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.