Cheese making? No whey!

The Discovery Lab in Acopian Engineering Center can be somewhat difficult to find, tucked away in the building’s bottom floor, but an appetite for cheese was a motivator for anyone in search of the Society of Women Engineers’ cheese-making workshop.

With the help of chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Anukriti Shrestha, cheese-enthusiasts were able to transform milk into savory, salty goodness.

“We’re doing a separation, and things don’t like to react by themselves — you need to give it some heat,” said Shrestha, explaining the connection between food and chemistry.

Some ingredients used were citric acid, which curdles fat to separate from liquid whey, and rennet — an animal-derived enzyme — to give the home (classroom?)-made mozzarella “its signature stretch and chewiness,” she said.

A “specialty” of now-retired chemical engineering professor Polly Piergiovanni, the cheese-making workshop has been a tradition of the Society of Women Engineers to provide a hands-on experience. 

“We’ve done it for the past few years now, and it’s been really successful and fun,” said society co-president Maddie Horvath ‘26.

Many of the event attendees had little to no experience with making cheese from scratch.

Integrative engineering major Bella Berlinger ‘29 said that she made cheese “a long time ago, when I was a kid, but not recently.”

“None of this applies to my classes,” said society co-president and mechanical engineering major Greta Magnuson ‘27. “But it’s a cool opportunity to learn something new.”

Soldering workshop brings small but lead-endary crowd

Monday afternoon brought a tiny but motivated handful of students to the fifth floor of Acopian, each ready to learn the ways of the wire at the soldering workshop co-hosted by the Dyer Center and the college’s Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers chapter.

In soldering, a small, pointed iron is used to melt a strip of filler metal, creating secure connections between separate pieces.

Our presenters, engineering majors David Green ‘26 and Sam Satalof ‘26, noted two major safety tips. 

One, the soldering irons were hot, so don’t touch them. Two, the filler metal we were melting down was super malleable and perfect for beginners, thanks to its high lead content — so try not to inhale the fumes.

“You got this!” read a note on the whiteboard. 

At the end of the event, attendees were left with a nifty inductive radio frequency amplifier, a palm-sized gadget that boosts the noise made by all electronics to audible levels. 

“Our goal was to make it accessible to anyone,” said Green, the lead technician for the college’s Makerspace. “Since everybody walked away with a working kit, I feel like that is a win.”

For a more immersive experience, our staff transcribed several sample noises as accurately as possible.

iPhone 14+: ZZzzzzzzzstststszzz

Classroom projector: EEEEEzzEkkEZZ

When the smoke clears, only ice cream remains

Flash freeze warning! 

Students entering Acopian 239 this past Tuesday were treated to dessert and a show, when the American Institute of Chemical Engineers hosted a liquid nitrogen-powered ice cream party. 

“We thought it would be a fun way to combine chemical engineering and food and get everyone together and have a good time,” said chapter co-president Sarah Sergi ‘26.

Sharing the same role, Madison Horvath ‘26 described the whole shebang as a “trial and error process.”

Bringing nitrogen into the mix isn’t just some smoke and mirror gimmick, but serves to maximize generated ice-cream per minute (GICPM). 

“It’s very cold, so it brings it to a temperature where it’ll freeze at a much quicker rate than normal ice cream,” said Sergi.

“But it’s essentially the same, like the exact same ingredients,” finished Bella Harrill ‘26, the final cog in the co-president machine. “You would normally just take significantly longer to freeze it and you would churn it with the mixer.”

This is not the first time this group took a scoop at nitrogen-based speedrunning, with the trio having done a similar event their freshman year, entirely by hand — this yielded unsatisfactory, “soupy” results.

“Now we have a mixer that does it for us,” said Harrill.

When this refined batch was finished, the reviews rolled in, and they were muddled.

“It was a little bit soupy,” said chemical engineer Max Richardson ‘26. “But this chocolate batch, I think they dialed it in and used more nitrogen. So I think this is pretty similar to regular ice cream.”

“It’s just kind of cool because it’s a novelty thing,” said economics major Lizzy Hurshman ‘26. “But I think day to day, probably just normal ice cream is a little bit easier to have.”

Henry Demarches Billman ‘29, a student in the chemical engineering department, had a slightly different opinion.

“It’s pretty bad,” he said, before opting to end on a more positive note. “But, I like how it didn’t cost me a meal swipe.”

Despite these critiques, the sheer turnout speaks for itself, with upwards of 30 sugar (and pizza) craving guinea pigs forming a melting pot of diverse disciplines. 

“It seems like it’s reaching people outside of Chem-e, maybe even outside of engineering, which is really exciting,” Harrill said.