Follow-up: Why Olin Is Racist

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Hi again, here is another article from Olin’s resident angry black lady (a title I’ve heard around campus used to describe me). For freshmen I would suggest reading my previous two Frankly Speaking articles, “Olin Is Racist” and “Follow Up On Olin Is Racist”, before this one to best understand my points and perspective. For those of you who don’t want to go read old articles, I’ll give a quick summary here:

I’m a black female student at Olin and last year I sent an article to Frankly Speaking describing all the ways I have been mistreated, discriminated against, and insulted at Olin for my race. highlighting an instance where another Oliner told me to my face that, “people like you don’t belong here,” insinuating it was about my race. It is an undeniable fact that Olin is racist and needs to be improved, but recently I was asked about my article and I started thinking about why Olin is racist. It’s a good question, and while there is no one decisive answer, I have a few reasons that contribute to racism on campus. 

  1. There are not enough black students: The other day a friend and I were wandering through the Campus Center and ended up in the 3rd floor hallway across from PGP. Shiny class portraits of past and current Olin classes hang on the wall with pride. Jokingly, we decided to look through each class picture and count up the number of black students we see. The game started out fun, like an Olin version of Where’s Waldo, but quickly got depressing when we realized how few black people there have been. Our final count was 52 students. In almost 20 years of graduating classes, only 52 black people have graduated from Olin. You might be thinking: “Olin is a small school, these numbers make sense,” but I did some research: Olin has had approximately 2000 students, so in the entire history of Olin, only 2.6% of students have been black. This is low even compared to other engineering schools. The percentage of black students in the history of MIT is 5%, and at CalTech, 7%. Around 14% of the American population is black, so a diverse school should have approximately 14% black students. Never in Olin’s history has there been a time where the percentage of black students in the student population was 14%. The percentage of black students currently at Olin is 4.5%, that is already an accomplishment for us. Many non-black Oliners will never meaningfully interact with a black Oliner, so how can they fix their internal racism without working with black engineers long-term?
  1. There are not enough black faculty: There are currently 2 black professors and 3 black associate professors at Olin. Out of 39 full time professors, only 12.8% are black. Even still, only in the past 5 years has the number of black professors at Olin dramatically increased, as originally this school was founded with no black professors involved. Non-black Oliners have less chances to interact with black engineers. Without exposure or a guiding hand, Oliners will never learn to let go of biases or hateful stereotypes. Furthermore, prospective black students don’t get to see themselves reflected or represented in the faculty, making this school unappealing to them, and contributing to reason 1. 
  1. Olin is designed to exclude black students: Olin college recruiters go to high schools that are majority white and Asian, and have historically avoided advertising at schools with majority black and brown students. Olin made a decision to not promote at those kinds of schools knowing that many prospective black engineers looking for a great college will not know about us and never apply. On top of this fact, to be admitted into Olin, prospective students are required to have taken calculus. Many schools in low-income neighborhoods that primarily serve black students don’t offer Calculus because of underfunding. When a black person goes to a mostly white high school like I did, it’s a battle for us to get into advanced math and science classes. In my senior year of high school I wanted to take AP Calculus, and requested it, but was placed in Statistics because my vice principal thought I wouldn’t be able to handle “the academic rigor of AP Calculus,” despite the fact I had a straight-A report card. I had to petition my school to put me into AP Calculus, and I ended up thriving in the class (I even got a perfect score on the AP exam, no joke). However, other black students at my school weren’t as lucky. They were also automatically placed in the lowest level classes, but most of them failed in their petition and never got to take advanced classes that could have helped their college applications. It is not a secret in the educational world that black students are systemically excluded from taking this class.  Last year, Olin ran a beta program that partnered with a math camp to sponsor incoming first-years to learn calculus before attending—but this option was not advertised anywhere online, and to access it, students had to personally reach out to admissions after acceptance and organize the lessons themselves. The fact that Olin was designed with a calculus requirement that directly disadvantages students of color demonstrates an internal attempt to keep black students from attending Olin.
  1. Black people at Olin are not respected: Every black student at Olin has been called by the wrong name repeatedly, even by the same people after correction. How would you feel if people don’t work hard enough to remember who you are? How would you feel if your own professors grouped you into a character in their head with all of the other students who share your pigmentation rather than taking the time to get to know you and differentiate you from other students who look like you? This is blatant disrespect and humiliation that black Oliners are forced to live with. People ignoring this issue spreads the internal belief that we are all the same and negligibly different from one another. But it’s more than just names. It’s hard to verbalise microaggressions and small acts of disrespect, but I have a story that I think conveys these effects. At the start of this semester my friend, another black Oliner, and I went on a grocery run together. When we were driving back to campus and turning into Lot B, a white woman stood in front of the car and asked “Are you guys lost? This is Olin College.” We told her we weren’t lost and her reply was “Well, this is student parking.” Once we corrected her and explained we were both students, she walked away with a confused look on her face. For those who can’t understand the racism in this situation, my friend and I were assumed to not be Olin students, which is an odd assumption to make about 2 college-aged students on Olin’s campus. And what’s worse was that we were at first assumed to not even have a reason to be at Olin. This woman’s first thought was that 2 black students shouldn’t be here and tried to shoo us away. We should not be harassed like this on our own campus. 

