Reflections on Senior Fall

I was originally enrolled in eighteen credits this semester, but after three or four weeks, I dropped down to fourteen. It was a decision I was pretty upset about because I dropped a class that I enjoyed and was taking for fun, but it was the right choice. I had underestimated how much time and effort grad school and scholarship/fellowship apps were going to take, and both SCOPE and Mechanical Design regularly took more than twelve hours a week each. I've had Olin classes take that much time before, but I'd never had two at once, and the fact that both were built around team projects (and thus team meetings) just made it worse. After I dropped BioTransport  (Transport in Biological Systems), some weeks were still rough, but I didn't constantly feel overwhelmed anymore. And between BioTransport and NLDC (Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos), dropping BioTransport was definitely the better choice.

Below the fold I'll talk about what I did this semester (apart from SCOPE, which is still in progress):

SCOPE Stories Week 13: Midyear Presentation

This week we presented at Boston Scientific!

The presentation went really well. BoSci is pretty happy with the work we've done and the direction we're going. There were more people at the presentation than we expected, and they asked some helpful questions and gave us some good ideas about what work they thought was most worth pursuing. They also asked us about whether our model could handle a feature we had just found out about... and the answer, happily, was yes!

Also, from today, this is a picture of a very happy product owner with our 51 page double-sided midyear report, two thirds of which is derivation/code appendices:

There's a little bit of work that we'll do next week so that everything is set up well for January, but for the most part, SCOPE is done for the semester.

On Math

tl;dr: Maybe we should teach math as math.

I sent out an email earlier this semester looking for students to join the graph theory research group. Joseph and I are both graduating in May, so we want to have some non-graduating students in the group next semester.

I got thirteen replies. From Olin students, I got thirteen replies. I've had two people later talk to me expressing interest.

We have both math and coding projects next semester, and a few people are definitely more interested in the programming side. While many others are interested in both and some of them might lean coding, part of what would make the project cool for them is that they think the math is exciting, as well. So essentially, I sent out an email asking if anyone wanted to do math research without many direct applications, and more than four percent of Olin said yes. (And we excluded the 25-30% of the school graduating in December or May as well as the tenth or so that will be abroad/on leave next semester!)

I know that's not a huge percentage of Olin, but that's fifteen non-seniors who would like to make room in their schedule to do mathematics, mathematics that might not get anywhere, mathematics for which we don't yet have answers, new mathematics. And that's enough to make me think, even more than I already did, that we do Oliners a disservice when we hide math away.

SCOPE Stories Week 12: T-shirts

From about 10:15 to 10:45 on Wednesday morning, the SCOPE teams floated in and out of their work spaces to look at the proposed SCOPE t-shirt designs. Well, okay, most of us actually emerged from our spaces to eat donuts, but the donuts were successful as a bribe to get us to look at the designs everyone had proposed. Each team had been required to submit at least one design, and several teams had come up with more.

One design was ridiculously intricate and included a reference to every team. One of my favorites was a simple design that just said, "Trust me, I'm (almost) an engineer." We'll see what ends up winning. I think the idea of a SCOPE t-shirt is a little odd, but it's a tradition.

Other than that, things were pretty quiet. Brian gave us comments on our first report draft, and I spent most of the day implementing those. We went through the outline of our presentation with him as well, and we'll do a full run through on Sunday. Our mid-year presentation at Boston Scientific is next Wednesday afternoon. Our mid-year report is due next Friday, and then we'll be done with SCOPE for the semester.

It's a little weird to be (almost) halfway done.

Thanksgiving Break Adventures

I'm going to see family for Thanksgiving, but I actually haven't left yet because I've been up to a couple of other things! First, I took a quick trip to Toronto, and then there was a fluid dynamics conference in town!

SCOPE Stories Week 11: How Is It Almost The End?

Brief summary of SCOPE life since week 8: In week 9 we had a sprint review that didn't go as well as we would have liked and didn't generate particularly useful feedback. In week 10, we went to Boston Scientific and were able to do a co-design with our liaisons on our user interface, which was really exciting! Sadly, I was sick, so I didn't get to go.

Life right now: Midyear report. Sprint review presentation. Midyear report. Midyear presentation. Midyear report. SCOPE t-shirt design? Midyear report.

I'm in charge of our midyear report, and until Friday afternoon I'm pretty sure it'll be where I put a lot of my time.

The sprint review today went a lot better than the one two weeks ago. There were still parts of it that weren't great, but they're easier to fix, and we did a much better job getting the feedback we were seeking. We had also finally gotten some new mathematical progress to discuss!

To an Oliner Considering E:Math

My major is not technically Engineering with a Concentration in Math, as often as people may think it is. I'm a mechanical engineer. However, I'm one of only two upperclass Oliners who are E:Math-ish (the other is an electrical & computer engineer), so at the moment I'm one of the best people to give advice about designing a math major. One of the sophomores asked me about being E:Math recently, and this is approximately what I told him.

SCOPE Stories Week 8: Bobsleds + Beanbags + Armadillos

Today we had a one hour teaming workshop. The most exciting part about this initially was that it was run by two Class of 2014 alums, and it was fantastic to see them again. They had us split up into groups with people not on our teams, and then we did an activity that was mostly an excuse to go through feedback after the activity. I'm not sure how well that worked, but the activity was fun in a ridiculous way. They gave each group of five or six students two slips of paper with nouns on them and gave us eight minutes to come up with a product based on those two nouns and develop a visual representation, and then each group had one minute to pitch the product to the class. Every group member had to speak in the presentation.

Our two nouns were bobsleds and beanbags. After coming up with a few ideas, we went with perhaps the most obvious, a bobsled sport in which you also have to toss beanbags at targets. With four minutes left, though, each group was given an additional noun to incorporate into the idea. We got armadillos, so naturally we decided that you also have to essentially bowl with armadillos as you go through this course. Note: this is a terrible idea on so many levels.

In other news, we have a new record for how high a stent can bounce, and we don't think we'll ever be able to break it, so the Stent Olympics have been won.

SCOPE Stories Week 7: Progress

I'm officially a quarter of the way done with SCOPE! That's a little weird, because a lot of times it feels like we're still just getting started.

Best moment of this week: our liaison told us we were making progress much more quickly than Boston Scientific had expected!

I'm perhaps even more excited, though, about what comes next. So far, a lot of our work has been in understanding and implementing models in which we already have a lot of confidence. We're still going to verify them, but we're reasonably sure the data will align with the model's predictions. Unfortunately, those models only apply to a few stents, and we want to produce something that covers a wide range of geometries and materials. So our big task between Wednesday and Sunday is a combination of literature review and ideation to figure out how to best represent different types of stents. I think we'll get to the really mathematical bit of the project very soon!

SCOPE Stories Week 6: Chairs and the Acronym

We rearranged our space today. Boeing had the smallest space and wanted more room because they're building a large model of part of their project. (Quote from this afternoon: "We built a jungle gym!") We agreed to move over the dividing wall between us. When we did, we also pushed our two tables together. That required taking the wheels off of one of them so that they'd be the same height. We also finally got rid of our extra chairs. We now have five, four for us to use most of the time and one at our workstation, whereas we'd had ten before. I'm not sure how the four person team ended up with ten chairs...

We took a break this afternoon to visit The Acronym, Olin's free coffee and tea shop. It's right outside the library, mostly student run with some faculty and staff support, open for two hours on Wednesday afternoons, and also features baked goods provided by students, faculty, and staff. It was a fun break. We got to hang out with people outside of our team, including faculty; I was able to talk to some faculty I don't get to see often.

I continue to learn more about Matlab than I ever wanted to know, but the user interface is almost done and is working wonderfully, so now I'm actually pretty excited about/proud of the code.

