#AIChEAnnual

I went to a conference and it had its own hashtag. And app. Welcome to the 21st century. I’ve been a ChemE for seven years now, and this was my first time attending the annual meeting of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE – most properly pronounced by spelling out A-I-C-H-E, often pronounced as “achy,” like “achy, breaky heart”). I figured I should at least go once, to experience it. Plus it was held in Orlando, Florida, this year. 

Well, after experiencing AIChE once, I can say that the best way to describe it is crazy. There are thousands of attendees, hundreds of talks and posters, and a couple dozen things going on at any given time. I’m glad I went, but it was five days of controlled madness. You can’t find anything in the program book, because it’s three hundred pages long. You can’t find anything in the app, because it’s horrible. You could search, verbatim, for the title of your talk on polymers, and the app would return talks on drug delivery, oil refining, and microfluidic devices. Even better, the app had the ability to be less helpful the more specific you were. You would search for the start of a talk and get lots of irrelevant results. To help the app out, you would then add more words . . . and get more results.

My coworker and I flew into Orlando on Saturday, in time for the opening festivities on Sunday. We spent the morning recovering from the previous day’s travel, then drove to the conference site in the afternoon. After collecting our name badges, we met up with some other lab members, ran into some Michigan people, and attended the welcome reception for the sake of free food. As a general rule, the bigger the conference, the less free food they’re likely to provide. It’s understandable, because the sheer amount of food required, and making sure everyone gets food, is a massive logistical and monetary undertaking. But as mostly destitute graduate students, at least some snacks would be appreciated.

Part of the conference center.  Poster sessions in the rooms on the left, vendors and attendees in the center, rooms for talks to the right, behind, and ahead left (out of the picture).

On Monday, the conference started in earnest. My labmates gave their talks bright and early, so we were there bright and early. Then lunch was a special event, held offsite with twenty-five years of our advisor’s graduate students. Some of his first students were there, all the way down to his current students. I’ve met former lab members before at info sessions or other conferences, but it was cool to see a bunch (there ended up being about a dozen of us) of them at once. After lunch, it was back to a somewhat random selection of talks and posters, though we did make it to a couple complex fluids talks, before the receptions that night. Most people who attend AIChE will admit that a decent percent of the reason you attend AIChE is to network and meet up with people you know. The first two nights, that’s accomplished by the receptions hosted by many of the larger universities in attendance. Basically, each university sets up in a ballroom or meeting room and gives out food and alcohol for a few hours. If you’re looking for an academic position, this is your time to go hunt down faculty; if you’re not, this is your time to wander around, eat, drink, and run into people you know.

Michigan’s reception (they had really good cake) was Monday night, but we also managed to make stops by MIT, Columbia, and UMass Amherst before calling it a night. Tuesday included more marginally tangentially related talks, plus Cornell’s reception. I saw former professors, classmates, and grad students, and got dessert, so I was pretty satisfied. The rest of the night involved crashing the Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and National University of Singapore receptions.

By Wednesday, we were tired and hungry, but the conference was only half over, and I hadn’t presented yet. We attended a lot of complex fluids talks, some of which were actually relevant to the work our lab does, before leaving at dinner time. On our way back to our lodgings, we stopped by Olive Garden, which ended up being one of the more palatable meals of the trip – i.e. not random appetizers on a plate or Americanized tourist-trap food. I managed to find the blandest item on the menu, pasta in a lemon herb sauce with grilled chicken. No cheese, no tomato sauce, nothing fried, and it even included vegetables.

Late afternoon outside the conference center

Finally, I presented on Thursday. In the afternoon. We attended a few talks earlier in the day before I reported to my session, heard about some projects involving similar systems to the one I work with, and gave my presentation. Being late in the day and late in the conference, you’re mainly just grateful anyone besides the session chair is there. And so we were done with any and all obligations at AIChE. We celebrated with Shake Shack.

After attending AIChE, I will say I’m glad I went, but it was a long week. Though there are constantly things going on, it’s hard to find the things that are most relevant to your research. Besides the actual content of the conference, the location was not the best. The conference center itself was fine, but the only places to get food inside it were the price-gouging hotel-owned restaurants/coffeeshops. Outside the conference center, it was tourist-trap central. All the restaurants were either places you’d take your date/business clients or bars/nightclubs. There wasn’t anywhere you could easily just get a piece of fruit, or a sandwich that wasn’t either grilled or soggy. And I’ll say it again, the app sucked. But I got to hang out with lab people, Michigan people, Cornell people, and other assorted friends, so I guess it was worth it.

It’s All Greek to Me

You know you’re an engineer when you recognize Greek letters on fraternities because you’ve seen them in your classes, not the other way around. When you get that deep into math and science, sometimes English just doesn’t cut it, but if the whole point was to increase the number of possible variables, why does each Greek letter stand for five different things? See below, with notes on which fields you’d commonly find each definition in.

