This quarter I decided to take ice skating with my roommate. The class meets twice a week at the ice rink. Mostly we free skate and practice basic skills, but sometimes we play games like sharks and minnows or capture the flag. The course is a lot of fun and a nice change of pace from my engineering classes. Also, I can now skate forwards and backwards without falling.

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.