Suddenly, three years later, my friend Alicia and I are teaching the lessons ourselves (the picture above is of us at a dance in Columbus last spring). Tonight we'll be finishing a four-week introductory unit on East Coast. Despite having started with only four returning members, the club is already more than fifty strong. Several members have travelled with us to various dances around the state – this Friday we'll be dancing at a couple's swing-themed wedding reception in Hilliard, Ohio. Next week we'll be moving on to the dance that it is really all about: Lindy Hop.

With my group I spent 5-6 hours on Friday night building our fortress of cardboard out of cardboard boxes donated from gracious court street businesses. The cardboard fortress was an engineering masterpiece if I may brag on my teammates. Each piece had slits cut into it so that each box would fit perfectly to the next box and so on around the house and upwards. I was practically a giant jigsaw puzzle. We designed it to be able to take back apart and then be rebuilt. We then tore it down the cardboard house to be rebuilt the next day.

After rebuilding it on Saturday we slept in it for the night. But rain plagued the evening and the vast majority of cardboard houses built had fallen by morning. But ROC fortress held to its foundation for the entire evening and in the morning was left standing among the rubble of the other cardboard houses that had fallen.

The class has been split into groups of about 5 or 6, and each member of the group brings a different background to the team. I am the engineering background for the group, and we also have a physics PhD student, several business and marketing members, and a video production major.

The course is taught by a young entrepreneur. I'm not completely sure, but he is probably about 30, and he already has two businesses that he has started. He took this same course through OSU, and he was able to start his businesses from this class. We are learning all about the different approaches and proven methods of taking a technology from an ideation phase to market.

I'm really excited to see where this course could take me.

Although the stress to perform this weekend was intense, everyone trying out kept a positive, playful attitude towards the process. There was a race to the Marathon gas station for lunch, an improvised hockey game while washing the planes, and much banter from recent alumni chosen to judge our performance.

After the day was finished and points were tallied, a solid, competitive team was formed. Due to the fact that it is my first year on flight team, I was only eligible to make ground events, and happily, I scored well enough to compete in the computer accuracy test. We only have one more weekend left until we leave for Western Michigan, so now it's crunch time!

To learn more about how flight team competitions work, check out http://www.nifa.us/.

After that we all met up at Bob Evans to get some breakfast and our advisor was nice enough to pick up the check. While there we thought it would be a great idea to meet up at Courtside Pizza to watch Ohio State put a beating on Illinois. It turned out to be a very fun time and I feel like it was a great bonding experience.

For our first lab experience this quarter, my unit ops team worked on running the distillation column, a three story tall piece of equipment designed to separated methanol from water. A feed stream is divided into two streams, one rich in methanol and the other in water, as the mixture passes through 12 trays. Although it was a little confusing at first, remembering which valves to turn and when to turn on the flow, I learned a lot about a common engineering process.

Yesterday, Dr. Robe, the founder of the Robe Leadership Institute, came and spoke to us about the use of effective questions and how they can lead to making effective decisions. My advice to incoming students is to get involved from day one so that you will have the opportunity to take advantage of these kinds of opportunities.

It has been rough week but at same time it was a big accomplishment for me other than my academics. This weekend, I settled down a little bit to catch up with my academics and exercises. I went to Ping (the Ohio University Rec Center) to play soccer, where there were about 15 people showed up to play pickup games. For people who are interested in playing soccer after classes, there are pickup games every Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturdays. Usually we start at 6pm during weekdays and 5pm on Saturdays.