Γ – gamma function (math), Poynting factor (thermodynamics)
Δ – change (math)
Θ – wavefunction (math, quantum mechanics)
Λ – deBroglie wavelength (thermodynamics)
Ξ – one of the thermodynamic ensembles (thermodynamics)
Π – product (math)
Σ – summation (math)
Φ – dissipation (heat and mass transfer, fluids)
Ψ – wavefunction (math, quantum mechanics)

Ω – domain of integration (math), angular velocity (general science), thermodynamic 

       ensemble (thermodynamics)

Not used (they look like their English counterparts): Α, Β, Ε, Ζ, Η, Ι, Κ, Μ, Ν, Ο, Ρ, Τ, Υ, Χ

Here's where things get real fun:
α – kinetic energy correction factor (fluids), angle (math), heat diffusivity (heat and mass
      transfer)
β – angle (math), coldness (=1/k_bT; thermodynamics)
γ – specific weight (general science), activity coefficient (heat and mass transfer,
      thermodynamics), heat capacity ratio (thermodynamics, chemistry)
δ – distance (general science), delta function (math), Kronecker delta (δ_ij) (fluids, heat and
      mass transfer, quantum mechanics)
ε – molar absorptivity (chemistry), electromotive force (physics), electron charge (also
      physics, general science), permittivity of free space (hey, look, physics again), strain
      (fluids), permutation tensor (ε_ijk) (math, fluids), energy (general science), effectiveness
      (thermodynamics)
ζ – dimensionless breakage time (fluids)
η – dynamic viscosity (fluids), efficiency (thermodynamics)
θ – angle (math, general science)
κ – bulk modulus (fluids)
λ – wavelength (physics, general science), eigenvalue (math), distance (general science),
      mean free path (thermodynamics)
μ – dynamic viscosity (fluids), growth rate (biology), coefficient of friction (physics), chemical
      potential (thermodynamics), moment (physics), shear modulus (fluids), reduced mass
      (chemistry)
ν – kinematic viscosity (fluids), frequency (thermodynamics), stoichiometric coefficient
      (chemistry), microstate (thermodynamics), frequency factor (chemistry)
ξ – extent of reaction (chemistry), complex function (math), mesh size (fluids),
      nondimensional length (probably fluids)
π – 3.1415926535897932384626 (life), Henry’s law coefficient (thermodynamics, chemistry),
      dimensionless group (ChemE)
ρ – density (general science), mass concentration (heat and mass transfer)
σ – surface tension (fluids), standard deviation (math), stress tensor (fluids), stress (fluids),
      particle diameter (chemistry, kinetics), symmetry number (kinetics), Steffan Boltzmann
      constant (heat and mass transfer), resistivity (physics)
τ – torque (fluids), time (general science), deviatoric stress (fluids)
φ – probability function (math), characteristic function (math), polar angle (math), volume
      fraction (general science), benzene group (chemistry), fugacity coefficient
      (thermodynamics)
χ – mole fraction (ChemE)
ψ – wavefunction (math, quantum mechanics)
ω – angular velocity (general science), degeneracy of microstates (thermodynamics)
Not used: ι (looks like i), ο (looks like o), υ (no idea what this is)

ε and σ win for most definitions off the top of my head (8 each), with μ coming in second with 7 and φ in third with 6. Totally not confusing at all.

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.

Class of 2016

The previous post about brings us to graduation, minus a few things I might go back and write about later if I feel like it. First things first: I graduated. It was not without much ceremony, pomp, and circumstances beyond our control, because what would be a graduation from Cornell without getting sunburned at Convocation and being caught in the middle of a thunderstorm at Commencement? Yeah, that happened.

My family arrived on Friday evening, after getting a first-ever flat tire within an hour of leaving the house. Maybe that should have been a clue it was going to be an interesting weekend. Saturday morning, we joined thousands of other families and students at Schoellkopf Field to hear performances by the band and chorus, a bunch of random people’s speeches, and James Franco, after which everyone left. My family stayed until the bitter, salty¹ end. Yes, it was hot, but the last guy, whoever he was, deserved to be heard too.

Convocation at Schoellkopf

I spent the last of my BRB’s at Trillium for special graduation weekend lunches, then we went to Watkins Glen. The gorge trail was insanely busy, with people doing such things as pushing strollers, letting hoards of children run/stop as they pleased, and leisurely strolling down the path two by two. I generally don’t mind how people choose to walk/hike at state parks unless it’s dangerous, but you probably shouldn’t, out of general courtesy, center your stroller in the middle of the trail or block the entire path when it’s that busy.

Falls at Watkins Glen.
The people density is crazy high for a hike.

Anyway, the hike was still nice, especially at the end where the crowds thinned out a lot. We ended the day with burgers at the Glenwood Pines. Nothing fancy, but they make solid burgers. I generally refuse to eat fast food burgers, so if I’ll eat it, it has to have some minimum quality. With that resounding endorsement², I returned to my apartment for my last night(!) there.

