Outside Frick Laboratory, a member of the men's track team prepares for a unique race. Dressed as Zorro and wielding a plastic sword, he races a fuse burning its way down a strip of aluminum foil covered in gun powder.
This is not the filming of a low-budget remake of the "Mask of Zorro"; it's CHM 215.
The gunpowder race is part of the course taught by chemistry professors Robert Cava and Robert Pascal. It is one of the 200 to 300 demonstrations conducted each year by senior technical staff member and lecture demonstrator Kathryn Wagner.
Now in her 13th year of demonstrating, she works with professors in all the general chemistry courses.
Wagner is also founder and director of the Chemistry Outreach Program, which trains undergraduates to assist her in performing experiments for visiting students and alumni.
Demonstrations have been a Princeton tradition ever since former chemistry professor Hubert Alyea '24 filled his lectures from 1930 to 1972 with spectacles like the "Old Nassau Clock Reaction," in which three clear liquids are combined to create an alternatively orange and black solution.
He challenged his students to determine the concentration of solutions needed to keep the reaction in time with "Three Cheers for Old Nassau."
It is fitting that Wagner — perhaps the first to bring such enthusiasm to classroom demonstrations since Alyea — reenacts this Princeton tradition with Outreach participants every year on Alumni Day.
"She has a good sense of what type of experiments that convey a really broad range of concepts, but also ones that will be engaging," said Carol Rosenfeld '05, who has been involved with the outreach program since her freshman year.
"They all have a purpose and demonstrate very specific concepts," she added.
Behind the Scenes
The instant it takes a hydrogen balloon to explode does not convey the amount of time Wagner devotes to designing experiments that illustrate the concepts covered in class.
Far from following a simple recipe of standard ingredients, she has invented her own demonstrations, turning the Frick 120 projector into a spectrophotometer.
It takes Wagner anywhere between five minutes and two weeks to prepare for a lecture. She must make up solutions, fix lab equipment and sometimes even construct new equipment.
Then comes the trial run. Before any student watches a thermal lamp burn like a sparkler, Wagner has practiced the experiment several times.
"You can know that a demo will work in some ideal world. But it's another thing to get exactly the right number of components and the right scale to make it look right," Pascal said.
Space is also a concern. Before awing students with a fireball, Wagner must first predict its size and the amplitude of its bang to find the best spot from which to demonstrate.
Last summer, Wagner advised the University to install heat-resistant flooring instead of carpet near the stage in the Frick 120 auditorium because so many holes had been burned through the carpet.
Wagner also convinced the classroom committee to raise the height of the ceiling in Frick 124, another general chemistry classroom, to accommodate one particularly explosive demonstration known as the thermite reaction.
"She makes it look really easy because she has been doing it for such along time. She has really good intuition about what works," said Brian Muegge '05, a chemistry major who has been involved with the Outreach program since he was a sophomore.
Reaching out
With the Outreach program, Wagner has turned the formerly part-time job into a full-time position.
The program's 20 active members assist Wagner at schools, museums and presentations conducted at the University.
Students can qualify by taking one chemistry laboratory course and undergoing safety training. After about 25 hours working with the program, students are awarded a certificate of recognition.
College students aren't the only audience to her demonstrations. Next week is particularly busy for Wagner — a group of 1,000 seventh graders are coming.
Since demonstrating for her son's kindergarten class, she has enjoyed working with children.
"All five-year-olds are scientists because they're always experimenting with their world," she said.
It was through her children that Wagner resumed work in her field.
When her son's kindergarten teacher asked her to come to explain what a chemist does to the class, Wagner did her first demonstration.
"I realized I couldn't tell them what a chemist did. I would have to show them what a chemist did."
With both her son and daughter in school, she felt the urge to work again and got her teaching certificate in K-12 education. Then she saw an ad for the position at Princeton in a newspaper.
"When I came here for the interview it was just like coming home," she said. "It's been fun ever since. I have fun for a living, which is not something everyone can say."
Background
Students may also be unaware of Wagner's extensive chemical background. She earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin and has worked for DuPont in Wilmington, Del. After four years at DuPont, she relocated to Princeton when her husband got a job in the area, staying home to raise her two children.
She decided to stay home so that she wouldn't "miss out on all the fun parts," she said with the same gleam in her eye as when she is describing a chemical reaction.
Wagner was a teaching assistant for Bassam Shakhashiri, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin who is renowned for his demonstrations. Wagner has been asked to contribute to the fifth volume of Shakhashiti's "Chemical Demonstrations: A Handbook for Teachers of Chemistry."
Since Wagner joined the department, the "quality and number of demonstrations have improved dramatically," Pascal said.
Part of her success lies in her ability to connect with students.
As a freshman in 215, Rosenfeld appreciated Wagner's presence as a female in a lecture that is taught and TAed mostly by males.
"At a time when women in science is something that you're trying to encourage, I think she's a good role model for [the students]," chemistry professor Robert L'Esperance said.
For Wagner, the connection stems from an understanding of the student perspective.
"I think a lot of freshman chemistry students are like me. They don't think in equations," Wagner said. "It's a physical science, after all."
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