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.

Reflections on Senior Fall

I was originally enrolled in eighteen credits this semester, but after three or four weeks, I dropped down to fourteen. It was a decision I was pretty upset about because I dropped a class that I enjoyed and was taking for fun, but it was the right choice. I had underestimated how much time and effort grad school and scholarship/fellowship apps were going to take, and both SCOPE and Mechanical Design regularly took more than twelve hours a week each. I've had Olin classes take that much time before, but I'd never had two at once, and the fact that both were built around team projects (and thus team meetings) just made it worse. After I dropped BioTransport  (Transport in Biological Systems), some weeks were still rough, but I didn't constantly feel overwhelmed anymore. And between BioTransport and NLDC (Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos), dropping BioTransport was definitely the better choice.

Below the fold I'll talk about what I did this semester (apart from SCOPE, which is still in progress):

It Flaps But Does Not Fly: Thoughts on Mechanical and Aerospace Systems

MechAero is a course I should not have taken.

Part of the mechanical engineering degree is a mechE elective, and MechAero counts as such an elective. It isn't taught very often, and I was excited because I thought, based on the course description, that I would get to do a lot of analysis, especially analysis related to fluid mechanics. Instead, the course was almost entirely a mechanical design class with little to no support for learning to do mech design.

I'm going to be a senior?

My life is still mostly class projects (even more so now that MechSolids projects are about to start), though the weather is finally warming up, so I've also been spending time at Babson's baseball games. There are only three weeks of classes left, and registration was at the end of last week. It's a little weird to think that I'm already registering for senior year. Here's what I'll be up to this summer and next fall: