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.