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...