Olin: engineering through an interdisciplinary lens (part 1 of 2)

In an attempt to summarize the nature of my second semester at Olin more concisely than in my first semester posts, I've decided to write about how "interdisciplinary thinking" as an approach to engineering was a large part of my second semester, as well as how it is a large part of Olin's approach to teaching in general.

I took a class this past semester called Paul Revere: Tough as Nails, a course summarized by professors Jon Stolk and Rob Martello as the following:

Imagine a course block in which students discuss the cultural implications of 17th century iron working in North America in one hour, and design experiments to examine connections between composition and strength in modern steel padlocks immediately afterwards. In the Paul Revere: Tough as Nails course block, students don't just study materials science and history of technology topics, they experience them. Through a series of readings, discussions, and self-designed projects, students explore materials science concepts alongside the social, cultural and environmental factors that shaped technological and scientific history. Although the course includes many formal in-class activities, approximately half of all class sessions are flexible, allowing students to engage in individualized learning approaches. The projects are loosely framed, enabling students to develop key competencies while investigating topics of personal interest and controlling project focus and direction.

So, the best way of I have of explaining this interdisciplinary approach is by summarizing the three major projects I did for this class.

1. Test and analyze the material properties of the MDF (Medium Density Fibreboard-also "fake wood") found in modern ceiling fans, and compare how these functions/material design choices relate to the ancient counterpart of the ceiling fan in China, the folding fan.
   
2. In order to study the acoustic/material properties as well as the microstructure of bells cast by Paul Revere in colonial times, we cast metal tuning forks with different metal alloy compositions, since tuning forks are essentially a 2-dimensional bell.
   
3. After studying the properties of Non-Newtonian fluids such as oobleck, we wrote up a curriculum/educational plan for students to learn about non-Newtonian fluids from three different perspectives: elementary school, high school, and college.
   

(Once I get back on campus I'll be able to actually give sample work/images from these projects.) You can tell already however from the description of this course and the projects we did that it was very much an interdisciplinary experience. Critical thinking and analysis of material from two (or more) perspectives (in this case that of material science and historical analysis) is a valuable tool to the "renaissance engineer."*

*I define renaissance engineer to be whatever it is that Olin is trying to produce with its graduates, who have all allegedly experienced a "new and unique engineering edcuation." This term also applies to work done at other universities, of course, since Olin isn't necessarily unique in its attempts to change engineering education. Either way you look at it, the engineer of the future can apply themselves in an interdisciplinary fashion.

Look for the next post on this topic in a week or two.

my first semester at Olin* (part 3 of 3)

*See part 1 of 3 post for my definition of "Olin."


3- "Marco and the Lounge" a tale of humor, enjoyment, and woe. ;)

So prior to coming to Olin, I didn't ever really work hard at school. I know it seems odd, that to explain my schooling college experience I go back to my experience in the 3rd and 4th grades, but it's actually incredibly relevant. (Though it will make for another long post ;D ) In any case, I grew up in San Diego, CA but my home is in Tijuana, Mexico. The commute always was tough, and early on my parents decided that it would be best for me to attend school in Mexico for a couple of years in order to actually consider myself fluent in Spanish. It didn't work, because I wasn't there too long, but it was certainly a huge part of my scholastic experience. For this reason I attended a bilingual school in Tijuana for 3rd and 4th grades.

My school was incredibly competitive. Lots of students there came from families with plenty of financial girth if you will, so being told your children were smart and seeing them dress up formally (military style that is) was oh so fitting of their social class. In any case, the top student for English and for Spanish were given these big HONOR banner things, and since I'd gone to school K-2nd in the states, I knew English well enough that by default, I took all the awards. I came close in Spanish as well, but the point of this story is something my fourth grade teacher did to me. She didn't really like me. I was a foolish 4th grader, and I corrected her poor English in front of the class, not to be an asshole, but because I thought she might be teaching the other students poor English...despite my good intentions, I don't think I was all that tactful in my corrections... In any case, she ended up changing my grades so I wouldn't receive the "HONOR" banner thing, and it was a big ordeal that ended up going to the Secretary/Board of Education...I pretty much stopped caring about grades after that.

