Three years ago, I was a first-year student entering campus for the first time. As an engineering major, I knew my classes weren’t going to be easy. I bravely took off to my first class, prepared to witness what college education would be like. CHM141 (College Chemistry) was a course I felt prepared for, and that seemed to be my sentiment throughout the year.
Sophomore year saw a rise in difficulty, but it remained reasonable. More general courses, but also an introduction to many of my major-specific subjects.
Junior year wasn’t a step up in difficulty; upon careful consideration, I found junior year to be more equivalent to a flight of stairs freshly placed in front of you to climb. However, I didn’t find myself having the easiest time climbing that flight.
Only now that I’m a senior do I begin to understand why junior year was so difficult compared to the previous two years, and why that has been such a beneficial experience for me. My first year introduced me to the basics, and my sophomore year compounded on those while introducing unfamiliar concepts and content that I would grow to recognize throughout the remainder of my major.
Junior year felt very different from the first two years and was a leap in difficulty. It was the introduction of not new content, but a new frame of mind. No longer was I to learn about charges or valence electrons (although I still was learning new content through courses like Organic Chemistry), but I was really learning how to synthesize.
In my years on campus, I’ve had concepts taught and drilled into my head. I could do a mass balance on a system in my sleep now, just with how much practice I’ve had with them. Junior year and senior year, understand that you know these concepts, and they challenge you to bring them all together as one.
As a senior year engineering student, you have a group project where you create a giant design. My friends in other majors seem to have those as well, so the concept is most certainly not an engineering exclusive. My project, for example, is a paper engineering project. This project surrounds recreating a specific sheet of paper and its properties. It is through this project that you finally find an opportunity to display all you know and how all the pieces snap together. Congratulations on purchasing all of the equipment for your backyard, now it’s time to build the patio.
I now see why the frustrating years of classes repeating the same concepts were so worth it. I’ve worked hard to get to where I am, and now I can prove it. This practical demonstration of knowledge and familiarity allows me to finally show off, and I’m ecstatic about it.
The payoff at the end of senior year wouldn’t have nearly the impact without seeing the milestones and pit stops along the way, even if they were numerous and all an opportunity to relearn the same things over and over again.
I’m glad I’ve made all of those stops. I’m glad I’ve learned all of these lessons. I’m glad that the repetition is worth the synthesis.
Nicholas Blauvelt is a senior chemical engineering major and a paper engineering minor. He’s from southwest Ohio and is also the president of Miami Film Society.
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