So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish, part 2 of 3

I’m going to start this off by borrowing a line from the Beatles and saying “I get by with a little help from my friends.” Once again, this broadcast year has been made possible by Cornell University, my family, and contributions from viewers like you. Thank you.

It was an insanely busy/crazy year, but a very good one, so I’d like to recognize the people and groups who were a part of it:

- my family

- friends who participated in my adventures biking, rock climbing, roaming campus, venturing out onto the Commons, doing problem sets, hanging out in the dining hall, and baking

- AAIV, particularly my small group

- Cornell Productions, because hauling all that equipment up and down stairs must build character, or at least muscle, or something . . .

- the Big Red Pep Band

- the professors who taught us some stuff that we promptly forgot after the final will remember for the rest of our lives and the TAs who had to deal with us (there’s nothing quite like the panicked night-before-problem-sets-are-due crowd)

- Cornell’s ChemE class of 2016, because suffering is always less painful when done together. Here’s to two more years of late nights, impossible problem sets, and pain and despair.

The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell, Fall 2013 edition

In case I haven’t said it enough, this fall was really, really busy. Between AAIV, Cornell Productions, pep band, rock climbing, and, oh yeah, actual classes, I didn't have a whole lot of time to sit around staring at the walls. With all the eventfulness came a fair amount of excitement, which leads us into this semester’s list of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell.

1. Madison Square Garden: My first time at Madison Square Garden, I not only got to see Cornell’s men’s hockey team play, but I also got to play with the pep band at the game. It was quite an adventure.

2. Unsupervised baking: As the semester wound down, some friends and I managed to get together and do some baking. So far we've made lemon bars and mini apple pies, and I made (not very cheesy) cheese crackers all by myself. The main thing about cooking in college is that you want recipes with as few ingredients as possible. Everything also has to be done by hand with basic tools. Pastry cutter? Don’t have one. I don’t even have salt, but flour has taste by itself, right?

Mini apple pies

3. Mariinsky Orchestra: This was part of the Cornell Concert Series at Bailey Hall, and I was working backstage for Cornell Productions during the concert. They played Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, Isle of the Dead by Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 5, and they were very good. Besides putting away the hundreds of chairs and stands, we also helped to load their truck. It takes a lot of wardrobes to clothe an entire orchestra.

4. Small group: Here’s how the story goes. At the end of summer one of my friends emailed me and asked if I’d be interested in being a core member for her small group. To be a core member I “just had to show up.” I said okay, because showing up isn't too hard once you commit your time to it. Sometime in the middle of the semester, my friend asks me if I’d like to prep for small group with her. I said, yeah, sure, because it would be good to see how preparation for small group goes. As we’re going through the passage, she asks me if I’d like to lead that week. Well, then. So much for just showing up. [I did end up saying yes and leading. And it was a good experience.]

5. First ChemE presentation: At the end of Mass and Energy Balances, we didn't have a written final, but we had to make a group presentation about our efforts to reduce the flow rate of carbon into the atmosphere. I was working with my Intro to ChemE group from last year and my current roommate. Apparently it isn't enough for chemical engineers to take all the same classes. We also do homework together, have meals together, and live together. It’s great.

Quite frankly, I can’t narrow down an entire semester to a few events and call them the most exciting things that happened to me in the past four months. I went hiking and saw waterfalls, helped to plan several AAIV events, got to use the very nice sound board the Bear’s Den has while working for Cornell Productions, spent hours yelling at Cornell sports teams, spent more hours hanging upside down at the bouldering wall, stayed up past midnight way too many times arguing with Mathematica or writing essays the morning they were due, trekked a couple hundred miles across campus, complained about anything and everything, and generally had a phenomenal time. And I get to do it all over again next semester.

A Word Problem

An engineer can prepare brownies in the following manner:
It takes three minutes to crack and beat eggs and seven more minutes to mix all the ingredients together. Brownies made in a 9x13 pan take 24 minutes to bake while brownies baked in a muffin tin take 20 minutes. However, it only takes one minute to pour brownie mix in a 9x13 pan but four minutes to spoon the mix into a muffin tin. Left alone, baking pans take 10 minutes to cool, but cooling can be sped up by four minutes by placing pans into the freezer. Brownies baked in muffin tins can be removed in a minute, while brownies in the 9x13 pan need five minutes to be cut and removed (muffin removal is done after the pans cool). One 9x13 pan makes 48 brownies.

