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.
Sustainable Design
I took SusDes for my Design Depth requirement. It had two professors, a very involved NINJA, and a kind of a weird mix of students. There were lots of Babson and Wellesley students (more than half the class), and most of them had some existing interest or coursework in sustainability. The Oliners were split between students who were very interested in sustainability or design and people taking it for Design Depth. There seemed to be an assumption in the class that even if we didn't have a lot of background we all bought into the ideas, and while at a basic level that held true, I'm not sure it was as true as the teaching team acted like it was.
The course was structured as two projects. The first one was a team project that took about two months. Each team chose an object (usually an electronic appliance), studied the needs and values of its users, did a life-cycle analysis on the object, and then after lots of ideation came up with an idea for an alternate product or service that would fulfill at least some of the needs of the original in a more sustainable way. Overall, I thought this project was well-structured. What was unfortunate was that several of the teams (mine included) chose products that were already relatively sustainable. My team focused on rice cookers, and they're already multi-purpose and more efficient than other methods of cooking rice. We came up with some ways to decrease energy use, but they didn't decrease the impact of the product by much. It turned out that a huge amount of the impact associated with using a rice cooker is in fact in the rice, so we ended up trying to come up with ways to address the issues of rice. The professors heavily pushed us in that direction; we'd decided to put rice outside our system boundary in the life-cycle analysis portion of the project, and a lot of our feedback from the ideation design review was about how we needed to consider the rice.
Another issue: for Oliners, this is a Design Depth, so UOCD is a pre-req. Pre-reqs don't hold for cross-registration, though, which is fine, but it meant that there should have been material for learning general design concepts and tools provided on the course website at the very least. A lot of the Wellesley and some of the Babson students had never taken a design class, and it ended up falling on the Oliners to teach them as we went.
The second project is individual and was left really wide open. The teaching team has provided a good amount of support where needed; I've definitely enjoyed this project more.
The lectures in the class, particularly by one professor, were really well-done and helpful, and I felt like I learned a lot about sustainability and sustainable design from that. We also did a lot of discussions in small groups, though, and those always felt strained and uncomfortable, though I've never completely figured out why. I think some of it was the big variety of backgrounds, and some of it was the sense that we should all agree about some concepts. For a lot of the class it felt like there were big pieces of the conversation that we ignored. We got to some of those near the end of the course, but not in as complete a way as I wanted.
Numerical Methods
Numerical Methods was pretty much my lowest priority this semester. From the beginning one other student and I were working on a different set of problems than the rest of the class, so it was more self-paced, and the professor was also my SCOPE advisor and someone I had talked to a lot about grad school. That meant that when I was gone for grad school visits or when SCOPE needed a lot of work, Numerical was what it was okay to drop in favor of other things.
We focused mostly on spectral methods, so I feel like I have a good understanding of that area of numerical methods. I spent some time on some numerical linear algebra topics and on finite element methods, but not a ton. I'll almost certainly take a couple more numerical classes next year at Columbia.
Research
We had two first years join the group this semester! That was pretty exciting, and it's good to know that there will still be students in the group going forward. Because research was my Olin Self Study this year, I did more of the direction setting and writing than I have in the past. We weren't in the middle of a problem at the beginning of the semester, so I got to come up with a list of possible directions, and we chose from those. We ended up finishing up something we had started and gotten very stuck on last spring. The paper is in very early stages but will definitely be finished this summer.
I'm going to miss the group; it's been enormously influential for me, and it's hard to believe that I've been in the group for three and a half years.
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