A Glimpse of Culture From the Eyes of an Engineer :: Personal Narrative Cultural Essays

The 8:50 a.m. bell rings. Thirty faces look up at the board. "The Refrigeration cycle begins with refrigerant R-134a proceeding to ..." Most pencils are hard at work, taking diligent notes. Some students stare into the board, attempting to imprint the entire schematic of the Refrigeration cycle into their memories. Others take a shot of Mountain Dew to clear the mental passages, or wake up from the previous evening. Concentration levels run high, as we all endeavor to excel at what we have been doing for the last several years -- pursuing an engineering degree. Each student in that Thermodynamics classroom had by this point in his or her undergraduate engineering career settled comfortably into the American engineering lifestyle. We had all gone through Statics as freshman, struggled with Dynamics as sophomores, and went on to tackle the curriculum that lay ahead. Gradually many of us became involved in campus organizations or committees. We bought organizer calendars, and watched the days fill up with meetings and activities that quenched our thirst for involvement and drove us to achieve in and out of the classroom. We dove into the crazy, driven and exciting pace of life at a very reputable Big Ten University, ready to reap all of the benefits that an undergraduate degree has to offer. As one of the thirty students in that very classroom, I had come to know this lifestyle well. To me it was the best and most intense of all worlds that I had seen up to that point in life, and it was the most satisfying. Yet being comfortable in the realm of undergraduate engineering arose in me a curiosity about other worlds. The curiosity developed into an urge to deviate from the well-founded path, and risk stepping into a complete unknown. The wheels began to turn, the plans formed, and several semesters later I was sitting in a somewhat different classroom. The students numbered around 60. They sat at long desks, ten seats in a row, elbow to elbow. Their style of dress was similar to what I knew, though there was not a baseball cap to be found on top of anyone's brow. They sat attentively, pens in hand, paper ready for taking serious notes. The professor stood before the room, waiting as stragglers walked in. No bell rang to signify the start of class. When enough stragglers had made it in, the professor walked over to the door and shut it.