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!