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!
My engineering confidence really crashed twice. The first time was first semester, largely due to Design Nature not going well, and the second was junior spring, when I came back from a semester of doing math and had three engineering classes, two of them heavy on mechanical design. Mechanical design is definitely my weakness as a mechE, and it's something a lot of Olin mechEs do well. When I gained confidence, it was through projects going well, working more with theory, or being in a non-engineering context and realizing how much I really did know.
Notice that my engineering confidence at the end of Olin is about the same as it was at the beginning. This isn't a statement of how much I knew; I know far more now. My sense of confidence in myself as an engineer was higher at the beginning of Olin than it really should have been, which shows in how quickly it crashed. I think it would have climbed back higher during senior year if I'd really focused on engineering, but by that point I knew that math was what I wanted to pursue.
My mathematical confidence was sometimes locally up and down, especially at times when I was doing a lot of math-y things, like at BSM, RIPS, or during SCOPE. Overall, though, it climbed while I was at Olin a lot. My confidence in math started a bit higher than my confidence in engineering, largely because I had experience in math. The two graphs ended up at vastly different points, with my mathematical confidence much, much higher.
The difference in the changes in my identity as an engineer and my confidence as an engineer are pretty interesting. Before Olin I would have told you I was going to be an engineer, was going to study engineering. But it turns out that Olin's focus on actually doing the work of engineering early means that a lot of us are more likely than other engineering students to call ourselves engineers while still in school. Even with my shaky confidence and long periods of confusion about math vs engineering, overall my engineering identity climbed. Even when my confidence was low in junior year, my sense of identity as an engineer didn't dip too much. I had recognized what kind of engineering I liked and that it wasn't the focus at Olin (see I Am a MechE), and that helped a lot.
Also, my engineering identity always climbed a bit when I was in non-Olin contexts, especially when I was in non-engineering contexts. I've definitely noticed a pattern of using engineering and math, whichever is less common in a given context, to distinguish myself from other people. That's why there's a spike at the Joint Meetings every year. The first time I remember calling myself an engineer was at JMM. This pattern makes the increase at the SWE conference in sophomore year counter-intuitive, but that was because I saw a presentation on a job I could imagine myself having; it made me feel like I really could fit as an engineer.
The only real dip in my identity as a mathematician (other than coming down from Joint Meetings spikes) was at RIPS last summer. That corresponds to a dip in my confidence, as well. That research was a lot more frustrating for the first half of the summer than graph theory research had been, even when we were stuck in graph theory, and I felt like I wasn't contributing as much mathematically as the rest of my group. When we switched to the numerical part of the project, though, there was one piece that I really owned, and that helped me regain both my confidence and my sense of identity.
Unlike my identity as an engineer, my identity as a mathematician usually increases in both engineering and mathematical contexts. In engineering contexts it's what sets me apart. In mathematical contexts, I'm around other math-y people, and I love and identify with the math community. That's why there's a spike at the Joint Meetings every year.
And finally, here's a graph of my sense of community. I'll write more about this in the community post, but I wanted to say a bit about it here. The graph is pretty up and down, but that's not surprising. In a new context, sense of community will usually start low and climb, and I was in a lot of different contexts. The Joint Meetings were always great, and those peaks got even higher junior and senior years when I had BSM and then RIPS people to hang out with in addition to my older math communities. The speed with which my CLS group became close was pretty incredible. SERIUS was definitely the roughest summer in terms of community but was actually similar to my first year at Olin. I had groups I hung out with that first year, but it was really second semester and then sophomore year when I started developing strong friendships at Olin.
The biggest dip was coming back to Olin from Budapest. Olin just wasn't where I wanted to be at the beginning. A lot of people helped me adjust to being back, though, and I started hanging out with a group of then-first years; they're responsible for that large increase in the second half of junior spring.
Together, I think these five graphs do a good job of capturing some of the key pieces of my four years at Olin. I did a number of different things in different places. I struggled a lot with engineering and my sense of myself as an engineer. A lot of times I framed that as an engineering vs math struggle, but really the trends in mathematics were far more linear; I just spent two years desperately wanting to like engineering more than I did. But I also like identifying as an engineer and a mathematician and how it allows me to cross worlds. A lot of times I doubted that I was a "good" Oliner, but that comfort in crossing worlds is very Olinesque. It's not at all strange to not fit easily in a box. The line I walk just happens to be between math and mechanical engineering, and it was my community, at Olin and elsewhere, that helped me navigate that balance.
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