I still have a lot to do in the meantime, though. Next weekend is the spring Tau Beta Pi induction, and since I am an officer, I get to help induct the new initiates. Tau Beta Pi is the engineering honor society, and we are getting ready to start some pretty fun stuff for next year, like volunteer work, tutoring sessions, and even some fun social activities.

I’ve also been doing a lot to get ready to go to graduate school. I already started research on my first grad school project, and I am registered to present my project at an American Institute of Chemical Engineers conference in the fall. All in all, it has been a busy but fun quarter, and I have a lot to look forward to as I get ready for graduation and moving on to grad school.

On Thursday morning we first visited Kenworth in Chillicothe. It is a large semi-truck assembly plant that assembles semi-truck to order. Now its capability is around 150 trucks per day, with more than a thousand employees working in the plant. There are more than 10 assembly groups with more than 50 assembly lines in the plant. It makes highly personalized semi-trucks according to customers’ requirements.

That afternoon, we went to GE Lighting in Circleville. That is one of the biggest GE lighting plant in the US. They make more than 30,000 of every kind of light bulbs per day. The production lines are highly automated, so the employees in the plant are mostly engineers and technicians. They work to monitor the machines and the products’ qualities, as well as some R&D stuff.

At night, we went to Cincinnati and had a wonderful dinner at Buca di Beppo.

On Friday, we had breakfast with Catherine Anbil, a very nice woman who set up her own business on system and software. She introduced her experience on her business and with her partner, and her early life.

After the enjoyable breakfast, we continued our trip to the last destination: GE Aviation. This was a long tour. We visited 4 different locations. Generally, we visited the labs that test the materials in different plane engines and we also got a chance to see how an engine was assembled, and how an engine works on a plane.

This trip was really an enjoyable trip that expands my horizon and lets me get to know more about the manufacturing in the US.

I really hope the weather stays nice, because I have a lot planned for my weekends this quarter. At the end of this month, there is a triathlon in Athens in which my dad and brother are both going to participate. Then the weekend after that is Moms' weekend. My mom and I have a lot of fun stuff planned, like shopping at Easton and getting ready for graduation. My grandma is planning to visit one of these weekends too.

I’m also going to do some fun stuff with my friends. I am really hoping to get my senior ChemE class together for a cookout at Stroud’s Run as a kind of send-off before we graduate. A lot of students like to go there when the weather is nice. You can bring a grill and have a picnic, you can go swimming, and you can play volleyball with the nets they have set up along the beach.

Springtime in Athens is great, and I am really looking forward to enjoying it.

Sakura is the national flower of Japan. Generally it is white or light pink. It usually blooms around the end of March to the beginning of April, when the Japanese will host the Sakura Festival and gather together to enjoy the sight of Sakura flowers. Sakura Flowers are beautiful, but won’t last long. They only last for one or two weeks, then they fade away soon. Because last winter was exceptionally warm, sakuras bloom about a week or two earlier than usual.

On the day I went to enjoy the flowers with my girlfriend, the weather was pretty good. We went to the sakura forest beside the Convocation Center after dinner, and the sky was still light. Sakura flowers were so well-blooming that when you were under the trees, you almost could not see the sky, but only white, little, pretty sakura flowers above you. The wind came, and flower petals dropped occasionally, as if it were snowing. Children were running around or playing games with parents; young couples were sitting under sakura trees, collecting flowers; some elderly people were lying under the trees reading books, or telling stores to the little children. A couple of people were even playing harps.

Walking along the sakura field along the river, enjoying the sukura flowers and the people around, feeling the early breath of spring, I could only feel joyful and harmonious. What a nice spring day.

