Project Wrap-up

Olin talks a lot about having a project-based curriculum. This post looks at all the projects I did at Olin. I considered when I did the projects, what kind of class I did them in, how long they took, and how many people were involved.

A Few Serious and Not-So-Serious Things I Did as an Oliner

In four years at Olin, I did the following:

Palace of Promise

Throughout junior and senior year of high school, Olin was my top choice largely because of its curriculum. I wanted to be doing engineering, not just learning about it, and I appreciated the focus on engineering starting and ending with people. It was the community that eventually led to my decision to go to Olin, but it was the curriculum and education model that initially attracted me.

Olin is its People

I chose to come to Olin over my other options largely because of the small community and particularly how strong the relationships between students and professors seemed. So, I wanted to take a post to focus on how those relationships ended up shaping my four years at Olin.

Left: with Professor Troxell. Center: with Rehana. Right: with Aaron.

Top left: with R rising senior. Top center: with C and K, rising junior and sophomore. Bottom left: with J and T, both rising seniors. Bottom center: with Amelie, a wonderful roommate and suitemate. Right: with Rocco, rising junior.

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!

The Problem of Grades

In my post on feedback, I mentioned that there's a complicated conversation around grades at Olin. We talk a lot about intrinsic motivation and so want to minimize focus on single number or letter, and as a community we tend to favor detailed feedback over just giving a grade. But in almost all classes, professors do still have to give out grades at the end.

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.

Feedback and the Test Tube

One of the key features of Olin is its experimental status. Innovation in engineering education is a cornerstone of Olin. That means constantly identifying what could be better and attempting to improve it. Part of the way that we do that is through feedback.

Reflections on SCOPE: My SCOPE Experience

Several people have asked me about how I think SCOPE went for my team, and this is my attempt to answer that question.

The Changing Composition of the School

The fastest growing majors at Olin are actually not majors in their own right but rather are concentrations within the Engineering major. Engineering with Computing (E:C) has grown an incredible amount just between my class and the current sophomores, and Engineering with Robotics has also grown. E:Robo became more popular starting with my class or the class above us because it became an official concentration instead of a self-design, and it has stayed popular.

Note that these are both related to software. Software Design has become an increasingly popular class for people to take as first years or sophomores; it often has a wait list in the spring with multiple sections offered, and there's now a section in the fall as well. As more people take SoftDes, the popularity kind of reinforces itself; Oliners who have taken the class tell other students that it's a good and useful class, and so more people take it. Post Graduate Planning is also reinforcing the class's popularity by encouraging everyone to learn to code and telling people it's easier to get jobs if you know how to code.

Religion, Diversity, Student Government

I write a lot of happy things about Olin. When I write negative things, it tends to be in course reflections, and the negatives are usually accompanied by some positives.

But on Monday night, the student government voted down an amendment that would have (in its final form) required that the student government consider the calendar of religious observances important to the current student body before scheduling an event meant for the entire study body.

Reflections on SCOPE: Corporate Sponsorship

Other than our presentations at Boston Scientific and SCOPE Summit, SCOPE is over. We turned in our report and all our other deliverables on Friday. I was planning on writing one reflection on SCOPE, but my thoughts on sponsors, NDAs, etc. ended up longer than I expected, so there will be multiple SCOPE reflection posts. Here are my thoughts on corporate sponsorship.

Reflections on Second Semester Senior Year Activities

Here are some thoughts on the activities I was involved in during my last semester at Olin. It was a pretty decent culmination of the things I've been involved with over my four years here!

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.

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.

SCOPE Stories Week 21: It's a Boa Constrictor Digesting an Elephant

Through the process of trying to change some of the properties of a particular stent in order to test a stent with our desired characteristics, we managed to pretty badly damage a stent. In this case, by "damage" I mean that we caused the stent to stay in deformed shapes instead of trying to regain its rest state.

We had a lot of fun with this.

At one point, one of my teammates pushed the wires into a shape and asked, "How would you mathematically describe this?" We debated for a little while -- kind of like a Gaussian, kind of like e^{-x}? Then Brian, our faculty advisor, said, "It looks like a snake swallowed something," at which point my teammate and I looked at each other and said, "It swallowed an elephant!"

After that, of course we had to fill the stent with runts candy to actually get it into a shape that really matched the Little Prince drawing.

(On a more serious note, we think we're actually going to get data soon, both from collecting it ourselves and from BoSci. Also, we've started on the final report. How is that already happening?)

Faculty Searching

I'm missing SCOPE for two weeks in a row to go on grad school visits to New York City...twice. (Yes, I probably should have planned this a little better.) As I won't have any SCOPE stories this week or next, I thought I'd say a little bit about something else I've been spending time on: Olin's faculty search.

Olin's calls for faculty applicants are here. It's a very broad search, which makes it really exciting to interact with all the candidates who come to campus. I've gotten to hear about a huge variety of topics over the past month or so just by going to the faculty candidate talks.

Faculty Searching

I'm missing SCOPE for two weeks in a row to go on grad school visits to New York City...twice. (Yes, I probably should have planned this a little better.) As I won't have any SCOPE stories this week or next, I thought I'd say a little bit about something else I've been spending time on: Olin's faculty search.

Olin's calls for faculty applicants are here. It's a very broad search, which makes it really exciting to interact with all the candidates who come to campus. I've gotten to hear about a huge variety of topics over the past month or so just by going to the faculty candidate talks.

On Math

tl;dr: Maybe we should teach math as math.

I sent out an email earlier this semester looking for students to join the graph theory research group. Joseph and I are both graduating in May, so we want to have some non-graduating students in the group next semester.

I got thirteen replies. From Olin students, I got thirteen replies. I've had two people later talk to me expressing interest.

We have both math and coding projects next semester, and a few people are definitely more interested in the programming side. While many others are interested in both and some of them might lean coding, part of what would make the project cool for them is that they think the math is exciting, as well. So essentially, I sent out an email asking if anyone wanted to do math research without many direct applications, and more than four percent of Olin said yes. (And we excluded the 25-30% of the school graduating in December or May as well as the tenth or so that will be abroad/on leave next semester!)

I know that's not a huge percentage of Olin, but that's fifteen non-seniors who would like to make room in their schedule to do mathematics, mathematics that might not get anywhere, mathematics for which we don't yet have answers, new mathematics. And that's enough to make me think, even more than I already did, that we do Oliners a disservice when we hide math away.

SCOPE Stories Week 12: T-shirts

From about 10:15 to 10:45 on Wednesday morning, the SCOPE teams floated in and out of their work spaces to look at the proposed SCOPE t-shirt designs. Well, okay, most of us actually emerged from our spaces to eat donuts, but the donuts were successful as a bribe to get us to look at the designs everyone had proposed. Each team had been required to submit at least one design, and several teams had come up with more.

One design was ridiculously intricate and included a reference to every team. One of my favorites was a simple design that just said, "Trust me, I'm (almost) an engineer." We'll see what ends up winning. I think the idea of a SCOPE t-shirt is a little odd, but it's a tradition.

Other than that, things were pretty quiet. Brian gave us comments on our first report draft, and I spent most of the day implementing those. We went through the outline of our presentation with him as well, and we'll do a full run through on Sunday. Our mid-year presentation at Boston Scientific is next Wednesday afternoon. Our mid-year report is due next Friday, and then we'll be done with SCOPE for the semester.

It's a little weird to be (almost) halfway done.