Reflections on First Semester, Part 2

This post is a look back at the past semester of Anthropology.

Class Update

I wrote about the current state of Design Nature (though since then, I found out that I'm on team Gibbon for the next project!), but I haven't mentioned recently how things are going in my other classes. Summaries of recent events in each class are below the fold!

Empanadas, Medical Interpreters, and Design

My past two Anthropology classes have been longer than normal -- three hours on Friday and nearly four hours on Monday. Long classes are often long and annoying, but these weren't.

These were field trips!

On Friday we went into the Jamaica Plain area of Boston and spent two hours walking around a mainly Spanish-speaking neighborhood. It's historically Dominican, but a lot of the people with whom we interacted were Cuban. We split into groups, but various people went into stores and looked around, found community playgrounds and gardens, got haircuts, and ate yummy food. I did several of those, but by far the most exciting was the yummy food.

We ate at El Oriental de Cuba, which is a pretty well known restaurant in the area. One of the few customers in the restaurant when we were there -- we were in the restaurant between eleven and noon, before most people eat lunch -- told us that she and her friends go there a lot for both the food and the community. I really like Cuban food, so I was pretty excited. Well, okay, my experience with Cuban food in general is pretty limited, but I'm a big fan of empanadas.

First Day of Class

Hello!

I'm a freshman at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, or just Olin. Today was the first day of classes after five days of orientation.

All freshmen at Olin are automatically enrolled in three of their four classes. The most advertised of these, and the one about which I am both most excited and most nervous, is Design Nature. Olin puts a lot of focus on design, and Design Nature introduces freshmen to the design process (and the machine shop) immediately. It is centered around two main projects, an individual hopper based on a hopping insect and a team project based on an animal with a goal that varies by year. This year the team project is a transporter.

The other two required freshman fall classes are Modeling and Simulation of the Physical World (ModSim) and Modeling and Control (ModCon). ModSim is centered around modeling projects and tends more towards math, and ModCon is much more of a circuits class.

All freshmen also take an AHS foundation course. AHS stands for Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and it is pronounced like Oz. My AHS class is The Human Connection, which is an anthropology course with a focus on aging and religion. Most people call it Anthro.

Today, I had all of my classes except ModSim, which is tomorrow. I normally wouldn't have ModCon on Thursdays, but because lecture is on Mondays and Monday is Labor Day, all the freshmen had ModCon today.