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.