After Olin

Starting this fall, I'll be at Columbia University, pursuing a PhD in the Applied Physics & Applied Math department. I'm in the applied math - atmospheric science track, and I'm really excited about this.

I've known for a long time that I was interested in fluid mechanics and thermal-fluid systems, and my mechanical engineering courses confirmed that these really were my areas of interest. I also found through my courses and projects that Olin that I loved math modeling, and so I started looking into any programs where I could do fluid modeling. For a while, that meant I was looking into lots of different departments, including math, applied math, mechE, chemE, and oceanic and atmospheric science. Through reading geophysical fluid dynamics papers and looking at NYU's Atmosphere-Ocean Science and Math program, I decided that the research I was most interested in was in the atmosphere/ocean space, but my top choices of programs were NYU and Columbia, the two where I would be in an applied math department. After visits to all the programs where I was accepted, I was most excited about and comfortable at Columbia.

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

In four years at Olin, I did the following:

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.

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.

SCOPE Week 26: Last SCOPE Wednesday

SCOPE isn't ending quite yet, but today was our last SCOPE Wednesday. Our final reports and our posters (one archival, two for SCOPE Summit) are due Friday, my team's presentation to our sponsor is on May 9th, and then SCOPE Summit is on May 10th.

We had some data analysis to finish up today still, and we put in an enormous amount of work on the report. There are still a few figures to add and a couple of paragraphs to write, and our report will come out to be around 80 pages of non-code material, plus a lot of code, raw and processed data, and a user guide for our user interface.

Even though SCOPE won't officially end for another two or so weeks, we're pretty much done; everything after this week is just talking about our work. I'll be posting a reflection on the full year once all of that is over. Right now, it's a relief to be so close to done. Do I wish we'd been able to do more technical work? Absolutely. If we'd had an additional month with the data, I think we would have had time to figure out what causes some of the discrepancies between our models and the data. But as it is, we can qualitatively (and in some cases quantitatively) say what's going on pretty well.

I'm happy with our report, and I glowed a little bit when our faculty advisor told us that our second draft was "overall really good." Our liaisons also seem happy with how far we got, though we'll see more about how Boston Scientific responds when we go there to present.

Goodnight git, goodnight stents,
Goodnight data discontent.
Goodnight model, goodnight slope,
Goodnight Wednesday, goodnight SCOPE.

SCOPE Week 25: Old SCOPE Supplies

Someone did some clean-up/reorganizing at Olin recently and found several boxes of old SCOPE things, so Rebecca, the SCOPE Director, brought the boxes around to the relevant teams. The BoSci materials that were found were marked "STENTS" and consisted of two long tubes in plastic bags.

When Rebecca came by, she said, "I brought you more stents!" assuming that something marked with "STENTS" would contain stents. We pulled the plastic wrap off and looked inside the two tubes and were disappointed to find them empty, at which point we realized there was something wrapped around the tubes, and maybe that was the important part.

It was a diffracting white sheet of some kind of polymer. We're not really sure what it was for, but we had fun throwing it around to watch it float, wearing it as a cape, and making it do diffraction-y things. We also think we know which BoSci project it was from. One year, BoSci sponsored multiple projects, and so the teams were identified by general topics, polymers and stents. We believe the tube was marked "STENTS" because it was for the Stents Team.

SCOPE Stories 24: Graphing and Goals

I looked at one of my teammates today and said, "I feel like I've been doing the same thing for the past three weeks."

"Graphing?"

"Graphing."

We got eight more stents worth of data today (and still might get a few more). We also got updated information on stents whose data we'd sorted through last week. It turns out that some of the parameter values we were given were target values, not actual ones, and the actual values were quite different. So today was a day of redoing some of our previous data analysis, doing new data analysis, and trying to draw conclusions so that we can write the report.

Not all of the models are going to be in a great place at the end, but at this point the hope is that we'll be able to diagnose ways in which they're wrong. If we can say that Model B is making incorrect predictions for a certain quantity because of too strong a dependence on a particular parameter, then we'll be in an okay place. It would be even better to be able to come up with a list of dependencies (essentially power laws or something similar) so that someone else would have a better place to start in developing a model.

SCOPE Stories Week 23: A Very Long Stent

At one point today, Abe was very frustrated with his model and spent a long time trying to talk through the theory of it with Brian. About an hour later, he started laughing uncontrollably. It turned out that instead of modeling a 7.5 cm stent, he was modeling a 75 cm stent.

We have more data! Some of it's a bit weird, though, so we're still sorting through it. The hope is that we'll be in a good place with the data and the models by the end of Sunday.

SCOPE Stories Week 22.5: Wait, the Models are Working?

This past Wednesday, I was really frustrated about having errors in our models and not knowing how to proceed. We redid some of our testing and analysis, though, and we're actually in much better shape than we expected. Our models are behaving and matching data pretty closely, and where they're not, we've figured out how to fix them.

We haven't gotten to check all of our models yet, but we're getting a lot closer, and I'm feeling a lot better about what we're going to be able to deliver to Boston Scientific at the end.

We have a weekly Sunday meeting, and I was kind of dreading it today because I was so unhappy with the state of the models. But this meeting turned out to be quite exciting!

SCOPE Stories Week 22: A Modest Amount of Data

We have a little bit of data, which means we can start verifying our models! And by verifying our models, I mostly mean scrambling to try to find missing factors of two and trying to resolve a few more fundamental errors. I feel like I've been banging my head against a brick wall all afternoon.

