Thoughts on Mechanics of Solids and Structures and Math Activities

My fourth class this past semester was Mechanics of Solids and Structures, or MechSolids, which is a mechE requirement. I also did a lot of math related activities. Compared to last semester, I didn't feel like I did very much math this semester, but what I did do was pretty varied.



MechSolids
I don't actually have very much to say about this class. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but I could never pinpoint why. The subject matter, statics and mechanics of materials, was interesting, and the class format was very similar to Dynamics, though the class wasn't nearly so grueling.

One of my favorite parts of the class structure was the final project. Chris asked us to come up with a project or activity that could be part of the class in the future, either going more in depth into something we had covered or going into something related that we didn't cover. I liked having to think not only about the engineering but also about how the class was structured, how my new piece could fit in, and how to best turn the really mathematical topic I covered for my project into an activity for Oliners.

NINJAing
This semester I NINJAed Linearity I and PDEs.

Linearity I was, once again, significantly changed from previous years, but this was by far the most effective version yet. I expect that the format will be the same next year, and it'll be nice to see the course stabilize a bit. There are still things that need to be fixed, though, especially from the NINJA side. For example, professor-NINJA communication was terrible, and the role of NINJAs was also unclear. A lot of class time was work time with professors and a few NINJAs floating, so office hours were much less important, which didn't become apparent until a few weeks into the semester. NINJAs were originally going to write solutions to the problem sets, but the professors would give us the psets in advance and then change them, so after a few psets they started writing the solutions themselves. We really needed a lot of NINJAs in class at very particular periods of time to grade and distribute quizzes and quiz corrections, but we often ended up with too few NINJAs at that point and too many floating around when there was no grading to be done. Part of the problem was that the professors hired fourteen NINJAs, which was excessive, and as a result a lot of the NINJAs didn't actually work.

As a PDEs NINJA, most of my work was in office hours. I also did some grading, but I spent far more time in both scheduled and unscheduled office hours. I really enjoyed NINJAing PDEs. I love the material, and I had fun working with the group of people who consistently came to office hours.

AoPS
For Art of Problem Solving this semester, I TAed a section of Prealgebra and an Intro Programming section. I also participated in a grading pilot for the same Intro Programming course in which I graded for the class every week, always commenting on the submissions from the same set of students.

Research
We came into the semester without existing problems, so we didn't end up submitting a paper this semester. We did a lot of work in a lot of different directions, both in L(2,1) labelings like we've done in the past and also in a different type of coloring, radio k-labelings. All the problems we started were much harder than we expected them to be, which is both frustrating and exciting. We're continuing the work over the summer and then in the fall.

Midnight Math
Midnight Math is the club at Olin in which we meet at midnight on Saturdays, dress classily, eat crackers and cheese, and talk about math. I gave a talk on something I covered in Extremal last semester. I think I went too fast at the beginning. I was concerned about spending too much time on definitions and being boring, but it would have been better to go slower and prevent confusion. But people asked good clarifying questions, and it turned out well!

Mathematical Competition in Modeling
I wrote about MCM already, but it was definitely a highlight of this semester. We ended up being ranked Meritorious. putting us in the top nine percent of teams!