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.