What To Take Second Semester of First Year

This is a bit of a strange post to do now, but I've been thinking about it a fair bit, and this is also a question that came up at the Post-Graduate Planning panel at Family Weekend. What classes should an Oliner take during the second semester of their first year to best prepare them for summer internships and later Olin classes?

There are just two requirements that semester, Products and Markets and Linearity I, which leaves most people with only eight credits already scheduled. For the next couple of years Olin will also be running Quantitative Engineering Analysis (QEA), which will cover the Linearity requirement and take up eight credits, so the students in that class would only need to take one more class to get to the standard sixteen credits.

Either way, that leaves at least one class to be filled, and for most majors it isn't convenient to start on major requirements in the spring. So here are some suggestions for what students should take.

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.

SCOPE Stories Week 17: Nitinol in the Snow

For the past few days the temperature outside has been hovering around 0 C, and while going between buildings with one of our stents, the Materials Science major on the team noticed that the stent started acting abnormally.

See, this stent is made of nitinol, which is a shape memory alloy. When you deform it, it returns to its original shape, usually pretty quickly. So we bend the stent, and it bounces back. We compress it, and it elongates again, not deforming at all. But when my teammate took the stent outside, the outside temperature was below one of the transition temperatures for nitinol. She bent the stent, and it was cold enough that the stent stayed bent.

Of course, once we figured this out, we all had to go outside for ten minutes with a bunch of different nitinol stents and try this. It's fantastic. And then as we went back inside, the stents slowly warmed up and returned to their original shape.

Conclusions: nitinol is cool, temperature matters, and we're easily entertained by basic materials science.

Breaking Bolts and Exploding Glass: Thoughts on Materials Science

MatSci was, from the second week of classes, my favorite course of this semester. I was a little nervous about going into projects right away with no background first, but MatSci ended up being the best project-based class I've ever taken, and I definitely think projects were the right way to frame this course.

The Most Project-y Time of the Year

We're more than halfway through the semester, and I'm doing projects in three of my four classes. Here's a little bit about what I'm working on at the moment:

Back at Olin

Being back at Olin is still a little weird. I'm living in a different dorm, and most of my friends have already gone through that adjustment. I'm in a double instead of having a large room to myself in a three person flat. I don't know a quarter of the school. (On the first day of one of my classes, the professor had us all introduce ourselves because "There's always that one junior who doesn't know the first years," and the other non-first-years pointed at me.) I'm not taking a math class, and I am taking four engineering classes. Olin culture is very different from BSM culture, and the Needham/Wellesley line is decidedly not Budapest. It's a lot to get used to, but it's been great to see people again, and I'm starting to settle in. Here's what I'm up to as far as academics this semester: