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

In four years at Olin, I did the following:

• Spent two months in Azerbaijan and learned Azerbaijani.
• Spent two months doing chemical engineering research in Singapore.
• Spent a summer working on orthogonal polynomials for applications to nuclear fusion. Visited a giant laser. Spent weekends at amusement and theme parks.
• Took five math classes in a semester and then finally admitted I was going to math grad school.
• Was in a graph theory research group for three and a half years. Co-authored six papers.
• Was a teaching assistant for dozens of online math and programming courses, and did this TAing all over Olin's campus (including at an acapella concert), in my rooms in Singapore and Budapest, in the conference center hallway in San Diego, in hotels in NYC and Toronto, and in JFK airport.
• Was a course assistant for five math courses (one four times, another three times), only one of which I ever took at Olin.
• Took proficiency tests in two foreign languages, took courses in two others, and did a co-curricular in a fifth.
• Played hours upon hours of the card game Fish.
• Wrote a Swan Lake/Ugly Duckling crossover in Hungarian.
• Served as my church's lay member to New England Annual Conference for two years.
• Sang tenor. Sometimes alto. Mostly tenor. Also, preached three times.
• Had season tickets to the Boston Ballet for four years and season tickets to the National Ballet of Canada for one. Went to Boston Ballet shows with six different people.
• Also saw ballets in Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, and Oklahoma City. Saw the ballet Romeo and Juliet in four countries.
• Learned to bind a book at the Wellesley Book Arts Lab.
• Discussed do-learn education in French.
• Developed a food crush on Georgia (the country, not the state).
• Hosted a chocolate party.
• Together with Amelie, ate a pound of cookie dough in a weekend during a math modeling competition.
• Helped lead the Catholic Association retreat and Stations of the Cross despite not being Catholic.
• Measured the moment of inertia of a toy meercat.
• Built a solar water heater and a water curtain.
• Sewed a circuit to a kite and then flew the kite.
• Did math with the Putnam study group on the Academic Center windows.
• Was declared 'Number 1 Fan' by some Babson baseball parents.
• Had many long conversations while sitting on the floor in the hallway, at dinner, or standing on the Great Lawn.
• Baked without measuring spoons for a semester.
• Ate frozen yogurt in Gloucester while on an adventure.
• Went to a Dodgers game on July 4th and spent it explaining baseball to English and Irish friends.
• Watched The Thief and the Cobbler multiple times.
• Went on several midnight adventures to IHOP.
• Designed a wind sculpture themed after Goodnight Moon.
• Nicknamed one of our SCOPE stents Steve.
• Disassembled a rice cooker.
• Earned a mechanical engineering degree.

It was a pretty good four years.