Four Years of Curriculum Changes

I recently posted about the changes to the first year curriculum while I've been at Olin. There have been a number of other key curriculum changes over the course of my four years here, though, and I wanted to discuss those as well.

Midterm Season and Spectral Theory

I'm done with midterms! Galois Theory and Extremal Combinatorics were some of the last classes to have exams; those midterms were on Tuesday. The Complex Analysis test was last Wednesday, and the Topology exam was the Wednesday before that. I've gotten my tests back in all my classes except Extremal Combinatorics, and overall everything went pretty well! While studying, though, I realized that it had been a while since I'd taken normal tests.

In my first two years at Olin, I took sixteen classes and only six exams. If I stretch my definition of exam, that maybe goes up to ten, but one was really a long, cumulative problem set in Transport Phenomena, and the other three were Biology quizzes, which each took a full class period to complete but all together accounted for only 20% of my course grade. Of the six "real" exams, two were self-graded based on effort (Physics of Waves and Bayesian Stats), and three were take home, open book, and open note tests in Dynamics. The last was an in class essay exam for Soviet History.

My exams for Topology, Complex, Galois, and Extremal were all in-class tests, so we had about 105 minutes to complete them. The first three were closed book; for Extremal we were allowed to use our class notes. All four of those classes will have final exams in December. Spectral Theory is exam-less, since it's based around us presenting our work to each other, and Hungarian will just have a final exam.

Halfway Through

Four semesters down, four semesters to go.

I'm halfway through my education at Olin. When I started this blog, I intended to document my experience in the experiment that is Olin. So far, I've mostly done this course by course, and this seemed like a good point to stop and look over the past two years as a whole.

Thoughts on Bayesian Inference and Reasoning

Dynamics and Transport were both mechanical engineering major requirements. I also took two classes that fulfilled general graduation requirements. The first of these was Bayesian Inference and Reasoning, which counted as my probability and statistics course.

Time

This has been one of those semesters when it never stops feeling like the beginning. I keep having to remind myself that it's Thanksgiving break now and that after break there are only two weeks of class and then a week of finals.

When I stop and think about it, though, it feels like it's been a really long semester. This past week, I looked back at my Dynamics notes from the first couple of classes and wondered what it would be like to do the first Dynamics assignment again now. I can tell that I've learned so much in that class. A lot of times it doesn't feel like it because nothing seems to get easier, but that's because there's always new material. When I wasn't looking, what would have been entire problems at the beginning of the semester became single steps.

When school started, I expected to take three language tests this semester: a Portuguese reading and listening test, the DALF French exam, and the DELE Spanish exam. I took the Portuguese test in late September, and it went really well, but I'm not going to take either of the other two. The DELE was supposed to be this past weekend, but at some point in the past year the Cervantes Institute in Boston closed, so I would have had to go to New York to take the test. With other commitments, that would have been feasible but not much fun. I'm not taking the DALF simply because I haven't put in enough prep time to feel comfortable.

On paper, this semester doesn't look that different from last semester. The only noticeable difference is that I added a second NINJA job. In fact, I'm spending fewer hours in class this semester. My Wellesley class meets for 140 minutes a week, not 200 like an Olin class, and last semester I had Bio lab, which ate two and a half hours on Wednesday afternoons. Despite that, I feel like I have far less free time.

What's contributing to that? First of all, Dynamics. Dynamics is the first class I've had at Olin other than Design Nature into which I regularly put 12 hours of work a week. 12 hours a week is what a four credit class is supposed to be, but for most classes, I don't actually do that many hours of work. For Dynamics, though, over the past three weeks I have spent more than 50 hours working. That's more than normal, but I'm never surprised to spend a lot of time doing Dynamics. I knew going into the class that it would take more time than any of my others -- that's just the reputation it has -- but I think I'd forgotten what that felt like.

Second, I put about as much time into my two NINJA jobs together as I do into Dynamics, so that adds up to more than a normal class for me, whereas last semester my weekly hours were more like a light workload class (5 hours a week). NINJAing has been one of my favorite parts of the semester. I love talking about math with people, and I've even enjoyed the grading. Discrete grading is reading people's proofs, which is always interesting. Linearity grading is much more rote, but it can be relaxing.

It feels like those shouldn't be the only two factors, but they're the only major ones I've managed to identify. My other classes and activities seem like they come out about even when I compare the two semesters. It will be interesting to see what happens next semester. I'm taking Thermodynamics, The Entrepreneurial Initiative (FBE), a Wellesley French class, and User-Oriented and Collaborative Design (UOCD), and I'll NINJA a couple of math classes and do research again. UOCD is a lot of class time, and the amount of out-of-class work varies by team, but the other classes aren't known as huge time commitments.

Year Two!

I'm officially a sophomore!

I came back to Olin on Tuesday, and classes started on Thursday. Below the fold is a basic overview of what I'm doing this semester, including classes, work, and activities.