| by Sandra Keats It’s been said before and it’ll be said again: Northwestern is a campus divided. It just happens to be that our Mason-Dixon line is Foster Street.
South Campus houses the theater freaks, sorority girls, lonely Foster-Walkers, Medilldos and music phenoms, students enamored with downtown Evanston, and the poor misguided freshmen who were simply misinformed that Allison is a real party dorm.
North Campus is home to the varsity athletes and club studs, supercool Bobb cats, frat boys, girls who love frat boys, and of course, techies.
Obviously, there are those who stray from these stereotypes and wind up on the other side of the invisible divide; not everyone in the north favored emancipation during the 1860s. But for the most part, one can expect drunken debauchery up north and sipping Peet’s coffee down south.
I happen to be a third year south campus denizen. Technically I fit the profile—Medillian sorority member who lived in Allison freshman year under the impression that it was the social dorm of the South. In reality, though, I’m mentally far from it. And like most other South Side students, I’ve crossed the divide. I’ve stepped over puke in Bobb, I’ve hung out at lame fraternity parties, and I’ve drunkenly cheered on football players at NU sporting events. But before last week I had never experienced any part of the mysterious world of a techie.
About the closest I ever came to Tech was attending a bunch of speeches in the gargantuan auditorium. I tried to Find God in 2001, a religion class which took place in a classroom close enough to the entrance that I never had to venture too far inside the eerie halls. And I think I went to Tech Express once, but got scared and walked the other way. I had heard my techie friends and acquaintances talk about their infamous problem sets and long days in Tech, but never had I braved a class, a lab, a homework problem, or even an “Express” lunch. I had a hard enough time in Intro to Statistics.
Curiosity burned within. What goes on in the unknown depths of the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science? Like many others, I had always pictured techies sneaking through doors with secret access codes to get to class. I imagined their professors as long-bearded eggheads with big spectacles and classrooms lined with glass cabinets full of flasks, test tubes, a Bunsen Burner, and maybe some flame-throwers. I envisioned blackboards smeared with erased white chalk and unsolved equations and theorems. They were obviously building top-secret devices for the government or inventing new types of environmentally-friendly fuel. Whatever they were doing, I wanted to know. That being said, I knew I needed to find the hardest, most ridiculous-sounding engineering class at NU, and attend.
After some in-depth course description research, the list of promising possibilities was narrowed down to the following: Principles of Heterogenous Catalysis, Interdisciplinary Nonlinear Dynamics, Polymerization Reaction Engineering, Cell Culture and Ex Vivo Tissue Engineering, and Kinetics and Reactor Engineering.
My personal favorite was Cell Culture and Ex Vivo Tissue Engineering, but I didn’t think I had any business being anywhere within a hundred miles of that 10-person, 400-level chemical engineering class. Plus, they probably wouldn’t want to let a commoner see their three-headed frogs and five-legged pony. Ahh, cute five-legged pony.
Nope, it was actually Kinetics and Reactor Engineering – a 30-person, 300-level, lab-free chemical engineering class – that took the crown. I spent two days in Dr. Lonnie Shea’s class … and to be completely honest, it was somewhat anticlimactic. I thought I would get lost roaming around in search of the classroom, but it couldn’t have been much easier to find. Where were the blue gasses slithering out from under door cracks or people running and screaming through the halls with equation answers? To my surprise, it was all rather normal.
The room is bright white with about 50 matching desks, two perfectly clean chalkboards, a clock in the upper-right corner of the front wall, and one small window in the back corner of the wall to my left. It’s nothing like the stale, aged classrooms of Fisk Hall with pieces missing from the ceiling and asbestos dangling from the empty gaps. There are no pipes lining the ceiling, nor any clamorous clanking in the radiators. And Professor Shea, 32, isn’t the scary bearded man in a lab coat whom I expected. He jokingly says with a grin he’ll most likely call on me. I laugh and take a seat in the back with the three engineering class thugs.
The students come off as almost normal, except for the fact the fact that they seem to really understand what’s going on in the class. That is abnormal. As I scramble to write down every letter, number and symbol on the board, some kids twirl their pencils, some doodle on their Daily Northwesterns (what else are you going to do with it?), and others actually take notes.
We start out with definitions and I think, “Alright, I can handle this.”
Catalyst: been around forever; present in natural systems; increases reaction rate in chemical reactions; unchanged by the reaction; not consumed; and expensive. The best part about catalysts is that there is a huge industry for them ($109/year—yes, I was in fact scared by the fact that scientific notation was used), and if you can make catalysts for cheaper, this could be an enormous moneymaker. (Hence, a prime example of why engineering majors will most likely make more money than journalism majors—they can make catalysts that are worth numbers that require scientific notation.)
Catalysis: the occurrence of catalysts in chemical reactions; catalysis is used to make products better or cheaper.
“Okay, fair enough,” I think. “We journalism majors can handle definitions ... oh wait, here come the numbers.”
“How much space can a handful of catalysts cover?” Professor Shea asks.
“A ton,” one girl in the front responds.
“Tech auditorium,” another student says.
To figure it out we start with what Professor Shea refers to as “simple sixth grade geometry”: pore volume: V = Np * pr2p * L
surface area: S = Np * 2prpL
S/V = Np * pr2p * L / Np * 2prpL = 2/rp
V = 0.60 cm3/gcat
Got all that?
Then comes some more math and symbols I had never seen, shortly before it's revealed that 10 grams of catalysts would cover 3,000 m2. I'm still confused as to when the numbers entered the problem and how the whole thing actually played out. (And by the way, I took geometry in ninth grade, not sixth, and I don’t remember this at all.)
We continue on to discuss catalyst design, deactivation and poisoning. Here is where I start to give up on paying attention altogether. As the class begins to wrap up, Professor Shea throws a diagram on the board as an introduction to what he will cover the next day. It sort of reminds me of a sperm’s journey to the uterus. He then reminds everyone they should be working on their group projects.
A lone girl with snowy-white skin and glasses turns to the kid sitting next to me and asks if he has a group and if she could join. He says his group is filled. “Oh, okay,” she says as she turns away, packs her bags and walks out of the classroom. I follow.
Day 2: More in the wonderful world of catalysis and catalytic reactors. After realizing my bike is broken five minutes before class starts, I book it up to Tech. I’m late to a class that isn’t even mine. But luckily, he hasn’t started yet. As I stumble in, the regulars start to wonder why I’m making a second appearance in their class.
The next 45 minutes are filled with diagrams, equations, letters, numbers and my utter confusion. I’ll spare you the gory details. After class Professor Shea asks me if I’ve been grasping the information at all. I think he's joking and I laugh—he's not.
“I like to think that I explain things fairly well,” he says. I clarify that I’m not trying to knock his teaching abilities, and can see that he happens to explain things extremely well to students who actually study chemical engineering.
After two days of Kinetics and Reactor Engineering and a brief talk with Professor Shea, I walk away with a new perspective on Tech. I might be confused by the problems and equations, but I stepped into an uncharted territory that most non-engineering students will only hear about second-hand. My occupation will never involve petroleum processing, manufacturing commodity chemicals, fabrication of computer microchips, designing DNA matrices, studying stem cells, or making polymers.
But, that’s perfectly fine with me—I’ll leave that to the techies.
Sandra Keats still prefers the name Delores Mulvawitz. She can be reached at s-keats@northwestern.edu. Got something to say about this article? Post it on the NUcomment message board. Back to the top of the article |
