After a Million Miles or So

I'm going to write more detailed posts reflecting on this semester, but here are some more general thoughts on how I ended up here and about going back home.

Why I keep going abroad:

Yes, I keep leaving the United States. I've spent 8.5 out of the last 18.5 months abroad. I knew I wanted to study away for a semester, but I hadn't planned to spend so much time overseas. The Critical Language Scholarship Program was something I found out about during fall of first year and latched onto; it wasn't how I had imagined spending my first summer. Last year, I applied for some mechanical engineering internships and was considering talking to Olin professors about doing research at Olin over the summer when I found out about SERIUS, and less than a week after hearing about the program, I was for sure going to Singapore to do research.

Budapest Semesters in Mathematics (BSM) was the one that was actually planned. Like I said, when I started at Olin I knew I wanted to go abroad, and I was considering BSM, but I was also thinking about programs where I could study in French or Spanish or German. By mid-fall of sophomore year, though, I was pretty set on BSM (more on that below).

Some of my family and friends love to travel, and while I enjoy traveling, it's not something I love. What I've found that I love is living in a place, the process of somewhere new becoming familiar and home. I love the way that dépaysement, the disorientation and breaking of habits by being in a new place or situation, gives way to surprising comfort. I love being a regular at my favorite restaurants, cafes, and bakeries, having church family in four congregations in three countries, and learning cities well enough to give directions when just a few months before, I got a little lost nearly every time I left my apartment.

I love being nearly 9,000 kilometers from my house and yet still feeling like I'm home.

Why I came to BSM:

This is in many ways more complicated than any other reflection I've written here because the why is so different. This wasn't as simple as 'I have to take these classes' or 'It meets a requirement and seems interesting.' I needed to take six more credits of math, but I could have taken a couple of math classes at Olin or Wellesley to do that. So why BSM?

If I Were At Expo

Rebecca Christianson, the Olin prof who organizes Expo at the end of every semester, sent out the email for Expo sign-ups today. Expo is the "end-of-semester celebration of student work," and all on-campus Oliners are required to present something each semester. I'm going to be in Budapest, not at Olin, so I'm not participating, but it made me think about what I would do for Expo were I somehow to be at Olin on December 19th.

A lot of Olin's classes lead to Expo-presentable work because they're project based, and many classes that aren't project based for most of the semester have final projects that are Expo-able. It's a little weird that I've only presented project work at one Expo. In fall 2012 I presented my last ModSim project, in spring and fall 2013 I used my graph theory research for Expo, and last spring I talked about my Passionate Pursuit. For the past three semesters, I've talked about either math or ballet.

So it shouldn't be surprising that if I had to come up with something for Expo this semester, it would probably concern math or ballet.

It's a little tricky, though, because my classes this semester have been very different from Olin classes. There are no projects. Even in Spectral Theory, my most Olin-ish class, nothing I'm doing is original. I'm very proud of the work I've done here, and I've worked harder than I generally work in a semester at Olin, but it's all proving known statements or solving problems with known answers because that's how one learns mathematics. There are lots of things I've proven or seen proven that I think are really cool, and I've considered trying to use a few of them for Midnight Mathematicians talks in the future, but giving that kind of presentation isn't really in the spirit of Expo.

That brings me to ballet. I've seen a lot of ballet here, more in a single semester than I usually see in a year. In Bratislava and Prague I saw two very unusual productions of Romeo and Juliet, and I could easily compare them to each other and to more standard choreographies. I also saw unusual versions of Carmen and Coppelia, so instead of focusing on R&J I could talk about new choreographies of traditional ballets, or I could add in La Sylphide and Merry Widow and explore the structure of story ballets from different time periods.

I think it's a little weird, though not necessarily surprising, that one of the ways I chose to spend my free time would yield at least three potential Expo projects, whereas the hundreds of hours of mathematics I've done wouldn't translate into anything appropriate for Expo. Expo works as a requirement at Olin because of the nature of Olin. BSM is very different, and trying to do Expo this semester with an Olin mindset would be difficult because of that difference.

These Are A Few of My Favorite Things

I planned on listing a few of my favorite things in Budapest. The list I ended up writing is a little longer than "a few."

Midterm Season and Spectral Theory

I'm done with midterms! Galois Theory and Extremal Combinatorics were some of the last classes to have exams; those midterms were on Tuesday. The Complex Analysis test was last Wednesday, and the Topology exam was the Wednesday before that. I've gotten my tests back in all my classes except Extremal Combinatorics, and overall everything went pretty well! While studying, though, I realized that it had been a while since I'd taken normal tests.

In my first two years at Olin, I took sixteen classes and only six exams. If I stretch my definition of exam, that maybe goes up to ten, but one was really a long, cumulative problem set in Transport Phenomena, and the other three were Biology quizzes, which each took a full class period to complete but all together accounted for only 20% of my course grade. Of the six "real" exams, two were self-graded based on effort (Physics of Waves and Bayesian Stats), and three were take home, open book, and open note tests in Dynamics. The last was an in class essay exam for Soviet History.