These are the simple reasons I can name without going into the larger history of deep rooted prejudice in education and eternal biases Americans are raised on. The main point is that Olin is a toxic environment towards black people, and in 25 years of operation has failed to make proper actions to address these issues. Olin needs to change, and until it does, expect more articles from Olin’s Resident Angry Black Lady. 

Olin is Not a Jewish Space

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Nearly 10% of Olin’s campus is Jewish. Consistently I can find between eight and ten Jewish students in every class. Compare that to the national population of two percent, and I expected a very different campus culture when I came to Olin. I would imagine people talking about the holidays in casual conversation, or find dining hall meals dedicated to the larger festivals. This does not happen at Olin—not in the years I’ve been here, and I don’t foresee this changing any time soon. 

From a top-down perspective, Olin is too small to appeal to observant Jewish students. There’s too much work for resting on the Sabbath. The dining hall doesn’t serve kosher meals. We don’t have a Hillel chapter. In case you don’t know, that’s an affiliation with the largest international organization dedicated to providing Jewish students resources on campus, and our school is too small to receive their services. 

Because of these top down limitations, students are restrained from creating their own bottom-up solutions. The school’s structure discourages observant Jews from attending Olin. The students here who try to run events operate on severe deficits in Jewish knowledge, and there’s no time at Olin to study up on how to properly run a celebration. Student initiatives barely get off the ground and seldom reach the broader Jewish community. Thus, Jewish life remains vacant. 

When I came to Olin, I wanted to explore more what it meant to be Jewish at college. I visited Jewish organizations at other schools, each with their pros and cons. Brandeis was too far away, Wellesley felt strange being a man, and the prayers at Babson were sexist sometimes. Then I went abroad for a semester and the one service I attended there made me so upset I wrote a FS article about it (It’s one of my proudest. You should read it if you haven’t). I gave up looking after that. 

Judaism at Olin is a journey traveled alone, and the institution will not help you through it. Heed my warning: The dining hall will NOT give you the food you need for Passover. 

That’s where JOO fits in. The Jewish Organization at Olin is left in a terrible position. The resources are sparse, the leadership lacks expertise, and our most active member is a baptised Catholic (we love you Azzy). Historically, JOO buys food from local Jewish vendors a few holidays a year and hosts small celebrations. However, these events could serve a greater purpose. These food events could gather Jewish students before the holidays, and we can popularize all the inter-school activities that happen in the near future. JOO doesn’t need to be a hub of Jewish culture at Olin. It can be a vehicle to transport Olin Jews to the communities they find solace with.

Serving as a guide instead of the host enables JOO to stay lean and serve the community with greater precision. It can focus its small events toward building something greater, and it can stay true to a mission instead of what I saw as failing to live up to its name. 

Seeing so many freshmen stop by on Rosh Hashanah for apples and honey filled me with hope. This FS would have been far more pessimistic otherwise. I hope to see more people going to Babson Chabad, and I recently became friends with a few members of the Wellesley Hillel e-board, so I’ve been going to their services every Friday. Let me know if you’d like to join.

Ivy Reviews Olin Library Books #2

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Fiction: Yellowface by R. F. Kuang, 2023

June Hayward, a self-described “brown-eyed, brown-haired basic white girl” from the Philly suburbs, will never be as successful of an author as her counterpart Athena Liu. While June’s debut novel is passed over again and again, Athena is dubbed “publishing’s newest prodigy … here to tell the AAPI stories we need” after her debut novel is nominated for Booker, Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards. According to June, Athena is “diverse enough” to succeed. Then Athena dies, and June finds the finished draft of her next novel.

What defines Yellowface is author R. F. Kuang’s masterful use of an unreliable narrator. Over the course of the book, readers bear direct witness to June’s immersive inner monologue as what starts as a “simple editing exercise” turns into a finalized manuscript of June’s – Athena’s – next novel. Each step of June’s descent seems so simple to her: why not soften some of the white characters when they’re so “cartoonishly racist” in Athena’s version? Why not rename Athena’s characters—the unsung Chinese soldiers of World War 1—to make them more palatable to American audiences? Why not rebrand as “Juniper Song” and speak on a panel about East Asian storytelling? By the time the world begins to learn the truth, June is so lost in her own narrative that at times it seems she’s forgotten that truth entirely. Even by the end of the novel, June never stops spinning a story—“cyberbullied”, “stalked”, and “gaslit” are the words she chooses to describe what she’s experienced.

Kuang crafts an even creepier story by setting much of June’s internal monologue during her endless Twitter doomscrolling sessions. June has few in-person conversations to tether her to reality—her only real friend dies with Athena, after all. Instead, she drowns herself in negative reviews, online discourse, and discussions of what a “tankie” is—all while engulfed in a paralyzing fear that someone might find out her secret and shatter her newfound success. I found that an unsettling nostalgia for my extremely online pandemic years crept up on me during these scenes, though I truly hope that for other readers this will be an unfamiliar experience. Kuang’s commitment to grounding her narrative in the awfulness of the Internet makes June’s narrative spiral even more immersive to the reader.

