A Fork in the Road

During the late winter or early spring of my second year at the university, the Shell company came to the university on a recruiting trip. At that time my plan was still to take another complete year at Iowa to complete the requirements for my degree (picking up various introductory freshman and sophomore courses that I had missed), so I did not expect to be looking for work for a year or more.

Perhaps it was Dr. Arnold who suggested that I schedule an appointment and interview with the Shell representative. At any rate I did sign up for an interview and it went very well indeed. This was partly happenstance as the course in chemical engineering principles I was taking at the time happened to had fractionation as an upcoming subject. For some reason I had read ahead so I was, as it were, primed on a unit operation of major importance to any oil company.

The interview did drift to distillation and mostly I was prepared for the questions that were posed. There were two questions that I was relatively unprepared for — one was as to the technique for measuring equilibrium data and my spur of the moment reasoning was satisfactory; the other question was on tray efficiency and when I was asked what tray efficiency I would suggest, I demurred saying that a selection depended too much on the particular service (certainly true). When pressed for a number I said 50% which at that time was an often used value.

In retrospect I think this was a key point in the interview and I suspect at that point the interviewer (a Dr. Millar) had made up his mind to offer me a job. He sort of leaned back as if to say I’m satisfied as to this student. There were two men on the interview team and at this point the second man (a Dr. Vaughan) took over and from that point on the interview was mostly a sales pitch, describing the research establishment at Emeryville.

I received a job offer several days later via a telegram (which I still have somewhere) and (I think) after a discussion with Dr. Arnold decided to accept, noting that it might be over a year before I would appear in California. Actually since the exigency of the draft situation grew steadily more pressing, I decided to go to school the following summer so as to graduate a half year (or more) early. This decision involved getting the university to accept various junior college credits (such as European history which I took the second year I was there) in place of some freshman and sophomore engineering courses (like surveying). The university seemed to accept this quite readily — I suppose it had been urged to speed up their instructional schedule.

I don’t recall if it was prior to the Shell interview, I guess it must have been, that I had been accepted for summer employment with General Electric in Rochester, New York. My memory on this is rather uncertain, I think that was the case but I’m not absolutely sure. GE had quite regularly hired some of the undergraduate Iowa engineers for such employment. Or whether I just intended to apply. This never developed when I decided to go to summer school so I could finish my schooling sooner.

Later on I also explored the possibility of enlisting in the U.S. navy in a meteorological program they were offering. I would have gone in as the lowest officer rank (ensign). I would have gone through a training program. I had the paperwork done but I never submitted it. Had I gone ahead and been accepted for this I don’t know for sure what I would have done. I mentioned the possibility to Dr. Arnold and I can still see him in his office in the chemistry building, stout as he was and projecting sort of an aggressive stance and hear him saying “What would you want to do that for?”

It like the chance interview with Shell, was one of the key moments in my life, since I’m quite sure that Arnold’s comment steered me toward going with Shell. My life would certainly have been different had I gone in the navy. I would have probably ended up in the Pacific theater of operations and been involved in some of the naval encounters there. Maybe I would not have survived. Had I come through the war, would I have used the G.I. bill to get an advanced degree in engineering, or would I have retreated to farming in Iowa? Who knows?