Five More Years at Forty-Two Degrees North

Better title: Hopefully Five More Years at Forty-Two Degrees North, because less than five years means I got kicked out of my program, and more than five years means I still don’t have my degree. That covers the five years part. As for the forty-two degrees north, after growing up shoveling snow off an abnormally long driveway and catching the bus at six dark thirty in the morning, spending four years at Cornell being rained, snowed, sleeted, and hailed on – with exactly zero weather-related class cancellations – I decided I didn’t have enough of the northern United States’s climate and chose to attend the University of Michigan. I also thought long and hard about the hours of pain and suffering inflicted by four years of ChemE problem sets, classes, and research, and opted for five more years of it to get my PhD in Chemical Engineering.

All of which is to say that I’m currently in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan working towards my PhD in Chemical Engineering, a process that takes an average of five years, and the weather is just as wonderful as in Ithaca.

My new clock tower (with carillon, not chimes) and engineering quad

How I came to this point is one of those stories. Like the story of the time I tried to fly out of Ithaca or the story of everything that happened at Lick Brook Falls. This story starts all the way back during my sophomore year at Cornell. After complaining about everything fluids related for four months, I spent one summer working on a fluids demo project, TA’d the class, spent another summer doing fluids-related research, then applied to grad school. My research group at Michigan studies surfactant solutions and does molecular dynamics simulations, among other things, so . . . more fluid mechanics-type topics.

I applied to six schools spread out across the United States and was rejected by four of them, including all three of the schools with significantly warmer temperatures. As a side note, my home, Cornell, and the University of Michigan rank among the coldest, windiest, and snowiest places in the United States. My only other option besides Michigan was Carnegie Mellon (CMU), which is slightly less frigid, but cold and snowy nonetheless.

I visited CMU and Michigan on consecutive weekends, and had a good time at both schools, besides that whole flying out of Ithaca thing on the way to CMU. The grad students were on their best behavior, we were shown the best of Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor, and there was as much alcohol as we wanted. [A word of caution: I heard that at one of my visits, a prospective student drank and behaved badly enough that the grad students recommended the school rescind their offer of admission.] But back to my decision. I liked the ChemE programs at both schools, but as much as CMU tried to convince us their school wasn’t right in the city, it was right in the city. The University of Michigan is also classified as an urban school, but to a much lesser extent than CMU, so when April and decision day rolled around, I officially accepted Michigan’s admission offer and four months later, reported to Ann Arbor.

Michigan is about twice the size of Cornell, both in terms of campus area and students, though the graduate ChemE program is less than half the size of my undergrad program. They have a bus system similar to Ithaca’s that I’ve already taken full advantage of and lots of local restaurants. What they don’t have is Wegmans, hiking trails within walking/biking/bussing distance, and an on-campus rock wall, but they do have a community band, a nice public library, and my desk in the group’s basement office has a window next to it. Hey, sometimes it’s the little things.

My new ChemE building (the complex houses other departments,
including some of the medical school)

I survived my first semester of classes – Cornell ChemE prepared me very well for grad school – and started my second. Now I just have to make it through four and a half more years of exams, research, and publications, and then hopefully they’ll give me my degree.