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.

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.

Thoughts on Dynamics

Friday was Expo, the last day of the semester. I’m more than a third of the way through college, which feels a little weird.

For some reason this semester didn’t feel like it was ending until the very end. Midway through the semester, I still caught myself thinking that it was just the beginning. I’m not sure why this was; I was definitely learning, so in general it wasn’t that I didn’t think we had covered enough material for it to be that far into the semester.

The class in which I learned the most this semester was Dynamics, which is a mechanical engineering requirement. It was also the class into which I put by far the most time. Below the fold are my thoughts on Dynamics.

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.