Notre Dame

Because of transportation scheduling, instead of dropping my brother and his girlfriend back off in Kalamazoo, we made a further detour to South Bend, Indiana for them to catch a train there. On our way south from Glen Arbor, we first made a stop at the Point Betsie Lighthouse. It was closed, but we weren’t trying to take a tour anyway, so we got a few photos and moved on. We reached South Bend in the late afternoon, with some time to look around Notre Dame.

 

Point Betsie Lighthouse

Notre Dame was founded in 1842 and covers 1,261 acres in Notre Dame, IN outside of South Bend. As of fall 2020, they had a total enrollment of 12,700 students, split 8,700 and 4,000 between undergraduates and graduate students. The school was not officially coed until 1972, though women had received (mostly religious) degrees from Notre Dame since 1917. Their sports teams compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) except for football (unaffiliated) and men’s ice hockey (Big Ten).

The major landmarks on the Notre Dame campus are probably the football stadium, the Basilica, and Touchdown Jesus (actually called the Word of Life). We did not go into the football stadium, the Basilica was closed on the afternoon we were there, and we did get to see Touchdown Jesus. After walking around for a while (and passing by the ChemE building), we went into the Duncan Student Center, next to the stadium. This was a really nice building with dining options, study spaces, a climbing wall, and a track and gym. I’m still kind of mad at Michigan for closing their climbing wall right before I started there and planning to build a new one after I left. We had an early dinner, then had to drop my brother and his girlfriend off at the train.

 

Basilica

Because we wanted to see the inside of the Basilica, we returned to Notre Dame the next morning before leaving Indiana to head back to Ann Arbor. It was an impressive building, filled with statuary, murals, stained glass windows, and an organ. Since we were on campus, we also stopped by the Snite Museum of Art. The museum was pretty typical of a university art museum – not huge, but they had a decent variety of paintings, sculptures, painted plates, gilded cups, etc. ranging from 16th century European oil paintings of earls and counts to modern art.

 

Touchdown Jesus

Notre Dame has a pleasant campus, though it seemed rather abandoned, even for summer (graduation was the week before, so the undergrads might not have returned for summer activities yet and the grad students were probably locked in the basement). Everything was also fairly well contained, with grassy quads, tree-lined paths, and few road crossings to get run over at. There was what looked like a nice commercial block with restaurants, shopping, and lodging just south of campus, though we didn’t walk there. Otherwise, the surrounding area seemed to lack the natural areas and hiking trails of Ithaca and the larger variety of restaurants, stores, theaters, etc. of a bigger city like Ann Arbor. I’m not sure I would have wanted to go to college there, but campus was nice for a visit.

The ChemE building

Life-Size LEGOs

What do a saucepan, the bottle opener of a multitool, and a borrowed mallet have in common? All three were involved in assembling my brand new IKEA furniture. I moved for the seventh time in six years of college in August and for the first time ended up in an unfurnished townhouse. After three days without a bed and a week without any other furniture, I got a ride to IKEA and finished furnishing my bedroom, minus desk chair. (I lasted a solid month without any chairs in the apartment.)

Over the next week, I assembled a bookcase, desk, and dresser. I started with the bookcase, which was about as simple as it gets: sides, top, bottom, backing, and shelves. The problems began with the screwdrivers required. I have an entire precision screwdriver set with several dozen screwdriver bits. Key word: precision. Shockingly enough, screws you might find in a computer or watch are not the same size as screws you might find in furniture. I grabbed the largest Phillips and flathead bits I had, ignored the call IKEA for help page in the instructions, and started putting pieces together.

This continued until I reached the back of the bookcase. The backs of cheap IKEA bookcases are a dense cardboard-type material that you slide into a slot and nail into place. Problem number two: I don’t have a hammer. Instead of summoning a hammer from the sky Amazon or borrowing one from any number of people I know who might plausibly own hammers, I started looking around for solid metal objects. I only own a limited number of solid metal objects, so it didn’t take long for me to settle on my pot. My faithful pot, which has now cooked me two years of pasta and rice, served nicely as a hammer.

A couple days later, I worked on the desk. I pulled out my trusty precision screwdrivers, ignored the fix this item with a friend page in the instructions, and inserted the first of many screws. Everything went fine until the end. I had gotten the top aligned, everything was secured in place, and then I looked down at the remaining dowel in my parts bag. Dowel, singular, not used in any of the remaining steps. Third problem? Or not? After flipping back through the instructions, I believe it was an extra part. If not, the desk hasn’t fallen down yet. I should have counted, but there were no spare parts for the bookcase and I really wasn’t interested in counting four dozen screws, three dozen cams, three dozen dowels, and various other miscellaneous parts.

