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.
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