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):
NLDC
NLDC or Chaos ended up being one of the classes I'm most glad to have taken at Olin. It wasn't one of the most challenging or one of the classes in which I learned the most, but it kept me doing and learning mathematics in a semester when I needed that, and it exposed me to some areas and problems in math that (I hope) I'll continue to study for the next five years. Aaron generally lectured, occasionally giving us problems to discuss and work through during class. Some of those checked understanding, and some were much more exploratory (like when he gave us the Lorenz equations to play with without telling us anything about them). The homework was always interesting, even when I found class a little slow. Aaron was also wonderful and sometimes gave me other problems to think about or showed me proofs that weren't included in our textbook. My final project was on data assimilation, which is really cool, and if I spend a lot of time over the next few years working with data assimilation for atmospheric or oceanic models, I will be very happy.
Mechanical Design
I took Mechanical Design solely because it is a requirement for the mechanical engineering degree. (It was, in fact, my last mechE requirement!) It's not entirely clear what this class is meant to be about. It seems like this should be a class about how to do mechanical design well (as opposed to semi-sketchily, which mostly works for your first two or so years at Olin). We talked about structures, joints, fasteners, and many types of transmission, spending about a day in class on each thing and then doing an in-class CAD exercise and some cumulative projects. (There was also a day on power, but the class was themed around wind sculptures, so we didn't actually use anything from the power lecture.) This was mostly just an introduction to what these various things were, though. We picked up more good mechanical design advice by asking the professor questions if they came up during class than through anything structured into the course.
It initially seemed like we were supposed to do structural analysis and design reports for every project, but we did next to no analysis and only did a report for the final project (which was also the only one for which we had to price out parts/material.) Through all the projects, the class ends up being something of a CAD class without much support for learning good CAD/Solidworks technique. The exception is that we learn to do drawings very well (by doing lots of them), at least in the style preferred by the professor (which doesn't entirely match up with the style preferred by Olin's machinists). I learned a lot, but I mostly learned by spending hours and hours CADing, and it was less than efficient. I spent two-thirds of the semester adding grooves to shafts in a functional but tedious way and then discovered a better and easier way by glancing at a teammate's screen while she was working on a shaft. I'm sure there are things I'm still doing in a suboptimal way, but because they seem to work fine, I don't know to ask.
So I'm not sure what to think of MechDes (what is it about design classes?). I learned, and I'm a lot more comfortable in Solidworks now. But that doesn't seem like it ought to be the point, especially when so many mechEs are on project teams and come in very comfortable with CAD, drawings, and CADing in a team (which is non-trivial).
Grad School Apps
They're done! I applied to five schools (six if you include the school I applied to for Fulbright), four for something along the lines of applied math, one for physical oceanography. At all the schools I'm interested in doing work in modeling geophysical flows, whether that's related to atmospheric science, oceanography, or oil reservoir simulation. My Fulbright application took a lot of time in September, and I spent a lot of October working on my NSF Graduate Research Fellowship application.
Discrete NINJAing, AoPS TAing, and Math Volunteering
I was a pretty hands-off NINJA this semester. I held office hours twice a week but at lower traffic times, so I got to know only a couple of teams well. I wrote a lot of solutions and graded a decent amount. Near the end I helped a couple of teams with their projects, which was a lot of fun. I TAed for Art of Problem Solving a lot, often four times a week. At one point I had three Geometry classes a week. (Anyone who knows how I felt about geometry when I did contest math is laughing at me at this point.) I never had a permanent Friday class; they just moved me around where they needed me.
I helped grade at Math Prize for Girls again this year, and while grading I met the coach of the Western Massachusetts ARML (math competition) team. As a result, I proctored at the Harvard MIT Math Tournament this fall, and one weekend in December I went out to Worcester and helped at an ARML team practice.
Research
We are finally done with our current paper, other than a last round of edits. We started working on this problem last spring, and it has dragged out as we've tried to get better and stronger results. I'm so glad it's close to done and we can move to other things. I put more work into the paper (as opposed to math) than I have previously, which was one of my stated goals for this semester. I also had a side problem, which I presented at Expo and will probably continue to think about. I'm really excited about next semester; there will be two first-years joining the group, and I get to suggest a problem for us to work on.
Other Activities
I spent a lot of time at church. I got talked into joining the choir, which I've enjoyed, and I've been going pretty consistently to Tuesday night Bible study. I'm also still on a couple of committees which have been meeting more because of upcoming conversations about the church's future.
At Olin, I went to Olin Christian Fellowship Praise & Worship and book study and Catholic Association mass most weeks, and I'm helping organize the Catholic Association retreat in February.
I spent about an hour a week at Putnam math contest prep sessions, working on math problems with other Oliners. I'm also currently Prime Minister of Midnight Math, and we held one event this semester. Instead of the traditional lecture by one student, we did Fifteen Proofs in Thirty Minutes: five people went through fifteen elegant, quick proofs in thirty-four minutes.
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