My exams for Topology, Complex, Galois, and Extremal were all in-class tests, so we had about 105 minutes to complete them. The first three were closed book; for Extremal we were allowed to use our class notes. All four of those classes will have final exams in December. Spectral Theory is exam-less, since it's based around us presenting our work to each other, and Hungarian will just have a final exam.

Prague Photos

I went to Prague this past weekend!

I wasn't there for particularly long; I arrived by bus after dark on Friday evening and then left at about sunrise on Sunday morning, so I really just had Saturday to spend in the city. But I walked around a lot, so here are some pictures!

Okay, this is actually Hungary, near the border with Slovakia. It was really pretty on Friday!

Municipal House

Powder Tower

Snapshots

A couple of weekends ago, Hannah, Philippe, and I went to the Kürtőskalács Festival. Kürtőskalács are chimney cakes, dough baked in a helix around a spit. The festival was held in City Park, so Hannah and I agreed to meet by the 1956 revolution monument at one side of the park. 

Evidently I'm really bad at picking meeting points because it happened to be the day of the Budapest Marathon, and the finish line was right in front of the monument. Oops.

The Chimney Cake Festival mostly consists of a lot of booths selling different varieties of chimney cakes. There's not much to do other than wait in line, get food, and eat, so the lines were very long. The chimney cakes were delicious and definitely worth it, though.

Hannah, Philippe, and I with our mini chimney cakes.

This was the regular (vanilla/sugar) one; I also got one with cinnamon. Note that this is about half the length of a normal chimney cake, and the diameter is smaller than normal, too.

Bratislava!

I spent this weekend in Bratislava, Slovakia! The center of Bratislava isn't very big, so it's a good city for a short weekend trip. On Friday evening after I arrived by train, I walked around the city a bit and went to St. Martin's Cathedral. On Saturday I did a walking tour of the city, went up to Bratislava Castle, and saw a ballet!

Exploring
Bratislava's Old Town and historical center is pretty small; most of it was destroyed under the communist government in the 60s and 70s. One of the things that was built where the rest of Old Town used to be was a highway with this bridge:

They call it the UFO bridge. Because, well... what else would you call it?

I walked around on my own on Friday, and the main place I went was St. Martin's Cathedral (Dom).

The back of St. Martin's Cathedral

The altar!

Ballet and Street Food

Today was my first experience with ballet in central Europe! I went to a matinee at the Opera House to see the Hungarian National Ballet perform Troy Game and La Sylphide. There was also a big festival today on the same street as the Opera House!

The Opera House
The Operaház is gorgeous, and I was sitting in a box. In the theater at home, all the boxes are on the sides, so I think they don't tend to be terribly good seats, but the boxes here go all the way around the circle, and I was near the center.

The Opera House! The screen outside was for a festival going on today.

Inside the theater

Some of the boxes on the Dress Circle level

Non-Mathy Fun!

I've spent a lot of time in class over the first two weeks of school, but there's still been a lot going on outside of class! Here are some non-academic highlights from the past couple of weeks.

Welcome Party
At the end of the first day of classes, there was a BSM welcome party! Lots of the professors and almost all of the students came. This was when I met a lot of the people who had arrived at the end of the last week. I also talked to a couple of professors. The most important thing I had to do was meet with Miklos Abert, the Inquiry Based Spectral Theory professor, and the other students interested in taking the course in order to schedule it. (Scheduling that class is a problem we're still working on...) I also ate a lot of what I think are sajtos pogácsa, a cheesy bread puff.

Supper at Hannah's
Vivienne, a student from Texas whom I met at the welcome party, and I had supper at Hannah's one night last week. Our plans for who would bring what food didn't end up working super well for various reasons, so we had to throw together supper from what Grace had. The final result was pasta with Hungarian white peppers (which are fantastic), peas, spinach, and "pesto" (olive oil and basil), along with some really good garlic bread. It turned out pretty well! Cooking and talking with Vivienne and Hannah for a few hours was a lot of fun!

Evensong
Last weekend the Anglican-Lutheran Society had a conference at Lake Balaton, so the night before the conference started, a Budapest Lutheran church and the Anglican church I've been attending hosted an Evensong service. I'd never been to Evensong before, and I really enjoyed the service. It was almost entirely sung, mostly by the Gabrieli Choir, which specializes in Anglican sacred music. There were a couple of hymns as well, and while I didn't know either one, they were both very singable. One was very fitting for an evening prayer service, and the other was about unity, which made sense in the context of the conference.

Graphs, Open Sets, and Vector Spaces: The First Week of Class

This was my first week of classes at Budapest Semesters in Math!

The first three weeks are a shopping period, which means I could attend as many classes as I wanted in order to decide which four or five to take. Registration will happen during the third week. While math classes started this week, most of the humanities courses don't start until next week, so the past few days were all math for me. I attended seven classes this week: Spectral Theory, Extremal Combinatorics, Complex Analysis, Topology, Galois Theory, Functional Analysis, and Real Functions and Measures. Here are descriptions and my thoughts on each!

