Project Wrap-up

Olin talks a lot about having a project-based curriculum. This post looks at all the projects I did at Olin. I considered when I did the projects, what kind of class I did them in, how long they took, and how many people were involved.

After Olin

Starting this fall, I'll be at Columbia University, pursuing a PhD in the Applied Physics & Applied Math department. I'm in the applied math - atmospheric science track, and I'm really excited about this.

I've known for a long time that I was interested in fluid mechanics and thermal-fluid systems, and my mechanical engineering courses confirmed that these really were my areas of interest. I also found through my courses and projects that Olin that I loved math modeling, and so I started looking into any programs where I could do fluid modeling. For a while, that meant I was looking into lots of different departments, including math, applied math, mechE, chemE, and oceanic and atmospheric science. Through reading geophysical fluid dynamics papers and looking at NYU's Atmosphere-Ocean Science and Math program, I decided that the research I was most interested in was in the atmosphere/ocean space, but my top choices of programs were NYU and Columbia, the two where I would be in an applied math department. After visits to all the programs where I was accepted, I was most excited about and comfortable at Columbia.

A Few Serious and Not-So-Serious Things I Did as an Oliner

In four years at Olin, I did the following:

Palace of Promise

Throughout junior and senior year of high school, Olin was my top choice largely because of its curriculum. I wanted to be doing engineering, not just learning about it, and I appreciated the focus on engineering starting and ending with people. It was the community that eventually led to my decision to go to Olin, but it was the curriculum and education model that initially attracted me.

Olin is its People

I chose to come to Olin over my other options largely because of the small community and particularly how strong the relationships between students and professors seemed. So, I wanted to take a post to focus on how those relationships ended up shaping my four years at Olin.

Left: with Professor Troxell. Center: with Rehana. Right: with Aaron.

Top left: with R rising senior. Top center: with C and K, rising junior and sophomore. Bottom left: with J and T, both rising seniors. Bottom center: with Amelie, a wonderful roommate and suitemate. Right: with Rocco, rising junior.

Identity, Confidence, Community: My Olin Story in Five Graphs

It's been about a month since I graduated! I'll be writing some more general reflections, including one specifically about community, but I was inspired by a conversation with a friend to draw some graphs that I thought were interesting enough to share on their own.

There are five graphs: confidence as an engineer, confidence as a mathematician, identity as an engineer, identity as a mathematician, and sense of community.

The time axis is divided into semesters and summers. My first summer was spent on the Critical Language Azerbaijani program, my second was in Singapore doing chemical engineering research, and during my third summer I was at UCLA doing applied math research in the RIPS program. I was abroad at Budapest Semesters in Mathematics during my junior fall.

All the graphs are annotated, but the annotations are pretty small; click or zoom in to read them!

The Problem of Grades

In my post on feedback, I mentioned that there's a complicated conversation around grades at Olin. We talk a lot about intrinsic motivation and so want to minimize focus on single number or letter, and as a community we tend to favor detailed feedback over just giving a grade. But in almost all classes, professors do still have to give out grades at the end.

What To Take Second Semester of First Year

This is a bit of a strange post to do now, but I've been thinking about it a fair bit, and this is also a question that came up at the Post-Graduate Planning panel at Family Weekend. What classes should an Oliner take during the second semester of their first year to best prepare them for summer internships and later Olin classes?

There are just two requirements that semester, Products and Markets and Linearity I, which leaves most people with only eight credits already scheduled. For the next couple of years Olin will also be running Quantitative Engineering Analysis (QEA), which will cover the Linearity requirement and take up eight credits, so the students in that class would only need to take one more class to get to the standard sixteen credits.

Either way, that leaves at least one class to be filled, and for most majors it isn't convenient to start on major requirements in the spring. So here are some suggestions for what students should take.

Feedback and the Test Tube

One of the key features of Olin is its experimental status. Innovation in engineering education is a cornerstone of Olin. That means constantly identifying what could be better and attempting to improve it. Part of the way that we do that is through feedback.

Reflections on SCOPE: My SCOPE Experience

Several people have asked me about how I think SCOPE went for my team, and this is my attempt to answer that question.