The next morning was humid and overcast, but Cornell made the decision to go ahead with outdoor Commencement, so all six thousand or so of us lined up on the arts quad to make the trek over to the stadium. The weather held . . . for about half an hour, when the engineering school was getting seated. We sat in the pouring rain while the remaining students entered, sat through speeches while thunder rumbled in the distance, and got more soaked. Finally, after several cycles of kind of clearing but not really, the ceremony was cut short, all six thousand degrees were conferred at once, and we were dismissed to our department ceremonies. Ours was, naturally, in Olin. Where else?

We were split up by design group, because Olin doesn’t have a lecture hall large enough for all ninety-six of us plus families. The design professors were tasked with saying something nice about every student, we were presented with a fake diploma, and with that, we were done.

We hung around for snacks and pictures, but after four years, 130+ credits, and countless hours in Olin, we had our Chemical Engineering degrees. It felt . . . good. And strange, with a side of weird thrown in. But mostly good.

¹From all the sweat. It was ninety degrees with full sun.
²I really do like their burgers. And they have a fun hidden object placemat.

The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell, Spring 2016 Edition

1. Grad school visits – Besides partaking in fun activities and alcohol, I met professors and grad students and found out about the places that could be my new home for the next five years. Highlights at Carnegie Mellon include walking around Schenley Park and a night visit to PNC Park, while at Michigan I worked on my bowling skills and went ice skating. In my travels I also got to take eight plane rides and visit five airports.

2. Cayuga Trail – Ever since one of my roommates and I hiked the whole Cayuga Trail in a day but returned to Cornell a different way, we wanted to hike the whole Cayuga Trail, out and back, in a day. Over spring break, we finally did it. We met a little after eight in the morning and ten hours later we were at the Commons eating burgers. We did walk down to the Commons but we rode the bus back to my apartment. My final mile count for the day was somewhere around 20 miles.

3. Fancy dress day – Weekly presentations for Senior Design require business formal dress. Fancy dress day involves almost everything except business formal. The best costume award went to the group dressed like Pac-Man and ghosts, but other costumes involved everything from balloons to animal footie pajamas to full body blue paint to a lightsaber. The lightsaber was mine. I gave my group’s presentation in penguin pajama pants, socks, and an American flag bow tie using my lightsaber as a pointer. It was actually the best pointer I’ve used. The rationale behind fancy dress day is that if you can present dressed like a hippo or half naked or whatever, you can certainly present to a few industry representatives. I think that argument has some merit, but honestly, but that point in the semester, everyone in Olin Hall could just use a laugh.

4. Pep band al fresco – This was my very last pep band event. As always, for the last rehearsal of the spring semester, we took the band outside to play around campus. We played a variety of perennial band favorites, ending on the slope with the Alma Mater, one last time. Besides ChemE, pep band was really the only other thing I did week in and week out for all four years at Cornell. I’d like to go back to concert band in grad school, but I’ll miss playing the Canadian and American national anthems, Davy times ten thousand, the Alma Mater at every single game, movies on bus rides, Lynah traditions, the band room, nonsensical heckling (e.g. “Princeton’s in New Jersey”), and all the other ridiculous things that happen in a student-run band for whom the name of the game (and their actual name) is pep.

5. Graduating – Well, it happened. Finally. We had unfortunate weather on Saturday for Convocation and different unfortunate weather on Sunday for Commencement. We then returned to our home away from home, Olin Hall, for the ChemE ceremony and reception. The diplomas were mailed and received, and just like that, we were done.

Schoellkopf Stadium during Convocation

Semester in Review, Spring 2016

This was it. My last semester at Cornell. I took the capstone ChemE class, a ChemE related elective, a non-ChemE related elective, and research.

Chemical Process Design – This is the capstone design class for Cornell Chemical Engineers. Each team of four is given a design problem, in my case increasing the value of a mixed hydrocarbon stream by reacting and separating it. We were then tasked with choosing the processes, equipment, operating conditions, and controls needed to achieve our goal. We also determined the economic feasibility of the project, but I was not our group’s money person. Every week, we reported our progress on the week’s assigned topics to our manager (professor) and supervisor (TA) at either a less formal round table meeting or a formal presentation. At the end of the semester, we made a final presentation to our professor, TA, and industry professionals. A worthwhile experience, though I’m not sure I can say I really enjoyed it . . . except for fancy dress day and finishing our last presentation.

Aerosols and Colloids – I needed a class to fulfill an elective slot and chose this class because apparently I couldn’t go an entire semester without a ChemE academic intensive class. [Senior design really focuses on being able to present information and defend the rationale behind your decisions.] I was interested in the material but I might have benefited from another semester of fluids, which, not coincidentally, I’ll be getting in the fall.

Research – In the fall, I started research late in the semester so I decided not to do it for credit. This spring, I took credit and used it as an elective. I mainly worked on chemical synthesis and perfecting my NMR technique, and it was a good complement to the research I had done over the summer. During the summer, I worked on programming and read lots of fun abstract papers about computational rheology. Then in the fall and spring, I returned to the lab and got more hands on experience.