Last Week of Summer

Tomorrow is the first day of classes, and I'm very excited! This week, students who weren't here for the language course arrived, the language course ended, and in general things were pretty relaxed. Here are some highlights:

1. Potluck brunch with nine other BSMers at Hannah's apartment today. Hannah is a BSM student who has an apartment to herself about ten minutes from where I live, and she was at a summer program this year with one of my roommates, Sandrine. Everyone brought something, so we ended up with eggs, muffins, multiple kinds of pancakes, fruit salad, nutella, and some other snacks. I think we were all there for about three hours, and it was a lot of fun!

2. Dinner cruise on the Danube on Tuesday. BSM shares a building with McDaniel College, and their convocation was Tuesday and included this dinner cruise. BSMers were invited, and while the convocation was a little awkward, getting to go on the boat was really cool. The food was good, I got to meet a few of the people who hadn't come for the language school, and the views of both sides of the city were excellent. Here are some photos:

3. Supper on Friday night. The game theory professor had planned an event that would involve going to John von Neumann's birthplace and then going to a restaurant with traditional Hungarian food. We never did find the plaque about von Neumann, but we did talk about his work in several different fields. I really enjoyed the restaurant; the food was excellent, and I sat and talked with Hannah and Sandrine as well as Lilian, who had arrived that day. There were several others who had just arrived, so meeting them was exciting!

4. The schedule for the first few weeks came out on Friday! We had all had to fill out a pre-registration survey about which classes we were intending to take, and based on that BSM put together a schedule. We have a shopping period, so for the first three weeks we can take as many classes as we'd like, and then we'll register for classes during the third week. During this next week, I'll definitely be going to Inquiry Based Spectral Theory, Extremal Combinatorics, Galois Theory, Functional Analysis, and Complex Functions. I might shop one or two other classes, but I'm not sure. Humanities courses don't start this week, but once they do, I'm planning on taking Intermediate Hungarian Language and Hungarian Art & Culture.

Magyaróra! (Hungarian Language School)

Today was the last day of intensive Hungarian language school,. It was advertised as being 80 hours, but that seems to include a lot of the break time. I think we had more like 60 class hours.

There were about 40 BSM students who arrived early to take the language class, and they split us into three groups. I was in a class of 11 students, and over the course of three weeks we had three different teachers. The first week we had one teacher, who was fantastic. I thought class was a little slow, but it felt organized, and we did a variety of activities, learned a lot of songs, and spent time practicing pronunciation. The last two weeks of the class, we kept going back and forth somewhat unpredictably between two teachers who didn't seem to communicate with each other as much as would have been optimal, and the course didn't feel well-organized anymore.

The style of the course was pretty similar to that of the Azerbaijani courses I took last summer. The language school has its own textbook, and in Azerbaijan one of my teachers had written the text we used. The textbook was almost entirely in Hungarian; new vocab was mostly illustrated with pictures instead of translations. A lot of the exercises were drill-like, and later on in the course we spent a lot of time doing role-plays based off of learned dialogues. The biggest difference between this class and my Azerbaijani classes was that this wasn't an immersion experience at all. The teachers almost always spoke English to us.

For the last day, we didn't really have class. In the morning, we took a test and filled out feedback forms, and then each group wrote and practiced a play. We performed the plays for each other after lunch. All three groups chose to write plays based on the continuing story in our textbook, which was about an American student named Kevin, his Hungarian friend Peter, and Peter's sister Csilla. The story was told mostly through dialogues at the end of each unit, and we were always excited to read the next dialogue. The story was much better than similar ones in other textbooks I've used.

A Week and a Half in Budapest!

Sziasztok!

I've been in Budapest for about a week and a half now. Math classes don't start until September 8th, but I'm here early to take an intensive language course. About half of this semester's Budapest Semesters in Math students are already here, including both of my roommates. I live in District VII, so I'm within walking distance of most things in Pest in addition to being near a couple of metro stations and several bus and trolley lines.

St. Stephen's Day
August 20th was St. Stephen's Day, which is a national holiday. I went out for the afternoon with a group of BSMers. We ate street food (lángos and ice cream) near Deák Tér, then walked over to Parliament. We didn't go inside, but we watched the changing of the guard at the flag and the a short ceremony on the building steps. After going over to the Buda side, we walked a bit until we ended up at Matthias Church and the Fisherman's Bastion, where we watched part of another ceremony and listened to music. Then we went to Clark Adam Tér and listened to more music!

Parliament!

The Parliament decorated for St. Stephen's Day

Going back into Parliament after a ceremony.

Matthias Church by the castle in Buda.

Celebration outside Matthias Church

Concert in Clark Adam Ter

Food Adventures
I feel like I've been going to the store every other day! There are lots of small convenience-ish stores that sell fresh produce as well as markets and chain grocery stores, so I go to different places for different foods. The apartment came with an odd assortment of kitchen utensils, and using the oven takes a bit of guesswork, so cooking can be a bit of an experiment. So far I've made pesto chicken, lots of pasta, scrambled eggs, cinnamon toast, and pancakes.

The produce here is fantastic, and that also means there's good fruit juice and jam. So far I've had apricot, peach, and cherry-plum-apple juices and strawberry and apricot jams.