SCOPE Stories Week 5: Motorcycles and Programming Adventures

SCOPE is divided up into a series of two week sprints, and at the end of each sprint we have a sprint/design review with another team. The first sprint ended today, and we had our first review with Harley Davidson.

Our sprint review went well. We didn't get a ton of feedback, but it's pretty early for that. We did come out of the review with some questions for our sponsor. More exciting was Harley's presentation. Harley Davidson's project is about motorcycles! (Such a surprise, I know.) But actually, there's not much more they can say publicly; Harley is known for having one of the strictest non-disclosure agreements every year. They're working on developing ideas for a system related to motorcycle control. (If you want to see how little they can see about their project, go look at their description.)

I spent most of the rest of the day working on a user interface for an implementation of a model in Matlab. Making GUIs in Matlab is weird. Actually, using the object-oriented parts of Matlab is just weird generally. We'll see how this goes...

SCOPE Stories Week 4: First Day of Work

Today is the first day of SCOPE when I've felt like we really did work. We still had a two hour workshop on non-disclosure agreements and intellectual property this afternoon, but most of the day fell into what will become the normal rhythm. We're still all working on understanding the material we've been given as background, so today involved a lot of time in front of whiteboards. We were working through derivations in the papers we're reading, trying to figure out the relevant physics and math.

We've been joking a lot about how we're going to make a fashion line for stents because our work statement is to develop a stent model, so yesterday while taking a break we made an outfit for one of our stents. Sadly, it fell apart by the end of the day. We should probably stick to math...

SCOPE Stories Week 3: Visiting Boston Scientific

Every SCOPE team visits its sponsor at least once and usually multiple times. Our first visit to Boston Scientific was yesterday. 

The visit was focused on getting us all the necessary background knowledge about how stents are designed, made, and tested. We spent a lot of time going from lab to lab talking to different people and learning about different machinery and procedures. My favorite area was definitely the stent-making lab, though the testing is more relevant to our project. We have a much better idea now of what parameters will be important in our model and what kind of testing we should do (or data we should ask for) when we need to verify our model, so it was a successful trip!

Also, our official/public project description is here!

SCOPE Stories Week 2: Stents and Goodbye to the Robo Lab

Today was SCOPE Kickoff, when all the teams had meetings with the liaisons from their sponsors! Most of those team meetings were in the afternoon from 4pm to 6pm, but our liaisons couldn't meet then, so we started our day with a two hour meeting. We have a much better idea of what our problem is now, and we get to visit Boston Scientific next week, which should help us define the problem even more.

We also now know which part of our project description can be public. We'll be working on mathematical modeling of gastrointestinal stents. Our sponsor brought us eight or so example stents that we get to keep until the end of the year, and we've already had a lot of fun seeing how they behave. We're jokingly referring to the tests we might end up running on them as the stent Olympics.

Also, remember how our space was weirdly placed in the Robo Lab? Well, a Babson MBA student was added to one of the teams, team A, in the room with four SCOPE spaces. He's not a US citizen or permanent resident, so he can't cross-sign the NDAs for Boeing or Raytheon, who are both in that room. (Sound familiar?) Originally, the plan was to switch team A with a different team, team B, all of whose members are US citizens. However, one person team B has a conflict of interest with one of the teams staying in the big room, so she can't cross-sign that team's NDA. My team, however, is all US citizens, has no conflicts of interest, and isn't dealing with information confidential enough that we need a room to ourselves. Thus, my team got to move again.

We think we're staying put this time.

Also, here's the promised answer to the question "What do the Harley-Davidson and BoSci teams have in common?" We have the same faculty advisor, Brian! We'll also be design review partners so that Brian only has to go to one set of design reviews.

SCOPE Stories Week 1: Wait, We're in the Robo Lab?