Introduction to Wines – Unlike every other (non-PE) class I took at Cornell, I did not need these credits to graduate, however, I couldn’t miss out on this Cornell classic and senior favorite. Every week, with a few exceptions, all 700-plus of the students in the class met in the Statler auditorium to learn about a different wine region and taste five to seven wines. We were educated on the climate, geography, wine laws, history, and major varietals of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and regions of the United States. I also learned that wine is made from grapes if I want tannins (found in red wines) I’d rather just eat grapes. In addition, we were introduced to the Finger Lakes specialty that is dry Riesling. This ranks as one of my favorite Cornell classes through all four years.

And with passing grades in each of the above classes, I finished everything I needed to graduate. Next semester I’ll be at another university in another state in a building that is not called Olin Hall.

Stuff I Did This Summer

Or: The Effect of Spherical Confinement on a Monodisperse Colloidal Suspension using Brownian Dynamics Simulation

Or: Everything I Never Wanted to Learn About Diffusion

After it was all said and done, I was left with some graphs, several gigabytes of free software on my computer, and approximately ten million data points. I’m actually not even exaggerating. The program I worked with kept track of the positions of hundreds to thousands of particles for several hundred time steps, and that’s a lot of data.

How I ended up doing research is yet another of my “Well, it’s kind of a funny story” stories. I met with one of my professors to talk about working on the project I had worked on the past summer. She said, sure, I could work on it, but how about research? It would involve coding in Fortran. I hadn’t programmed anything since my freshman year Intro to MATLAB class and told the professor so. No problem, she said, you’ll be fine.

Okay, then. After talking to the grad student I’d be working with, I decided to do research over the summer, because why not? And that’s how I ended up reading research papers about exciting topics such as long-time self-diffusion and modeling hydrodynamic interactions while coding in Fortran to confine imaginary spherical particles in a larger imaginary spherical cavity. When I told my dad I was working in Fortran, he asked if people were still coding things in Fortran. Apparently so.

My job over the summer was to modify existing Brownian dynamics code to simulate particles enclosed in a sphere. By tracking their positions and collisions, you can do magic math to determine properties of the fluid. I also got to edit Python code (another language I had never seen before in my life), and do post-processing on my millions of data points.

All of this mostly took place in Olin, making it two consecutive years of not being out of Olin for longer than two weeks, discounting winter break. I was jammed into a corner of the group office with two grad students, but I had my own desk and I could see out of a window, which instantly elevated the space over the senior/undergrad lounges. Actually, lounge is a bit of a misnomer, because there’s very little lounging done in the lounge. A lot of last-minute-deadline-meeting, procrastinating, complaining, some sleeping and eating, but not much on the relaxation front. Which makes it the natural place for many of the seniors to congregate during their final year. #FunInTheSunDingyGreyBasement #ChemELife

Anyway, in the end, when summer was over, I learned some stuff about colloids and computational microrheology. I had fun, because I’m a nerd like that.

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.

Semester in Review [Fall 2015]

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.

Mostly Alive

So in the last two months, I started classes, committed to applying to grad school, took the GRE, wrote lab reports, did problem sets, went to a conference, graded, played with the pep band at field hockey, sprint football, volleyball, hockey, and a wedding, ate peanut butter and jam sandwiches, went rock climbing, and spent many happy moments long arduous nights in the Olin lounge. My state of being can best be summed up as “mostly alive,” and if anyone’s seen my brain, please send it my way.

In the midst of all the craziness, the wireless adaptor/card on my laptop decided to go ahead and die, so for awhile I could only connect to the internet in my apartment using an Ethernet cable. At least it wasn’t dial up. For now, I’m using a new (cheap) laptop. Besides its lack of processor power, nonexistent memory, horrendously dysfunctional touchpad, and low quality audio, I like the computer. It works, and it has a touchscreen.

I actually still have half a dozen or so posts about what I did this summer that I’ve just never gotten around to editing and posting. As the northeast sinks into six months of winter, expect these posts of sunshine and carefree days reminding you of everything you’re missing by not living in California. But at least we have water.

One of the other effects of having to switch computers suddenly is that I don’t have any of my most recent pictures on the flash drive I’m working off of. So instead, here’s a two-year-old picture from my favorite vacation spot, Acadia National Park:

Hopefully will get the rest of my summer posts out “soon.”

The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell, Spring 2015 edition

I’m finally writing my semester wrap up posts. I’m not going to say that I’m catching up on writing, because that would be to admit I’m behind. At the very least, though, I do want to write about my rock climbing trip to the Gunks. It was extremely exciting. Anyway, here’s the list:

1. Road tripping with the pep band: I had the opportunity to travel with the band for my first overnight trip. The stars finally aligned, allowing me to leave Olin for more than 24 hours, and I spent lots of hours on a bus travelling to Harvard and Dartmouth. It was during the time New England was buried under two or three miles of snow, and we were asked to bring blankets . . . just in case we were in New England longer than expected.