There are a lot of restaurants, especially bakeries and gyro stands, near the language school. My favorite lunch place so far is a sausage restaurant. The school is also next door to Fragola, one of many wonderful gelato places in Budapest.

Exploring Budapest
I've walked around Pest a lot, especially in Districts VII and V. I walk to language school most days, though there's a tram that would cut about ten minutes off the trip. I like seeing the city, and the weather has been good for walking.

The Anglican church I've attended for the past two Sundays is in District VII, so I can easily walk from my apartment.

I live near Városliget, or City Park. For the first few days that I was here, my grandsibb Marguerite was also here for Sziget Festival, so we met up a couple of times, and once we walked around the park. It's huge; we spent more than an hour making a circuit that only went around about half of the park. The zoo is also part of Városliget, and inside the zoo is Hungary's one roller coaster, Hullámvasút.

Hungary's one roller coaster is a 92-year-old woodie. It's lots of fun. I heard a little girl get off behind me and tell her parents, "Nagyon jol! Nagyon jol!" (Very good! Very good!), and I agree.

Last Sunday, I went on a free walking tour of Budapest that focused on Hungary under communism and what has and hasn't changed in the past 25 years. It was really interesting to think about the similarities and differences to Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan.

Picture of everyone on the Communism Tour in front of the one remaining Soviet monument in the city center.
Photo by Free Walking Tours Budapest.

Language Class
I've only had six days of language class (about thirty hours in the classroom), but it feels like a lot more. Hungarian isn't related to any other language I've learned, but structurally it has a lot in common with Azerbaijani, which has been helpful in picking up grammar. I go back and forth between feeling like I can still barely communicate anything and being surprised at how many words I recognize when I walk around. At the zoo, I spent a lot of time looking at signs, and even though I couldn't read most of them, I could pick out a lot of words and reason out a few others, which was exciting!

Summer Research

This summer I've been in Singapore, doing chemical engineering research, and I've been enjoying it a lot!

 I'm working on clathrate hydrate research at the National University of Singapore. Clathrate or gas hydrates are crystalline solids formed from water and a gas. The water forms cages that enclose the gas molecules. Different guest gas molecules result in different hydrate structure, the most common of which are structure I (sI), structure II (sII), and structure H (sH) hydrates. For example, carbon dioxide generally forms structure I hydrates, which have six small dodecahedral cages and two large tetradodecahedral cages. Hydrate formation tends to occur at low temperatures and high pressures, the kinds of conditions that you would find in permafrost or subsea regions.

Why do we care about hydrates? The biggest reason is related to the oil and gas industry. The majority of the earth's methane is in the form of methane hydrates, and we'd like to extract it. We also need to be able to prevent the formation of natural gas hydrates in pipes.

The other main application, the one to which my work is more related, is gas separation and storage, particularly of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide emissions make up around 60% of greenhouse gas emissions, but if we could capture and sequester carbon dioxide, then it wouldn't be released into the atmosphere. One solution is hydrate based gas separation. Industrial applications generally involve a mixture of gases including carbon dioxide. If we're clever about the temperatures and pressures we use, we can form hydrates in a way that is very selective for carbon dioxide. For example, fuel gas is 60 percent carbon dioxide and 40 percent hydrogen, but we can form hydrates from fuel gas in which 80 or 90 percent of the guest gas molecules are carbon dioxide. If we do a couple of cycles of forming and dissociating the hydrates, we end up with a gas that is almost entirely carbon dioxide. The hydrogen can then be combusted.

The carbon dioxide can also be stored in hydrate form in the earth; if it's injected into parts of the earth's crust with the right conditions, then the carbon dioxide will form hydrates and not be released to the atmosphere. In fact, researchers have been doing experiments on methane/carbon dioxide hydrate exchange, working on how we could replace the methane in methane hydrates with carbon dioxide so that we can use the methane gas and store the carbon dioxide in hydrate form.

There are basically three general areas that you can study when thinking about gas hydrates: thermodynamics, kinetics, and morphology. They're all pretty closely linked, and I've had the opportunity to do at least a little bit of work on each while I've been in the lab.

Halfway Through

Four semesters down, four semesters to go.

I'm halfway through my education at Olin. When I started this blog, I intended to document my experience in the experiment that is Olin. So far, I've mostly done this course by course, and this seemed like a good point to stop and look over the past two years as a whole.

Reflections on Semester 4: User Oriented Collaborative Design

In which I really don't know what to think of UOCD. (It is a design class, after all.)

UOCD Final Photos

I took a lot of pictures after my team's final UOCD final presentation. I thought about putting these in my UOCD reflection post (coming soon!), but there are a few too many, so here they all are! My team named itself the Mathemachickens, and our user group was recreational mathematicians. We designed Abacus, a space in which recreational mathematicians and other curious people could discover and design mathematical art and objects together.

The view walking into my studio. My team's space is in the back left corner of the picture.

We strung up some of our old material that we still needed to reference. This photo shows our personas, which we made in Phase I and modified at the beginning of Phase II.

Here's the rest of that "clothesline." The bigger poster is information from our codesigns, and the yellow poster is some mini product posters for our more developed ideas.