Seniors at Olin have two options for year-long capstones, Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship and SCOPE. ADE focuses on identifying opportunities and developing products/services to meet needs in underserved areas around the world. Most people, though, take SCOPE, in which each team of four to six students is sponsored by a company. SCOPE teams meet all day on Wednesday, and our first day was this week! 

I'm on the Boston Scientific (BoSci) team along with three other Olin seniors. We're a pretty diverse group in terms of major; we have a Mechanical Engineering major, an Engineering with Materials Science major, an Engineering with Physics major, and then me (mechE but very mathematical). We won't know until next week what we're allowed to say publicly about our project, but it's a good fit for all of us. It was my top choice of the projects, and I'm really excited for the rest of the year.

This week, our main task was to set up our work spaces. To our surprise, my team's space is in the Intelligent Vehicles lab, despite having nothing to do with robotics. In fact, we don't expect to use any of the tools or machines in the IV lab. We found out that Boeing was originally going to be in that spot, and their project is much more mechanical. However, the other team whose space is in the lab is Locus Robotics, and one of their team members is not a US citizen or permanent resident. Boeing's non-disclosure agreement this year requires that the signee be at least a permanent resident, and teams in the same space have to cross-sign each other's NDAs. To resolve this, the SCOPE organizers swapped Boeing and BoSci, and thus my team ended up in the Robo lab.

Question (to be answered next week): What do the Harley-Davidson team and the BoSci team have in common?

To an Oliner Considering RIPS

The last day of RIPS was a week ago. It ended up being a good program for me, but I remember how unsure I was when I first got the offer and how long I considered it before saying yes. I wasn't sure what it would be like to be an engineer at RIPS, if I would end up as the team project manager because of my experience on teams (or worse, end up PMing despite not being the official PM), and whether I would end up on a project that would be interesting to me. So now, looking back, here's what I would tell another Oliner considering RIPS.

Community

The past couple of  weeks have made me think about communities of which I've been a part. There are a lot of them, and often it's the people that end up being most important to me about a place or experience. Here are a few recent moments that have really highlighted community for me.

Things I'm Learning

RIPS Midterm Presentations were a week ago, and after our midterm presentation and report, our team and sponsor agreed that the specific problem we had been working on was probably not going to lead anywhere. We'd been searching for closed forms for several values/properties related to a family of polynomials, and what we had found so far indicated that getting clean analytic results was unlikely. So we've pivoted to some more numerical and physics-related directions for the last couple of weeks of the project.


I was thinking through all of this, and I concluded that most of what I've learned falls into three categories.

"Not much is known" is quite different from "Not much has been done."

We thought we were coming into a problem on which relatively few people had worked. One of our tasks for the first part of the project was to conduct a more thorough literature review and find out how much people had looked at this family of polynomials and what they had found. It turns out that a small group of people had done significant work, simply without much success. Either the problem is very difficult, or it's simply not possible. (My team leans heavily toward the latter, though saying it's impossible is questionable because of some vagueness in the problem statement.)

"The steady state of mathematical research is to be completely stuck."

(Quote from this NYT article about Terry Tao)

I knew this quite well coming into this summer. But if there is anything this project has reinforced, it is that much of the story of doing mathematics is a lot of work resulting in not much progress. (This goes with the above, really.) Earlier this week, I walked into Mariette's office to check on something with her, and she looked at me and said, "I found the brick wall again." That's math research for you: banging your head against a brick wall, hoping at some point it will fall...so that you can move onto the next, even more exciting brick wall.

Math.

Without this project, I don't think I would have considered learning about orthogonal polynomials. Other than using a couple of nice families of them in PDEs, I'd never really seen them, and even then I didn't have to know anything about those families, just that they existed and were solutions to particular equations. But now I know so much about the theory of orthogonal polynomials, and I probably know more about Maxwell polynomials than all but maybe a couple dozen people in the world. In addition, for our new directions, I've been working on a numerical analysis part of the project. (I'm the one person on the team who knew almost zero numerical analysis... so of course I volunteered to do that bit.) In just a few days I've learned a lot about numerical analysis in general and quadrature and root-finding in particular.

