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Chemical engineering graduate Hensley Sejour ’01 talked about his experiences as a Lafayette student athlete and current graduate student at Georgia Tech yesterday in Alumni Hall of Engineering.
The talk was sponsored by Minority Scientists and Engineers and the student chapter of American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
Graduating with honors in chemical engineering, Sejour received Lafayette’s Charles Duncan Fraser Prize, Dr. E.L. McMillen-K.K. Malhotra ’49 Prize, and Luther F. Witmer Prize. He was a Marquis Scholar, EXCEL Scholar, and member of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society and student chapter of AIChE, which he served as president, vice president, and newsletter editor. He also competed in track and field, was a residence adviser, and performed community service through the Landis Community Outreach Center.
Balancing these many responsibilities required sacrifice, the ability to say “no” to additional commitments, focus, and support from family, friends, and professors, said Sejour.
“There are a lot of professors here who care about what you do and want you to succeed,” he noted. “You should take advantage of that.”
He cited his EXCEL and honors thesis research as valuable experiences that prepared him for graduate school, urging students to seek these opportunities.
“They were a great help,” he said. “One example was talking to my adviser at Georgia Tech about my thesis there, which I had already gone through at Lafayette. And through EXCEL, you learn how to do things on your own and about attacking a problem in research.”
Sejour said he started with a list of 20 potential graduate schools, applying to eight. He was accepted into five schools and chose Georgia Tech for its research in polymers and wide variety of other options.
“There’s a strong Lafayette presence at Georgia Tech,” said Sejour, citing mechanical engineering graduate Andrew Maurer ’02 as an example. The graduate student committee seeks to attract more Lafayette students, he noted.
Sponsored by British Petroleum, Sejour’s graduate research project involves developing technology to separate propylene and propane. The goal is to devise a method requiring less capital, energy, and space than the current technology, which employs 30-story towers.
Jeffrey Sejour ’06 is following in his older brother’s footsteps as a track and field athlete at Lafayette.