One of the reports that I will be writing is actually pretty interesting. In my unit operations class, we perform 4 different experiments, and use the data that we collect to develop relationships and equations that define the systems that we worked with. Then, for the final report for the class, each person in a unit ops group focuses on a different lab that was done during the quarter and uses the equations and relationships that were developed to design an industrial size system. This sounds pretty intimidating at first, and I’ll admit it can get frustrating at times, but overall it’s actually pretty fun because at the end you have this system that you designed yourself. It really gives a sense of accomplishment to look at what you were able to design by bringing together what you have learned in various engineering classes. The professors are also very helpful if you run into problems while you are trying to design your system. They want you to succeed, so they do everything they can to help you understand your system and find the best way to design it (short of writing the report for you anyway).

Dr. Hood's research areas include molecular biotechnology, immunology, genomics, DNA sequencing, where he developed a systems approach to studying these topics. He got his PHD from Caltech, and MD from John-Hopkins. He is one of only 10 people in the world to be elected to National Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine. In addition to being an amazing scientist, he is also talented in business. He has helped to establish 14 famous biotechnology companies including Institute of System Biology, Amgen, Applied Biosystems.

Dr. Hood was very nice and pleasant to talk with. During the whole night he shared a lot of his early experience as a student in Caltech, his interests and opinion towards the research topics, and his attitude towards the career. I still remember that when he talked about his idea of commercializing the DNA sequencing was rejected by the president of Caltech, he did not give up. He said, if you think an idea is right, you should stick to it, and do your best to carry it out. Then he tried to persuade the instrument manufacturing companies to actually make DNA sequencing instruments. He got approval from the president of a company and got funding for the project. However, the guy who actually was in charge of the project disliked Dr. Hood and he directly talked to the top manager without letting Dr. Hood in, and showed a negative attitude and refused to cooperate, which finally led to the failure of the project. Dr. Hood said: “From the case, I learned a lession that if you really want to bring an idea into business, you have to persuade the top guy, but on the other hand, don’t just leave out the mid-level manager.”

Dr. Hood also shared his funny story of meeting and travelling with Bill Gates; his opinion to the president election and political issues; and his early experience of learning foreign languages. He also discussed with us about our future career and the impression of our majors, the Russ College, and Ohio University. This was a very enjoyable, impressive, and wonderful night.

We all have individual design projects, where we are assigned one of the experiments and have to scale-up and solve a real life problem. My design project is that I have to treat a plant waste product that is released into a lake. The waste product is crystal violet dye in water, so it is safe for the environment, but it is a very bright purple color. It is decolorized when sodium hydroxide, NaOH, is added to it, but that makes it basic, so I have to worry about the pH being unsafe for the lake. In addition I have to choose the best reactor for the reaction to occur in and be as cost efficient as possible.

I am excited to solve the problem and feel like a “real” engineer.

My mom came to see me on Friday, and we went to the hockey game. We always have so much fun at the games, and the team played really well. The teams were pretty evenly matched, so it was a very exciting game. Then Saturday morning my mom and I got up early to go visit my great-grandma. It was her 100th birthday, and she was really excited to see us. She had some new quilts to show us (she is very good at quilting and her quilts are always very intricate and pretty), and we got all caught up. That night, we tried to make ice cream using two coffee cans with the cream and sugar in a small can in the middle, and ice and salt in the big can surrounding the little can. We had fun rolling it back and forth on the floor, and my grandma even helped roll it some! When we opened it up we found that it hadn’t frozen even a little bit…so we just put it in the freezer. We tasted it later on and it was very good.

Now that I’m back in Athens I have some catching up to do on homework and everything, but it was worth it to go see my grandma and have a good time with my family for the weekend.

At the end of the quarter, each student does a design project over one of the systems that they worked with that quarter. For my design project I had to design a system that would move 3000 gallons of a chemical from one tank to another tank that was much higher up and almost half a mile away from the first tank. It was a challenge, but it was a lot of fun working out what I had to do to make the safest, most efficient system that I could. I also thought that it was really cool because I felt like a real engineer. I even had to figure out how much the system would cost and take that into account when determining what I thought was the best system.

I can still hardly believe that only three years ago I never could have done this project, but now I can take what I have learned the first three years of my college education and actually apply it to design a chemical system like one that would actually be used in industry.