Traditional

My second semester at Olin started two weeks ago. I have a pretty traditional schedule this semester, which is a little odd after the fall. I'm taking Real World Measurements, Modern Biology, Partial Differential Equations, and Physics of Waves. Despite how traditional most of my classes seem from the titles, they're still very Olin-ish, just in different ways than my classes last semester were. The classes have each met several times now, so I'm going to go through each one below the fold.

Real World Measurements (RWM)
All first year students take this class. In some ways, this is a continuation of ModCon, but I wouldn't call it ModCon 2. The goals of the course are rather different. We're still learning about circuits, but the class titles are very appropriate. ModCon's full title was Modeling and Control, and that's exactly what the course was about. Real World Measurements, or RWM (pronounced 'worm'), is about using what we learned about circuits in ModCon to measure real world observables. We're using lots of sensors. The first lab involved an accelerometer, last week we built EKGs, and this week the lab is about beam bending, and we're using a strain gauge. The first half of the class will be built around individual labs using various sensors. Them the second half of the class will be team projects focused around measuring or sensing something. Weather balloons are common RWM projects.

Modern Biology
Bio is a graduation requirement regardless of major, and there's no way to test out of it. (I know of a few people have gotten permission to replace it with a more advanced bio class, but most of them did bio research in high school.) My class is almost half first years, but I think the other section has more sophomores and juniors. The class covers the normal intro biology topics, but it's not as memorization heavy as most intro bio classes. We're using an online textbook from Nature which includes more recent research than most texts, and for each three to five short chapters, each student writes two questions and answers which go into a Google doc shared with the whole class. The questions are supposed to be at least at the comprehension level of Bloom's taxonomy, and the three quizzes will be built from those questions. We start each class by looking at each others' questions, and then we do a worksheet based on our reading, which we discuss as a class. The professor goes through a presentation, but we spend more time in class discussions than lecture.

There is no final exam -- our grades are based on daily work, quizzes, labs, and then projects. There are two types of projects: teachable units and podcasts. Each student does a teachable unit -- a twenty-five to thirty minute mini-lesson about something fairly specific, generally involving a short presentation and then some kind of activity. My teachable unit needs to be related to the genome, but within that I can choose any topic. We also each have to write and record two short podcasts on some biological topic, preferably related to recent research. Both the teachable units and podcasts are designed to give each student the opportunity to find something within biology which interests them, which is important because I think a lot of Olin students would say biology is their least favorite of physics, chem, and bio.

Physics of Waves
Everyone has to take a Physics Foundation course to graduate, and we're heavily encouraged to take it either freshman spring or sophomore fall. The normal offerings are Mechanics and Advanced Classical Mechanics (ACM) in the spring and Electricity & Magnetism (E&M, which is vector calc-based) in the fall, but this spring there's also Waves. The focus of Waves will eventually be sound waves in the context of music, but right now we're just building up everything we need. At this point, there's one word that sums up Waves pretty well -- and it's "springs," not "waves." So many springs. We've derived the second-order differential equation for the linear spring at least three different ways, we've talked and seen examples about how springs are everywhere, and today we added forced motion to our spring equation.

This class is actually going to have an in-class, timed final exam, which I think will be my only exam this semester and my first for an Olin class. However, all the homework is graded on effort, and we're encouraged to write down how certain we are on multiple choice questions. If we're between two options, we can write down 50% for each of those two. The professor also does a lot of approximation, so on non-multiple choice questions, many of the questions will just ask for order of magnitude (ten to what power).

The professor hands out feedback sheets at the end of each class, and we usually spend twenty to thirty minutes of the beginning of the next class answering people's questions from the end of the last class. It doesn't sound like a good way to run a cohesive class, but somehow it works. Class is lecture-based, but the professor regularly asks questions, gives a few minutes for us to work out the answer, then asks us to vote on answers and defend our responses, so it's pretty interactive.

Partial Differential Equations (PDE)
 I have a math class! I missed math when I didn't have a math class last semester; doing math on my own just wasn't the same. PDE is a requirement for mechanical engineering majors. This is probably the most traditional of my classes. We have a physical textbook (Strauss), class is mostly lecture, and we have weekly problem sets and quizzes. However, after we turn in the problem sets, we correct them based on solutions, and then we turn in the corrections, and quizzes are take-home. We'll also have a final project in this class, not an exam.

PDE is taught by Aaron, who is also my advisor. He gets really excited about math in class, which makes me really excited, and he writes and chooses some fun/hard problems for psets. He's also glad to give students additional things to think about. I spent part of the weekend trying to figure out solutions to the inviscid Burger's equation (the characteristics cross?), which was lots of fun. PDE is my favorite class, but it's math, so that's not surprising.