Halfway through the book, though, the Twitter mob makes an unexpected move: it turns on Athena herself. Formerly idolized by the Internet as a “paragon of good Asian American rep”, her legacy is transformed into that of a “stunning example of Western imperialism brainwashing”. The mob accuses her of every niche moral failing under the sun: from refusing to critique the Tiananmen Square survivors that have become Trump supporters, to being a “champagne socialist” rather than a true Matrix, even the godlike Athena Liu cannot escape the vitriol of Twitter leftists.

Much of this is pulled from Kuang’s own experience in the online literary world. Her previous novels, The Poppy War and Babel, are both undeniably critiques of the horrors of colonialism. Yet the Internet cannot seem to decide whether she is too overtly critical or not critical enough. Even Athena’s in-world haters mirror the words of Kuang’s loudest critics, who described Babel as “heavy-handed”, “didactic”, and “frequently interrupted by lectures on why imperialism is bad”. But like Athena, Kuang is simply telling the story of her life. What’s different about this novel is that in Yellowface, Kuang is looking at that life from an outsider’s perspective. In doing so, she holds up a mirror to the readers themselves and asks: Is this how you view me?

Spankly Freaking: This Issue’s Rejected Headlines

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We Have Access to A New Supercomputer!

 “Great, this’ll make ModSim so much faster,” says first year

Homecoming Is Coming Up! You Should Get A Sign To Ask That Special Person Out!

Specifically a sign from Babson’s campus, or Wellesley if you’re feeling extra romantic

Brandeis Moves To Overthrow Babson As The “B” in BOW

“How are they even going to know?” states Brandeis’ president

Planned Overcommitment Intervention For Sophomore Class Fails As Time Can’t Be Found To Schedule Anything

OFYI Makes “Lunch” Session Mandatory

Attendance will be taken and a written reflection will be required after

Why Does The Unicycle Club Only Meet At Night?

Because they’re never two tired for it

Olin Releases Official Statement to Babsoners: Get Your Hands Off Our Balls

In retrospect, communication in regards to Ball Room access could have been phrased differently

The Freshman Flu Officially Dropped!

For those in the betting pool: reminder that COVID was 1.5:1 odds, Common Cold was 3:1 odds, and Hand Foot Mouth was 20:1. 

Seniors Respond To Claims That “Wow The Weather Has Been So Nice!”

The whole class turned, looked to the east with hardened eyes… “Winter is Coming”

Faculty Eager To Create Challenging New Curriculum Take One Look At Community Chess Board in Library, Scale Back Expectations

“How the hell did the rook even GET over there??” question faculty before accepting that their curriculum plans far overestimate Oliner’s intelligence

Olin’s Biggest Financial Mistake Isn’t What You Think

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I’ve now been at Olin for more than five years. Every month, I get a copy of Frankly Speaking pinned up right by my office door. The first thing I do is to read the headline of the front-page article, mostly because it’s the largest, most eye-catching thing. But the next thing I do is see the phrase written in the upper right hand corner: “Free, as in beer”. 

I have three major problems with this phrase, and because this has annoyed me so much for so long, I’m going to use this very platform to describe each of those in as much detail as one does when wasting time while waiting for some torrents to finish downloading intensive data processing to finish running. (Should’ve written it in C++ instead of Python, but oh well.) 

First: of course it’s free. I’m not expecting the Association of Frankly Speaking Editors, Emeritus to suddenly send me a massive bill for all of the issues that I’ve taken and placed in a pile somewhere on my desk and not cleaned since 2022. At least, I hope not. 

Second: there’s a troubling implication made by this phrase. To understand this, it’s helpful to know where the phrase actually comes from. It’s from the Free Software Foundation, at least as I understand it, but since I’m not going to go through a bunch of their webpages to figure out where the quote comes from, I’ll just tell you that I copied this quote from a Wikipedia article: 

“Free software” means software that respects users’ freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer”. We sometimes call it “libre software,” borrowing the French or Spanish word for “free” as in freedom, to show we do not mean the software is gratis. 

The problem with this phrase is that the term “free beer” is contrasted with “free speech”, and between those two, a newspaper that is arguably a bastion of free speech has decided to bill itself (no pun intended) with…the other definition of “free”. Also, does this mean that Frankly Speaking isn’t free as in free speech? 

Third, and finally: beer is most definitely not free. Where the hell are you guys getting your beer?

A Conversation with President May

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On Thursday, September 28th, Maddy (‘27) and Quinn (‘27) sat down with Olin’s newly appointed president, R. May Lee. Despite it only being the 9th business day of May’s new role, she had plenty to say and share about herself and how she’s approaching new horizons with Olin.

Quinn: 

Can you tell us about yourself, what you like to do for fun, and why you came to Olin?

May: 

I’ve been around for so long, it’s hard to know where to start. So I will start with the last of your questions, which is what I like to do for fun. I love to hike and be outside, and I’m excited to explore this whole area. There seem to be a lot of trails, and I hear Parcel B is excellent for bird watching. I love to read, knit, be with my family—although I don’t love arguing with them about what we should watch on Netflix, but that’s part of being a family!