Sigh.

In happier news, we pretty much have one of our posters done, we're making good progress on our report, and our user interface has pretty much all the features we want! The user interface being very functional has been helpful for all the comparisons of models to data that we've been doing, especially as I've played with changing things in the model...

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?)

SCOPE Stories Week 18: Sine's a Nice Function

Today was the end of a three-week sprint after having no SCOPE last week due to an Olin Monday  on Wednesday. This is also my last SCOPE day before spring break; I'm missing the next two for grad school visits. We spent today doing a lot of technical work -- finishing up development of a model, cleaning up numerics in the implementation of an old model, testing, and working on the user interface.

My accomplishment for today: simplifying some work I'd done earlier this week by talking to one of my teammates and our advisor, finding a mistake, and figuring out that a particular sine series has a very convenient sum. (I'm still trying to think about why, but hey, evenly spaced things are nice.)

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.

SCOPE Stories Week 16: Matrices and Springs

The beginning of the SCOPE semester has been a little rough. After deciding that we weren't going to continue pursuing some paths we'd considered, we've rearranged team roles, so there's been an adjustment period for that. It's also going to be a few weeks before we have the data we were planning to use to drive our main modeling work for this semester and to validate last semester's work. We're trying to both reshuffle our schedule to frontload everything that doesn't rely on data and start on some of the modeling work even without the intuition from the data.

This has involved reading some books and papers in fields with which none of us is familiar. Two of us spent far too long trying to make sense of a couple of pages of a book that were filled with entries of three different but related matrices, starting with one that nothing on the internet seems to explain. Also, one paper refers to the work in the area of research we're looking at as "sparse and not complete." Thanks, random paper; that makes us feel so confident that we'll figure something out.

Luckily, when Brian visited he suggested we start by approximating everything with springs, and that was easy to work out. We're taking some data on our own while we wait for the more comprehensive data sets, so hopefully we'll know within the next couple of weeks whether that simple a model is effective or not.

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):

SCOPE Stories Week 13: Midyear Presentation

This week we presented at Boston Scientific!

The presentation went really well. BoSci is pretty happy with the work we've done and the direction we're going. There were more people at the presentation than we expected, and they asked some helpful questions and gave us some good ideas about what work they thought was most worth pursuing. They also asked us about whether our model could handle a feature we had just found out about... and the answer, happily, was yes!

Also, from today, this is a picture of a very happy product owner with our 51 page double-sided midyear report, two thirds of which is derivation/code appendices:

There's a little bit of work that we'll do next week so that everything is set up well for January, but for the most part, SCOPE is done for the semester.

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.

SCOPE Stories Week 11: How Is It Almost The End?

Brief summary of SCOPE life since week 8: In week 9 we had a sprint review that didn't go as well as we would have liked and didn't generate particularly useful feedback. In week 10, we went to Boston Scientific and were able to do a co-design with our liaisons on our user interface, which was really exciting! Sadly, I was sick, so I didn't get to go.

Life right now: Midyear report. Sprint review presentation. Midyear report. Midyear presentation. Midyear report. SCOPE t-shirt design? Midyear report.

I'm in charge of our midyear report, and until Friday afternoon I'm pretty sure it'll be where I put a lot of my time.

The sprint review today went a lot better than the one two weeks ago. There were still parts of it that weren't great, but they're easier to fix, and we did a much better job getting the feedback we were seeking. We had also finally gotten some new mathematical progress to discuss!

SCOPE Stories Week 8: Bobsleds + Beanbags + Armadillos

Today we had a one hour teaming workshop. The most exciting part about this initially was that it was run by two Class of 2014 alums, and it was fantastic to see them again. They had us split up into groups with people not on our teams, and then we did an activity that was mostly an excuse to go through feedback after the activity. I'm not sure how well that worked, but the activity was fun in a ridiculous way. They gave each group of five or six students two slips of paper with nouns on them and gave us eight minutes to come up with a product based on those two nouns and develop a visual representation, and then each group had one minute to pitch the product to the class. Every group member had to speak in the presentation.

Our two nouns were bobsleds and beanbags. After coming up with a few ideas, we went with perhaps the most obvious, a bobsled sport in which you also have to toss beanbags at targets. With four minutes left, though, each group was given an additional noun to incorporate into the idea. We got armadillos, so naturally we decided that you also have to essentially bowl with armadillos as you go through this course. Note: this is a terrible idea on so many levels.

In other news, we have a new record for how high a stent can bounce, and we don't think we'll ever be able to break it, so the Stent Olympics have been won.

SCOPE Stories Week 7: Progress

I'm officially a quarter of the way done with SCOPE! That's a little weird, because a lot of times it feels like we're still just getting started.

Best moment of this week: our liaison told us we were making progress much more quickly than Boston Scientific had expected!

I'm perhaps even more excited, though, about what comes next. So far, a lot of our work has been in understanding and implementing models in which we already have a lot of confidence. We're still going to verify them, but we're reasonably sure the data will align with the model's predictions. Unfortunately, those models only apply to a few stents, and we want to produce something that covers a wide range of geometries and materials. So our big task between Wednesday and Sunday is a combination of literature review and ideation to figure out how to best represent different types of stents. I think we'll get to the really mathematical bit of the project very soon!