Reflections on Semester 4: The Entrepreneurial Initiative (FBE)

One of Olin's requirements is an entrepreneurship foundation course. Over the past decade, that course has taken a lot of forms. Last semester, the class was The Entrepreneurial Initiative, which everyone called FBE (left over from an old course title).

I went into FBE dreading it. I was taking it because it was a requirement and only because it was a requirement. That dread faded, but FBE was both frustrating and disappointing.

Thoughts on Sophomore Year Activities

I did a lot of non-academic things this year, so here's a bit about the most exciting ones!
 
Passionate Pursuit
In the spring, I did a Passionate Pursuit in Soviet ballet. I watched a lot of videos of old ballets: The Red Poppy, The Stone Flower, two versions of Romeo and Juliet, two versions of Spartacus, and short made-for-TV versions of Swan Lake, Flames of Paris, and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. I also watched Children of Theatre Street, which is about the Vaganova school, and the ballet parts of the Sochi Olympics opening and closing ceremonies. I reread relevant parts of Apollo's Angels, a ballet history book, and read Swans of the Kremlin, which is about Soviet ballet from the beginning of the Soviet Union to about 1968. I also watched a lot of short videos and read a variety of things that my mom or I found online. All of this was a lot of fun.

I'd said when I applied for credit that I would write a paper and present at Expo. I decided to write and present about which ballet of the of the seven mentioned above is the most Soviet ballet - which one best represents Soviet ballet as a whole. I cheated a little and gave two answers, Romeo and Juliet and Spartacus. Presenting a non-technical poster at Expo was really interesting. I'd only ever presented modeling or math projects before, and I talked to an entirely different group of people than normal. Some of the people who came by my poster were a lot of parents, some middle school girls who dance, the computer networks professor, the head of the machine shop, and people from Olin's department of family and alumni relations. Like normal, I still came up with a short description of what I'd done, but I had more in-depth conversations than I have when I present my graph theory research.

Church, Disciple, and OCF
Both at Christ Church and in Olin Christian Fellowship (OCF) this year, I've been involved in a lot of discussions about the future. I was on the Strategic Team at Christ Church, talking about selling the church building vs. not and what our options would be in either case. We lead an all church service/meeting in February, and people prefer the visions of a future in which we do sell the building, so right now we're exploring options from there. As for OCF, the leadership team this year was essentially all seniors. The current leadership and the future leadership had meetings once a week starting just before spring break. The future leadership is two rising sophomores, Michel and Sonia, and me. Michel and Sonia are co-presidents for next year. The big decision that came out of all of those meetings was the choice to no longer be associated with Cru and, through that, be more welcoming to all Christians on campus.

Reflections on Semester 4: French Literature

This semester, I took a French class at Wellesley for AHS! The class was called Fictions of Childhood in Nineteenth-Century France. It ended up being a really small class (5 students!), and we covered a really wide range of material, from medical reports to fairy tales. We also wrote, illustrated, and bound our own children's books.

Reflections on Semester 4: Thermodynamics

Despite the fact that I never said much about it here, Thermo was my favorite class this semester. Since I'm a mechanical engineer because I love thermal-fluids, this wasn't really a surprise. The reason I didn't mention it much was that it was pretty low-key, particularly compared to UOCD.

Below the fold are my thoughts on Thermo!

Sometimes It's Obvious We're Engineers

Words Oliners are more likely than other college students to use in everyday conversation

Abstraction: Life is complicated and hard to model accurately. Let's get rid of some of the finicky details; we can add them back in later if they're important.

Assumptions: What are we making simpler than reality? What aren't we making simpler? Let's make sure everyone knows, because without assumptions, there's no context. State your assumptions early and often.

Complexity: Complex things are interesting. They also tend to be messy.

Claim: If we formally state what we believe to be true, then everyone is on the same page.

Design: Before we build something or make something happen, we plan, and we think a lot about those plans.

Feedback: Something happens, and it causes a change in how it happens in the future. There are two slightly different ways we use this term, and I'm not sure which is more common. We describe the world in terms of positive and negative feedback loops We also provide and want written and verbal feedback on everything.

Thoughts on Sophomore Year Math Activities

It's earlier than I normally start writing reflection posts, but this one covers the entire school year, not just this semester, and everything is in project mode now. This is all about math related things -- NINJAing, online assisting, graph theory, and Putnam!

Build a World of Foam

The third phase of UOCD is called "Develop." At this point, we have one or two ideas, and we're supposed to narrow down to one and take it all the way to a final model and a product poster. That final model is generally some form of a looks-like prototype. In class last Thursday, we talked about how to make that model.

The answer is lots and lots of foam and foam-core.

Two speakers came to class and talked to us in the auditorium. One was a designer at Continuum, and he showed us lots of pictures of various parts of Continuum's design process and of some of the models and prototypes they've built. Something that was really interesting for my team was seeing that they had built full-size models of hotel lobbies or restaurants out of foam-core and foam for a couple of projects. If we choose to go with the Puzzle Cafe, something like that is an option. (We've talked about maybe turning our workspace into part of the Puzzle Cafe.)