I came to Olin because I heard so much about the innovation in engineering education that it’s been doing for the last 25 years. In Shanghai, as a dean, I sent some of my faculty from the School of Entrepreneurship and Management to Babson. I wandered over and learned about what Olin was doing for engineering faculty. I went back to Shanghai and told my fellow deans, “You really need to send your faculty to summer boot camp at Olin.” And it turns out that a few years later, they did. I was inspired by the idea that somebody would actually start a new college focused on improving engineering education. That obviously resonates with my own history, having been the person who led the team to start NYU Shanghai, and then being part of the inaugural team at Shanghai Tech. So I love the idea of folks in higher ed trying to do something new and different, that’s focused really on the students. And when this opportunity came up, I was just blown away by the ethos and sense of culture. I thought, “Oh, okay, this feels like a good fit.”

Maddy: 

You touched on some of your work with Shanghai, but we also know that you’re coming from RPI as Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer for Institutional Impact. What aspects of this work are you excited to carry with you to Olin, and how do you see your presidency at Olin as unique from that? 

May: 

One of the things that struck me over the summer as I was transitioning out of RPI and started meeting people at Olin: I realized I was going from the oldest engineering school in the country to the newest. Depending on your perspective, one funny or not funny similarity is the maintenance issues. As a 200-year old institution, RPI is constantly replacing pipes and walkways. Imagine my surprise when I received the email update about the big trench. I saw the pictures of the pipes in the parking lot and I thought, “Oh, this must be my RPI email.” And I looked at it and realized, “Oh, no, that’s actually happening at Olin too!” Maybe it feels like a non-material kind of similarity, but to me, I found it ironic that the 200-year-old and the 25-year-old institutions were wrestling with very similar things. My work at RPI was unusual in that I created a new position focused on strategy.  That was possible because I had a great relationship with the president who understood the importance of strategy and focus. And when you’re looking at a 200-year-old institution, you have a lot of DNA to work with. He pledged to start a brand new strategic planning process. I joined him to do that, and it gave me an opportunity to really introduce a whole new process of dialogue with the community. These are things that you’re really familiar with at Olin, but were really new to RPI. It’s a much bigger place, so there were more people to talk to and more iteration. Over the course of two and a half years, we managed to put together a terrific ten-year vision and three-to-five-year plan under his leadership. To some extent, I think that task also needs to be done here at Olin. You know, Olin was formed 25 years ago and we had a sort of infancy with a partner class and the first-years in the Class of 2006. Extending that metaphor, in preschool and toddlerhood, we were getting the school up and running while being innovative and amazing. Now it’s like we’re in middle school, right? The school’s been up and running long enough that we have to replace the pipes. And we need to think about, “Okay, what do we want to be for the next 25 years?” I know that we have Engineering for Everyone and CALL, which is fantastic. I hope we can refine and focus our efforts a bit across campus as to what we want to spend the next five years working towards. So in that sense, there’s a clear carryover from the work I was doing. I think the difference is maybe I won’t be the person doing all of that work, but I’ll have a team of great faculty, staff, and students. I’m hoping that I can sit in the dining hall, I can go to DesNat, I can be in the Shop, we can have informal conversations and do a bunch of those things with all the members of the community. 

Quinn: 

You talked a little bit about this, but Olin has had a lot of growing pains as the college is trying to find its footing and identity in the higher education space. How do you approach the tensions that come up when an institution tries to change its infrastructure and culture while maintaining the trust that’s necessary throughout this process with the community and the constituency of the college?

May: 

Somebody wise once said that you can only move at the speed of trust, and sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. People have asked me the same question in various forms—”What dramatic change are you going to make? What plans do you have?” My answer is that I don’t know. I’ve only been here for eight days. I have the data points that I’ve been able to accrue over eight days of these kinds of conversations. What I’m really hoping to do is ask a lot of dramatic questions and engage in a lot of active listening to get more data and to start to connect the dots and hear what people care about and what’s really core to the essence of Olin. I think it’s gonna take us some time to actually get to the place that you’re referring to. And I have to say that I’m really pleased that you have identified that getting to the essence of Olin’s identity feels like a challenge at the moment, because I think that’s one of the questions I’d like to answer with everybody. 

Maddy: 

There are, as you mentioned, a lot of things that are unique to Olin and they can also often be fun and quirky. What are some favorite weird Olin things that you’ve noticed since you’ve been here? 

May: 

You mean other than the avalanche of post-its that surround me starting with my front door? I walked up and said, “Oh, look, there’s Post-its covering my door that spell Olin, that’s cool.” I think that’s how this whole place feels to me. I’ll give you one example. I don’t know that it’s weird and quirky, but it did make me feel very welcome. When I first used the term co-creation at RPI, everyone looked at me with befuddled stares. And they’re really smart people, but that’s not the realm within which they operate. I’ve come from that world, but when I said it in my conversation with the search committee for Olin, everybody’s face lit up and I said, “Oh, this must be the place where I belong, these are my kind of peeps.” So it’s not weird and quirky so much as a pleasant surprise to actually enter a community where people were actively engaged in the practice of really ideating, prototyping, learning, trying again. I think that feels like so much a part of what Olin is about. And that is weird and quirky for a higher education institution, right? That’s not something that’s in the muscle memory of many other places. 

Quinn: 

Something that really struck me when I got to Olin was the difference in power structure with faculty and students. I mean, we talk about flipped classrooms all the time, but it’s really a flipped institution. Like professors will come and sit down in the dining hall and eat lunch with us. That wouldn’t happen at most other institutions that I’ve been at. Was that surprising and appealing for you? 

