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.

Here's an excerpt from my application essay:

"I am interested in going into industry and working as a mechanical engineer in product design. For this reason, Olin’s real world focus appeals to me. I like that students take their first design class in the fall of freshman year and that design is an important part of the curriculum throughout all four years... I find it exciting that Olin students do so many group projects and gain experience instead of just working problem sets."

I turned out to be a little wrong about what I enjoyed and wanted to do. Nevertheless, the statement of interests I wrote the summer before college is actually not that far off from where I've ended up:

"I’ve studied a lot of foreign languages to this point, and I’d like to continue learning those. Maybe classes, but also taking time to read books or online articles in the languages.

I’d like to have more experience in engineering than in math. I’m not really sure what would fulfill this, but at this point my graph theory experience exceeds everything else.

That said, I really enjoy graph theory, and I’d like to read and work through some of a book I have. My goal is to understand more in the presentations at the Joint Math Meetings this year than I did last year.

I’d like to keep dancing in some manner. I plan to audition for Babson Dance Ensemble, but just dancing blues at Olin or going to a couple of contra dances during the year would be awesome."

I spent two years in a Spanish co-curricular, took a French course at Wellesley, took a Portuguese proficiency exam, and studied Azerbaijani and Hungarian abroad, so I did pretty well as far as foreign languages go. I ended up doing much more graph theory, and the book I mentioned played a big role in my first publication. Not only did I understand more in the JMM presentations each year, I gave graph theory presentations of my own three times. I did audition for BDE once and did a little swing and salsa at Olin, but most of my dancing was indeed contra in Cambridge once or twice a semester.

That just leaves the second point, which makes me laugh every time I read it. I don't know when exactly I stopped wanting this, but it was probably sometime during my semester in Budapest. I wouldn't say I have more experience in engineering than math, and I'm not sure I did at any point along the way. However, I've done work that I'm proud of in both fields, and I've spent a lot of time in the boundary region where engineering and math cross. If I could go back and give advice to myself in sophomore or junior year of high school, I would say, "I know you love fluids and roller coasters, but really, I promise applied math is where you'd be happiest." I don't know if I would have believed it, though, and I don't know if it would be as true as it is now.

If I could only go back as far as April of senior year, when I was trying to make a college decision, I would tell myself to choose Olin. To be fair, that's the only path I got to take; maybe I would have ended up just as happy or happier along one of the others. But in a place with a less project-based curriculum, I could have gotten so deep before realizing that mechanical engineering work in industry wouldn't feel right. Maybe I would have had a corporate internship early on and found out that way; I hope so. But I doubt I would have had the chance to do so much math modeling and find the frustrating, exciting, rewarding rightness of it. I wouldn't have done so much math research and teaching. I almost certainly wouldn't have studied abroad three times in a year and a half.

Maybe I'd be going to mechanical engineering grad school to do fluids, in the best case scenario, and that would be a good outcome. But it's not three and a half years in a graph theory group, a summer at an applied math REU, a math modeling capstone and two modeling contests, four or five other modeling projects, a semester taking five pure math classes, and a decent background in applied math on top of that. It's not four presentations at the Joint Meetings or TAing ten math classes in six semesters, and both of those were things of incredible joy. By a more roundabout way than I ever imagined, Olin helped me go home.

However much that process sometimes hurt, I believe it was the right path. I don't regret choosing Olin, don't regret choosing that community, flexibility, and environment. It was messy, but that's do-learn for you. I did and I learned, and sometimes I didn't really like what I learned (in terms of subject matter or myself). But Olin was also a place that said, "Sit with that. Reflect on that." Reflection was even messier and scarier and more disconcerting, but it was important. Olin's mascot is the phoenix for many, many reasons.

Olin's promise is of innovative real-life engineering education, of producing engineers and designers, not just engineering students. I emerged not-an-engineer, which would seem like a poor outcome given the goal. But in fact, Olin expects it of many of us, enough that one of my Candidates Weekend interview questions was about the value of an Olin engineering education if I didn't go into engineering. My answer was shaky at the time because I could not fathom a future in which I wasn't a working mechE. I hadn't considered it.

Now I have considered it because it's what I'm living. Olin taught me the mathematical modeling process and taught me that part of said process is doing work with the results. Olin reminded me again and again that this work is for someone, that there are stakeholders with identifiable needs and values. I came to appreciate the value of regular feedback and reflection. I learned how to be part of a healthy team and how to keep a team's health good. Olin taught me to look for the meaningful questions, to keep pushing and asking why (ask why five times, they told us in UOCD) until I found the core, meaty bit. It applies in design and engineering, and it applies in research, too. What is really the interesting thing here? It's how we find research problems, and it's how we write good papers.

None of that is technical, you'll notice. I did learn plenty of technical subjects that I'll carry on and use. Fluids and thermodynamics will continue to be relevant as I begin to study atmospheric science, and I'm sure I'll keep raising my eyebrows at any design that uses a set screw and asking questions about the transmission mechanisms in mechanical systems. I am still a mechE, just less than I expected. But going forward, the greatest value in my engineering education isn't already having studied fluid flow or knowing something about the feasibility of 3D-printing a part. It's about being able to approach a project, alone or in a team, with very little direction and get to a meaningful result that I can communicate well to my target audience. And it's about identifying how I could do better the next time and then acting on that.

I would choose Olin again. In some ways, I chose Olin over and over in my four years there. It was the right decision every time.