The Chosen Five

There were five.

Five among dozens.

Five who braved ferocious storms and ceaseless battering.

Five who got screwed by their lousy online schedules.

Five who had to take design and control at the same time.

I was one of five, and barring the hyperbole of dramatacism, it was indeed a very difficult semester I was faced with this fall. I faced it with Charlie, Drew, Jewel, and Willis. Charlie and I go way back - back to the Team Bloat days with Jenna and Joam in Transport and Kinetics. Drew has been a co-op at NOVA with me for my last 3 rotations. Jewel I knew of, but didn't really know, and Willis.. Dave Willis.. well, with a name like that he couldn't help but be the man :-)

There were 15 other people in control, but only us five for design and health & safety. We spent many many hours down in B72, the basement ChemE computer lab, hashing out progress reports or putting together laborious H&S reports. When everybody else was down there worrying about the monstrous impossible process control homework, we were worrying about that plus tomorrow's progress report on exergy plus the 38-page health & safety draft due Friday.

The groups were formed as soon as we walked into the classroom at 8am Monday morning in late August. Willis, Drew and Jewel were over at a computer desk on the right side of the room, and Charlie was sitting at the left front desk. Thus team Willis coalesced, and Charlie and I joined forces yet again. I consider myself fortunate to have had him as my partner. He works extrememly diligently, and I don't have to worry about being cool around him. I suppose from the outside we're both ChemE nerd dorks who pool our dorkiness and are very uncool. But from the inside we're like brothers--don't have to worry about what you say or do, just work, joke, blow off steam, and get done what needs to get done. Exactly my style :-) Team Willis always finished their work before us, and we were usually late - for classes and assignments. I kinda feel bad for that, but it's how it happened, and our professors were gracious. And in the end I think we turned in better work, or at least as good.

So, with that backdrop, let me usher you down to B72 early on a crisp and frosty Monday morning. We hop up the 4-foot ledge at the truck loading docks underneath big grey Benedum and walk in the door to the loading foyer. Pull through the double doors, pass the drinking fountain and bathrooms on the right, face left, and punch in the code at the door of the lab. It's really not a lab, it's a computer classroom. Two-story-high ceiling with innocuous vents and pipes running around, 15-foot screen in front of the extra-long blackboard on the wall at our left. The instructor's desk, rounded by it's brushed metal ledge, is tucked back in that corner. On the right are the desks - 9-foot long semicircles with two computers in each and chairs scattered around them. Most of the chairs have formed a herd in the back of the room, over by the printers, unused and out of the way. The desk right at our right is me and Charlie's--he sits by the wall and I sit by the aisle. Team Willis sits at the second desk on the other side of the room. But they're not here now. Charlie and I sit at our desk, typing, leaning back and sighing, and leaning in again to the screens and keyboards. The strange thing is, it doesn't seem like a classroom at all. Books and backpacks are littered around like a dorm room, and the whole room flickers and glows in the warm light of Christmas lights and a crackling fire. Julie Andrews sings with spirit undimmed by her bleak listeners, and the media player visualization flickers warm flame on the giant projector screen. Colored lights circumnavigate the blackboard, and a string of white lights is taped around the instructor's desk. Even though it's 4am and the new day is starting, you can't help but feel pretty cozy tucked down there in the basement, carpet under your feet, open computers, a classroom at your command, a locked door if you want to close it, and a clearly-defined task steadily chipping away under your efforts. It doesn't feel at all as though you've been sitting at that desk since 3:30 Sunday afternoon, that the Steelers have played and won, night has come and gone, and workers are waking and starting their days. You know that there are five more hours until the report is due, and you will need all of them to get close to finishing it, but you don't think about it enough to realize it. You just keep scanning the marked-up progress report on Pipes and making changes to the document on the screen. Every once in a while you or Charlie kick back and make some comment about how ridiculous some of the comments are, or bust out some South Park quote, but by this time you're pretty much in a zone, and there's not much talk except for questions about the report.

Taking the liberty of the omnipotent narrator, we now sweep past those five hours, rush up the 13-story staircase, round the corner past Parker's office, and pull up in front of the Chemical Engineering main office. Charlie and I weakly greet Dr. Enick and Dr. Parker, whom I salute and call "masters," since they have ruled our lives for the past 4 months. We hand Dr. Enick the light blue 1.5-inch three-ring binder, exchange a few words, and turn towards the elevators. The sun is already well risen over the convoluted hospital buildings of Oakland outside the 12th floor window next to us. 18 hours ago I drove down to campus from a brief nap after church, and now I roll back down those roads, for one of the last times. I'm not tired, just zoned out. My nose started dripping around 6am, and my throat has gotten scratchy, and my rear end is sore from sitting for so long, but I'm plenty alert. It's a pretty strange feeling, but not unpleasant. I'm actually glad I got to do such a crazy thing at the end of my college career, and I'm amazed that it actually was that much work, for that long, and we did it.

Two days later, after the dreaded process control final kicked our butts from 11am to 2pm, Charlie and I finished the last edits to the 92-page Chemical Engineering Plant Design final report, printed out the remaining pages, and under the recording eye of my cell phone camera signed the cover letter and plopped it in the holder outside Dr. Enicks office, thus ending our undergraduate careers.