2. Outdoor rock climbing: Two years after I started climbing semi-regularly, I climbed outside for the first time. And not just anywhere, but in the Gunks (Shawangunks), which are considered by many to be world class climbing. I learned how to lead belay, remove and manage gear, and rappel, all while having a great time. And unlike during my sailing class, we had amazing weather.

View from the top of the Gunks.

3. Grading marathon(s): I’m not sure I would really consider this exciting, but it was quite an experience. After hundreds of hours at office hours, I found myself on the opposite side of the table for once. No matter how well you think you understand the homework problems (which we were required to fully work out before holding office hours), someone will ask something that hasn’t even crossed your mind. Or even better, it did cross your mind, but you promptly decided it wasn’t important. Anyway, the undergrad TAs were in charge of grading the fluids prelims and final, which was preferably done in a group in one long grading session. Seven hours staring at the same problem? So much fun. Except not.

4. APT puzzle challenge: One of the things I miss about high school is math team. Yes, really. There’s something about staring at a problem that looks ridiculous, then all of a sudden seeing exactly how to get the answer. One Saturday, a couple other ChemEs and I (yes, we hang out even when we’re not forced to in class) spent a few hours problem solving. We weren’t horribly great at it, but we weren’t awful either. Problems were similar to those found here.

5. The Glass Menagerie: One of the 161 Things is to see a play at the Schwartz Center. So I did, and it was very good. It was actually the same day that I graded the first fluids prelim. I’m sure I had plenty of problem sets to work on, but I gave myself the rest of the night off after grading for seven hours. Besides the actors’ excellent work, I liked seeing the props that I had a part in making being used.

Next semester will surely be exciting, because after three years of learning about running distillation columns and separators in theory, we'll be running them for real.  Hopefully we don't break anything too expensive.

Semester in Review [Spring 2015]

Half of four score and twenty days ago, our administrators brought forth on this university, the end of another semester, after many finals, in dedication to the pursuit of education. And only now will I be writing about it.

In addition to taking five academic classes requiring actual work, I had three one credit classes of varying time commitment, and I was a TA for (ChemE) Fluid Mechanics. Which may not have been the best idea, but the only thing I regret is not taking my liberal studies class pass/fail.

Environmental History – This was my second 2000-level liberal studies class. The material was interesting enough, but I didn’t find the course as a whole coherent. Although the professor lectured somewhat chronologically, in the end the class felt like a collection of related facts instead of topics that built on each other (unlike, say, an engineering class). If I were to recommend a history class, I liked History of Science in Europe much better*. I will say that the books and readings for the class were well chosen and generally interesting or of historical significance.

*With the caveat that the enjoyment of liberal studies classes – more so than technical classes – depends very much on the professor or teacher.

Intro to Process Dynamics and Control – Required ChemE class number one. This class focused on mathematically modeling systems to predict transient behavior (non-steady state, so the time derivative can’t be assumed to be zero, which just makes everything that much more difficult). In the second half of the class, we used the model to develop control systems.

Process Control Strategies – Not the same as the class directly above. I’m planning to use this as one my ChemE electives. In this class, the professor tried very hard to convince us that in the real world, no one uses mathematical models to control processes; people just use trial and error. While taking the class, I didn’t like the professor’s teaching strategy at all, but after getting through the class, I have to admit I learned ChemE things. The midterm and final were good exercises in process control, though frustrating at times – the TAs, on multiple occasions, gave us different answers to the same question asked minutes apart. That’s totally not confusing at all.

Chemical Kinetics and Reactor Design – Required ChemE class number two. It’s kind of like two mini classes – one on kinetics followed by one on reactors (though kinetics plays a part in designing reactors). Taught by the same professor who taught me Intro to ChemE, and just as well organized. We had competitions every week in recitation ranging from matching chemical reactions and rate equations to figuring out fun facts about our fellow ChemEs.

Analysis of Separation Processes – Required ChemE class number three. Another lecture style I was not a big fan of: annotating handouts on PowerPoint and drawing arrows all over everything. I didn’t need to read my notes anyway. Material was exciting enough, and relevant – separation units and reactors are both major parts of process design.

Career Perspectives – Required ChemE class number four. To go with the academic classes, we had a seminar every week given by a former ChemE who spoke about his or her current job. Definitely a good thing to see how (or not) their ChemE knowledge was used after graduation.

Production Lab – A couple times a week, I worked in the scene shop at the Schwartz Center. I used the screw guns and saws, painted, cut rope, and tied flowers, among other things, for two plays – The Glass Menagerie and Blood Wedding.

Shawangunks Rock Climbing – Another PE class just for fun. After a couple introductory/preparatory classes at Lindseth, we went climbing in the Gunks for a weekend. It was fantastic. I don’t know if I can say it was my favorite PE class ever, because b-rock was every week for over two months (vs. just a weekend), and in high school I got to try cross country skiing/go hiking/do the ropes course in PE, but it might be my favorite PE class ever.