The Changing Composition of the School

The fastest growing majors at Olin are actually not majors in their own right but rather are concentrations within the Engineering major. Engineering with Computing (E:C) has grown an incredible amount just between my class and the current sophomores, and Engineering with Robotics has also grown. E:Robo became more popular starting with my class or the class above us because it became an official concentration instead of a self-design, and it has stayed popular.

Note that these are both related to software. Software Design has become an increasingly popular class for people to take as first years or sophomores; it often has a wait list in the spring with multiple sections offered, and there's now a section in the fall as well. As more people take SoftDes, the popularity kind of reinforces itself; Oliners who have taken the class tell other students that it's a good and useful class, and so more people take it. Post Graduate Planning is also reinforcing the class's popularity by encouraging everyone to learn to code and telling people it's easier to get jobs if you know how to code.

Religion, Diversity, Student Government

I write a lot of happy things about Olin. When I write negative things, it tends to be in course reflections, and the negatives are usually accompanied by some positives.

But on Monday night, the student government voted down an amendment that would have (in its final form) required that the student government consider the calendar of religious observances important to the current student body before scheduling an event meant for the entire study body.

Reflections on SCOPE: Corporate Sponsorship

Other than our presentations at Boston Scientific and SCOPE Summit, SCOPE is over. We turned in our report and all our other deliverables on Friday. I was planning on writing one reflection on SCOPE, but my thoughts on sponsors, NDAs, etc. ended up longer than I expected, so there will be multiple SCOPE reflection posts. Here are my thoughts on corporate sponsorship.

Reflections on Second Semester Senior Year Activities

Here are some thoughts on the activities I was involved in during my last semester at Olin. It was a pretty decent culmination of the things I've been involved with over my four years here!

Reflections on Second Semester Senior Year Courses

I took Sustainable Design, SCOPE, Numerical Methods, and graph theory research this semester. I'll talk about SCOPE separately, but here are some thoughts on the others.

SCOPE Week 26: Last SCOPE Wednesday

SCOPE isn't ending quite yet, but today was our last SCOPE Wednesday. Our final reports and our posters (one archival, two for SCOPE Summit) are due Friday, my team's presentation to our sponsor is on May 9th, and then SCOPE Summit is on May 10th.

We had some data analysis to finish up today still, and we put in an enormous amount of work on the report. There are still a few figures to add and a couple of paragraphs to write, and our report will come out to be around 80 pages of non-code material, plus a lot of code, raw and processed data, and a user guide for our user interface.

Even though SCOPE won't officially end for another two or so weeks, we're pretty much done; everything after this week is just talking about our work. I'll be posting a reflection on the full year once all of that is over. Right now, it's a relief to be so close to done. Do I wish we'd been able to do more technical work? Absolutely. If we'd had an additional month with the data, I think we would have had time to figure out what causes some of the discrepancies between our models and the data. But as it is, we can qualitatively (and in some cases quantitatively) say what's going on pretty well.

I'm happy with our report, and I glowed a little bit when our faculty advisor told us that our second draft was "overall really good." Our liaisons also seem happy with how far we got, though we'll see more about how Boston Scientific responds when we go there to present.

Goodnight git, goodnight stents,
Goodnight data discontent.
Goodnight model, goodnight slope,
Goodnight Wednesday, goodnight SCOPE.

SCOPE Week 25: Old SCOPE Supplies

Someone did some clean-up/reorganizing at Olin recently and found several boxes of old SCOPE things, so Rebecca, the SCOPE Director, brought the boxes around to the relevant teams. The BoSci materials that were found were marked "STENTS" and consisted of two long tubes in plastic bags.

When Rebecca came by, she said, "I brought you more stents!" assuming that something marked with "STENTS" would contain stents. We pulled the plastic wrap off and looked inside the two tubes and were disappointed to find them empty, at which point we realized there was something wrapped around the tubes, and maybe that was the important part.

