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.

At the Library Again

In the over two years I've spent at Cornell, I have not studied at the library once. Over the summer, however, I did make use of the library to fill my free time by borrowing a number of books to read for fun. Apologies to more sensitive readers for using the f word.

Unfortunately, my experience was that the Cornell library system did not have every book I searched for. I guess the books I was looking for must have been extremely obscure or wildly unpopular. Probably both.

I got my book recommendations from online lists I stumbled upon and out of the books I managed to hunt down at Olin Library, I didn't hate any of them, but some were definitely better than others. Some of my favorites:

2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke) – I read the whole Odyssey series, but the first book was the best. I enjoyed the whole series, but if you’re not a big science fiction fan and/or don’t have time to read an entire series, at least read the first one. Although the movie shows up on multiple “Most Confusing Movies of All Time” lists (yes, I do spend too much time looking up random stuff on the internet), I didn't think the book was confusing at all.

Discworld, Terry Pratchett – There’s an entire series of Discworld books, and this summer I read the first two, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic. If The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (one of my favorite books) is science fiction humor, the Discworld books are fantasy humor. There was adventure, weird characters in a strange world, and utter ridiculousness.

Our Town, Thornton Wilder – The last play I read was The Importance of Being Earnest, in the spring of my junior year of high school. So it’s been awhile. I really liked the descriptions of life in a small New England town, probably because I did most of my growing up in a small-ish New England town.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell – Along with Brave New World and We (Yevgeny Zamyatin), Nineteen Eighty-Four is considered one of the most influential dystopian works. I have not read We, but I ended up liking Nineteen Eighty-Four more than Brave New World. There wasn't any particular glaring failure of Brave New World; I just like Nineteen Eighty-Four better overall.

It was a good summer in terms of books (and overall) and one of the reasons I wrote this post is because I forgot a picture in the last summer reading post I did. What trip to the library is complete without some penguins?

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.”