This brings us to the dresser, which I left for last after realizing that I would have to assemble each and every drawer. This is also where the multitool and mallet come into play. My screwdrivers and I ignored the tipping hazard page in the instructions and got the frame of the dresser screwed together, aligned, and standing. Next, the drawers needed to be put together. After temporarily misplacing all my drawer fronts (they were on my bed), I identified the backs, sides, and bottoms and got to work. I attached the sides to a drawer back. The bottom slid in nicely. The front needed to be secured by ridged plastic nails(?). Return of problem two: I (still) don’t have a hammer. I decided to spare my pot, the drawers, and my neighbors’ ears and borrowed a mallet.

Finally, after several hours, a scraped palm, and a lacerated toe, I could insert the drawers into the dresser. The last step was tightening plastic screws to keep the drawers from being pulled out all the way. Problem number three: my precision flathead screwdriver was not just probably too small, but entirely, utterly, much too small. I started looking around for other flat metal things and settled on the tip of the bottle opener on my multitool. I’ve been wondering if a coin would have been better, but the multitool sufficed without too much damage to the screw heads.

And that is how you assemble IKEA furniture with exactly none of the proper tools. Except the provided hex key. Long live the IKEA hex key.

Beer, bowling, and Boeing 747s*

In other words, another grad school visit. This week, the destination was Ann Arbor to visit the University of Michigan. I left at the more sane hour of 10 am after paying a quick visit to Olin to check in on our design presentation. Without having to wait for things like the computers to warm up and the deicer, I reached my first stop, Philadelphia, in plenty of time to catch my connecting flight to Detroit. The joke of this trip was that Detroit is one of the three places you can fly directly to from Ithaca but the flight was full by the time I booked my tickets.

The flight to Detroit landed early, of all things, but we had to wait for a few other flights and ended up standing around the baggage claim for an hour before getting stuck in Ann Arbor traffic for another hour. By the time we got to the hotel, we had just enough time to check in, get our information packets for the weekend, and head back out for dinner. We were taken to a bar for burgers and beer (both good) to meet professors and grad students. After dinner at the bar, we were taken out for drinks at another bar. Only in college. It was a good first night.

Friday was our serious business day. We had the department overview presentation before walking over to the North Campus Research Complex (NCRC) for the rest of the festivities. NCRC was bought from Pfizer by the medical college but the engineering school rents some of the space. Most of the ChemE faculty and labs have moved to NCRC. It’s a nice building.

We had a poster presentation and lunch followed by the faculty meetings, then we got a short break at the hotel before dinner. All fifty of the prospective students, plus current grad students, plus professors, were hosted at the house of one of the professors. We had a catered dinner (with open bar) and I talked to more of the grad students. After dinner options included returning to the hotel (tempting, but boring), a bar crawl (also tempting, but I would probably have passed out after approximately one bar), and bowling (which I went to).

I bowled a game that would have looked better on a golf scorecard before realizing that the line on the floor was too far back for my child-sized legs. Once I stood in front of the line to begin my approach, I immediately bowled strikes for the rest of the game slightly fewer gutterballs. We got back to the hotel after midnight but I got up early the next day for ice skating, because I couldn’t give up the opportunity to skate at Yost Ice Arena. Fun fact: according to Wikipedia, a weekend series against Cornell in 1991 holds the record for largest crowd in Yost.

Ice skating at Yost

I continued my athletic prowess by falling all over the ice. I did, however, avoid giving myself any blisters. We returned to the hotel for brunch, which was followed by a driving tour, whirlyball, and a grad student panel. Our last events for the weekend were dinner in smaller groups with a few professors and grad students, then a house party. By the time we made it to the house party, everyone was pretty tired, including the grad students. We were driven to the house party, I had an unknown quantity of the punch, then one of the students said she would be leaving to drive people back to the hotel. A few of us moved toward the foyer to leave, where we were met by another student who was thrilled to discover that two cars were needed and he could leave too.

Back at the hotel, I packed for the following morning, when I would, once again, be at the airport for an early morning flight. At 4:30 am the next day, I met with the other unfortunate students who were leaving Ann Arbor before sunrise. Unlike in Ithaca, there was already a line, though not a very long one, for security. I got through pretty quickly, then settled down at my gate to write a memo for senior design. That’s ChemE life for you.

Like the previous week, the flights home went smoothly. I got to Philadelphia with more than an hour before my connecting flight, so I thought I’d take my time getting to my next gate. About five minutes later, coming out of the end of terminal A, I noticed a set of doors to my right leading to a convenient shuttle to terminal F, where I was headed. Another sign warned me that terminal F was a fifteen minute walk. I chose to walk since I had time, plus I’d just been sitting for an hour. Well, the sign wasn’t wrong. The Philadelphia airport is shaped kind of like a giant insect. I had landed by the tail; my next plane was taking off from the tip of the antenna.