It was a diffracting white sheet of some kind of polymer. We're not really sure what it was for, but we had fun throwing it around to watch it float, wearing it as a cape, and making it do diffraction-y things. We also think we know which BoSci project it was from. One year, BoSci sponsored multiple projects, and so the teams were identified by general topics, polymers and stents. We believe the tube was marked "STENTS" because it was for the Stents Team.

SCOPE Stories 24: Graphing and Goals

I looked at one of my teammates today and said, "I feel like I've been doing the same thing for the past three weeks."

"Graphing?"

"Graphing."

We got eight more stents worth of data today (and still might get a few more). We also got updated information on stents whose data we'd sorted through last week. It turns out that some of the parameter values we were given were target values, not actual ones, and the actual values were quite different. So today was a day of redoing some of our previous data analysis, doing new data analysis, and trying to draw conclusions so that we can write the report.

Not all of the models are going to be in a great place at the end, but at this point the hope is that we'll be able to diagnose ways in which they're wrong. If we can say that Model B is making incorrect predictions for a certain quantity because of too strong a dependence on a particular parameter, then we'll be in an okay place. It would be even better to be able to come up with a list of dependencies (essentially power laws or something similar) so that someone else would have a better place to start in developing a model.

SCOPE Stories Week 23: A Very Long Stent

At one point today, Abe was very frustrated with his model and spent a long time trying to talk through the theory of it with Brian. About an hour later, he started laughing uncontrollably. It turned out that instead of modeling a 7.5 cm stent, he was modeling a 75 cm stent.

We have more data! Some of it's a bit weird, though, so we're still sorting through it. The hope is that we'll be in a good place with the data and the models by the end of Sunday.

Four Years of Curriculum Changes

I recently posted about the changes to the first year curriculum while I've been at Olin. There have been a number of other key curriculum changes over the course of my four years here, though, and I wanted to discuss those as well.

SCOPE Stories Week 22.5: Wait, the Models are Working?

This past Wednesday, I was really frustrated about having errors in our models and not knowing how to proceed. We redid some of our testing and analysis, though, and we're actually in much better shape than we expected. Our models are behaving and matching data pretty closely, and where they're not, we've figured out how to fix them.

We haven't gotten to check all of our models yet, but we're getting a lot closer, and I'm feeling a lot better about what we're going to be able to deliver to Boston Scientific at the end.

We have a weekly Sunday meeting, and I was kind of dreading it today because I was so unhappy with the state of the models. But this meeting turned out to be quite exciting!

SCOPE Stories Week 22: A Modest Amount of Data

We have a little bit of data, which means we can start verifying our models! And by verifying our models, I mostly mean scrambling to try to find missing factors of two and trying to resolve a few more fundamental errors. I feel like I've been banging my head against a brick wall all afternoon.

Sigh.

In happier news, we pretty much have one of our posters done, we're making good progress on our report, and our user interface has pretty much all the features we want! The user interface being very functional has been helpful for all the comparisons of models to data that we've been doing, especially as I've played with changing things in the model...

Four Years Worth of First Year Curriculum Changes

One of the things I always emphasize to potential Olin students is that the curriculum is in flux. One of Olin's goals is essentially to be a testing place for new ideas and practices in engineering education. Participating in that experiment is part of being an Olin student.

With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to list ways in which Olin's curriculum has changed while I've been here. It turns out that the changes to the first year curriculum alone are quite extensive, so in this post I'll start with those.

SCOPE Stories Week 21: It's a Boa Constrictor Digesting an Elephant

Through the process of trying to change some of the properties of a particular stent in order to test a stent with our desired characteristics, we managed to pretty badly damage a stent. In this case, by "damage" I mean that we caused the stent to stay in deformed shapes instead of trying to regain its rest state.

We had a lot of fun with this.

At one point, one of my teammates pushed the wires into a shape and asked, "How would you mathematically describe this?" We debated for a little while -- kind of like a Gaussian, kind of like e^{-x}? Then Brian, our faculty advisor, said, "It looks like a snake swallowed something," at which point my teammate and I looked at each other and said, "It swallowed an elephant!"

After that, of course we had to fill the stent with runts candy to actually get it into a shape that really matched the Little Prince drawing.

