Author Archives: Kelsey Breseman

Do Something with Frankly Speaking

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Frankly Speaking is important. It is extremely valuable to communication within the Olin community as a forum for people to bring issues to discussion. I’m worried, because as important as the paper is, Frankly Speaking doesn’t seem sustainable.

Most of Olin’s written communication takes place over email. Important issues are brought up and discussed on ThinkTank, Radical Notion, even Therapy and Sexuality. But there are two major problems with these email lists as public forums: they are self-selecting, and they are not fully developed as pieces of writing.

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Olin’s Endowment: A Guide

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Olin received its initial endowment of over $400 million from the F. W. Olin Foundation, and has since been using these funds to found and grow Olin- with a vision towards Olin as the recognized leader in the transformation of undergraduate education in America and throughout the world.

As part of its plan to attract top engineering students, Olin has offered the Olin Scholarship, an eight-semester merit scholarship, to all of its students since the college’s beginning. Until 2006, this scholarship included room, board, and full tuition; until 2011, Olin students received full tuition scholarships. The initial reduction in scholarship was planned; the more recent reduction was due to a sudden value reduction on endowment investments.

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Skydiving

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I said Skydiving
hoping to start them talking
not a one blinked their
hands on steering wheels
and books, the littlest listless
in the backwards seat the leather car
seats ‘why don’t we
put on some’ Beethoven
electric fiddle anything guitar
too spaced sounds sift out
Let me at least be Daedalus
was left behind unuttered
already on our way forward
in space at least.

The Struggle for Good Enough

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I was angry. I was right. And as usual, it didn’t make a bit of difference.

We were building a woodshed to earn our keep, and my father Rick and I were each adamant about our own, contradicting design decisions. My way would make the roof stronger. His would get the job done faster. Either way, our materials were poor salvage and the sun was too hot.

And Rick’s way was wrong.

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A Candid Conversation with Aaron Hoffman

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Aaron Hoffman’s office is sparse but lived-in, with a few chalk and crayons drawings on the wall, courtesy of his young daughter. The bookshelf is full of mathematics texts in various colors, and the table is laid with a draft of a problem set.

Originally from a New York suburb, Aaron comes to Olin via Swarthmore, Brown, and Boston University. This is his first teaching post, and he’s spent the last year and a half fostering mathematical enthusiasm wherever it presents itself,and his passion is obvious. Though he answered many of my questions with seeming reluctance, Aaron spoke with exclamation marks when I asked him about math.

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Fund to Restore the Scholarship

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Olin’s scholarship is an important tradition of this school. It recognizes all of Olin’s students as meritorious, and puts them on equal ground. It gives the students of Olin a fierce loyalty to the institution and the freedom to experiment with their education and education style.

The scholarship affects me, personally, very strongly; it’s not why I came here, but it is how. I know I’m not the only student who couldn’t afford Olin without the full scholarship. And having more pressure on a job through the college years would hurt the experience and grades of any student.

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A Candid Conversation with Lawrence Neeley

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Lawrence Neeley has been teaching at Olin for four years. He grew up in Oakland, California before crossing the country to go to the honors college in Maryland, where he decided to be a mechanical engineer. He earned his master’s and PhD at Stanford, and then came to MIT for postdoctoral mechanical design work.

The MechE side of him was clear stepping into his office; he had various small metal parts lined up neatly on his desk, and elegant, magnetized carabiners hanging from his shelf. His bookshelf was full of rapid prototyping and design theory, and a vinyl cutter in a case rested under his clean desk.

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A Candid Conversation with Brad Minch

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On Star Wars, stained glass, and integrated circuit design.

Brad Minch is one of Olin’s best respected professors. The son of two mathematicians, Minch earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and his PhD in Computational Neural Systems from CalTech.

He came back to the Northeast for a teaching position at Cornell, where he won an award for dedicated and inspirational teaching, and a year later, came to teach at Olin.

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