Sarah Nuss-Warren '02
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- Sarah Nuss-WarrenSarah: My name is Sarah Nuss-Warren and I currently live in Manhattan, Kansas, and I am a member of the Grinnell College class of 2002. I’m going to talk about one of my best academic experiences at Grinnell. And there are actually two classes that were really similar, and the first really great experience kind of caused me to seek out the second one.
- Sarah Nuss-WarrenSarah: So, the first experience I had was, as a freshman, I really wasn’t sure what I was interested in. I thought that I probably liked economics, or maybe sociology, or something social science-y. But, I’d had friends who’d been taking Modern Physics that semester, older friends, and it looked really kind of cool.
- Sarah Nuss-WarrenSarah: So, I signed up to take the Workshop Physics class and I just loved Workshop Physics. It was amazing, because instead of sitting there and listening to someone give a lecture and taking notes, you actually sat down and there was sort of a guidebook that had questions in it and you had equipment on the table every day in class. And so, you would just do the experiment and answer the questions and figure out what was going on, and I thought that was just great. And so I loved that class. It was just, the highlight of my day whenever I’d have it, and I think there may have even been days when I wasn’t feeling so great, but I went to class anyway because I didn’t want to miss out.
- Sarah Nuss-WarrenSarah: And then, the next year, when I was getting ready to take Linear Algebra, I noticed that there were two different sections. One of them was a section where you just did the problems and there were computer labs that went with it, but it was just a normal math course. And this other one was a computer-based course where supposedly you were working through this sort of guidebook again.
- Sarah Nuss-WarrenSarah: And I just thought that was a really cool idea so I took that, and then I just.. That was an amazing class as well, because instead of listening to someone, I got to sit there and think about the problems on my own, and since it was a computer-based math class, instead of spending all the time doing multiplication and division, the computer did all of the grunt work and you got to figure out how to solve the problems. So, those were my best academic experiences.
- Sophie Haas & Sarah Nuss-WarrenSophie: What did you end up majoring in?Sarah: I ended up being a Physics major, and I’m sure it was because that class was so good.Sophie: And what do you do now?Sarah: Well, I’ve done a lot of different things. I started out... I started out- I went to graduate school in Physics, but it wasn’t quite what I expected it to be, the research part, so I left after I got the Master’s degree.
- Sarah Nuss-WarrenSarah: And I spent three years working for an engineer, where I did an emissions project. So, we put emissions monitoring equipment on natural gas production engines. So, they have to pump the natural gas out of the ground; it doesn’t just come out, and of course, it burns natural gas to power the engine. And the problem with that is that you get pollutants. Mostly natural gas is a really clean-burning fuel, but, if you don’t have enough oxygen, you get carbon monoxide, which is toxic and if you burn it too hot you get a lot of oxides of nitrogen. And so, we put a catalytic converter on them that was supposed to convert those things and we read the concentrations of the pollutants coming out the end of the pipe.
- Sarah Nuss-Warren & Sophie HaasSarah: But, the cool thing about that project was that I did it all remotely. So, we set up all this stuff in New Mexico and then in Kansas, where I live, we would read the information.Sophie: Oh, wow.Sarah: So that was really cool, but I stopped working there. Travel was really hard. It was... I don’t know. It seemed like it might be hard to have a job doing something similar in the future.Sophie: Mhm.Sarah: So I decided I should teach high school, so now I’ve been teaching high school for three years.Sophie: Wow, that’s amazing. That’s really cool.Sarah: Yeah. Well, it’s been an interesting trip so far and I’m getting ready to move again, so I don’t know quite what I’ll do, then.Sophie: Wow, that’s neat.
- Sophie Haas & Sarah Nuss-WarrenSophie: Do you have anything else you want to talk about?Sarah: I don’t have any other brilliant ideas.Sophie: No, that's totally fine. Should I stop it, then?Sarah: Sure.Sophie: Okay.
Alumni oral history interview with Sarah Nuss-Warren '02. Recorded June 2, 2012.