The part of class that I found more exciting, though, was when Beth Sullivan talked to us and did demonstrations. She's a well-known model maker in this part of the country, so she was mostly showing us how to work with foam and foam-core. This doesn't seem like it should be that complicated; we did a lot of work with foam-core for sketch models in Design Nature, and we've been making simple representations out of blue foam since Candidates' Weekend. The difference is knowing how to work with a material and knowing how to work well with it. We want the representations we do in this phase to be clean and accurate, so Beth talked to us about the grain of foam core, using a rabbit tool (which helps with nice corners in 3D objects), and how to cut basically anything out of blue foam using a hot wire cutter.

A lot of us left saying things like, "Can we be her when we grow up?" Beth was a lot of fun, and I felt like watching someone work with the hot wire cutter to make models of everything from a crinkle cut french fry to a hair dryer was really useful. When I heard people last year talking about this class period, I think what I heard was the 'in the auditorium the entire time' bit and not the 'but it was super awesome' bit, so I was really surprised to enjoy this session as much as I did.

Future Adventures!

I know what I'm doing this summer and next fall!

Over the summer, I'll be one of about two dozen students doing engineering research at the National University of Singapore as part of the SERIUS program. My project is in the chemical engineering department with Prof. Praveen Linga's group; I'll be working on dissociation of methane from methane gas hydrates using carbon dioxide.

I'm also studying away next fall! I'll be in Budapest at Budapest Semesters in Mathematics. I've known about BSM for a long time, and I'll looking forward to spending one semester of lots of math! I won't know until a couple of weeks into the fall semester what classes I'll take, but I'm planning on taking a mix of combinatorics, algebra, and analysis as well as a Hungarian language course.

Imagine a World

Yesterday was the Phase 2 Design Review for UOCD, so I spent most of Wednesday (and a total of more than 22 hours over the past 6 days) in my team's corner of the design studio. There are many pictures and some description of what we've been doing below the fold!

Our space on Wednesday. We're going to reorganize it a little for the final phase, so there will be pictures of that next week!

The Art of a Book

My French class this semester is about literature and 19th century childhood in France. As a project, each of us is writing, illustrating, and binding a children's book!

This past Tuesday, we spent some time in Wellesley's Book Arts Lab (yes, this exists!) to learn about how we're going to bind our books and to study different types of printing.

 We're going to accordion fold our books, so we talked about how to format the documents we type, and then we started talking about binding. Our books will be accordion folded. Using an accordion fold allows the book to be read like a normal book, but it also allows us to pull out the pages so that they can all be seen at once. We'll all have multiple sheets that will need to be attached, and that's done with a type of Japanese tissue paper that has the right kinds of strength and durability. We practiced folding and attaching sheets using colorful pieces of paper! We also got to use some really interesting tools, like bone folders.

A yellow sheet and a pink sheet attached with a strip of tissue paper. That little bag is basically a paperweight, but evidently it's standard in book binding. The bone folder is to the left of the scissors.

We talked about different types of printing and looked at some examples of each, but the best part of our trip to the Book Arts Lab was printing a poster on a press! One of the first works we read was Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile, in which Rousseau repeatedly manipulates his student so that the student will learn, so we chose to print "Keep calm and manipulate Emile" on our poster.
This phrase has five Es in it, which is a lot for something like this where the font should be large. This was one of the only large types that had five Es. Each letter is called a sort, and with most of the other types, we would have been out of sorts. (That's the origin of that phrase!)

The inked type for our poster!

The press we were using was a 20th century press, so it had one motorized part. This was a really fascinating machine, and it was so much fun to figure out how various bits of it work!

All photos are by Becca, who has been awesome in working with us on this project. In the picture is Katherine, who runs the Book Arts Lab.

Mittens to Oliners: Choosing Olin

Olin admissions decisions come out this week!
We have nicknames (of varying popularity) for the different stages of the admissions process. Students start out as prospies, short for prospective students, which isn't a very Olin specific term. People who come to Candidates' Weekend are candidates, or candies. After that, some candidates become admitted students, also known as mittens. People who choose to come become Oliners.

I've been thinking back to two years ago when I was a mitten, so here's a list of a few factors to consider when making the decision to come (or not) to Olin. Some of these are based on what I took into consideration when making my decision, and some of them are related to what I've observed since coming to Olin.

Changing the Curriculum

Next year, Olin is changing the first year curriculum. (Again.)

For the past few years, there have been two semesters of circuits classes. Modeling and Control, or ModCon, is in the fall, and Real World Measurements, or RWM, is in the spring. They're each 3 credits, though 4 credits per class is standard at Olin. RWM in something like its current form was first run in spring 2010, so this is its fifth year. It's also its last.

