of times, it was the most humid of times. It was the season of sunshine, it was the season of thunderstorms, it was the epoch of mosquito bites, it was the epoch of muddy hiking boots, we had work every weekday, we had no problem sets on weekends – in short, it was summer. Summer in Ithaca to be precise, and all of us in the apartment were doing research or working, not taking classes, so our nights and weekends were free for all the shenanigans and misadventures we could devise. And devise them we did.

I’ve written about most of the things we did, but I also wanted to compile a chronological list as well as record some of our other accomplishments.

6/13 – Sat. – Buttermilk Falls State Park
6/20 – Sat. – Taughannock Falls State Park [same link as above]
6/24 – Wed. – Princess Ida (Schwartz Center)
6/26 – Fri. – Rockwood Ferry concert (arts quad)
6/27 – Sat. – Museum of the Earth
6/28 – Sun. – Lick Brook Falls
6/30 – Tues. – violin/piano concert (Schwartz)
7/1 – Wed. – 4th 1st of July fireworks (slope)
7/3 – Fri. – Cascadilla Gorge Trail
7/9 – Fri. – alumni hockey game (Lynah Rink)
7/10 – Sat. – Racker Center rivals (hockey) (Lynah) [same link as above]
7/16 – Thurs. – A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Plantations)
7/18 – Sat. – Cayuga Trail/chimes concert
7/21 – Tues. – Klez Project (Schwartz) [same link as 6/30]
7/24 – Fri. – Mutron Warriors concert (arts quad) [same link as 6/30]
7/25 – Sat. – Treman State Park
8/1 – Six Mile Creek/The Small Kings concert (Taughannock)
8/15 – Lab of Ornithology
8/19 – blueberry picking (Grisamore Farms)
8/24 – Buttermilk Falls State Park

Additionally, I read the following:
The Naked Mountaineer (Steve Sieberson)
Two for the Summit (Geoffrey Norman)
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (John Boyne)
Reservation Blues (Sherman Alexie)
Dune Messiah (Frank Herbert)
Migraine (Oliver Sacks)
The Astronaut Wives Club (Lily Koppel)
Carrying the Fire (Michael Collins)
If I Fall, If I Die (Michael Christie)
Speak (Laurie Halse Anderson)
Train Dreams (Denis Johnson)
A Walk Across America (Peter Jenkins)
The Wayward Bus, Burning Bright, Sweet Thursday, The Winter of our Discontent, and Travels With Charley (John Steinbeck)

Watched the following:
28 episodes of The Walking Dead (Seasons 3 and 4 minus a few episodes)
9 episodes of The Astronaut Wives Club (Season 1, minus the first episode)
Season 3 of Sherlock (still can’t decide if my favorite scene is Sherlock getting shoved to the ground/head-butted/punched in the face all in the same night or the pub crawl)
Mean Girls

Tried a couple new recipes for peanut butter chocolate oatmeal muffins and white chocolate brownies

Went rock climbing half a dozen times

And collectively, in the apartment, grew mold on the following:
potatoes, peaches, tomato sauce, onions, oatmeal muffins, raspberries, bread, broccoli, and clementines

Stuff I Did This Summer

Or: The Effect of Spherical Confinement on a Monodisperse Colloidal Suspension using Brownian Dynamics Simulation

Or: Everything I Never Wanted to Learn About Diffusion

After it was all said and done, I was left with some graphs, several gigabytes of free software on my computer, and approximately ten million data points. I’m actually not even exaggerating. The program I worked with kept track of the positions of hundreds to thousands of particles for several hundred time steps, and that’s a lot of data.

How I ended up doing research is yet another of my “Well, it’s kind of a funny story” stories. I met with one of my professors to talk about working on the project I had worked on the past summer. She said, sure, I could work on it, but how about research? It would involve coding in Fortran. I hadn’t programmed anything since my freshman year Intro to MATLAB class and told the professor so. No problem, she said, you’ll be fine.

Okay, then. After talking to the grad student I’d be working with, I decided to do research over the summer, because why not? And that’s how I ended up reading research papers about exciting topics such as long-time self-diffusion and modeling hydrodynamic interactions while coding in Fortran to confine imaginary spherical particles in a larger imaginary spherical cavity. When I told my dad I was working in Fortran, he asked if people were still coding things in Fortran. Apparently so.

My job over the summer was to modify existing Brownian dynamics code to simulate particles enclosed in a sphere. By tracking their positions and collisions, you can do magic math to determine properties of the fluid. I also got to edit Python code (another language I had never seen before in my life), and do post-processing on my millions of data points.

All of this mostly took place in Olin, making it two consecutive years of not being out of Olin for longer than two weeks, discounting winter break. I was jammed into a corner of the group office with two grad students, but I had my own desk and I could see out of a window, which instantly elevated the space over the senior/undergrad lounges. Actually, lounge is a bit of a misnomer, because there’s very little lounging done in the lounge. A lot of last-minute-deadline-meeting, procrastinating, complaining, some sleeping and eating, but not much on the relaxation front. Which makes it the natural place for many of the seniors to congregate during their final year. #FunInTheSunDingyGreyBasement #ChemELife

Anyway, in the end, when summer was over, I learned some stuff about colloids and computational microrheology. I had fun, because I’m a nerd like that.

