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.

Changing the Curriculum

Next year, Olin is changing the first year curriculum. (Again.)

For the past few years, there have been two semesters of circuits classes. Modeling and Control, or ModCon, is in the fall, and Real World Measurements, or RWM, is in the spring. They're each 3 credits, though 4 credits per class is standard at Olin. RWM in something like its current form was first run in spring 2010, so this is its fifth year. It's also its last.

This week was Course Fair, which means that we all got to see the probable list of fall classes (and a really tentative list of spring classes). There had been rumors going around about changes to the first year curriculum, and the course booklet confirmed them. Next year, the first years will only take a circuits class in the fall, not the spring, and it will be 4 credits. Why the change? Well, RWM has been successful, but a lot of people find ModCon pretty frustrating. It's not really a circuits class; the point isn't to learn how to analyze circuits, and everything in lecture is pretty abstract. The content really is about modeling and control, but a lot of students don't come away with a good understanding of control. What students do learn, though, is how to build a circuit neatly and how to debug. The other issue has been that neither RWM or ModCon has really been a 3 credit class. They took nowhere near 9 hours per week for the average Olin first year. There will be content cut in moving to a single 4 credit class, but the credit count will be more accurate, and maybe mixing ModCon and RWM will result in a course with the right amount of abstraction.

For now, the new class is being listed as "New Combined ModCon/RWM Course," so goodness only knows what anyone will call it. I also know nothing about how it will be structured. Will it have the half-semester RWM team project? How much of each current class will it cover? Where will the topics that are no longer covered in the first year curriculum end up?

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 1

In order to look back on the past semester in some kind of organized manner, I'm going to split this post (and all following ones) up by class/activity. This post is about ModSim and ModCon.

Class Update

I wrote about the current state of Design Nature (though since then, I found out that I'm on team Gibbon for the next project!), but I haven't mentioned recently how things are going in my other classes. Summaries of recent events in each class are below the fold!

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).

I Can't Believe I'm Writing This

Today was my first Modeling and Control (ModCon) lab. It wasn't a hard lab, but there was lots that could go wrong, and it seemed like everything did. There were also lots of students who hadn't worked with circuits before, which complicated things. (One of my friends from high school would have scolded me for helping other people before doing my own work.)

I not only had Electricity and Magnetism in high school but also a circuits class (EC, for Electric Circuits), and today reminded me of the EC labs. As I thought more about it, though, I realized that the ModCon lab today had very little in common with EC labs, other than the material and the circuit debugging. Eventually I realized that it wasn't so much that ModCon was reminding me of EC -- it was making me miss EC.

Anyone who spent much time with me during spring semester of my senior year will know that EC was my most frustrating class. Modern Physics 2 was my hardest, but EC was the one that took by far the most time. I had trouble with the labs and was a bit behind, then missed something like eight hours of lab while on a college visit. For weeks I was the first person into the lab on Monday afternoons, and I started going in on Tuesday mornings as well. The work outside of lab wasn't as frustrating, but there was plenty of it. I complained about EC more than any of my other courses.

I never thought I would hear myself say that I miss EC. It would have seemed absurd, but I'm also not as surprised as I should be.

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.