OK, I think I'm done with the story. There's more I want to say, and it's too clusmy to put it in that kind of clothing. Yes, 14 design progress reports culminated in a crazy all-nighter down in B72 putting them all together into the final report draft. We got an A in the class. Team Willis turned their final report in one hour before we did :-)

There's one other picture I want to take you to, actually. When I think of this semester, that comfortable and friendly image of B72 is the primary one that comes to mind. I also strongly think of parking my car around Oakland - waiting for spots to open up on Atwood, finding a meterless 4-hour spot on Bellefield, and that sweet sweet feeling of slipping into a spot where you know you're set for the day. I sorta think of sitting up in the 12-floor classroom listening to Parker's performance lectures. But one of the stirling memories is down in the darkened basement room of Fuel & Fuddle, a popular Oakland bar and pizza place. Twenty-some chemical engineer students sit around tables and on benches, faces fixed on the screen at one end, listening intently to people talk about hot wort, mash tuns, yeast collection patterns and heat exchangers. After a month of excruciating work on the Process Control project, we have all made it here--our presentations are in Dr. Parker's briefcase and we're presenting our work to the class. What I want you to see is the attention to the presenters; the quality of the graphs and discussions; and the questions. Dr. Parker only had to ask a few the whole time. After the end of every 10-minute presentation hands shot up all around the room and points were raised, discussed and usually answered. Fuel & Fuddle employees slipped through occasionally, and a few patrons passed by on their way to the restrooms, and I wonder what they thought. Uber-weird, probably :-) But I was proud of us. After getting beaten around by two exams with F-grade averages, merciless homeworks and brutal lectures, we had risen to this project and kicked it squarely in the heine. Non-linear simulation using grad-student-level matlab code? Barebones project information and difficult research? Gruelling controller tuning to achieve stability? Harsh time limit on the presentations? Cold steely questions from the super-intelligent Parker? We ate 'em all for breakfast :-)

Parker himself agreed with me the following day about the quality of the projects and participation. It was by far the best project he had ever seen in his 8 (I think) years of teaching this class. And my team's paper was by far the best of the bunch. Those words settled a tremendous weight of failure, uncertainty and hope inside of me. I had worked myself to the bone the night before pulling our paper together and tightening up the analysis. We had killed ourselves Thanksgiving week to get the filter and pasteurizer models working, and now we had a bunch of closed-loop controller responses to interpret and discuss. We threw all kinds of disturbances at our system once we had it designed and simulated, to see if it could handle it. Our beer pasteurizer came out with flying colors, and I covered every single base with our assumptions, decisions, and reasons. At every point I unconsciously asked myself "What would Parker ask here?", and then proceeded to answer it. The paper was 38 pages, but it was perfect, and to have Parker realize and acknowledge that meant more to me than every A+ I earned in college (and I earned 15).

That project was the best-whipped-into-shape that I have been since Critical Writing last fall and Organic Chemistry the summer before that. And those three are the academic pinnacles of my college career. A close fourth is Thermo 2, where I lived in Chapter 11 of the book and plunged my brain again and again into fugacity and gibbs free energy and all the hateful abstract concepts of thermodynamics until I actually understood them and got an A+ in the course. Those were the four times I had something really hard to do and I squared it up, took it on, and came out successful. I came to realize at the end of this semester that that is one of the best things you can do in life, even though it's always hard, discouraging and hateful at some point along the way. Now that I'm graduated, I miss that kind of clear-cut challenge within the relatively safe confines of academia. I miss the prospect of hanging out with the students whom I've finally gotten to know and who've gotten to know me. I wish for more of the heedless expenditure of time on things that have no choice but to be done, yet are pretty much independent and fun as you do them. Real life seems a good bit harsher and less interesting, but I suppose it will turn out to be just as rewarding once I get into it.

So yeah - down there in Fuel & Fuddle, our class glowed with professionalism, quality and solid scientific behavior. It makes me very happy to think of us down there. After all the misery and failure in process control, we proved our capabilities there, and Parker saw it and acknowledged it gladly. I talked to Dr. Parker the next week about the course and some of the comments I had developed over the months. We ended up talking for almost 2 hours, and I got to share, completely, coherently and demonstratively, exactly the things that had bothered me about him and how he ran the course, and together we considered them and how they could be addressed. At the end he thanked me heartily and said he'd never been given such well-thought out and considerate feedback, removed from emotions and didactic in nature. That was likewise very rewarding, because the unsettledness of being in what appeared to be a mismanaged class was relieved, and I came out really believing that Parker is a solid guy.

Baugh, this post has become an untidy and obese growth of text. It doesn't even talk about final's week (and the harder week before that) chronologically. But, I think it carries most of the spirit of this last month and semester of classes, and that's what I really want to remember. I think of B72 affectionately, and I have great memories of working with Charlie and my other groups, and the fun times down in the lab with everbody focused on a common assignment. It has been probably the best sememster of college in that respect, even as it has been the most miserable at times and the most difficult by far. I'm glad to have ended out my academic life on a genuine note--a hard challenge well met. We'll see what the coming weeks hold, and I'll write later about this whole 5-day trip to Akron that I just got back from :-)

If anybody has read this far, I'm amazed at you and you deserve a smoothie. This post has taken full liberties of the "for future John" purpose of this blog. It's been a great time of life these past months, and perhaps I'll come up with a more succinct and vibrant way of describing it some other time.

--Clear Ambassador