In fifth grade everything was easy enough that it didn't matter, but once 6th grade hit my grades slipped. I would receive high grades for most of my work, but then just not turn what I happened to not get to, and thus get zeros for that work. I didn't really understand how those assignments destroyed my grades, but from 6th-8th grade my parents constantly got on my case (rightfully so) about my lack of interest in doing well in school. Its not that I couldn't but it just didn't bother me at the time. 8th grade I started caring, but I did so much extra work for the teachers that I would not finish my own work at times. Once high school started I got my act together, but I hardly ever worked hard at what I did. Only in a handful of AP classes did I really work hard, and that was a personal choice, when I did work above and beyond what was expected of me. And then I got to Olin.

Well, merely going through the hoops wasn't going to work at Olin. My first assignments made me think and pushed the boundaries of my definition of what was considered "school work." Rote learning was a beast I'd tamed a long time ago, and to be asked to actually LEARN instead of memorize things "enough" to ace tests was mind blowing. Naturally, (and unfortunately,) I reacted poorly. I spent most of my semester doing "work" in the 2nd floor lounge of my dormitory. I sat in the same chair, for an entire semester. I did ok I suppose, but I also had an atrocious level of efficiency, and as a result had to pull at least a dozen full all-nighters that semester. Sure I enjoyed my time, I know I got to know lots of people because of my social tendencies that first semester, but that was not going to fly for very long. The worst of it all was that for several classes I was so close to pulling off something I would have been proud of, but I was always 10 hours short, 5 hours short... By the end of the semester I knew less math and physics than I would have liked and way more about card games, DDR, Guitar Hero, and other distractions that were huge parts of lounge culture...The second semester I vowed would be different. I would work hard, no matter what the cost, and I would NOT be "one of those kids" who never did work and just sat in the lounge all the time. I think I did that second semester, though. In fact, not only did I do it, I OVER did it. This is a story for another time, but during the second semester I became addicted to serious amounts of caffeine and had weeks with more than 100 hours of scheduled meetings and work, but....(<--don't ever do that.

my first semester at Olin* (part 2 of 3)

*See post before this for one possible explanation of "Olin."
2-my courses and how nothing prepared me for the work at Olin
I talked a bit before about how nothing prepared me for work at Olin, but never gave an example or any real explanation. So this is the first week of school, as best I remember it. We were still getting used to everything, still not completely settled in to college life not including academics when we were first asked to do actual work for our ICB Class. ICB stands for Integrated Course Block, the course all first year students take both semesters. The first semester is Calculus and Physics:Mechanics, and the class is taught by interweaving both math and physics while applying them through different case studies, projects, papers, and other activities that take place outside of "lecture" and in the studio environment, which is a large part of the time spent "in class" for this course.

In any case, I'd been to many college lectures, but this was different. We stopped regularly to do sample problems as NINJAS and Professors walked around answering questions. (NINJAs are like Teacher's Assistants at most schools. NINJA is a actually an acronym standing for "Need Information Now Just Ask" :D) In any case, our first assignment was to use a program called MatLab, (short for Matrix Laboratory) to manipulate data sets of temperature data and plot the information on graphs generated by the us using the program. Ahhh!! Most of us had never seen this program, many of us had never programmed anything before, and yet we were still expected to complete the assignment!!

Looking back it's funny how simple that first assignment actually was, and while it took hours to learn the program well enough to be able to complete the assignment, it would take me less than 5 minutes to do it now.

Anyways, that's what classes at Olin are like. At Olin you are thrown into something you've never seen before, allowed to struggle and make sense of it, and every once in a while professors throw bits of knowledge at you, enough to stir you to learn more and continue making progress. That's one approach, but another involves teaching us a mountain of material, and then starting a project which requires that we understand everything we learned only a day or two before. The project is a struggle because you still are trying to grasp concepts you've never seen before, but eventually you sort of learn to deal with the constant push towards learning and improvement. Then you can look back and marvel at how much you actually learned, even though at the time you felt like you were struggling to understand anything at all!

There are tons of projects worth mentioning but to be honest I would rather not spent the next two weeks writing about them. Below is a picture of a 3-D model for my "hopper," a project in a course called Design Nature where we had to design and build our own hopping contraptions after studying click beetles, grasshoppers, and other animals with jumping capabilities.

my first semester at Olin* (part 1 of 3)

*where, for those of you who do not know about Olin, means:

• a school with only 300 students, (which is only just the size of my K-8 elementary school)
  
• a breeding ground for interdisciplinary-based engineering work which utilizes project and user-oriented learning to stimulate "lifelong learning" of its students
  
• a tight-knit community of students, faculty, and administrators united by many things, including a "passion for the welfare of the college," a desire to innovate and improve American engineering education, and an understanding that in order to succeed you have to screw up, a lot.
  