May: 

It’s definitely appealing. I was in the dining hall yesterday, and I’m hoping to be in the dining hall at least once a week for lunch. It does happen in other places, but I don’t think it happens in the same way. I think there is a kind of relationship that the faculty hope to create with the students, likely because of our size, and because of our ethos. Other places do have it, but it’s not consistent, either because of size or some other reasons. I’ve certainly experienced it elsewhere, because when you have talented educators, they’re going to create that kind of relationship, because they understand that their job is about learning. The best teachers are always learning. And the relationship between people who do high-level research and who teach, they understand that’s a holistic circle. That is an ecosystem that feeds itself. The difference here is that you really have that across the board—that’s one of the special things about Olin. 

Quinn: 

Could you tell us about a time that you felt really at home in a community and what you learned from that experience and what you took away from it?

May: 

Something important to know about me is that I grew up moving every couple of years, and it will surprise you to know that I was a very shy child. My mother would tell stories about how I was too embarrassed to say anything to anyone for the first many years of my life. But I think that the exercise of moving so frequently taught me to prioritize understanding the culture of the place that I was in and what was happening around me. I worked to understand the slang, the favorite foods, the habits—things that make up a community. It gives me comfort, and also it helps me meet people and make friends. Over time, I have learned to be comfortable with who I am, and therefore I feel at home in most places, though it took me a while to understand that it was within me and not something that I needed the community to give me. I realized if I could alter my own sense of perspective to be embracing and curious, in most cases it would be paid back. I don’t mean to paint the picture that I’m welcomed by every person in every place, but at least in my own lived experience, over time I’ve managed to feel some sense of community where ever I’ve landed. And I’m certainly feeling very welcome at Olin. I’m feeling very at home, even if I never would have expected that it would be in a suburb of Boston. 

Maddy: 

Life takes us crazy places, like Needham Massachusetts. 

May: 

Yes, exactly. What you learn is sometimes it’s about the geographical place, and sometimes it’s about the spiritual place, right? People say, “Where do you consider home?” My family would say New York City. Sometimes that’s how we define home. For me, home right now is Olin. It happens to be in Massachusetts. And I’m committed to learning about Boston and this whole area. I was really confounded by the idea that I had spent my whole life committed to living in cities and living in New York, and now I would be in the suburb of all suburbs. It’s very quiet at 8 pm here. You can’t walk out and go to the corner deli and get a quart of milk. It took me a while to go from being anxious or worried about that to thinking “Okay, this is going to be an adventure.” I did get lost on my first run. I went out without a phone thinking I’d just run straight and come back… that’s not what happened. Then I realized that every street was looking the same. Every house was looking the same. I had no idea where I was. 

Quinn:

Have you gotten to explore any parts of Boston at all? Have you taken the T?

May: 

Our daughter is a rising sophomore at Tufts, so we have spent some time navigating the Somerville, Medford, Cambridge part of Boston. And last year when we were here visiting, you know, we took the T, explored some areas of Boston, went to the Isabella Gardner Museum. I would not say that I am fluent in Boston yet. I think that will come with time. 

Quinn: 

Understandable!

[As our interview devolved into delightful conversation, the topic of Collaborative Design at Olin came up.]

May: 

I taught a version of Collaborative Design when I was in Shanghai, so I kind of have a sense of the class. I’d love to see how it’s taught here. 

Quinn: 

That’s awesome. What are some highlights from that experience, teaching that class similar to CD? 

May: 

I taught it in Shanghai to Chinese students who were engineers and scientists. They weren’t like you guys. You came into this excited about that, but they came to the class thinking, “Oh my God, this has nothing to do with math or engineering. Why are they making us take this?” The first semester was an unmitigated disaster. They hated it! And I had folks from IDEO teaching all the things that you love—the Post-its, the brainstorming, the put-yourselves-in another’s shoes, go out and do the field interviews, all that—my students hated it. To them, it just was a giant waste of time, and they were not shy in saying that. So I had to cancel the spring semester classes and redesign the whole class. I had to start from scratch. I had to really think about what was the essence of what we were trying to teach. Who were we trying to teach? What was it going to take to kind of get them there? What was the balance of direction versus exploration? They had a much longer road to get to the  starting point for most Oliners, and culturally, they were in a very different place. Asking people about their feelings is not something that really happens in Asian cultures and certainly not in China, right? So there was a lot of just going back to the brass tacks of, well, what are we really trying to achieve here? And then the second piece of that was how big the class was. How many students are there in CD here? 

Quinn: 

About 100, with teams of four to five. 

May: 

Right. Where I came from, you’d have 24 people in a section, and then they would break up into teams of four or five. The leadership in China said to me, “We have over a billion people here, so doing things 25 people at a time is not very sustainable.” And so what they said was, you have to do it with 100 kids in one classroom at a time. So I had to figure out how to break them into teams, and then I had to figure out how to manage the teams. Just think about what you do in CD if you are in a team, and you’re reporting back out and getting feedback. If you have 20 teams and you have one hour to do that, it’s not very much. 

Quinn: 

Here, there’s four faculty dedicated to that process and a whole host of student workers. 

