I first met Nick when he came to my office, asking for permission to take Linear Algebra, despite not having the prerequisites. Nick explained that he was trying to learn quantum mechanics, and he had run into a barrier with some terse linear algebra. I let him in. Later he explained that he had failed 11th grade trig in high school. I was skeptical of his abilities at that point.
In the actual Linear Algebra class Nick plowed through every topic, leaving no stone unturned. I knew at that point that he was something special.
The last time I saw Nick was when he stopped by with a question about the 2-dimensional heat equation, and its application to a conduction problem on a disk. He had to solve one problem, and use the result to solve another. I explained what they wanted and he was good. Nick then told me his transfer to U.B. was seamless. His junior-level courses all picked up where we left off at NCCC. That did not surprise me, either.
The last chapter that I painstakingly added at the end of our calculus sequence develops the language of Maxwell's Equations, which govern the whole electro-magnetic universe. I also added spherical coordinates to Calculus III, which are useful in quantum mechanics. In Differential Equations I added a plethora of applications of Newton's 2nd Law, including mechanical vibrations, and also circuits.
One large problem I had students work on is J. J. Thompson's original determination of the ratio of the charge to the mass of an electron. In 1899 Thompson shot an electron beam into an electric and magnetic field, and it travelled in a cycloid path. Determining the ratio of e/m required solving a system of differential equations. The students love this problem! I also added some numerical methods that appear here and there throughout physics, including power series methods.
I passed off my Differential Equations course to Tadeus Krupa back in 2013, when I got involved with teaching Engineering Science. Tad weaves everything together, as only he can do. In the end he will start with 20 students, finish with 20, and the students will have received an excellent education, and are no worse for wear - all the while learning about 50% more content than when he and I took the class many years ago.
Very few people have the capacity and temperament to do what Nick did. But, my point is that, for someone of his ability and interest, it is possible to do what he did at NCCC. Many more came before him, and did a similar thing according to their interest and ability. Nick was not a fluke.
About 20 years ago I was invited to the wedding of Brian Milleville, who is now a math professor at ECC. One of his aunts asked how I knew Brian. I told her I was his professor and advisor at NCCC. She did not believe me at first. She did not think it was even possible to take college math at NCCC. It was as if I stated that the Pope had become a Pentecostal. I might just as well have stated that Sanborn really was Silicon Valley.
When Brian got married he was in a Ph.D. program at Indiana University. Brian had transferred from NCCC to U.B., and then was accepted into 6 Ph.D. programs for theoretical math. He was ABD, but did not finish, instead taking a job at ECC and getting on with his life.
STEM has been invisible to the public at NCCC over the years. Doc Kwitowski tried to advertise our programs and success stories during the Miller era, and was not allowed. It is one thing, after all, to give the public a brochure. It is quite another to actually prove to the public that these programs work.
Dr. Cleveland would have gotten along with us, but she was not here long enough. And Dr. Klyczek, well, it was no secret that all of our money went into advertising the NFCI. Every time someone was hired at Delaware North for a low paying job, there was a press release.
I ran engineering forums for a number of years, inviting numerous former students back to speak. At one such forum, we had an engineer who designed the roof for the world cup soccer stadium in South Africa, an electrical engineer who was the plant manager at American Brass in Tonawanda, a mechanical engineer who built the wind tunnel at Calspan and a mechanical engineer who now works at SpaceX. Later on we had a roboticist who worked on a new autonomous vehicle manufacturing facility at BMW/Clemson, the senior marketing manager at Micky Thompson, a mechanical engineer who designs hunting bows, an environmental engineer who works for the DEC, a senior engineer who works for National Fuel gas, a pharmaco-kineticist who worked for Merck, a VP of Analytics at M&T Bank and an actuary who is the senior underwriter for Magellan Health Care.
None of this was newsworthy, of course. Public Relations would never advertise these events, despite all my the blurbs I put together each year for a press release. In the end I transitioned these events to just having former students come speak directly to our students. Every single former student I asked to come and speak did, with the exception of one industrial engineer who wanted to, but had a conflict.
I made the best of it. And my students prospered.
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