• and finally, "fuck-awesome." that is all.
  

For more information about Olin, don't go to Olin's website. ;) Instead, talk to an Olin student!!
______________________________
¡Overview!
In any case, I expect this to be another long post. I've broken it up in my head into different chunks, which should make this post easier to get through and to read. I can't wait to get up to date with my posts for this past year, that way my posts won't be so freakin' long!...

1. arriving on campus, my first impressions, and work
   
2. my courses and how nothing prepared me for the work at Olin (part 2)
   
3. "Marco and the Lounge" a tale of humor, enjoyment, and woe. ;) (part 3)
   
4. final thoughts (part 3)
   

Here goes nothing.

1-arriving on campus, my first impressions, and work
So even before arriving on campus, I knew a majority of my classmates...That sounds like a lot, but that really only means about 45 people, since my graduating class has about 88 students :D A lot of us stayed in contact with each other between Olin's Candidate's Weekend and arrival on campus. It was sort of crazy to know anywhere from 1/7-1/6 of the students at Olin before I even arrived!! Today, over a year from my first arrival, I know every single student on campus by their full name, and most faculty (with a few exceptions), in addition to this I've also met a whole slew of administrators and other personnel. This right here is one of the biggest differences between Olin and other places. You know everyone, you work with lots of people because of all the team projects, and most divisions within the Olin community are contrived. The sort of community feel is huge at Olin; add this to the fact that the student body, faculty and entire administration is made up of amazing people and you've got an amazing college experience.

Now, there's more to college than being a part of a dynamic and active community; college is about learning and "furthering yourself" right? Well, the first month of Olin for me was a big shock as far as work goes. I'd never really worked hard at school ever before, other than a few flashes during high school and for projects and other big assignments over the years. At Olin, every assignment tests your limits, and asks for more than you thought you could give. Every project not only teaches you about the topic at hand, but also teaches you how to direct your own learning, the value of being passionate about your own education, and finally, it teaches you how to cope when something completely different and seemingly impossible is thrown at you. The response of: "you want me to do what?!!" from the beginning of the year turned into "sweet! when can we start on it and where in my schedule can I squeeze it in?"

how and why I chose to attend Olin College

Well, I know it isn't ideal to look back a year later at something and expect to remember everything as well as one would like to, but I'll give it a shot anyways. As you might expect if you've seen my writing before, I won't actually start at the beginning, which would make sense. Instead, you get to piece the story together as I see it in my head, which may mean jumping around in time on occasion. Enjoy.

From the instant I stepped on Olin's campus and talked to students, I knew deep down that I had found a home away from home, though in reality I was months away from knowing for sure that I would be coming to Olin in the fall. "Candidates Weekend", the first time I was on Olin's campus, is one of the more vivid memories I have had to date. I remember Marbrisas, and I remember asking Ato "Donde estan las donas?" I remember the soccer game when I broke my ankle sophomore year... I remember singing "...caminando por la calle yo te vi..," i remember playing hockey and our games, I remember learning how to mishandle a computer by banging on the keys of Nene's computer. :) (sorry!) I remember going to Guadalajara when I was eight well enough that the last time I was there this past summer I felt like I'd time traveled 10 years. The memory of Candidates Weekend is as vivid as any of these to the extent that I distinctly remember talking to dozens of Olin students, from those who would come to join me at Olin to others that would graduate before I ever returned to campus.

I've told a few people this before, but now I'll tell everyone. In all of my life, the two single best choices I have made have been the following.

1. Attending Saint Augustine. Now I know that the only reason I attended Saints is because of the fact that I have parents willing enough to sacrifice above an beyond what I can put to words, but nonetheless few times have I ever been so sure of something as I was when I told my parents I wanted to go to Saints.
   
2. The second of these two is my decision to attend Olin. The odds were heavily against Olin from the start, but it was most definitely the right decision.
   