(On a more serious note, we think we're actually going to get data soon, both from collecting it ourselves and from BoSci. Also, we've started on the final report. How is that already happening?)

Faculty Searching

I'm missing SCOPE for two weeks in a row to go on grad school visits to New York City...twice. (Yes, I probably should have planned this a little better.) As I won't have any SCOPE stories this week or next, I thought I'd say a little bit about something else I've been spending time on: Olin's faculty search.

Olin's calls for faculty applicants are here. It's a very broad search, which makes it really exciting to interact with all the candidates who come to campus. I've gotten to hear about a huge variety of topics over the past month or so just by going to the faculty candidate talks.

Faculty Searching

I'm missing SCOPE for two weeks in a row to go on grad school visits to New York City...twice. (Yes, I probably should have planned this a little better.) As I won't have any SCOPE stories this week or next, I thought I'd say a little bit about something else I've been spending time on: Olin's faculty search.

Olin's calls for faculty applicants are here. It's a very broad search, which makes it really exciting to interact with all the candidates who come to campus. I've gotten to hear about a huge variety of topics over the past month or so just by going to the faculty candidate talks.

SCOPE Stories Week 18: Sine's a Nice Function

Today was the end of a three-week sprint after having no SCOPE last week due to an Olin Monday  on Wednesday. This is also my last SCOPE day before spring break; I'm missing the next two for grad school visits. We spent today doing a lot of technical work -- finishing up development of a model, cleaning up numerics in the implementation of an old model, testing, and working on the user interface.

My accomplishment for today: simplifying some work I'd done earlier this week by talking to one of my teammates and our advisor, finding a mistake, and figuring out that a particular sine series has a very convenient sum. (I'm still trying to think about why, but hey, evenly spaced things are nice.)

SCOPE Stories Week 17: Nitinol in the Snow

For the past few days the temperature outside has been hovering around 0 C, and while going between buildings with one of our stents, the Materials Science major on the team noticed that the stent started acting abnormally.

See, this stent is made of nitinol, which is a shape memory alloy. When you deform it, it returns to its original shape, usually pretty quickly. So we bend the stent, and it bounces back. We compress it, and it elongates again, not deforming at all. But when my teammate took the stent outside, the outside temperature was below one of the transition temperatures for nitinol. She bent the stent, and it was cold enough that the stent stayed bent.

Of course, once we figured this out, we all had to go outside for ten minutes with a bunch of different nitinol stents and try this. It's fantastic. And then as we went back inside, the stents slowly warmed up and returned to their original shape.

Conclusions: nitinol is cool, temperature matters, and we're easily entertained by basic materials science.

SCOPE Stories Week 16: Matrices and Springs

The beginning of the SCOPE semester has been a little rough. After deciding that we weren't going to continue pursuing some paths we'd considered, we've rearranged team roles, so there's been an adjustment period for that. It's also going to be a few weeks before we have the data we were planning to use to drive our main modeling work for this semester and to validate last semester's work. We're trying to both reshuffle our schedule to frontload everything that doesn't rely on data and start on some of the modeling work even without the intuition from the data.

This has involved reading some books and papers in fields with which none of us is familiar. Two of us spent far too long trying to make sense of a couple of pages of a book that were filled with entries of three different but related matrices, starting with one that nothing on the internet seems to explain. Also, one paper refers to the work in the area of research we're looking at as "sparse and not complete." Thanks, random paper; that makes us feel so confident that we'll figure something out.

Luckily, when Brian visited he suggested we start by approximating everything with springs, and that was easy to work out. We're taking some data on our own while we wait for the more comprehensive data sets, so hopefully we'll know within the next couple of weeks whether that simple a model is effective or not.

The Joy of the Joint Meetings

The Joint Mathematics Meetings are a large annual math conference, so named because they are the joint annual meeting of the Mathematical Association of America and the American Mathematical Society (and have significant participation from several other societies/associations). This year was my eighth JMM, and I love them every year. JMM was last week, and some of my friends expressed confusion at my great enthusiasm for the meetings, so I thought I'd try to explain a bit.