May: 

Right. So I got to a place where I thought, okay, I can do this with two teaching faculty members, but we had no student workers. But it was really gratifying. It was amazing to see when we finally got it right, the “Oh, this is why it matters”. That was almost 10 years ago when I started, and now those students in those first two or three classes are all getting their PhD’s, and I think really embracing the spirit of what we taught them. As a teacher, the most gratifying thing that you can see is that somehow it made a difference in their lives and how they think about their work, which I think is how faculty members here feel about you guys. 

Quinn: 

Yeah, definitely. I hope you get to see part of the CD process in the spring because it’s really quite magical, I think, to see all of that just sort of unfold.

May: 

Yeah, I mean, I’m hoping that I get to. I’m going to sit in on DesNat, and ModSim. I thought my first couple weeks I’d spend more time with the team and the faculty and the students, just trying to get a sense of the place. 

Quinn: 

Is there stuff that you’re going to do to try to maintain that connection, aside from the first couple of weeks? Because students graduate, faculty turnover, and staff turnover. How are you going to keep that fire going throughout your time here?

May: 

My hope is to have at least one lunch a week in the dining hall. When my schedule settles down—let’s say after the first three months—my hope is that I also have regular office hours, one afternoon a week for students who can just drop by and chat about anything. Though it’s also a good learning for people to think, “Oh, I can actually make an appointment and go to the president.” So we’ll see. I think having regular sessions where people could attend, and then opening up so that, whether it’s for Halloween or Chinese New Year—maybe trying to do parties at the President’s house so students have a place to come and be social more than 15 feet away from West Hall. I’m thinking about those things and I’m open to ideas if folks have suggestions.

Quinn: 

It’s awesome that you’re thinking about this; it’s really encouraging. 

May: 

Yeah, I’m thinking a lot about it. I feel that being in community physically together is an important thing for us. 

Quinn: 

Looking broadly in five years when it comes to the end of your term as president, regardless of whether you continue—I hope you do. You seem really awesome and great for this community. What things do you think you’ll be thinking about to determine whether you’ve had a successful term as president of all? 

May: 

I think if we can successfully answer the question, “What is Olin’s identity for the next 25 years?”, and we have some clarity about how we want to do that in five years, that would be a success. So I would include in that, getting us to a place where we’re feeling financially resilient. We’re running an operating deficit right now; we’re spending more money than we’re bringing in. And I’m not saying that every decision has to be driven by financials, but we can’t make decisions without thinking about financials. Getting that balance right and having the community see that and understand it, and getting us to a place in five years where we’re spending what we bring in, or we’re bringing in more than we’re spending, is a really important goal for us to hit in five years. If we want to be responsible stewards of this institution that we love, then we want to make sure that it’s here for another 25, 50, or 100 years. You don’t spend more money than what’s in your bank account; it’s not responsible. And then I think really being able to execute on Olin’s identity and who we are in the next five years, whatever those two or three things are, would feel successful. I would say the final piece, and I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I do sense—both in your questions and what I’ve heard—a sort of yearning for us to be together more as a community, to have a degree of trust and to really be able to have a dialogue. I think if we get to that place in five years, I would be really happy. 

Quinn: 

I would also be very happy to see that. 

Maddy: 

That is definitely important to us. Probably one of the top things on everybody’s minds right now is having that. 

May: 

The other thing that I said to another large group is that as great as some aspects of the Olin culture are, I think that we are not as fluent as we could be in addressing conflict. Often people think, “Oh, I don’t want to speak up because people won’t like me,” or “They’ll disagree” or “They’ll yell at me” or whatever it is. I would like us to work on that. In this moment, we need to learn how to disagree with each other and still be in community. There are many people in my life who, they may not be my best friends, but they are people with whom I’m friendly. They are neighbors. They didn’t vote for the same person, they probably don’t believe necessarily in the things that I believe in, I don’t believe in the things that they believe in, but we’re in the same community, and so we have to find ways to be able to do that. I think that happens less and less. I don’t know if you’ve seen the work that’s been done on migration patterns in this country, but what you’re starting to see is people are moving to places where other people agree with them. If I look back at all the places where I grew up, I realize we likely lived with folks with a totally different worldview t, and yet we were still neighbors. We had potlucks together. We had block parties together. We played with their kids. The adults carpooled. Whatever it was, we managed to live together, even though I’m pretty sure now you would find us completely different in almost everything. But we were neighbors. That’s important for us to do here at Olin. And the truth is, we’re a lot alike here because we all co-create, and so meeting somebody who has no patience in co-creation says, “Look, I just want to decide.” What do you do when you’re faced with that? 

Quinn: 

And how do you resolve that conflict?

May: 

That’s the question. I think the answer is that yes, you won’t always get what you want, and they won’t always get what they want, but understanding how to do that is important. 

Quinn: 

It’s really awesome to hear that you’re thinking about this in a transparent way. Hearing from the next leader of the college that we need as a community to be better at conflict is really encouraging. 

May: 

I have said that to other people. So far, nobody has hit me (literally or metaphorically speaking). So I think that’s a good sign. 

Quinn: 

Well, thank you so much!

May: 

No, thank you guys. Thank you for making the effort. I’m glad we could make it work. I look forward to seeing how silly I look in print.

Title: “To First-Years: A Word Of Warning About Formula”

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To First-Years: Don’t join Formula. Or Rocketry. Or Baja. Or any other project team.