The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell, Fall 2015 edition

I spent most of the semester running between the band room, the rock wall, the lab, and the basement of Olin. Even amidst the craziness, I managed to have some exciting times.

1. Wedding – I attended my first wedding. Well, kind of. I stood outside Sage Chapel with the pep band until the wedding ceremony was over and after that we played a couple of sets. Besides the Alma Mater, they also requested “I Want You Back” by the Jackson 5 and the theme from the Muppets. Not exactly wedding fare, but then again, I’ve never been to a wedding before.

2. Happy hour – Before Thanksgiving break, most of my lab group plus another friend and I decided that after the ChemE semester we’d been having, we needed to go to happy hour. For four dollars each, we got a half price pitcher of beer and an order of fries. We ate, we drank, and we talked about ChemE, because what else do we have to talk about? Okay, we also talked about other things. Like grad school.

3. Climbing – For my PE class, I took performance rock climbing (p-rock). Somehow, over the course of the semester, I found myself able to actually climb routes at Liindseth. And not just routes, but routes that weren’t the absolute easiest routes that I could find. Routes that other competent looking climbers worked on and sometimes struggled with. In other words, I was not the worst climber at Lindseth anymore. I also got to put up my own bouldering route.

4. Continuous distillation – After learning about distillation columns for three years, we finally got to run one, in our very own unit operations laboratory. It was a bit of a race to see whether we’d reach the distillation column lab first or if the construction crew would have the column reconstructed, but in the end the column was put back together in time (if just barely) for us to do the lab. ChemE lab may not be about mixing chemicals or building circuits, but after you do data analysis and find that it matches up – usually not perfectly, but sometimes really well – with what you expect, that’s still pretty cool.

5. ChemE holiday party – And we ended the semester (almost; there were still a few finals after, but for all intents and purposes, we ended the semester) with the annual ChemE holiday party. We did not have the party in Olin, but in Statler, and there was lots of good food, skits and gifts, and alcohol before, during, and for some people, after dinner. It was a lot of fun, and directly after I had to finish up my grad school applications and study for my last final.

Semester in Review [Fall 2015]

After every semester, I finish my finals and think, “That was a crazy semester.” And then the next semester, it’s even worse. I don’t know how ChemE does it, but even when you have a deceptively easy course load of one lab class, two ChemE electives, and a PE class for fun, hypothetically you might still live in the Olin basement, never get to sleep, and miss more meals in a week than you usually miss in a semester. Hypothetical you might also fulfill the ChemE graduation requirement of eating a meal consisting entirely of items from the vending machine in the basement.

Real me took three classes, a PE class, TA’d for Intro to ChemE, started in a new research lab, and applied to grad schools. Real me might also have lived in the Olin basement, didn’t sleep, missed too many meals, and eaten a meal from the basement vending machine.

My main class was ChemE 4320: Chemical Engineering Laboratory, also known as UO Lab, which stands for Unit Operations Lab; this was our capstone lab class. Every week, we would go into the recently renovated, shiny new Unit Ops lab where we ran apparatuses ranging from the fluidized bed to the heat exchanger, and finally the distillation column. The thing about ChemE lab is that there’s not that much to physically observe. You turn valves and switches and things happen that you only know about if you have pressure gauges and thermocouples and rotameters to read. Still, with a lab report due every week drawing concepts from most of our previous ChemE classes, we learned a lot. I was our group’s data analysis person, and seeing how our collected data correlated with equations and concepts we’d learned in separations or heat and mass transfer really connected everything together. Our last lab report, on running the distillation column continuously, was the peak of the ChemE lab experience. We’d learned about distillation columns since the first semester of freshman year, and not only running the column, but getting it to work, was more than a little exciting.

I also took Bioprocess Engineering as an elective, and this class was my least favorite of the semester. I enrolled in the class because I don’t like straight up bio, but I don’t mind applying bio to engineering problems. We didn’t end up learning much in the class, never mind anything about engineering bioprocesses. The professor was often travelling, and when he was present, we were rarely taught 1) new material or 2) anything we needed to know for the homework. Which would have been okay if the textbook was a good resource, but our kinetics textbook, written by someone whose first language wasn’t English, was a better read. When the professor wasn’t in Ithaca, he often had guest lecturers, which was fine, but meant that we had very little continuity in the class. I need to know how things connect to really understand them, and I just couldn’t piece together a totally coherent story between lectures, guest lectures, the textbook, and the homework problems. On top of all that, we had a group project. Groups were a mixture of MEng/masters students and ChemE undergrads, and the difficulty of coordinating between the grads and undergrads led to fairly significant discrepancies in work distribution. Overall, this class was a disappointment since I took it because I was actually interested in the material.

My last main class was Microchemical and Microfluidic Systems. I took the class because I’d heard it was an easy elective. I ended up liking the material. It was a different perspective on ChemE, focusing a lot on manufacturing devices, especially in the first part of the course. Good elective, would recommend.

My PE class was (yet another) rock climbing class, this time Performance Rock Climbing. We climbed more advanced problems, and I was surprised to find that just by trying harder problems and climbing more, I got better at climbing. Another worthwhile class from COE.

If I had just had classes, I would have been fine. But I also TA’d, which was a very different experience from TA’ing fluids. And did research, which was also a good experience, one that will play a part in what I decide to do in grad school. And that’s it, another crazy semester for the books. Up next: Senior Design.