This week was Course Fair, which means that we all got to see the probable list of fall classes (and a really tentative list of spring classes). There had been rumors going around about changes to the first year curriculum, and the course booklet confirmed them. Next year, the first years will only take a circuits class in the fall, not the spring, and it will be 4 credits. Why the change? Well, RWM has been successful, but a lot of people find ModCon pretty frustrating. It's not really a circuits class; the point isn't to learn how to analyze circuits, and everything in lecture is pretty abstract. The content really is about modeling and control, but a lot of students don't come away with a good understanding of control. What students do learn, though, is how to build a circuit neatly and how to debug. The other issue has been that neither RWM or ModCon has really been a 3 credit class. They took nowhere near 9 hours per week for the average Olin first year. There will be content cut in moving to a single 4 credit class, but the credit count will be more accurate, and maybe mixing ModCon and RWM will result in a course with the right amount of abstraction.

For now, the new class is being listed as "New Combined ModCon/RWM Course," so goodness only knows what anyone will call it. I also know nothing about how it will be structured. Will it have the half-semester RWM team project? How much of each current class will it cover? Where will the topics that are no longer covered in the first year curriculum end up?

Beautiful Wood

Yesterday, I took a quick trip into Cambridge with my FBE team! I've been spending a lot of time off campus for projects recently, but most of those trips have been user visits for UOCD. We've been in teams for The Entrepreneurial Initiative for about a week, though, and my team needed to go to a woodworking store.

The Entrepreneurial Initiative is a required class, and it has changed a lot over the years; it seems like Olin has never been sure quite what form it should have. We shorten the name to FBE (pronounced 'fib-ee') because the course used to be called Foundations of Business and Entrepreneurship, and the acronym stuck. In its current incarnation, the class is focused on starting a business in teams of about five.

All the students came up with product/project ideas, and we pitched them to each other. Based on those pitches, we formed teams. My team was formed from the merging of two project suggestions that were both pitched with the idea that we would make a simple product, not spend too much time on design details, and focus on learning basic marketing and finance.

After our first meeting, we decided that we would make wooden coasters. Part of what we're working on this week is design, since there's still some involved in the project, so we needed wood for prototyping. Three of us went into Cambridge to Rockler Woodworking. I didn't know all that much about wood, and I'd never been to a wood store before, but I enjoyed the trip a lot more than I expected I would. The employees were really helpful, and we got some beautiful wood for prototyping:

From left to right: white ash, zebra wood, padauk, walnut, and Bolivian rosewood

My favorite is the padauk, which is the red wood. Another wood I really liked (though we didn't end up buying any of it) was bocote.

The timing of this is pretty interesting. Because a lot of my UOCD users are people who design or make mechanical puzzles, I've been around a few woodworkers, and they've all talked about types of woods and how they choose them. If you'd asked me a month ago what I thought some themes of this semester would be, I would never have said wood, but it's been a really fun surprise.

A puzzle designed by one of my team's UOCD users. There's a lot of symmetry, including color/wood symmetry.

Do-Learn at Olin and French Philosophy

Yesterday, for my French class at Wellesley, I read an excerpt of a book called Le Maître Ignorant  by Ranciere, and the excerpt focused on a French professor, Jacotot, who, after the restoration of the monarchy in France, moved to the Netherlands and taught there. However, he spoke no Dutch, and his students spoke no French. Nevertheless, he was able to teach French literature by giving the students a bilingual copy of a book and having them read it and write about it. The essay then goes on to analyse the role of teachers in various manners of teaching, and it argues that explaining material should not be part of a teacher's role.

I found this reading particularly interesting because it's closely related to my experience at Olin. Some phrases that people use to describe the learning experience at Olin are Do-Learn, Just-in-Time, and project-based. These all imply a greater focus on learning from trying something than on a lecture model. Do-Learn is what it sounds like: learning from doing. Just-in-Time generally means that students are working on some project, and when they reach a point where they need information or a skill they don't have, then they learn it. Project-based is a term we usually use to contrast our classes with problem set courses, and it implies that the course is organized around the projects, not just theory. In reality, most Olin classes involve some amount of lecture or explanation on the part of teachers and/or NINJAs, but it's often less than in the vast majority of engineering, math, and science courses elsewhere.

One Reason I Love Olin

It has snowed several times this week, so Facilities has been working really hard to keep the pathways and parking lots clear. The first Candidates' Weekend was this week, so that was especially important. This means we've all gotten used to getting emails from Facilities asking students to move their cars to certain lots so that it's easier to remove snow. When I woke up on Friday morning and saw an email from the facilities director, I thought it would be about parking, and I very nearly didn't read it, but the title was "Snow Removal Thurs. Evening," which seemed odd.

The Facilities Snow Removal Team had been out late on Thursday clearing snow around campus. When they were done, they went out to the parking lot to dig out their own cars and go home. Upon reaching the parking lot, though, they discovered that a group of students had already dug out their cars for them. The email was a thank you.

User Oriented and Collaborative Design

The only time at Olin after first semester that every member of a graduating class takes a course together is spring semester of sophomore year, and that course is User Oriented Collaborative Design. In UOCD, we're split into teams of five or six, and each team designs a product or experience for a specific group of people. (The classic user group example is bike messengers.)

The whole point of UOCD is that engineering design should be for someone. Design should happen with the user in mind. In the first semester, Design Nature is meant to be a class in going from ideas to a final prototype, but UOCD focuses on earlier steps in the design process. We start with a group of users, and where we end up won't be much beyond ideas. The final deliverables are "design representations" (often foam models) as opposed to functional prototypes.