When I made it to the end of terminal F, I found out why I was taking off from there. I was surrounded by people going to places like Bangor, Buffalo, and Sheboygan – other small-ish towns more or less in the middle of nowhere. Our small fleet of turboprop planes was relegated to this end of the airport, probably so they wouldn’t accidentally get run over by a 747. I met another Cornell ChemE (it was peak grad school visiting time). We flew back to Ithaca, took the TCAT back to Cornell, and I promptly began studying for my wines prelim and finalizing process conditions for design.

*Note that all the aircraft I rode were much too small to be Boeing 747s. I did get to fly on the trusty DeHavilland Dash 8 turboprop again though.

Wined and Dined

When I last left off, I had finally arrived in Pittsburgh after my seven-hour flying ordeal jaunt through the stratosphere. It was now about noon, six and a half hours before our first scheduled event. I stayed in the hotel for awhile, then decided I didn’t have four more hours of internet surfing in me and went outside to explore.

I passed by, among other things, a large dinosaur and Carnegie Mellon itself before arriving at Schenley Park. Schenley Park is a park named after Mary Schenley. There are jogging paths, trails, creek-ish bits, bridges, lots of trees, and no cars. Some of the many bridges were constructed by the Works Progress Administration in 1939. I determined this using my extensive US History II knowledge and analysis of a rock sample (or see picture below). I wandered around for awhile enjoying the low people to trees ratio, then headed back toward Carnegie Mellon and the hotel.

Back at the hotel, I caught up on email and the latest happenings regarding senior design, then promptly fell asleep. When I woke up, it was 6:30, ten minutes after the meet and greet in the hotel lobby and time for dinner. I stumbled, drunk-like, into the hotel restaurant and proceeded to get more drunk-like on a glass of unremarkable chardonnay (the cake for dessert was good through). We met our fellow visiting students and some of the grad students and professors, then sat through a presentation on Why Pittsburgh is a Great City.

The next morning, we had more presentations about ChemE at Carnegie Mellon and each of the research areas, which lasted for over three hours. After lunch and a poster session, we were brought to the ChemE building for lab tours and faculty meetings. As the story goes, the ChemE building was built with its floors slanting so that in case the school didn’t work out, the building could be converted into a factory, with the uneven floors allowing gravity to transport materials. In any case, the school did work out, so the ChemEs occupy one giant ramp.

Panther Hollow Run in Schenley Park (I think)

Before the faculty meetings, we were shown the labs. The interesting thing about the lab space at Carnegie Mellon is that it’s divided up not by professor but by research area. Each research area has a large shared lab space and each grad student has bench space, but the major equipment is communal.

Next was one of the main events of our trip: professor meetings. Five of them, in a row. We met professors, heard about research, talked about our experiences and interests, asked questions, and generally tried to seem intelligent. It was a good experience, if a slightly exhausting one. Dinner was served at PNC Park, and while the Pirates are an inferior team to a certain other Boston team named after colored footwear, it was pretty cool to be in a Major League Ballpark. The actual food, however, bizarrely consisted entirely of different kinds of pasta. While my cooking repertoire consists almost entirely of variations on pasta, I would have expected something more from a catered event.

View of the city from Carnegie Mellon

Following the PNC Park pasta-fest, we were taken bowling, but I left before things got too crazy. The next day we had breakfast, a trolley tour, then I explored the Cathedral of Learning with some of the other prospective students before being driven to the airport. The plane rides back to Ithaca were downright uneventful compared to what I had experienced two days prior. I made it back to Ithaca by 11 that night, got picked up by my roommate, and prepared for three days of classes before I would be travelling again.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Well, it was a turboprop engine plane. And we were trying to leave. Ithaca was just getting in the way, as usual. I normally have no need to fly out of Ithaca’s one-building, three-gate airport, since flying home takes more time and is more expensive than bussing or driving. In this case, however, I wasn’t going home. I was headed to Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon for my first grad school visit. It was also my first time flying by myself.

Due to the wide array of flights leaving Ithaca’s airport (all eight of them per day), I had been booked for a 6 am flight to Newark. After a one hour, twenty minute layover, I would proceed to Pittsburgh, hopefully arriving at 10:22 am. Spoiler alert: I didn’t.

The morning started fine enough. I got up at 4 in the morning after three hours or so of sleep thanks to good life choices, had breakfast, and took a cab to the airport, arriving before 5. Since I hadn’t flown alone or been to the Ithaca airport before, I wanted to get to the airport early to make sure I didn’t get lost or anything. You’d have to try pretty hard to get lost in the Ithaca airport. Once you get through security, you can see all the gates at the same time.