To preface, I do not despise Formula, nor any project team for that matter. I refer to Formula throughout this article simply because they are the most clear example, but most observations are true for all project teams. I also write this opinion piece in, well, an opinionated way, but I don’t think any project team is all awful. I think they have their good qualities and their bad qualities. Their triumphs and their failures. I certainly don’t have a problem with any of the people in them—many of whom I look up to and who are my close friends—and to be fair, in my conversations with project team leaders, most of them are relatively forthcoming about the shortcomings of their teams and receptive to criticism and change. 

But there is a difference between hearing those shortcomings from someone who likes project teams and who is trying to recruit you, and hearing the shortcomings from someone who dislikes them. And for all of the very, very vocal proponents of project teams abound at this school, I find there are very few vocal opponents. 

I’ll avoid most of the common critiques as best as I can: the interpersonal conflicts and drama caused by tightening the Olin bubble even further, the weirdly obsessive and borderline manipulative recruitment of first-years, the embarrassing gender ratios, the many, many safety hazards and near disasters that project teams have caused and then shrugged off, and others that I’m sure we’ve all heard. I’ll instead focus on what I feel are the three main interconnected problems in Formula: the work culture, the trends in leadership, and the subsequent definition of engineering that it gives to its members.  

The work culture is well known, so I won’t dwell on it for long. We’ve all had friends who can’t hang out because of an “important” deadline, teammates in class projects who have missed meetings for Formula, and we have all heard of the late, sleep deprived nights, where the LPB doors are propped long after 2am. I won’t try to prove that Formula members are often if not always overworked—just ask any of them. Hell, many have bragged to me about their sleepless nights showing their “work ethic and commitment”. I’ll get to that later.

This work culture affects all in the club, but I have seen it cause the most damage in the trends of the leadership for these teams. Leads have the responsibility of coordination, mentorship, lead engineering, project managing, and countless other tasks. Many go into it with very little experience leading and get “thrown in the deep end.” In theory it’s a valid enough tactic for learning, but Formula is going into this year with no upperclassmen leadership. Upperclassmen know well that sophomore year isn’t a walk in the park, and yet the upperclassmen members are so unpassionate or checked out or burned out to step into those roles. To me, that is not a smoking gun for any failure from any specific individual in Formula, but for a much larger, systemic problem with leadership culture and trends.

It makes me sad, but it doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen the story play out well over a dozen times now. Sophomore lead enters excited from a fun first year. They get thrown in the deep end. Classes ramp up. Stress ramps up. But they like Formula. They love the people or the project or whatever else but it just gets to be so much. They talk about it in the exact same way they would talk about a toxic relationship. And in every case, for every person I’ve seen fall by the wayside—guilty, miserable, and overworked—the last reason they won’t let go has always been feeling that they are letting the team down.

Honestly, it sometimes seems that overwhelming guilt at letting the team down is the lifeblood of what keeps people in Formula. But the guilt of leaving a club is not a reason to stay, and good friendships should hold whether they are team members or not—that is true whether you are a casual member or the project manager. You want my hot take? If any organization depends on one person to keep existing, it shouldn’t keep existing.

And all of this leads to what I have seen as the most pervasive effect of project teams: the definition of engineering it gives to its members and to the school. Because project teams’ main selling point is that, yes, they are learning mechanisms for engineering. My first year, each project team marketed itself as a different environment to learn engineering, and importantly, each one told me that I would learn more engineering with them than I would in any of my classes first year. I’ve heard this repeatedly every year since. That Formula will fast-track you on learning engineering, when you want more “engineering” than your classes provide. Which I totally get. When you’re a first-year and you are presented with going outside to draw a bug in DesNat and with building a car in Formula, one feels more engineering. 

But DesNat is an engineering class. And a good one at that. Formula feels more engineering because it matches more the conventional definition of engineering: move fast, build a car, get it to drive. But Olin’s education is not the conventional definition of engineering—we have specifically stood out as a top-ranked school because of an unconventional approach. One that puts DesNat hoppers before complex machinery analysis. That isn’t some half-thrown-together placeholder from the faculty. The entire curriculum is put together to build upon ideas and to build specifically an unconventional definition of engineering. 

But when the connotation is made in the first year that Formula is more engineering than classes, part of that buy-in is lost. That buy-in is important because it builds on itself all throughout Olin. I’ve seen a clear correlation between project team participation and generally having less buy-in for design courses like CD, for engaging in AHS concentrations, or participating in larger engineering reflections. It’s not the engineering they’re learning in their teams, so there’s less need to dedicate as much time and attention to it.

It’s not the engineering that goes on within project teams, so there’s less need to dedicate as much time and attention to it. 

And what is the engineering that supersedes the curriculum’s? What is Formula’s practiced definition of what it means to be an engineer? It is one that is defined by work and burnout. By spending sleepless nights to finish some arbitrary deadline for some arbitrary project. And that seeps into how everyone here defines engineering. I’m not denying that there is passion and learning, but an all-consuming work culture and guilt has been built into the foundation of what keeps Formula going. That anxiety—not work ethic, anxiety—affects what people perceive engineering should be. That “proper” engineering is inherently stress and late nights, and that the more stressed and overworked you are, the better an engineer you become. 