Approaching Hard Problems: Math and Engineering

My friend Amelie and I have been talking about our summers, and in particular the differences in our research came up. She's on an interdisciplinary engineering team working on blimps, and I'm doing math research that has many applications but isn't really applied in and of itself. 

It turns out that my team is working on a problem that is harder than we expected. We're looking for a number of different pieces, and we've found that having any one of them would allow us to find all of them without too much work. The problem is finding one, and we're a bit stuck. There are directions that we're exploring, and we've confirmed a lot of the work that we've found in literature, but at this point it doesn't feel like we're going to be able to make much progress, and we'll probably end up pivoting to a related but more approachable problem.

Amelie's reaction when I told her this was that math research seemed pretty scary, that in her kind of research, maybe there's one way she would prefer to do things, but really she could come up with six different ways. If something doesn't work, there are other ways to accomplish the same task. But when we're stuck, we don't necessarily have that option. We try to find ideas for new approaches or information from doing more literature review and from discussions with other people, but sometimes that doesn't lead to anything helpful.

We're looking for closed forms of certain expressions, and we're not even sure they exist. We know that if they do exist, they're far from elegant, but we don't really have ideas for proving the closed forms don't exist, either. So we're reading, trying to follow lots of trails, and talking to our liaison a lot for suggestions on directions to go right now and about possibilities if this is just too intractable.

A Few Summer Pictures

I've been away from Olin for almost a month and a half, so I thought I'd post about what I've been up to! Pictures below the fold.

Thoughts on Spring 2015 Activities

Here's a little bit about what I did this semester that wasn't related to classes or math!

Thoughts on Mechanics of Solids and Structures and Math Activities

My fourth class this past semester was Mechanics of Solids and Structures, or MechSolids, which is a mechE requirement. I also did a lot of math related activities. Compared to last semester, I didn't feel like I did very much math this semester, but what I did do was pretty varied.

It Flaps But Does Not Fly: Thoughts on Mechanical and Aerospace Systems

MechAero is a course I should not have taken.

Part of the mechanical engineering degree is a mechE elective, and MechAero counts as such an elective. It isn't taught very often, and I was excited because I thought, based on the course description, that I would get to do a lot of analysis, especially analysis related to fluid mechanics. Instead, the course was almost entirely a mechanical design class with little to no support for learning to do mech design.

Breaking Bolts and Exploding Glass: Thoughts on Materials Science

MatSci was, from the second week of classes, my favorite course of this semester. I was a little nervous about going into projects right away with no background first, but MatSci ended up being the best project-based class I've ever taken, and I definitely think projects were the right way to frame this course.

Arduinos, Valves, and Raining Patterns: Thoughts on Principles of Engineering

Principles of Engineering (PoE) is very much a do-learn course. It's really a class about integration, starting with three labs using Arduino Unos and then spending the rest of the semester on a team project that must include significant mechanical, electrical, and software systems. I was nervous about PoE going in because I was a mechE who hadn't done much mechanical design, so I wasn't sure what role I would take on the project team. I ended up having a lot more fun than I expected, and PoE contributed more than any other class this semester to my growth as a mechanical engineering. I wouldn't have expected to say this going in, but I think PoE is an important class to have in the curriculum, and I'm really glad it's a graduation requirement.

I'm going to be a senior?

My life is still mostly class projects (even more so now that MechSolids projects are about to start), though the weather is finally warming up, so I've also been spending time at Babson's baseball games. There are only three weeks of classes left, and registration was at the end of last week. It's a little weird to think that I'm already registering for senior year. Here's what I'll be up to this summer and next fall:

The Most Project-y Time of the Year

We're more than halfway through the semester, and I'm doing projects in three of my four classes. Here's a little bit about what I'm working on at the moment:

It's a Small World After All

About a month ago, my friends Amelie and Eleanor and I participated in the Mathematics Competition in Modeling (MCM). The contest is 96 hours long, and the final deliverables are a report and some short, non-technical piece of writing specific to the problem topic.

