Identity, Confidence, Community: My Olin Story in Five Graphs

It's been about a month since I graduated! I'll be writing some more general reflections, including one specifically about community, but I was inspired by a conversation with a friend to draw some graphs that I thought were interesting enough to share on their own.

There are five graphs: confidence as an engineer, confidence as a mathematician, identity as an engineer, identity as a mathematician, and sense of community.

The time axis is divided into semesters and summers. My first summer was spent on the Critical Language Azerbaijani program, my second was in Singapore doing chemical engineering research, and during my third summer I was at UCLA doing applied math research in the RIPS program. I was abroad at Budapest Semesters in Mathematics during my junior fall.

All the graphs are annotated, but the annotations are pretty small; click or zoom in to read them!

Four Years Worth of First Year Curriculum Changes

One of the things I always emphasize to potential Olin students is that the curriculum is in flux. One of Olin's goals is essentially to be a testing place for new ideas and practices in engineering education. Participating in that experiment is part of being an Olin student.

With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to list ways in which Olin's curriculum has changed while I've been here. It turns out that the changes to the first year curriculum alone are quite extensive, so in this post I'll start with those.

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.

Majors, Gender, and First-Year Courses

I'm treasurer for the Olin chapter of Society of Women Engineers this year, and the national conference was a few weeks ago! Olin sent eight students. We met lots of people, went to the career fair, and listened to some interesting sessions, so I'd definitely say it was a successful trip. Something I found very interesting was how different the general SWE population was from Olin's female population in terms of fields of engineering.

Before the conference, we had decided to sell t-shirts, and the SWE members at Olin had voted on a design made up of circuit components that spelled out SWE. There's a picture below! The 'S' is a power source, the 'W' is a resistor, and the 'E' is a loop of wire. A lot of us thought this was a clever design. Olin is about 1/3 Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) majors, and though there's some variation in major by gender, ECE is about half and half, like the school as a whole. We're also all required to take circuits classes (Modeling and Control and Real World Measurements) during our first two semesters at Olin. Even if they aren't our favorite classes, we all come away with circuit literacy and generally aren't afraid of circuit-related work.

SWE t-shirt!

Reflections on First Semester, Part 3

In which I really don't know what to think of Design Nature.

This is a Tale of Maggie Gibbon

Once upon a time, there was a gibbon named Maggie who lived happily in the southeast Asian jungles. Then, however, a developer arrived in the jungle and planned to cut it down. Maggie wanted to save her jungles, but she wasn't sure how. Then she noticed that the workers left the keys to their truck in the open while they took a break. Now, Maggie was unusual -- she had been born with magnetic feet! So her plan was to swing through the jungle, pick up the keys while the workers were away, and save her forest!

Between 11:59 pm on Tuesday and 12:01 am on Wednesday, Team Gibbon concluded that Maggie the Magnetic Gibbon was incapable of swinging, and she transformed into Maggie the Macho Gibbon, who was captured and wants to escape, so she's doing pull-ups while holding dumbbells with her feet in order to get strong enough to escape.

The transformation was a little like Cinderella, except not at all.

Last night was Transporter Night, I ate too much because upperclassmen are the nicest ever and bring wonderful food to the studios, and I did not get anywhere near enough sleep.

Look, a Gibbon!

Team Gibbon has a functional prototype! On monkey bars!

Well, for some definition of functional. Some parts of it are pretty fragile, and it's rather difficult to control, but all the components work, and it is capable of swinging! Its legs also move up and down so that it can pick up items with its feet (which have magnets). The leg movement is the best-working part of the gibbon.

Here is the frame of our second prototype (on bottom) beside the frame of the first prototype (on top):

When Hoppers Hop (or not)

The halfway point of last semester was last Wednesday. It's on the academic calendar, marked as the 33rd day. For freshmen, though, the real halfway point was not Wednesday but Thursday: Hopper Demo Day.

For several days, the studios had been set up for the demos. There was a table in the middle of the room with a black Delrin (plastic) square on it, off of which we would launch our hoppers. A tape measure ran from the table to the ceiling so that on Demo Day we'd be able to measure how high our hopper jumped. There was another tape measure on the table to find horizontal displacement of hoppers.

Before demo-ing, we all had to turn in two spreadsheets. The first kept track of all the Delrin we had used through our prototypes. The second and more interesting spreadsheet asked for the mass of our hopper, its name, and the amount of energy it stored. (Project specs said that energy could be at most three joules). That information was all put into a different spreadsheet which the NINJAs filled out as we demo-ed our hoppers. That spreadsheet had columns for whether or not the trigger worked, whether or not the hopper stayed in one piece, vertical displacement, horizontal displacement, and any other notes.

All we needed in class for Demo Day was our hopper, a print-out of our original design goal, something to write on, and a pen. The instructor handed out a sheet with everyone's names for us to evaluate each others' hoppers. First, we evaluated the challenge level of a person's design goal -- how ambitious were they? Then, we evaluated the extent to which the hopper met the design goal, ranging from "Not at all" to "Nailed it!"

Parts! (And An Experimental Prototype)

The past two or so weeks of Design Nature have mostly involved SolidWorks, a 3D computer-aided design (CAD) software. If you walked through the dorms or the studios at almost any hour, you'd find freshmen CAD-ing. First there was the motion analysis, where we CAD-ed a very simple version of our hopper and used the Solidworks motion simulation software to get a guess for how high our hopper would hop. Then there was the solid model, which involved CAD-ing and assembling all the parts of our hopper to get something that looked like our intended prototype.

My laser cut parts! There's another piece exactly like the little one, but it was already part of the in-progress hopper when I took this picture.

Math Prize for Girls, Part 2

After the awards ceremony, the group of Mathcampers went back to Random for a while, and on the walk there, I had the chance to talk to Stephen Wolfram. His daughter was competing, and she’s MC12, so he was trying to figure out when we were doing what and where we were going to be. We talked a little bit about Olin (evidently he was on campus a couple of years ago), which was really cool. Once we got to Random, GW, who lives there and was MC ’09, ’10, ’12 and RSI ’11, gave a tour to the people who hadn’t spent much time in Random. I sat in the kitchen with Brigitte on her floor and did some Art of Problem Solving grading.

We met in Lobby 7 at 5:45 and gathered a group of around 30 Mathcampers to go to Bertucci’s, a pizza place. I got to talk to some people I haven’t seen for a while, and I had a really good calzone. We definitely made good use of the Round Table Theorem (if there are n people seated around a table, there is always room for an n+1^st person).

A Hopping Deficiency

 The first project in Design Nature is to build a hopping toy based on an insect. There are lots of insects that jump with astonishing acceleration, resulting in very high jumps. The insects that most Olin students choose to use as models are click beetles and froghoppers. I'm going the froghopper route.

Our assignment due Monday at midnight is to come up with five design ideas. This has, to this point, been deeply frustrating for me. I'm having trouble coming up with ideas, and then I wonder if my ideas are different enough to count as different ideas. Was my design goal too ambitious? How do I actually achieve something like the mechanism I claim to be imitating? Are my designs too simple? What if I'm not including enough detail? What more detail can there be?

In short, I'm panicking a little about this, but I'm also trying very hard to figure it out on my own -- maybe to too great an extent. It might have helped me to go talk to one of the Design Nature NINJAs. I currently have two designs drawn, and I have another one that I'm going to draw tonight. That still leaves two more. I'm lacking in ideas for hoppers.

So far, ModSim has been largely programming and difference equations, and I'm familiar with both of those. I wrote an entire post about ModCon and Electric Circuits. I've never studied anthropology before, but none of the ideas have particularly surprised me, and I'm used to writing about readings. That makes Design Nature my hardest class.

Brave

In thirty minutes, two things which, for me at least, constitute being brave.

First, I went to a field to sketch insects. Next, I asked someone if she'd like to go see the Boston Ballet with me.

Neither one of those seems like particularly hard things, right? But I'm pretty squeamish about insects, and I'm shy.

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.