It’s a great way to get burnt out, I’ll say that much. If you keep it up after Olin, it’s a great way to get used by others. 

I’m not saying that Olin’s curriculum is perfect. While I think there’s something to be said about the difference between a learning experience crafted by Ph.D. professors versus overworked sophomore leads, Olin’s curricular definition of engineering is not perfect for anyone. That definition is something each person has to find on their own, but the activities and priorities you choose will inherently affect what engineering, work, and life all mean to you. 

I’m sure you can put any large group of Oliners together and with enough motivation—whether that motivation comes from passion or feelings of obligation or crippling stress—they’ll be able to make an electric car in a year. Or anything else they set their minds, time, bodies, and mental health to. But I also know that in that same time, they could learn and reflect about what actually makes them passionate. They could get more out of their classes, both in that time and in the future. And I know they could all still learn and demonstrate technical concepts that really interest them while still maintaining a work-life balance.

I admit that I write this from a position of bias. I’ve seen so many of my friends, my residents, my classmates delve into these project teams, work themselves to the bone, and burn out. It hurt me seeing them go through that and I knew it hurt them more. I don’t want to see it happen again, and I’ve held out hope each year that it would be the year where all the positives that these teams can bring shine and all the negatives get washed away. Those who know me know I’ve been wanting to write this article for two years now, and I’ve waited in optimism because I didn’t want to unnecessarily give any team a bad name as they were on the cusp of change. I have that same optimism this year, but I write this piece as a warning of trends that I cannot ignore.

Because I can’t take another year of standing by. Of supporting my friends as they gradually reach their breaking point, beat up and burnt out from project teams they once enjoyed. So for all the people yelling at you right now to “Join Formula! Or Rocketry! Or Baja!”, I will get up on my small soapbox here between the pages of this Frankly to shout as loud as I can: 

“DON’T join Formula! Or Rocketry! Or Baja! Or any other project team!” 

Am I biased? Sure. But I will be a vocal opponent this year. And if you’re a first-year who wants more perspectives before joining a project team, you can come find me. If you’re a sophomore in a leadership position who feels the tendrils of burnout start reaching out, you can come find me. And if you’re a junior or senior or anyone else who reads this and vehemently disagrees, you can come find me. I’ll happily talk about my observations and reflections, about where you are right and where I am decidedly wrong. But for all of the people surrounding you and declaring that project teams are the best ways to get good jobs or make friends or learn engineering, just know that you are always welcome to find me if you want to hear the opinion of someone who, frankly, doesn’t think they do a great job at really any of those things.

Learning To Grow On A Farm

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I stopped following politics after Trump got elected again. In 2020, I thought I was a part of a movement where everyone was growing in conscious. With every day a new headline, a new crime, a new impeachable offense, the country could clearly see the damage he dealt domestic and abroad. After 2021 there was quiet, and I thought we liked it that way. I thought I was part of a growing movement, but I wasn’t. I was terminally online, and I was out of touch. 

I stopped reading the news because the one way I thought real change could happen would not come. I thought great change must come from laws, government departments, political advocacy, and more radicals in government. But that got us the same old fascist, DOGE, and insert any other upheaval I’m not reading about. I couldn’t stay online.

This summer I touched grass, and I mean really touched grass, in a way I never had before. I did so by working on a farm.

I did research at Olin under Alessandra, and she asked a simple, yet challenging question for me to explore: what economic and ecological incentives align for farmers? After a bit of googling, one of the answers to this question is the concept of “regenerative agriculture”, a series of strategies that prioritize revitalizing the land and capturing carbon through farming practices. Broader research points to a variety of successful, well tested strategies for farms to implement, alongside being far more profitable in the long run. Now, the follow up question becomes: How can I contribute to enabling farmers to implement regenerative agriculture?

The answers to this new question are diverse, fascinating, and complicated, but one discovery was clear to me. The government could never “legally mandate regenerative agriculture”. Farms are too diverse for blanket standards, and guidelines are frequently unable to encompass the farmers they supervise. My aforementioned theory of change could not succeed under these conditions. This developed my first new understanding: Systemic change must be designed to empower its users at a granular level, and these systems do not need to be government supported.

The farming community in Massachusetts is beautiful and diverse, and every farmer is supported by relying on one another to teach and grow together. I saw farmers that depended on networks of mutual aid, and I could see how successful this strategy was. Farms hosted events to share how they found success, and how that impacted their perspectives about the industry. Systemic change must be enforced through a community’s dependence on their peers, not their dependence on authority figures. Farmers change their behavior through close community mentorship, and it is difficult for politicians, academics, or engineers to meaningfully contribute to a farmer’s operations.

My final project became a guidebook for farmers to compare success stories related to regenerative farming. It took the summer of engrossing myself in a new ecosystem, questioning my biases as an engineer, and exploring how I can support a community that already relies on an established system of aid. 

I want to farm more. Not just because the community is so welcoming, not just because the work is tangible and rewarding, but because farming makes me believe that change is still possible. What I learned might not resonate with you. But there are other ways to change the world that you may not be thinking about. I implore you to seek out these means of change and discover the greatest contributions you can provide. Your current theory of change does not encompass every impact one can make in this world. And if you’re like me, then you know your capacity to give is greater than support for movements that don’t feel successful. You deserve to discover how.