There were four problem options, and we went with Problem A:
The world medical association has announced that their new medication could stop Ebola and cure patients whose disease is not advanced. Build a realistic, sensible, and useful model that considers not only the spread of the disease, the quantity of the medicine needed, possible feasible delivery systems, locations of delivery, speed of manufacturing of the vaccine or drug, but also any other critical factors your team considers necessary as part of the model to optimize the eradication of Ebola, or at least its current strain. In addition to your modeling approach for the contest, prepare a 1-2 page non-technical letter for the world medical association to use in their announcement.

We ended up building two models to look at the problem on different scales. One model was of a district (and would be easily extendable to a country), and that model was focused on supply of the drug and distribution of medical workers. Instead of looking at individual people, we looked at percentages of the population moving among risk levels and susceptibility levels over time.

The other model was at a town level, and we focused on the connections among people and how a triage-like system of distributing the drug influenced disease spread and resistance within a community. For this model, I got to play around with graph theory! After reading some papers about networks and modeling spread of disease or information, we chose to go with a type of network structure called a small world model. In our implementation, each person in the community was represented by a vertex, and close relationships (the kind that would lead to a lot of contact even if someone were ill) were represented by edges. We gave each edge a weight between 0 and 1 to indicate how strong a connection it was. The small world part comes in from how we determined where to put edges. Each vertex had edges to a few vertices near it in a very regular pattern, and then we added in a set number of randomly determined edges. For example, say we had a community of 70 people, and we organized the 70 vertices in a circle. Then one possible setup like ours would have each vertex connected to two vertices immediately to its right and two vertices immediately to its left, and there would be a few random edges crossing through the center of the circle.

I spent most of my time working on the small world model and thinking about how to integrate the two models. I hadn't expected to get to do graph theory, so this was exciting! My research group published some spread papers a year or two before I joined, and I've seen a lot of presentations at math conferences over the years about spread and containment in various networks, but I'd never actually done any work in the area. Knowing what kinds of networks were possibilities and where to look for more information was really useful for the competition, and I feel more comfortable working with networks in general now.

We came to some cool conclusions from the graphs we got out of the models, and we were even able to use some of our user-centered design experience in interpreting the results. From a mathematical point of view, there's more information that I would have liked to know about our graphs, but at the time I wasn't entirely sure if that information would be relevant. We were pretty happy with our work, and Amelie and I are planning on competing again next year!

I Am a MechE

In this month's issue of Frankly Speaking, Olin's newspaper, Meg Lidrbauch wrote about trying to do too much and the culture around that at Olin. It's a good piece, and I agree with its main point, but I'm going to go off of something that's a bit of a side argument in the article.

Meg talks about realizing that she's not a mechanical engineer, and in doing so she describes the typical Olin mechE as someone who does design in Solidworks, puts a lot of time into one of the large vehicle project teams, and can be found in the machine shop.

But this is far too broad a brush, even at Olin. Amelie, Erzsi, Ariel, and Antoinette are all mechanical engineering majors, and I've had major requirement classes with all of them. Amelie can CAD and machine but would much rather spend her time on sensor research. Erzsi builds and loves being in the machine shop, but she does not CAD. Ariel is interested in sustainability and helps lead the Human Powered Vehicles team, so she fits the description but has her own slant. Antoinette prefers conceptual design to hardcore mechanical design or CADing and is really interested in K-12 education. Actually, one of the people who conforms most to that image of the Olin mechE is much more of an electrical engineer; each month he chooses an integrated circuit of the month and writes a little bit about it in a newsletter that he distributes through the dining hall.

