Antsy senior post

Well, if there’s anything worse for the blog than Week 10, it must be exam week. I got really lucky this quarter. Historically, I’ve been stuck every quarter with a Thursday or Friday exam, which means no relaxing for the whole week. This time around (perhaps as a little pat on the back for putting up with all those previous exam weeks?) all of my finals (a whopping total of 3) were scheduled for Monday and Tuesday. Yup– I just have one left!

After the biochemistry final tomorrow night, I am going to start packing. Three years of co-oping out of town have had a couple of effects: one, I’m really good at packing; and two, I have a bunch of stuff sitting at my parents’ house that I dropped off there at regular intervals over the past four or five years and never touched again. My parents live about 30 miles north of UC, so I’m going to spend some of my week up there sorting things into Goodwill piles and whatnot. It is the antithesis of fun, but it will feel really good to clean up all of the old clothes and books.

Commencement is on Saturday. UC has two ceremonies– half of the colleges graduate in the morning, and the other half in the afternoon. Fortune strikes again– the College of Engineering is in the afternoon, which means we don’t have to be on campus at 8am to line up!

And on Sunday (that’s right, the day after graduation) I’m driving a little moving truck up to Cleveland. It’s a pretty quick turnaround time, but usually when I’ve gone from school to co-op (or the other way), I’ve packed one day and moved the next day, so I’m just glad I have most of this week to prepare.

I’m so antsy!

Where did everybody go?

You can tell it’s the tenth week of the quarter, because nobody is posting on the blog… except me, because I’m a senior and have finished nearly everything I need to do in order to get that diploma.  Everyone else has finals coming up and projects due, and there’s always barely enough time to finish it all.

I have been staying busy as of late wrapping up my senior project.  Senior project is a “capstone” requirement for engineering majors, and each major does it a little differently.  Most of the projects are team-based, where a group of students are responsible for designing something that’s relevant to their major (a car, a big radio-controlled aircraft, a biomedical device, etc.).  As a materials engineer (in a field that is more research-based than most of the other engineering disciplines), I was responsible for an independent research project, working in a lab for one of my professors.  It was challenging in many ways– not only in the academic/scientific sense, but also in trying to find time to work on it!  Needless to say, since I finished it last week, I have been a much more relaxed person.

Relaxed, but also antsy.  After three quarters in a row of school, I am so ready to move on to the next phase!  Ten more days…!

Storytime! “How the Engineer Got Into Medical School.”

In a previous post I mentioned this as a story for a later date. Well, grab a juice box and join the circle on the carpet, kids… it’s time for the tale of an engineer who decided to not pursue a career in engineering.

First of all, let me state that I am not the only one. In fact, if you’re a regular reader, you might have noticed Kaylan’s mention of the dual-admissions program here at UC. I was a little different in that I didn’t seriously consider medical school until the end of my third year here. I was bound and determined to go to graduate school for materials engineering or materials science or polymer engineering. That was the plan…

Then I co-oped at Pfizer Global Research and Development, working in a product enhancement lab. It was cool, but the little glimpse that it gave me of working to improve the lives of real, live patients left me unsatisfied. Wondering if I might enjoy working more closely with those real, live people, I started thinking about becoming a doctor. After a lot of thought (and some volunteering at one of the many hospitals around here) I made up my mind: I was going to apply to medical school.

The only trouble was… I still liked the idea of research. In fact, masochist that I am, I liked the idea of being a graduate student. During my explorations of medical school websites, I came across these entities called MSTPs: Medical Scientist Training Programs. If admitted to one of these programs, a student attends both medical school and graduate school, and comes out in 7 or 8 years (hopefully younger than the photo at left) with an M.D. and a Ph.D. in a biomedically relevant field. This sounded like just my cup of tea, so I decided to apply to some of these dual-degree programs.

Okay, now fast forward a year. We’re skipping a year because that’s how long the application process took from start to finish. It wasn’t pleasant; it was super-competitive; and no, I had no idea what I was getting into. I’m glad it’s over.

As it turned out, I’m going to Case Western Reserve University (which was my first choice) and I begin med school in a little less than two months. I have not yet decided if I’m going to pursue my Ph.D. in biomedical engineering or in another discipline, but I’m interested in tissue engineering and biomaterials in general. In the meantime, I am really excited about needing to purchase a stethoscope.

The End.

This is a study break. Repeat: this is a study break.

I need to get away from biochemistry for a few minutes (midterm is tonight), so I thought I’d take a minute to post on here about living in Clifton.

Now, I’m from kind of around here (about 30 miles north of Cincinnati), but I had never spent any time in Clifton (which is the University neighborhood) until I came to UC.  After co-oping out of town and living in all sorts of different neighborhoods, I’ve really come to appreciate what we have here.

All around the University is densely packed with a few different mini-neighborhoods, residences, and stores.  Over on McMillan and Calhoun (which are parallel one-way streets on the south side of the University) there’s a huge student apartment complex (University Park Apts) as well as smaller apartment buildings, a few houses, and some apartments over storefronts.  I’ve never lived over there, but if I did I would get fat.  Why?  That’s where all the good eats are!  There’s your standard Panera, Chipotle, Starbucks, etc., but more importantly, there are unique and fantastic places to eat.  There’s Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, and Greek restaurants– King Wok has terrific egg drop soup, and if I go to Chicago Gyro I don’t have to eat again for about 36 hours.  Myra’s Dionysus (another Mediterranean place) is super-cheap and really tasty, too.  There’s also Mac’s (a pizza pub), Christy’s & Lenhardt’s (a biergarten, German restaurant, and rathskellar combined)… I could go on and on.  There are also non-food-related things over there, like non-UC-affiliated bookstores, art supplies, Urban Outfitters, American Apparel, etc.