The most important part of UOCD is the user group. It took us about a week to get sorted into teams based on user groups. Over the weekend after the first class period, we all went out and talked to someone in a group we thought would be a good user group. Some of the user groups that were suggested were amateur blacksmiths, elderly swing dancers, door-to-door evangelists, and suicide hotline volunteers. We wrote about our conversations, read each others' write-ups, and voted on a few user groups that sounded interesting. There were a couple of rounds of voting to narrow down the groups, and then the profs put us into teams based on our preferences. The user groups that made it through to the end are volunteer physicians, blacksmiths, mathemagicians, people who refurbish old cars, drag queens, and people who commute on public transportation.

My team's user group is mathemagicians! We've been especially focused on people who make geometric puzzles, but they're generally interested in recreational mathematics more broadly. The first phase of the project involves meeting a handful of people in the user group and getting to know them. So far, my team has talked to one mathemagician in person and one on the phone, and we have a few user visits planned for next week. It's been a lot of fun talking to mathemagicians so far. They really love math and showing other people why it's beautiful and cool, and it would be hard to not get excited when we're around them.

The classic image of UOCD is a room whose walls are covered in butcher paper and sticky notes, and that has already begun. This is my team's process diagram, where we listed everything we want to do in various parts of the first phase of the project. We have another piece of paper with our schedule on it and yet another with all the information we gained on our first user visit. We're not quite to "Undergraduate Opportunities in Coloring and Drawing" yet, but we're getting there.

The team is the other really important part of UOCD. Everyone says that having a good team is much more essential in UOCD than in most other project classes (which is a little unfortunate, given that the teams are somewhat random). This is because teams are the same through the whole semester, and we just start with a user group, so it's really up to the team where to go from there. My team is fantastic. There are five of us, four Oliners and a Babson student, and we're all really excited. With a good team and an interesting user group, I think it'll be fun semester.

A Mathematical Festival

I spent last week at the Joint Math Meetings in Baltimore. The JMM is an annual gathering of thousands of mathematicians, and this was the sixth time I've attended. I always love it. People who do math gather from all around the world, and to me it always feels like a big festival. People talk about their research, their teaching, and their projects. They see old friends and meet new ones. All the publishers come with books and software, and there's even a mathematical art exhibit.

So what did I specifically do last week?

1. Jacques and I presented our research! Jacques presented work from one of the group's 2012 papers, and I presented the result from the paper we published last spring. Our talks were well attended, and several people asked questions, both of which were exciting! We were in a session on extremal and structural problems in graph theory, so we also heard some talks on topics closely related to our own work.

2. I went to a lot of talks. Maybe around 50? I love going to talks because even when they're short and don't go deep into details, I learn so much. Most of these talks were ten or twenty-five minute research presentations on graph theory and combinatorics, which are the areas in which I'm most comfortable, but I also saw some talks on number theory, mathematical modeling, mathematical fiber arts (crocheting polyominoes, for example), partial differential equations, and the impact of summer math camps. I went to two large lectures. The first focused on topological graph theory, and the second was about math in animation and computer graphics.

3. I talked to people. There was a Mathcamp reunion, so I saw campers and staff from my two years at camp and met people from other years. I had a couple of really good conversations with Mathcamp staff about math and engineering. I also saw people I've met through Research Science Institute and Math Prize for Girls. I talked to some of the people who were at lots of the graph theory sessions, I met a couple of Wellesley students, and I even met someone while looking through books in the exhibits! Talking to new people is something I haven't done very well at previous JMMs, and even if I wasn't great at it this year, I was definitely better.

4. I bought two books! All the book publishers come to the meetings and have fantastic books on sale. After going through the exhibits a couple of times, I ended up with a list of thirteen interesting books, and I ended up buying two. They're both related to partial differential equations, specifically fluid dynamics, and I'm very excited to read them!

5. I ate a lot of good food. The meetings were in Baltimore, which meant delicious crab. I had crab cakes, crab soup, and shrimp and salmon stuffed with crab. The Mathcamp reunion was at a Turkish restaurant, and eating there felt like being back in Azerbaijan. My father and I found a place right on the harbor called Lenny's Deli which served good omelets, so we went there for breakfast most days.

All of these are the ways I love the JMM.

Thoughts on Soviet Union History

While at Olin, I'm required to taken seven Arts, Humanities, or Social Science (AHS) classes. One of those is the first semester AHS foundation, and another is The Entrepreneurial Initiative. I get to choose the other five. Three of those five have to form a concentration of some kind. Because my Azerbaijani language classes from the summer transferred as two AHS courses, I wanted to take another related class to finish a concentration. I took The Tragic Colossus, a Soviet Union history class, at Wellesley. Here are my thoughts on Soviet.

Thoughts on Bayesian Inference and Reasoning

Dynamics and Transport were both mechanical engineering major requirements. I also took two classes that fulfilled general graduation requirements. The first of these was Bayesian Inference and Reasoning, which counted as my probability and statistics course.