Of course there are mechEs here like the one described. The other two people on my MechAero team pretty much fit the stereotype. For that matter, so do at least two-thirds of the rest of the class. The image accurately describes a lot of people. That's how it originated! But this is not the only way to be a mechE. I identify less as a mechanical engineer at Olin than I do anywhere else because of the prevalence of this idea of what it means to be a mechE at Olin. Outside the Bubble, calling myself a mechanical engineer provides others with reasonably accurate information about my knowledge base, but that's not the case at Olin.

#LoveOlin

I didn't fall in love with Olin, not really. Not like so many other Oliners do.

I was impressed when I first visited in summer 2010. I came to Olin right after leaving Mathcamp, and what I heard about Olin culture reminded me of Mathcamp culture. I liked the idea of knowing everyone and especially of knowing the professors. My Olin visit also changed what I looked for at other schools. I started asking about how easy it was for students to be trained on the machines, looking at how present design was in the curriculum and how early, and finding the statistics on how many graduates went into industry. But I wasn't in love, not yet. It was far too early to fall in love, far too dangerous to fall in love a year before I started applying to schools.

I called Olin my top choice for all of junior year and most of senior fall. It was close to Rice and Georgia Tech, and a lot of times I just grouped the three together as my top choices, but if asked to name one, I would say Olin. In January 2012 I was invited to Candidates' Weekend, and in February, I became a candidate.

I liked Candidates' Weekend, but so many people talk about leaving CW knowing for sure they wanted to go to Olin. I didn't know that for sure. I liked the other candidates and had some good conversations with Oliners, but the design challenge had made me pretty uncomfortable, and I still wasn't sure about parts of the curriculum. I wasn't sure about the curriculum constantly changing. While I liked campus, I didn't like the location, and the small size came with a lot of disadvantages.

Obviously, I ended up choosing Olin, but I wasn't in love when I chose. I was sure, but not in love.

I still don't think I'd say I'm in love, not in any continuous way. I have had plenty of moments over the past two and a half years of being in love, and a lot of them are unsurprising: good team experiences, great conversations with professors, opportunities I wouldn't get at other places due to school size or my major. But not all of these moments are so predictable, and some of them remind me that whether or not I'm in love with Olin, I do love it.

Last Friday wasn't exactly the kind of day to make me love Olin. It hasn't been the easiest or happiest semester in general. I was leaving at 1pm to go to the airport and fly home for the long weekend, but I had an assignment due at 5pm that wasn't done. I had gotten too little sleep, hadn't finished packing, and was frustrated with the assignment and myself, but I still felt like I needed to go to Linearity class and NINJA.

And then I stood in the middle of the Dining Hall Mezzanine after answering a couple of questions at a whiteboard, looked around at the eighty or so Linearity I students working on problem sets and quizzes, and thought, "This is why I'm here."

Some days that's all it takes.

Back at Olin

Being back at Olin is still a little weird. I'm living in a different dorm, and most of my friends have already gone through that adjustment. I'm in a double instead of having a large room to myself in a three person flat. I don't know a quarter of the school. (On the first day of one of my classes, the professor had us all introduce ourselves because "There's always that one junior who doesn't know the first years," and the other non-first-years pointed at me.) I'm not taking a math class, and I am taking four engineering classes. Olin culture is very different from BSM culture, and the Needham/Wellesley line is decidedly not Budapest. It's a lot to get used to, but it's been great to see people again, and I'm starting to settle in. Here's what I'm up to as far as academics this semester:

Spectral Theory

I've already written a fair bit about Inquiry Based Spectral Theory already, but it still deserves a post of its own. It's definitely the BSM class I'll miss the most.

Combinatorics and Topology

Extremal Combinatorics and Topology were my math classes at BSM that had the most fun homework and were generally the lowest stress. Here's a bit more about each:

Analysis and Algebra

Going into BSM, I knew I wanted to take at least one analysis class and at least one algebra class. My analysis ended up being Complex Analysis, and my algebra was Galois Theory. Here are my thoughts on each: