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!

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!

Thoughts on Spring 2015 Activities

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

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.

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!