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!

Thoughts on Spring 2015 Activities

Here's a little bit about what I did this semester that wasn't related to classes or math!

Halfway Through

Four semesters down, four semesters to go.

I'm halfway through my education at Olin. When I started this blog, I intended to document my experience in the experiment that is Olin. So far, I've mostly done this course by course, and this seemed like a good point to stop and look over the past two years as a whole.

Thoughts on Sophomore Year Activities

I did a lot of non-academic things this year, so here's a bit about the most exciting ones!
 
Passionate Pursuit
In the spring, I did a Passionate Pursuit in Soviet ballet. I watched a lot of videos of old ballets: The Red Poppy, The Stone Flower, two versions of Romeo and Juliet, two versions of Spartacus, and short made-for-TV versions of Swan Lake, Flames of Paris, and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. I also watched Children of Theatre Street, which is about the Vaganova school, and the ballet parts of the Sochi Olympics opening and closing ceremonies. I reread relevant parts of Apollo's Angels, a ballet history book, and read Swans of the Kremlin, which is about Soviet ballet from the beginning of the Soviet Union to about 1968. I also watched a lot of short videos and read a variety of things that my mom or I found online. All of this was a lot of fun.

I'd said when I applied for credit that I would write a paper and present at Expo. I decided to write and present about which ballet of the of the seven mentioned above is the most Soviet ballet - which one best represents Soviet ballet as a whole. I cheated a little and gave two answers, Romeo and Juliet and Spartacus. Presenting a non-technical poster at Expo was really interesting. I'd only ever presented modeling or math projects before, and I talked to an entirely different group of people than normal. Some of the people who came by my poster were a lot of parents, some middle school girls who dance, the computer networks professor, the head of the machine shop, and people from Olin's department of family and alumni relations. Like normal, I still came up with a short description of what I'd done, but I had more in-depth conversations than I have when I present my graph theory research.

Church, Disciple, and OCF
Both at Christ Church and in Olin Christian Fellowship (OCF) this year, I've been involved in a lot of discussions about the future. I was on the Strategic Team at Christ Church, talking about selling the church building vs. not and what our options would be in either case. We lead an all church service/meeting in February, and people prefer the visions of a future in which we do sell the building, so right now we're exploring options from there. As for OCF, the leadership team this year was essentially all seniors. The current leadership and the future leadership had meetings once a week starting just before spring break. The future leadership is two rising sophomores, Michel and Sonia, and me. Michel and Sonia are co-presidents for next year. The big decision that came out of all of those meetings was the choice to no longer be associated with Cru and, through that, be more welcoming to all Christians on campus.

Una Conversación Oblonga

I've thought since my first year of Mathcamp that mealtime conversations are some of the best indicators of how I fit in a group of people. At Mathcamp and my high school, I loved the interesting (and often highly amusing) conversations at lunch and supper, and my mealtime conversations with people at Candidates' Weekend gave me a better feel for the Olin community and for the other potential members of my class than almost anything else. In the end, the sense of the Olin people that I got while sitting in the dining hall was a big factor in my decision to come to Olin. They seemed like my kind of people.

My expectations for mealtime conversations have been completely met, and starting this past Tuesday, the conversations have grown even more entertaining, at least three times a week. Tuesday was the first meeting of Por Supuesto, the Spanish conversation co-curricular.

Co-curriculars are student activities at Olin that are organized by faculty, and they count for non-degree credit. (That means they don't help students graduate, but they are on transcripts.) They don't have to have any academic nature, though some do, and many repeat year after year. Por Supuesto is one of the oldest co-curriculars, occurring every fall, and it is currently run by Oscar, a Puerto Rican electrical engineering professor who is also one of my ModCon teachers.

Por Supuesto lends itself to being the kind of activity that students do year after year. It doesn't get boring or repetitive because it's talking to and hanging out with people. That means that lots of students do Por Supuesto during all four years of Olin, so the Por Supuesto members really get to know each other, and there's definitely a Por Supuesto culture of sorts. This year, half of the students are seniors, there are no juniors, and then there are some sophomores and six freshmen. Not everyone comes to every meal -- I don't know how we'd seat that many people -- but people come when they can to eat, speak Spanish, and laugh.