Kush M.
Chemical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering First-Year Student

7am
Got up, attempted shaving.

8am
I’m meeting some friends for breakfast at the Carnegie Café. When I get there, they’re all studying for our bioquiz. Every Monday we have a quiz in Modern Biology class, which is a co-requisite for Introduction to Biomedical Engineering, which I’m currently taking. I’m a first-year, so I haven’t officially declared my major yet, but I already know that I am going to do Chemical Engineering with a double major in Biomedical Engineering. I definitely want to continue my education past a bachelor’s degree, either in med school, business school, or engineering grad school – I’m not sure which.

8:40am
I got caught up studying for bio and forgot to eat breakfast, so I grab a milk chug and a Tartan cookie and walk to Doherty Hall for class.

9:30am
The quiz was pretty easy. It’s basically designed to help us keep up with the readings. Then the professor starts class. Carnegie Mellon has a great online tool called Blackboard which all of my professors use for everything from keeping track of grades to submitting homework. The biology professor puts all of his lecture notes on Blackboard, so I just print them out before class so I don’t have to write very much.

10:30am
It’s cold out, so I take the indoor shortcut from Doherty Hall to Wean Hall for my Intro to Programming class. Right now Professor Slater is using a program called Alice to teach us Java. It is a Pixar movie that helps us visualize what can be done with our Java programming. It really tests my imagination.

11:30am
I walk over to the College of Fine Arts building. I admire all of the sculptures in the Grand Hall and then quickly run up two flights of stairs so that I’m not late for my English class. Every student has to take Interpretation and Argument, which involves reading, discussing the meaning, and analyzing the author’s context and what we should gain from the work. I actually like the class a lot – there aren’t a lot of students in the class and the professor is really thought-provoking.

12:20 pm
On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I have a one-hour break between English and Math. On these days I walk over to Ginger’s Deli to eat lunch. It’s a popular place to eat, so I usually see friends that I met in classes or during First-Year Orientation – plus, I meet new people every day. The fun of being a first-year!

1:30pm
My friends and I take up the front row of Porter Hall 100, where our Calculus in 3D class meets. This class is different from any other math class I’ve taken Thinking and drawing in 3D is really interesting.

2:20pm
I have another break before my Introduction to Biomedical Engineering course. All of the first-year biomedical engineers have this break, so we usually hang out in the Engineering and Science Library in Wean Hall to talk about random stuff – usually technology.

3:30pm
I love this class because the teacher treats us like we are real engineers. He will present a real-world problem and then show us ways of solving the problem. He is always showing us the practical side of the things we learn. He also wrote the book that we use for the course. Apparently there aren’t very many books on Biomedical Engineering yet.

4:20pm
My classes are finally over for the day. I’ll probably go to the gym and then grab some dinner before heading home. Tonight I have to prepare for a big presentation for the research project that I work on. It is kind of unusual for a first-year to be involved in research, but there is so much going on at CIT, that I decided to take a chance. I contacted Professor Dahl to see if I could help with her research, and she gave me a chance. Now I get to use cutting edge equipment to study cells and vectors, which will be very relevant to my ChemE and BME double major. I probably wouldn’t have had this opportunity if I hadn’t come to CIT.