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?