Mixing ingredients has to be done after beating eggs, but there are two bowls for brownie mix. There is only one 9x13 pan but two twelve-cup muffin tins and two six-cup muffin tins. How long does it take two engineers to bake 144 brownies in the 9x13 pan and 42 brownie-muffins, for a total of 186 brownies?

Answer: much too long, or around two and a half hours, with help from a very kind friend. So my engineering friend sucked me into asked if I would help her put together care packages for AAIV. In the spring and fall, AAIV puts together packages with candy, school supplies, and information about AAIV for people who give us contact information. This is our way of following up on our initial invitation to join or visit AAIV, and I got a nice care package last fall, so I agreed to help.

After a two-hour trip to Wal-Mart involving 20 packages of pens, several supersized bags of candy, and five boxes of brownie mix, we got down to making 200 brownies. Anyone should be able to make brownies from a mix, right? Besides preheating the oven, there’s one instruction: mix together two eggs, ¼ cup of water, 2/3 cups of vegetable oil, and the mix. Well, it’s apparently not that simple. Solving quadratic functions is simple. Balancing chemical reactions is simple. Making brownies from a boxed mix? Not so much. Welcome to Cooking With Engineers.

Yes, we can predict the probability of an electron’s location in a hybrid sp³ orbital in a methane molecule, but no, we cannot follow directions to make brownies from a boxed mix. We are going to do well in the real world.

Eventually, we did reach our goal of just under 200 brownies after much mixing, and spilling, and scraping brownies out of not-very-well-greased-pans (I take responsibility for that one). We did not set the fire alarm off and nobody got burned or sliced a finger open. Success.

The brownie making process before we spilled mix, oil, and egg
all over the counter

One last word problem: How many flights of stairs does it take to go from the third floor to the fourth floor (of the same building)? [Hint: It’s not one.]

Answer: Three. That’s a story for another time.

The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things that Have Happened to me at Cornell, Spring 2013 edition

The last time I wrote this list, it was about a semester that happened mostly before I started blogging. This semester, I've already written about most of the exciting things that have happened, so going forward, these lists will probably highlight some of my favorite/most thrilling posts from the semester.

1. Field trip – If anyone ever tells you they’d like to go on a day trip with you from Ithaca to Maryland, laugh hysterically (the 6-hour drive one way is stretching the definition of “day trip”), then accept and make them drive. Proceed to sleep for the first four hours of the trip that take place before the sun rises, and enjoy the approximately three hours you’ll have in Maryland. My first away trip with the pep band, scheduling resulted in it being – guess – a day trip to Maryland. It was, however, for the NCAA men’s lacrosse tournament, and we did have a great time.

2. Rock climbing – I don’t think I can narrow this down to one particular moment, but I will say that the time we went to the bouldering wall at Noyes was the most exhausted the class ever was.

Notice that the entire wall is overhung.

3. HEC weekend – Initiation by fire at its finest. For my second event working for Cornell Productions, I worked over fourteen hours in three days and learned the basics of wiring and lighting large spaces for fancy events. Note: involves vast amounts of extension cords and gaff tape. Plus, we were fed ridiculously well.

4. AAIV dessert night – Something I haven’t written about yet. Basically, instead of trying to put together an entire meal (face it; I could probably burn water), everyone brings a dessert to share. So rather than scraping charcoal out of a pot, a friend and I made cookies to contribute to the month’s worth of sugar already being consumed. Since the theme was Color Explosion (I’m not going to go into what the original name of the event was. . . . If you're curious, it had to do with the spelling of "explosion."), Red 40, Yellow 5, and Blue 1 also featured prominently. Naturally, I dressed for the theme by wearing all black. And neon yellow socks. Other than the food and the clothing, it was a fun night of testimonies, musical performances, and a skit of the story of Joseph by the juniors.

5. And finally, the strangely popular inside look into my life – the minifridge edition.

Overall, another good semester, but it seems that this one didn't have as many single exciting events as fall semester. Maybe something to do with the fact that Cornell was frozen into a giant ice cube for three months of “spring” semester. It was more about recurring activities like pep band, climbing, and work, and if I wasn't studying in advance for exams doing homework due the next day in a few hours, I was probably at the band room/Schoellkopf field, the climbing wall, or backstage at Bailey Hall.

Next semester, I get started on physical chemistry, which I’ll be taking at the same time as Mass and Energy Balances and linear algebra. I can barely contain the excitement. No, really.

So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish, part 1 of 3

In acknowledgement of the fact that I have now survived my freshman year of college (been home for a week), there are some people I should recognize who made my year as fantastic as it was.

At Cornell (I'll see most of you in the fall; congratulations to the class of 2013):

The professors who were truly enthusiastic about teaching hoards of clueless freshmen. Any demonstrations were an added bonus and were appreciated by me at least, especially if they involved fire and/or explosions.

The TAs who endured endless questioning, complaining, whining and confusion while trying to help us understand homework/labs/lecture/the meaning of life.

All the engineers who suffered through classes with me. There’s nothing like bonding over Green’s Theorem and Avogadro’s Law.
My fellow ChemEs. To the class of 2016: Here’s to three more years to come. To W8: Thanks again, guys (even if one of us might be having a problem choosing his/her major).

5-3 (my unit in the dorm I was living in) and our perfectly normal late-night middle-of-the-hallway conversations.

The staff and climbers at Cornell Outdoor Education/Lindseth/my rock climbing class for 1) teaching me the basics of rock climbing, 2) belaying me, and 3) just being a fun group of people.

AAIV, for friendship, fellowship, sailing ships, and challenging me to grow in my faith.

Cornell Productions for hiring me at the best job I've ever had. When they said no experience necessary, I guess they meant it.

The big red pep band, especially the clarinet section. #LGR

At home:

The attendees of my home church, who were always ready to welcome me home.

My friends from high school, because they’re that cool.

And lastly, my family, since they’re the ones paying for my education, supporting me through this college thing, transporting me to and from Ithaca . . . you know, small things like that.

The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things that Have Happened to me at Cornell, Fall 2012 edition

In no particular order:

1.  Interfellowship Minute to Win It, followed by a visit to the Johnson Museum:  I may or may not have gotten back to my dorm at around one in the morning, but anyway . . . Minute to Win It was a fun opportunity to ruthlessly compete against hang out with some of the other Christian fellowships on campus.  (Besides, AAIV won.)
2. Tour of McGraw Tower (the clock tower):  As part of my ENGRG 1050, we took a guided tour of the clock tower, which included getting to see the practice chimes, the unofficial clock tower history museum, the actual chimes, the bells, and the view from the top of the tower.  On top of everything else (literally and figuratively), at the end a couple other people and I got to manually play the hour bells that sound, usually automatically, every quarter hour.  We each got one note and were supervised the entire time by a chimesmaster, because to actually get to play on the chimes, you have to audition and commit to playing a certain number of concerts a week.
3. Cornell vs. Clarkson, men’s hockey, W 3-1: Cornell closed off the first half of its hockey season with a pair of 3-1 wins over Clarkson and St. Lawrence University.  As part of the pep band, I decided to play at both games (because I have nothing better to do with my Friday and Saturday nights).  The Clarkson game was especially memorable because Clarkson brought their own band, which is always fun.  Also, we had some Cornell fans in section O, the “away section,” who brought signs to hold over the Clarkson band’s heads reading “Old guys say” and “Losing band.”  In addition, there was a fight, a Clarkson player was kicked off the ice, and 50 penalty minutes were divided up between the two teams.  And of course Cornell won.
4. Visiting the Olin Hall distillation column: You know Cornell is an exciting place when an event like this is mentioned in a list of fun college activities.  But after around four months (okay, more like a few weeks) doing McCabe Thiele analysis on distillation columns in Intro to ChemE, this was an opportunity to see a real, live distillation column, run by real, live ChemE seniors.  To get to this exotic location, we had to go down two whole flights of stairs in the same building as the classroom we were having our calculation session in.  Dangers included getting hit by the door as it closed and tripping over the stairs.  Back to the actual event . . . we did get to see the distillation column in action, which was nice after all that time spent drawing operating lines and labeling the equilibrium line. 

Honorable mention(s)

• Cornell vs. Harvard, men’s hockey: The only reason this wasn't more exciting was because we lost. Other than that, there was fish throwing and Lynah Rink was absolutely packed, which made for an intense fan experience.
• Intro to ChemE design competition: Because who doesn't like spending five hours on a Sunday night smashing F9 in Excel and yelling at your ROI to go up?  (To explain for those unfamiliar with the design competition – we were given a process with certain parameters and told to maximize the ROI for one year.  In order to easily change any of the variables, we used an Excel spreadsheet to chart the process and mathematically link the products and reactants before and after reactors, separators, etc.  F9 performs a set number of iterations; holding F9 will perform iterations until the process reaches steady state.  At that point, we could calculate our ROI.)

And thus I have convinced everyone of what a thrilling place Cornell is.