How Yale taught me not to become a chemical engineer
When I first came to Yale, my goal was to train to become a chemical engineer. I’d wanted to do that ever since a DuPont entertainer came and gave a demonstration to a school assembly of some chemical wizardry including driving a nail though a two-by-four with the glass flask and then dropping a grain of sand through the neck of the same flask and having it burst into smithereens. He explained the trick by the contrasting manufactured tensions between the inside and outside surfaces of the flask. Wow.
So I took Calculus 10 and Chemical (Qualitative Analysis) 12. I brought with me a treasured ivory slide rule that had come from my father by way of my older brother. It sported its own case that hung from my belt loop. I fancied myself as a fine figure of an earnest engineer swinging my way up Prospect Street three times a week to arrive at the Sterling Chemistry Lab on Science Hill.
I was doing all right in Chemistry but still got a disappointing 77 for the first term. At the end of the second term came the infamous “Mystery Solution.” The culmination of all of our work of the year, the Final Exam, was to detect in our individually brewed mystery solutions the seven or eight chemical ions that were there and to deduce the four or five ions that we had studied that were NOT in the solution. And so we toiled through the entire afternoon, mixing various reagents in varying order and testing the resulting precipitates. When finished, we handed in our work sheets and went down the hill, exhausted.
Grading was strict and mathematical: the lab was to be two-thirds of our semester grade, and the lab grade depended entirely on the Mystery Solution grade, which was determined by counting the number of ions correctly found and adding to that the number of ions that were correctly deduced as not present. Penalties would be calculated for “finding” ions that were not present and for missing any that were.
Two days later, grades were posted on the classroom bulletin board. I got a “50” on the lab and a “67” (i.e., failing), for a final, semester grade. It took me a while to recover from shock, since I had never before failed any class, ever, in college or high school. After a few days of brooding, I went back up the Hill to see the grad student who had prepared my Mystery Solution, expressed some consternation since I was not that bad in Chemistry, and asked him if there could possibly have been some mix up in my solution or maybe I got the wrong one. He said, “Well, sure, a mixup could have happened, but we can never tell now, can we?”
I asked about a do-over. He said that would be impossible. After a bit more brooding, I asked him if he would prepare the same solution that I was supposed to have received so that I could analyze it, and see if I could identify what may have gone wrong the first time. He said that I could do that but that it would not change anything. I replied that I understood, but would just like to do it for my own satisfaction. He prepared the solution, I took a couple of hours with it, processing it in the same way I recalled having done the original, and turned in my worksheet. He graded it on the spot and said that I would have gotten an 83 in the lab if it had counted. That would have given me an 85 or so in the class.
With a failed grade in Chemistry and a low grade in Calculus — that is another story — my zeal for engineering studies at Yale faded to nothing. I ultimately majored in Culture and Behavior — and had no further use for my ivory slide rule.