Episode 1: The Ladle and the Line

Episode summary

The show starts where every Porter student starts. Two weeks before this episode was recorded, nearly 2,000 new students stood in the Founders Hall high bay in borrowed leather aprons and poured pewter into sand molds during Welcome Week — the First Forge pours on Thursday and Friday, August 28 and 29, 2025. Each of them left with a flat disc stamped with their class year.

Lyle Haugen ’81 has supervised that pour for more than 30 entering classes and has taught MACH 1100, Machining Fundamentals on the high bay’s 1912 wood-block floor since August 1988. He walks the hosts through the safety briefing (the one day a year, he says, anyone is excited to hear one), why the molds are sand and not steel, and what goes wrong when a student hesitates with a full ladle.

Chancellor Elaine Vandehey poured her own disc in August 1992, as a first-year mechanical engineering student, and Haugen handed her the ladle. She talks about where that disc lives now, why she spent two hours on a move-in unloading crew this year (2,540 students moved in, and one lofted bed now has a name), and why she thinks the applied-learning requirement is the one thing Porter will not streamline.

The hosts also ask, and fail to get an answer to, the question of what exactly the disc is made of. The magazine settled that in spring 2024; Haugen declined to spoil it.

Chapters

Selected transcript

An excerpt, lightly edited for reading. The full speaker-labeled transcript is in your podcast app’s transcript view, or email podcast@uwporterfalls.edu for an accessible document.

Corinne Lacasse: Chancellor, you poured a disc in 1992. Do you still have it?

Elaine Vandehey: It’s in my desk drawer, under the stapler, which is the only safe place in that office. It has a bubble in it the size of a lentil. I was nervous and I tipped too slowly.

Lyle Haugen: That’s the most common mistake there is. People think slow is careful. Slow is cold. The metal starts to freeze at the edge of the mold before the middle fills, and you get exactly what she got.

Abe Tollefsrud: Lyle, did you know at the time that the student with the lentil bubble was going to be chancellor?

Lyle Haugen: I knew she listened during the briefing. That’s rarer than you’d think. Most of them are looking at the furnace.

Corinne Lacasse: What are you actually telling two thousand eighteen-year-olds in that briefing?

Lyle Haugen: Three things. Closed-toe shoes, and I mean leather, not mesh. Don’t step back when you’re pouring, because the person behind you is closer than you think. And if something spills, you stand still and let it cool on the floor. The floor has survived since 1912. It will survive you.

Elaine Vandehey: And that’s the whole university in about ninety seconds, honestly. Here is a real thing with real consequences. Here are the three rules. Now you do it, with someone who knows what they’re doing standing a foot away.

Corinne Lacasse: Is that what you mean by day one?

Elaine Vandehey: Yes. Most places make you wait until junior year to touch anything that matters. We hand you a ladle the first week. The tagline is a little corny, and I approved it, and I still think it’s right.

Links mentioned

• Campus traditions — First Forge, Millrace Week, the Ring of Iron and Foundry Friday
• “Thirty-Eight Years in the High Bay” — Porter Falls Magazine’s profile of Lyle Haugen
• MACH 1100, Machining Fundamentals
• About 2,540 students move in (news, August 27, 2025)
• New student orientation
• Chancellor Elaine Vandehey
• Founders Hall