Things I Learned at Cornell: Ice is Hard

In some of the many classes I attended in Cornell’s lecture halls, we learned about water. We saw how the density of water decreases when it freezes on its phase diagram, then were reintroduced to that phase diagram in thermodynamics. Turns out there are over ten types of ice. We calculated hydrostatic forces and surface tension and drew McCabe-Thiele diagrams for the distillation of water and methanol. There are, however, some things that can only be learned through real life experience. And through firsthand experience, I learned all about how ice is hard. Plus cold.

Before attending Cornell, I could follow along with any of the commonly played sports but really only cared about soccer (and in particular the hapless New England Revolution). Then I arrived at Cornell, joined the pep band, and went to 94 hockey games in four years. For all the skating (and shooting, passing, name calling, body checking, and fighting) I watched, it took until the end of fall semester of my junior year to get me out onto the ice in skates. The event was a skate night with the hockey teams, and many of the pep band members went. So I went too, and did something vaguely reminiscent of skating. I had fun, and and wouldn’t you know it, every time I fell the ice provided a nice, hard, unyielding cushion to land on.

Open skate at Lynah

Another year passed, and senior year was well underway when I returned to Lynah to skate for the second time in my life. A few friends and I had talked about having fun during the year since it would be our last chance to do a lot of things at Cornell. Apparently falling half a dozen times, slide tackling the boards on skates, and a blister that took weeks to heal weren’t enough to deter me from skating, because ice skating was on my list of things to do before graduating and leaving Ithaca.

I met one of my former roommates at Lynah on a Sunday night for open skate and fell slightly less. Something else I got from that night is perhaps the only picture of said roommate and I where we both look fairly normal. I also saw several fellow ChemEs taking a break from Olin, because sometimes you have to forgo perfect reactor dimensions and separation purities for your sanity’s sake and go glide in circles for a couple hours.

A couple weeks later I got the chance to skate at Yost Arena at the University of Michigan while I was there for the engineering grad school visit weekend. The day I returned to Ithaca, I skated at Lynah for the last time as an undergrad. And I didn’t fall once. But not to worry, I fully remember my lesson: ice is hard.