If you need a lab science requirement, and you don’t want to take chemistry or physics, check out Fundamentals of Horticulture (HORT 101). Besides being worlds easier than anything having to do with pipettes or vectors, you get to play in the dirt, cut up plants, draw flowers, and go on fun field trips, and those are just the lab sessions! The lectures are easy to follow and the professors are nice and well informed.
The famous Muppet character, Kermit the Frog, was named after a professor of philosophy at
Purdue University. Theodore Kermit Scott grew up
in Leland, Mississippi, with Muppet creator Jim Henson, who borrowed Scott’s middle name for his most famous creation.
Twenty-two astronauts hail Purdue as their alma mater, including Neil Armstrong and Eugene Cernan, respectively the first and last men to set foot on the moon, and Jerry Ross, the man who has been on more space walks than any other astronaut. Purdue alumni have flown more than one-third of all U.S. manned flights into space, which has led to Purdue’s epithet of “the Cradle of Astronauts.”
Purdue has graduated more women engineers than any other university. For that matter, Purdue has probably graduated more engineers, period, than any other university, since one in 50 engineers in the U.S. is Purdue-trained.
Purdue civil engineering faculty member Charles Ellis conceived and drew up specifications for the Golden Gate Bridge, which was built in San Francisco, California, in 1937 as one of the “Seven Wonders of the Modern World.”
In 1962, Purdue became the first university in the nation to establish a department of computer science. Perhaps alongside the epithet “the Cradle of Astronauts,” Purdue should also be hailed as “the Cradle of Hackers” or “the Cradle of the Most Socially Reclusive People on the Planet” or “the Cradle of Increasingly Poor Eyesight.”
Amelia Earhart served as a women’s career consultant to Purdue from 1935 to 1937, and the Lockheed Electra aircraft used on her ill-fated world flight was made possible with gift funds from the Purdue Research Foundation. Incidentally, that flight is not listed as one of Purdue’s greatest successes.