Posts

When I came into my first at Ohio State, I wasn’t sure what to expect from college. I mean, there’s something people try to prepare you for: that it’s gonna be harder, that there are gonna be more opportunities, that you are more responsible for yourself. But it’s one thing to hear, and it’s another to experience, and now I’ve experienced it.

Now, I have a much better idea of how I want the next few years to go. A large part of this is due to my lovely scholars group, Arch Scholars. The program and the people taught me much about the college experience. I was introduced to events, organizations, and just… options. Namely, I had never heard of co-ops, nor had I ever considered that my college experience might last more than 4 years. I am now okay with happening, if it means I am getting something valuable done by extending it (e.g. co-op). In that way, my goals have shifted. One way that they haven’t was that I am still interested in undergraduate research. I attended career fairs to look for co-ops and internships, but did little to look for research.

In terms of academics, I had developed good habits in high school and many of those paid off. I could do the long multiple choice exams of general chemistry. I knew that studying math was all just practice. I knew how to manage my time, which I had much much much less of as compared to high school. As the year went on, things got harder, but I started off in a good place and developed alongside the difficulty increase.

In terms of personal developments, I was forced to make friends because I knew effectively zero people coming into college. I was very lost at first and found “trying” to make friends weird and tired. Everyone was doing it though. By the end of the year, I had a good group, and I felt like I belonged somewhere. I had people to miss, at least, when summer finally came.

Overall, first year, gotta say: pretty epic.

In the first few weeks of Sophomore year, one of my more recent friends introduced me to a student organization she was a member of: SASE, the Society of Asian Scientists and Engineers. When I heard the title I was instantly intrigued: after all, I’m Asian! And I’m an Engineer! In fact, I’d say those two tidbits of information are important to my personal identity, and as a result, I decided I would try out this SASE thing.

I attended just about every meeting from that day on, in the beginning because of my friend, but very quickly because I actually liked what was going on. Professional development and social events with other Asian people. As a South Asian, I wasn’t exactly matched up with the East Asian majority that SASE features, but even then. There’s qualities that are shared for anyone who was exposed to two disparate cultures from a young age. From early on, I felt like things clicked.

When it came time for the SASE regional conference, a two day long conference with workshops and a career fair, I was excited to attend. It was the first conference of that sort that I had ever attended. Over those two days I felt more and more a part of the org, gained some valuable experiences, and when E-board Elections opened up, I jumped on the chance. I’ve had a disappointing lack of formal leadership experience during college, and I could think of few other places to start. Wonderfully, I got the position I had wanted: events chair.

SASE was a lovely organization to stumble upon, one that I wish I had known about earlier. From the very beginning I felt like I belonged, and I look forward to being involved in the organization as I continue with my collegiate career.

You don’t realize just how long 9 months can be until you try to sit down and write about them.

This was a long year, a crazy year. It was great though, and got better and better (until it stopped and then got worse). Let’s get into it.

Academically, it started off with me getting into my major, Chemical Engineering. Practically, this meant taking one major-specific class; CBE 2200, Mass and Energy Balances. This was, and looking back, still is, the hardest class I have ever taken. The homework was brutal, the pace was breakneck, and the exams these extended ordeals. This sounds like an action movie. Really, 2200 was just a tough course made even tougher by my fellow ChemEs. The problem is, they were all so smart. I thought a test was so hard, and everyone else did too. Then the average was almost an 80%. I felt like I was constantly on the brink of mediocrity, and the high standards I set for myself (to always be at the top) were becoming increasingly hard to fulfill. I did well in the class, actually, I did well in all my classes, let’s just say that here. Academically, this year was great. I struggled, but I adjusted, I adapted, and I prevailed. A satisfying tale I can only hope to repeat in the semesters to come. On an aside I also took Organic Chemistry for the first time. Ochem is one of those things people have talked about since high school, this big bad subject “all memorization, the hardest course you’ll ever take, 30% averages”, and I’ll say none of those things were true for me. It was hard, but I loved the material so much that I enjoyed the difficulty. I had Dr. Callam, who I have to say is the best professor I have ever had. God bless.

Before we get into my personal development, let’s hit on second semester academics. At this point I was taking two major classes: Separations, which was effectively an extension of MEB, faster paced but easier (though I was used to it), and Transport. Transport was tough because it was extremely abstract, Separations comes in close with Ochem as my favorite course. I love these things the way I love a good movie, a good book, they fill with me satisfaction that I can’t rightly explain but feel strongly nonetheless. A large part of my enjoyment second semester came from seeing the same people two semesters in a row, now that we were in the same major. I was taking classes with my friends, and that made it so enjoyable. We could study together, suffer together, recover together. I cannot overstate how lovely this aspect of second semester was. People are what life is all about.

Just looking at how I’ve changed since Freshman year is ridiculous. I hardly feel like the same person, and this is a fact I appreciate greatly. I am far more clear in what I want to do. I wanted to get an undergraduate research position and take an internship/co-op over the summer. I’ve attained a research position, and if it wasn’t for COVID, would have worked in a lab over the summer. As a result of this, I stopped trying for a summer internship/co-op second semester, which may have been a mistake, I see now. Regardless, all things of import were canceled this summer, and the best I can do now is focus on my third goal: doing well in school. So, I’ve taken a summer course online, literature. We do as we can.

For now, I’m just trying to take it easy. Let’s go back to that action movie comparison. It was a high octane action movie 9-months, but now that it’s over, let’s let my life be something more like slice-of-life, a simple comedy, maybe even a romance! Ha ha! HA! Regardless, the world is a stressful place to be in right now. I think it’s best that, for now, I let myself relax.

Stuck in the house during quarantine, wondering what the point of life is these days, I found myself looking through pictures I took during the year. A school year is a long time, but it still astonishes me that all those pictures I looked at occurred during this 9 month period of my life.

Of all these pictures, from parties and adventures, restaurants and parks, the one that gave me an idea to write about was a picture of a ChemCAD drawing showing a multi-stage distillation process. (ChemCAD is a software that models large-scale chemical processes.)

Distillation is a major topic of  Separation Processes, which is in itself a major course in Chemical Engineering. This is becuase distillation is important, a widely used process that by itself is 6% of the U.S. power usage. While that is impressive, I think this image stood out to me as it does because Distillation, like most of the separation processes we covered in class, is based on the concept of equilibrium.

Equilibrium, I think, is a fairly intuitive concept. It’s where everything is balanced. Where, given something dynamic, there exists conditions that temper turmoil so that it is static. You can think of a stable relationship as one that has reached equilibrium, where you’ve gone through the ups and downs and have now found your groove. A balanced seesaw, or pencil, or scale, represents equilibrium of the forces at either end. In chemistry, two chemicals react because something about them being together is imbalanced, and they change to reach a point of stability. Our own bodies are often described as being in a “dynamic equilbrium”, where things are always changing but the body always works towards being at equilibrium.

(In the case of distillation, it’s all about liquids-vapor equilibrium: at equilibrium different substances distribute themselves differently in the liquid and gas phases. You can exploit this difference to separate the compounds.)

What I find so interesting is that you can see so much of the natural world and the universe is just trying to reach equilibrium. Given the means and left to its own devices, things will always try to reach a stable configuration. I kind of see this as something like a Universal Intent, that the Universe wants things to reach equilibrium. Then, in a philosophical way, you can start to see the universe as alive and that is working towards subsistence. I mean, just look at the words I used to describe it; that the universe can try and have intent and work are qualities we assign to a living things, and they feel to me the correct words to describe what’s happening.

The thing is, our bodies are truly a bunch of cells that don’t know that they are part of something larger. And those cells are made of atoms that also don’t realize that they are part of something larger. We, then, don’t need to realize that we may be the atoms of the universe. An atom is as simple to us as we are to the universe, after all. And in a way, from an chemical/physical point of view, a human life is a net forward step towards equilibrium, towards stability, in the same way our cells work towards stability. Life may be turmoil, but when we die, we reach death, a state of unending stability. But more, throughout that life, we have killed plants and animals for food and used volatile and unstable chemicals for energy. This allows them as well to reach a new, more stable equilibrium. Through the course of a life, we work, unknowingly, to bring things ever closer to a final equilibrium. For the universe, though we don’t know it, would never really believe it.

I don’t know if that’s beautiful or awful, deep or meaningless, nihilistic or anthropocentric. This is all awfully philosophical and I am no philosopher. These are random thoughts, shower thoughts, my can’t-sleep-so-let’s-ponder-the-meaning-of-life thoughts. My point with all of this is that all these ramblings were sprung into my head because of a topic we covered in a Chemical Engineering course. I think if you take the time to to mull things over, you start to see that all the things we learn have value besides what’s on the syllabus. A Chemical Engineering course certainly won’t teach you the meaning of life, but it might get you thinking about it.