Sure it was free, but to be honest, money wasn't an issue for any school I applied to. In fact, I think Olin is more expensive than any other school I could have attended. My college application process was very strange and in the end, extremely rewarding. The reason why it started "strangely" has to do with the fact that I knew nothing about college, other than what little I remembered hearing from Iliana and Erik about Davis. All I knew about college was that it was where Ato & Nene disappeared to for a while, and USD was a college that people occasionally got married at ;) In any case, when I started making my list of colleges sophomore year, my criteria were the following:

• number of engineering majors from the university,
  
• proximity to the city, where closer was many times better than further away
  
• being far away from home, where the safety net of family, good weather and high school friends would do little to help me become independent and "grow up."
  
• oh yeah, and by this time I'd finished doing the Preliminary SAT test, so I chose schools who's SAT range was approximately mine, scaled up a bit.
  

Well, the interesting thing about the list that came out of those four criteria is that without meaning to, in my list of 9 schools I had 6 of the 11 hardest schools to get into (at the time). Oops! What did I know about colleges? I didn't know what schools were actually "Ivy Leaque." My list, which initially consisted of: Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, MIT, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Wash. U in St. Louis, among others, would eventually grow to include schools that my counselor knew I could get into, like WPI and University of Miami. In any case, the reason why my college application process turned out to be "rewarding" and pleasant was the fact that despite assuming I'd see more rejection letters than anybody else at my high school, I didn't receive a single one! :D

Still, Olin wasn't high on that list. It was actually only added it because my counselor really liked Olin, even though it wasn't in the city, & it was tiny, which is not what I originally wanted at all, I included it in my list.

Flash forward to Candidates Weekend again. By this point I've looked at Olin a bit. I'm intrigued, and I can't help but think that the teamwork/project oriented learning at Olin might just put it on the radar of top college prospects. As I boarded the plane to leave for Olin, I couldn't help but think that I would be at Columbia come the fall. It was perfect! In the city, NYC in fact! It was large, it had engineering, and there campus was nice I suppose. After 3 hours on campus, before Candidates Weekend had even started, I knew that Olin meant business. In the first 3 hours I was given a tour of the robotics lab at Olin, full of robotic snakes, robotic legs, games and doodads, and on top of that, the sophomores I was talking to were actually working on them! I also got a chance to meet about a dozen of the craziest people I've ever met.

There are 300 crazy people at Olin. Every single one of them. There were students who engineered a hammock in their room without screwing anything into the wall, other students that were randomly unicycling up the stairs, another doing crazy acrobatic handstands in the middle of the quad (called the Oval) and others that did similar crazy things, but nothing stood out as much as the atmosphere of community and openness that knocked me out every time I talked to another student on campus.

After a weekend around some of the most interesting people I'd ever met in my life, I knew Olin was for me. Fast forward to when I found out I got into Olin. I never have told anyone this, but I actually sent in my enrollment form for Olin around April 12th (about two weeks after finding out I got in). In any case, Ma told me several times that I should really take my time, and that I should make sure that Olin really was for me every time I commented on how I thought Olin was it. There was just something Olin had that I didn't find anywhere else in the schools I visited. I sent in the form, and didn't tell anyone that I did, knowing that even If I had to take out loans for the entirety of what it would cost to attend Olin, that I would be flying out to Needham, MA in late August. Sure enough, I did, and here I am.

That's all for now. Next time I can write about my first semester at Olin!

my first post already has a lame title

Well, hello everyone. I'm not sure exactly what it was that put the idea in my head that I should write my own blog, but here I am anyways. The purpose of this blog is in my mind two-fold:

1. This is a convenient way of keeping everyone back home up to speed on what's being going on in my life, and having it will force me to post to it! (family, friends and everyone in between)
   
2. Sometimes it's just nice to not work and have some time to do things for myself, and the self-reflection that writing a blog imposes conveniently does just that.
   

I'm not exactly sure at this moment what it is I will be writing about a few times a week, but one thing is true. I know that I don't want to spend time writing things necessarily if they aren't useful or interesting. For this reason, feel free to let me know what I should write about! If you have a question or even just a random comment, send it my way!

This is only the first post, so I won't really talk about much right this second, but as soon as I am done writing this I will be sending everyone a link to this blog, and hopefully this will motivate me to keep posting!

It'd also be nice to have some direction as far as what you might want to hear about. Let me know what I should write about first! If you notice on the bottom right of the page there's a poll of topics, choose one or two that you'd like to hear about for next time!