Another sub-neighborhood is the Short Vine area, directly east of UC.  This area is a bit sketchier, to be honest, but it contains many things necessary for survival:  Kroger (chain grocery store), Blockbuster, LaRosa’s (local pizza/Italian chain), the post office, and a couple of popular bars (although don’t go to Martino’s during football season; it’s full of Steelers fans).  There’s lots of housing around here too, and it’s relatively inexpensive compared to other areas around campus.

Finally, my favorite neighborhood:  the Gaslight.  It’s about a mile north of the University, on the other end of Burnet Woods (a huge park full of trees… very nice to have in the middle of the city!).  The Gaslight is just far away enough from the University that it could stand on its own as a neighborhood.  It has a lot of historic old houses and a wide variety of apartment buildings.  The best part of the neighborhood is Ludlow Avenue, which is full of shops and restaurants.  There’s the Esquire, Cincinnati’s primary independent movie theater, as well as several other Cincinnati favorites:  Skyline (see photo), Servatti’s bakery, and Graeter’s ice cream.  There are plenty of ethnic food opportunities (Chinese, Thai, Mexican, Indian, Mediterranean) as well as the Proud Rooster, a traditional diner, and a couple of really nice places that I have tried, in vain, to get my parents to take me to.  Oh, and there’s Sitwell’s coffee shop, which is a very cool place, although it makes me feel very enginerd to go in there with all the artsy types and their crazy hair.  I lived in this area once (actually, right above Sitwell’s) and it’s absolutely fantastic.  There’s also a grocery store right smack in the middle of the neighborhood… a good trade-off for living a little further from campus.

I have left out a ton of fun and exciting things about all of these neighborhoods, but I really need to get back to biochemistry.  This is unfortunate, because I am now also very hungry.

By looking at the number of posts on the blog this week, it is clear what’s going on here in the College of Engineering: midterms!

I have a pretty easy quarter as far as midterms go (finally catching a break now that it’s the end of senior year)– all of the tests that I did have fell in different weeks, which is a treat. Biochemistry, the toughest one, is this upcoming Tuesday, and it’s going to be a bear. However, I only have myself to blame for that one, since it isn’t even a required class for engineers. (Full disclosure: I’m actually taking the class pass-fail, but this class is so flipping hard that I will need to put in several hours of studying in order to get that “pass.” It’s one of the most challenging classes I’ve ever taken.)

So yeah, anyway, everybody is pretty busy. My goal is to have my senior project completed by my birthday (which is in… less than two weeks), because it would be nice to have a relatively happy carefree self-centered day. Meanwhile… it’s about tour-time, gotta go!

Why it’s good to major in engineering.

A biologist, a engineer and mathematician vacation in Britain. They see a black sheep off in the distance.

The biologist says, “Ah! So the sheep in Britain are black!”

The engineer says, “No. At least one kind of sheep in Britain is black.”

The mathematician says, “No. There is at least one sheep in Britain that is black on one side.”

Okay, so I realize that this joke is not the funniest joke ever, but bear with me here. It’s serving a purpose. There is a happy medium between making decisions based on a generalization of an informed observation (the pure scientist) and coming to conclusions by applying nitpicky detailed theory (the mathematician). That happy medium is engineering, where the awareness of a big theoretical picture is used to guide real-word decisions. See why I had to use a joke to say that?

The reason I bring this up is because I had a test in a biology class the other day and just got my grade back. The class is dual-level in the biology department, and I’m the only engineer taking it (and why am I taking it? I’m going to med school, which is a story that I will save for another blog post). I ended up doing well on the test in comparison to my classmates, which surprised me because biology majors are terrific at memorizing facts, while engineers are… a little lacking in that area. Another handicap: I have never taken an upper-level bio class before.

So what does this have to do with why anyone should major in engineering? Well, the obvious first answer is that you get some of the coolest jobs out there (see Rachel E’s post). But what if, like me, you end up not pursuing a career in engineering? In my humble opinion, five years of engineering classes and co-op jobs will prepare an individual extremely well for a wide variety of careers, some of them not even science-based. The reason to major in engineering can be answer in two words (or three if you don’t count the hyphen): problem-solving skills. Whatever you (or I) (or Rachel E) end up doing, your education will be terrifically relevant. It does not, however, guarantee that you’ll be able to tell good jokes.

Hello! I’ll be leaving now.

Ah… senior year. We engineers are especially ready to graduate, since (because we’re in a five year program) many of our peers graduated last year. It doesn’t help matters that most other universities are having their commencement ceremonies now, at the beginning of May, while ours isn’t until June 14th.

However, I need all the time I can get. The end of my senior year is full of “to-do” items like finishing my senior capstone project, planning to move, handing Engineering Ambassadors off to a new group of officers, and participating in the half-million or so events that go on at this time of year– awards and recognition ceremonies, end-of-the-year dinners, and the like. Oh, and apparently I am still in these things called “classes,” which take up a bit of time as well.

I will also be doing my best to make time during the last six weeks to throw a few posts on this blog. As the title indicates, I feel like I am making a very brief appearance here– there’s just enough time to introduce myself, then make my exit! Fortunately, there’s a veritable army of Engineering Ambassadors who are capable of developing this blog into an accurate account of what it’s really like to be an engineering student here at the University of Cincinnati. I’m excited that I’ll be around at least to see it get off the ground!