MY UNDERGRAD YEARS - Summer '91 (originally posted on 11/09/23)

Since my co-op counterpart Stephen had finished his tour of duty at Cyanamid and was back at Georgia Tech completing his degree requirements, I stayed in New Orleans for my seventh (and final) work quarter. My commute had a new wrinkle - I carpooled with Betty (an LSU student from New Orleans East), a newly-hired co-op student in a different part of the plant. She was nice, and had great-smelling perfume.

During the three years that had elapsed since the start of my co-op stint, there had been enough org chart churn to give me a sense of "seniority" (a welcome consolation at the bottom of the corporate food chain). When my boss moved to a different assignment in the plant, his replacement was engrossed with finding his footing in his new role, which afforded me increased autonomy.

My final project was training the co-op student replacing me: Simon, a freshman from LSU. To educate him about the acrylonitrile production process, I designed and created a poster depicting the plant's material streams: each "pipe" was proportionally sized to represent its mass flow rate and had a cross-sectional pie chart depicting the breakdown of chemicals contained therein. I was really proud of this data visualization, but unfortunately I don't have any record of my creation - there wasn't an electronic version of it (prepping the pie charts involved a photocopier, colored pencils, scissors, and a glue stick), and cameras weren't allowed in the plant, so I wasn't even able to take a picture of it. Hopefully it was useful to Simon as he began (what Googling just now reveals to have been) a multi-decade career as a chemical engineer.


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Frank Serpas III | frank@serpas.net