If you made it to the end of this long post about classes which you probably don’t care about, congratulations. Here’s a picture of a waterfall as a reward:

April

Things happened in April, I think, but I’m not quite sure what they were. According to my records, here’s what happened:

[April] 1: Hiked the Cayuga Trail for an environmental history environment and just because I wanted to walk 5+ miles, because why not?

2: Got taken to dinner at Istanbul Turkish Kitchen (in the direction of the farmer’s market/the Sciencenter).

3: Baked mini apple pies in my muffin tin.

4: Wrote my soon-to-be-award-winning-(not-really)-children’s picture book See H about hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon derivatives.

5: Started writing my environmental history essay early. Shocking, I know.

6: Returned to classes.

7: Tied fake flowers to beds in production lab for the Schwartz Center’s performance of Blood Wedding.

8: Watched a documentary on Rachel Carson in environmental history.

9: Held office hours for fluids.

10: Cut rope for two hours in production lab (also to decorate the beds in Blood Wedding).

11: Went to a lacrosse doubleheader with the pep band in 40 degree weather. It snowed.

12: Played intramural coed indoor soccer in the Noyes gym.

13: Woke up unnecessarily early for fall 2015 pre-enroll (and didn’t pre-enroll in my only required ChemE class)

14: Took the second kinetics prelim.

15: Went to process dynamics office hours immediately followed by separations office hours.

16: Learned about emergency shutdown in process control strategies.

17: Spent Friday night partying grading fluids problem sets.

18: Participated in the APT puzzle challenge.

19: Ran the spotlight at Bailey for the Rhythms of China show.

20: Had pep band rehearsal.

21: Took the second separations prelim.

22: Got rained on during an Earth Day walk in environmental history.

23: Went to four hours of classes followed by four hours of office hours.

24: Saw Blood Wedding.

25: Watched the chorus, glee club, and orchestra perform at the charter weekend concert.

26: Had the first meeting for my outdoor rock climbing class.

27: Ate oatmeal with raisins and craisins for breakfast, just like every single other weekday. (On weekends the dining halls only serve cold breakfast, so I have muffins.)

28: Took the second process dynamics prelim.

29: Had the second meeting for my outdoor rock climbing class (and experienced a hanging belay at Lindseth).

30: Held office hours for the last fluids problem set.

Semester in Review [Fall 2014]

Sailing – I continued taking PE classes for fun, and I liked the exposure to sailing, which I've wanted to try, but sailing is extremely weather dependent and my class happened to get awful weather. It took a month of classes before we finally got out on the water. We sailed small boats (420s, I think, or something very similar), though we went out in larger boats a couple times when the winds were too high. The class was good, but it felt rushed whenever we did manage to go out in the small boats, maybe because we had so much bad weather. I would have liked to have more time just getting used to the boat and sailing in general.

Creative Writing – Not only did this class qualify as a liberal studies class, but it was also 2000-level, and my passing grade means that I have just two liberal studies classes left to complete. As a side benefit, I was hoping that being forced to produce a certain number of pages would inspire me to keep writing, but . . . nope. We split our time between workshopping peoples’ writing and discussing assigned readings. Overall, this ranks as one of the better liberal studies classes I've taken.

Organic Chemistry – So that I could jam creative writing into the middle of my schedule (so that I had seven hours of class and pep band rehearsal on Mondays – bad idea; I wouldn't do it again if I had other options), I took an organic chemistry class that met at 8 am and attempted to cover two semesters of material in one semester. I liked the topics we covered – nomenclature, stereochemistry, transformation of functional groups, mechanisms, synthesis, but there was just too much material. I didn't particularly agree with the professor’s teaching style and with four other academic classes, I couldn't spend the amount of time it would have taken to do really well (i.e. better than I did) in the class.

Organic Chemistry Lab – In addition to learning about orgo, I actually had to do it. My lab technique can be described as questionable at best, and it’s definitely not at its best under a time constraint. Fortunately, the only time orgo lab grades on yield and purity is during the practical, so as long as you do halfway decent on the practical, your lab reports and final can earn you a high grade. Besides being the source of dozens of stories about lab mishaps, I enjoyed this class.

Heat and Mass Transfer/(ChemE) Thermodynamics – Generally, I liked both of the ChemE classes I took over the past semester, but there was more than a little frustration at times. Lectures were good; recitations, problem sets, exams, and office hours tended to vary. A lot.

Up next semester: lots more ChemE classes, a liberal studies class, another PE class for fun, plus pep band, work, and that other stuff on the side like sleeping and eating.

The No-Longer-Hypothetical List of Exciting Things That Have Happened to me at Cornell, Fall 2014 edition

In an effort to get caught up with my usual end of semester posts, I started thinking about what exciting things I did in the past semester . . . and I couldn't come up with anything. Well, not totally nothing, but not much. I spent a good portion of the semester in class, at office hours, working on problem sets, and generally not getting enough sleep. There were, however, some less mundane events. Here they are.

1. Intramural soccer – I played intramural soccer for my dorm again this fall. For whatever reason, interest in playing for the team was drastically less than last year, and at our last game, only three members of our team decided to show up. After we forfeited, we were initially going to combine the two teams to scrimmage but we didn't even have enough players for that, so we played world cup instead. To play, you have a goalkeeper and pairs of players all trying to get the ball into the goal for their team. Last person to touch the ball before it goes into the net is credited with the goal. If the goalie saves the shot, he kicks the ball back out onto the field. As the teams score goals, they leave the field and move on to the next round. The last team who hasn't scored is eliminated from the game and a new round starts with the remaining teams.

I ended up with one of the players from my house and we started out by almost getting eliminated in the first round. Almost, because then we got the ball into the net and moved on. And kept moving on until we reached the final round. We began the final playing two on three but to make the teams even, we added the third player from our dorm to our team. We won, which was a happy end to a frustrating season. And then I went to office hours.

2. Ice skating – During finals week, the pep band and the men’s and women’s ice hockey teams hosted a charity skating event at Lynah Rink. Although I have spent dozens of hours in Lynah, I had not yet ice skated there. In fact, I had not ice skated ever before in my life before deciding that I could not spend another hour studying for my orgo final and that I should take a break by going ice skating. The rink turned out to be pretty busy, but it was a lot of fun, and I would go ice skating again.

3. Madison Square Garden – Over Thanksgiving break, I went to MSG with the pep band again, except we won this year. It was a come from behind victory and completely worth the nine hours on a bus.

4. Thanksgiving – Although I was abandoned stayed voluntarily at Cornell for the Thanksgiving break, I still got plenty of Thanksgiving food. For lunch, I went with people from my dorm to one of the North campus dining halls  where they were holding a traditional Thanksgiving meal. Later that day, a couple (ChemE) friends and I were invited to another (ChemE) friend’s dinner. They had cooked at least half a dozen legitimate dishes, plus dessert. All the food was great, plus I drank the most alcohol I’d ever had at once. A whole three ounces.

Then there were the usual ChemE happenings: We stayed in Olin past midnight working on problem sets (over five straight hours). We had a late night dinner in which we discovered that a dish called the triple crispy consisted of two plates – one was a plate of rice; the other was a heaping plateful of a variety of fried meat. We set record low means on our prelims and finals (41% on the orgo final). We ate, worked, slept didn't sleep, struggled, lived, and hung out together, and we’re going to do it all again next semester.

Two Years

I realized recently* that I've been writing this blog for two years now. This will be my 161^st post in twenty-four months, for an average of 6.71 posts per month. That average, however, is brought up by a spring semester freshman year in which I only took four classes - Intro to Microeconomics, a first year writing seminar, MATLAB, and differential equations. Econ was less than two hours of work a week and I did all my essays for my writing seminar the morning night before they were due, so I was essentially taking two classes. Maybe two and a half.

With my relative abundance of free time, I went to every pep band event, went rock climbing two or three times a week, and blogged. I averaged 13.5 posts a month during that semester, and without those numbers, I averaged 5.35 posts a month over the past two years, which is slightly high compared to this year’s average (3.83; 9.33 in 2013). Here’s a graph, because I like graphs:

Particular months to note: this April I only wrote once because of the impending doom known as finals while having fluids and pchem problem sets due every Friday, with the additional possibility of also having bio problem sets due on – guess – Fridays. The only month in which I wrote more this year than last was July, due to the fact that I spent this summer in Ithaca with what was essentially a 9 to 5 job. Instead of having classes from 9 to 5 and then working on problem sets for another six hours, I worked from 9 to 5 and then was done for the day.

This past semester while I was trying to pass two ChemE classes, two chem classes, and a liberal studies class that actually took time all at once, I wrote less in the entire semester than I did during a single month of spring semester freshman year.

So in the past two years, I've survived four semesters of college, living in an apartment with my cooking for three months, and affiliation with Chemical Engineering, and written tens of thousands of words about my questionable decisions good life choices, adventures, and epic quests. Next semester I have four ChemE classes, a liberal studies class, and a ChemE seminar. It’s going to be interesting.

*Actually recently, not I-meant-to-post-this-three-weeks-ago-and-didn't-edit-it-recently.

The Best and the Brightest

As an Ivy League Institution, Cornell attracts some of the greatest young minds. Case in point:

1) The other day, I was going to eat breakfast in the dining hall in my dorm. I live on the fifth floor, so I have quite a few stairs to descend to get to the dining room, which I access by crossing over to the other side of the building on the second floor. On my way down, I caught myself passing the second floor landing and figured I just wasn't fully awake yet. One day later, I was returning from dinner and going up the stairs when I walked past the fifth floor and started up the flight to the (locked) roof. Stairs are hard.

2) When the weather could still be considered nice out, I was periodically going for bike rides. The other week, I biked out to the Arboretum and back just for the fun of it. As I was wrestling my bike back into the bike room, I shifted a gear. It’s not good for the bike to shift gears without pedaling, but I didn't want to wrangle my bike outside to pedal for fifteen or twenty feet, then have to get it back inside, so naturally I tried pedaling in the eight feet I had in the bike room. I’m sure it looked absolutely ridiculous, but I did eventually get my gear to shift to where it was supposed to be.

3) A couple weeks ago in lab, I showed off my impeccable lab skillz. Part of the procedure was to preweigh a round bottom flask, so I massed it and recorded the result in my lab notebook. After evaporating a solvent in the flask, leaving a white powdery product, I reweighed the flask and product. The total mass was less than the initial mass of the flask. I made negative mass! Not really. When I first weighed the flask, it was slightly wet. I thought that a little water wouldn't matter. Then I found out that the maximum amount of product I could make was 0.032 grams. That little water? Mattered. But it doesn't end there. I then ran my product and a standard solution on a chromatography plate. The general idea is to use a liquid to carry the two samples distances up the plate. My product moved. The standard did not.

Things Engineers Don’t Say

Rise and shine; 8 am classes are the best!
I get too much sleep.
It was really hard to choose my classes this semester because I had so many choices.
I should take more classes next semester.
Fugacity is my favorite physical chemistry topic.
I love everything about statistical mechanics.

Let’s name all our variables η.  That’s not confusing at all.

We should go faster in class. I understand everything.
Could you write messier? I can read your handwriting.
Taking notes on my computer is really easy. Especially the equations.
Poetry analysis? My favorite.
My essay is too long. I wish it could be single instead of double spaced.
I don’t know why I scheduled a lunch break. Having seven lectures in a row is great.
All labs should be windowless basement rooms lit by flickering light bulbs.
My lab technique is flawless.
I am so ready for the prelim tonight.
The textbook readings were super interesting this week.
I bought all five of my textbooks new and spent less than a hundred dollars.
I read three hundred pages of ancient Greek texts last night in an hour, no problem.
All my problem sets this week were easy and short.
Office hours? I never need office hours to get my problem sets done.
I don’t spend enough time working on my problem sets.
No class on Fridays or Mondays. Four day weekend!
My professor cancelled class. Again.
I have nothing to do tonight. Let’s go to a party.

You know you’re a Cornell student when . . .

I’m back on campus for another thrilling year of the ChemE life. To kick things off, here’s how you know you’re a Cornell student:

- any distance less than a mile is “a quick walk”
- it’s perfectly normal to have a clock tower, a dairy, a thirty-foot climbing wall, and a 4,000 acre garden right on campus
- all. the. hills.
- you have a deep distaste of crimson

You know you’re an engineer when . . .
- you can’t remember the last time you were on the arts quad
- you know all your Greek letters but you've never taken a language class
- when you write lab reports, there are more words that spellcheck thinks are spelled incorrectly than words it recognizes
- you either have a prelim every week for ten weeks straight or three prelims in six days twice a semester
- you mentally draw free body diagrams/analyze chemical reactions/explain real life using things you learned in class that didn't seem relevant at the time

You know you’re a ChemE when . . .
- when you say Olin, you always mean Olin Hall, not Olin Library
- two hour recitations and prelims are normal (apparently, other majors don’t have weekly two hour recitations and normal prelims are one and a half hours)
- for fun, you complain about problem sets, non-engineering majors, writing, liberal studies classes, the temperature in Olin, the lines in the only all-you-can-eat dining hall on Central Campus, and the color of the sky, among other things
- you’ve been in Olin past midnight

Twas the Night Before Classes

Twas the night before classes, and all throughout campus

The students were stirring, raising a ruckus;
The textbooks were dropped on desks without care,
In hopes that the first day of school would not soon be there;

The students weren't nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of equations tormented their heads;
And ChemEs in the dorms, and I in my hat,
Had resigned our brains to wrestle with Schrodinger’s cat,

When out on the hill there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew in a flash,
And heard from below a thump and a crash.
The moon on the grass of the slope down below,
Set the hill and the trees and the campus aglow,
When what to my half-asleep eyes did appear,
But some drunk college students clutching bottles of beer.
Leaving my window with some things left unsaid,
I turned back to my room and tried to go back to bed.
But more rapid than thirty-second notes the equations they came,
And they stayed in my brain and I knew them by name:
Now Henderson, now Hasselbalch, now Navier and Stokes,
Now Bernoulli, and Maxwell, Reynolds and Helmholzt.
Explaining fluid flow, and acid concentrations,
There were laws and rules, formulas and relations.
And round my brain, the equations they flew
With their letters and symbols, and differentials too-
And then, in a twinkling, I heard in my head
Another voice saying, “Go back to bed.”
As I closed my eyes, and was falling asleep,
Slowly away the equations did creep.
But I heard them exclaim, ere they slipped out of sight,
“Happy semester to all, and to all a good night.”