Security took approximately two minutes, then I sat down to wait for my flight to board. Meanwhile, the flight to Philly was cutting weight so they could fly in the marginal weather – it was early March with the temperature right around freezing, with some nice sleet/rain/snow coming down. Half of the twenty plus passengers were being left behind in Ithaca. Fortunately, for whatever reason (larger plane, leaving fifteen minutes later, not carrying rocks in the cargo bay, don’t ask me), my flight was leaving at full capacity. Unfortunately, at the time we were scheduled to take off we were still sitting inside the airport.

When we boarded, the first thing we noticed was that it was quite possibly colder inside the airplane than outside. We had apparently lost out on the coin toss for the airport’s single plane heater. While we waited for the airport’s single deicer, our friendly air steward informed us that the earlier delay was to wait for the airplane computers to warm up enough to work. Thanks, Ithaca.

Fifteen minutes before we were supposed to have arrived in Newark, we took off from Ithaca. The flight went smoothly, and forty-five minutes after taking off, we landed in Newark around 8. Great, I thought. I still had almost an hour to catch my connecting flight. Then I looked out the window and couldn’t see the airport. For the next fifteen minutes, we taxied in circles before we were dropped off in the middle of nowhere where we would be picked up by a bus to be driven to the airport terminal. For the fifteen minutes after that, I waited on the bus while the rest of the flight collected checked luggage. We finally got everyone on board the bus and were about to drive off when a very helpful passenger yelled, “Wait! Is that someone’s suitcase?” and pointed out the window at a large yellow suitcase sitting forlornly between the plane and the bus. “Yes!” another very relieved passenger yelled, running to collect the suitcase. At least she was running.

By this time, it was nearing 8:30 and I was running out of hope that a “Your flight has been delayed” message would magically appear on my phone. We drove in circles across the same concrete we had just taxied across and were about to drive through a tunnel between two buildings when we were cut off by a luggage truck. Trailing about nine thousand luggage carts behind it. After that passed, we finally reached our drop off point and I took off.

It was 8:36. My next flight was supposed to take off at 8:53, which meant that boarding technically ended at 8:38. At 8:38, I walked up to Gate 16. The sign behind the gate very helpfully informed me that the flight to Texas, or Hawaii, or somewhere that was not Pittsburgh was Now Boarding. I looked down at my boarding pass. My flight was at Gate 18. Two gates down, the boarding area was empty. But. The ticket agent was still there. At 8:39, she let me and a few others making the same connecting flight board.

And then we sat there for an hour getting deiced and taxiing in circles. After my first flight of the morning, I was just glad to be sitting there at all. We touched down in Pittsburgh at 10:40 am, and after another forty-five minute drive, we pulled up to the hotel, elapsed travelling time seven hours. Google maps tells me that without traffic, I could have made the entire drive from Ithaca in five hours and four minutes.

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 College Student’s Guide to Laundry

Before I begin this post, there are a couple things to note: If I’m giving unsolicited advice, it’s probably 1) terrible and 2) not to be taken seriously. If I’m asked to give advice, it may still be terrible, but you can at least take me seriously. This post falls under the first category of advice (that of unsolicited nature).

The first step in doing laundry is deciding whether or not you need to do laundry. This can be determined using several methods. One: the ratio of clothes in your laundry basket/floor to clothes in your closet/dresser is undefined. Two: You have no clean socks. Three: Your cleanest pair of pants has grass stains, mud stains, and an indeterminate food stain.

Once you have determined that you do in fact need to do laundry, move on to the next step. Gather everything that needs to be washed. Take your laundry, detergent, and method of payment to the laundry room. In your laundry room, proceed to throw all your laundry into a washer and add detergent. Sorting is unnecessary because your entire wardrobe consists of jeans* and t-shirts. Pay to start the washer, then choose the one setting that’s been allowed to remain on the washer (dark colors, colors, whites, etc.). Since you didn't sort your laundry, choose colors.

Wait forty minutes, then return to rescue your damp and presumably cleaner clothing. At this point, throw all your laundry into a dryer, pay more money to start the dryer, and choose how warm you would like your clothing at the end of the drying cycle. Your options are hot, very hot, and superheated.

Another forty minutes later, it’s time to remove your clothing from the autoclave dryer. Depending on which heat setting you chose, you may or may not need protective gear to collect your clothing. At this point, you can bring your freshly laundered clothing back to your room, where you have between one and three days to fold everything.

Indicators of laundry success include: articles of clothing coming out of the process the same color as they went in (hey, at least the stains didn't get any worse, and now they’re clean stains), everything smelling better than it did before laundry, and not losing any socks.

*I actually don’t own any jeans, but I still don’t sort my laundry.