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):
Monday, December 28, 2015
Saturday, December 12, 2015
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.
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.
Monday, December 7, 2015
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.
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.
Thursday, December 3, 2015
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)