Olin Faculty Leave at Nearly Twice the National Rate

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Olin is losing faculty at an alarming rate. Since 2018, sixteen regular faculty1 have departed voluntarily. Over the same time period, Olin has also lost a large number of critical staff members. In this piece, we focus on regular faculty losses.

A departure of nearly half the regular faculty in eight years is a staggering statistic for academia, where voluntary departure (besides retirement) is rare. One survey shows that tenure-track faculty voluntary turnover nationally has been roughly 2.3-3.7% annually since 2017 (the upper bound of which corresponded with the COVID-19 pandemic).2 Olin’s annual voluntary turnover since 2018 has been 5%, assuming a stable regular faculty size of 40 members and excluding 5 retirements. Despite the intrinsically small sample size, a binomial test suggests that this turnover rate over this period has only a 5.46% chance of being observed due to random chance (if Olin faculty matched the national population). Since information regarding people’s employment is considered confidential, we estimated these numbers based on our collective knowledge as faculty who know the people who have left. This method has its limitations, as we do not have access to official records.

Although the sample size is small, there is a strong signal; Olin faculty are leaving at nearly twice the national rate. These faculty losses have the following costs.

Costs to students and community: The high turnover of faculty results in a tearing of our community fabric. Many students and college communities benefit from stable faculty groups who can carry institutional knowledge and meaningfully shape their individual expertise into the context of the campus culture. Experienced faculty have more advising expertise and their classes are more polished and optimized. With this high turnover, we have many new peers who are doing excellent work adapting to Olin, but have less experience and have fewer connections to colleagues and students. The student learning experience is compromised by the revolving door of faculty members.

Monetary costs: When Olin hires new faculty, it offers startup funding, which is standard in academia. Traditionally, it is intended to allow researchers to start up a research program and obtain grants. When a grant is obtained, the college receives a cut of that grant, which pays the college back for the startup investment. Although Olin has a broad definition of “external impact,” Olin receives little payback for these investments if faculty depart quickly. Startup fund amounts vary, but are generally tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand dollars. We estimate that Olin’s investment in the Assistant faculty who left before being promoted to Associate rank was at least half a million dollars, which includes startup packages, summer salary, and student stipends.

Time costs. As Olin loses faculty at nearly twice the national rate, it follows that we must hold faculty searches nearly twice as often. In fact, almost every year, Olin has a faculty search. These are time-intensive for the faculty search committee and community. Instead of opportunistic searches that seek the best candidates, Olin’s searches are reactionary in response to departures. While the former can afford to leave a position unfilled if a strong candidate is not found, the latter must fill the position so that critical courses can continue to be covered. Course scheduling is more challenging and takes more time, as these faculty departures often occur after student enrollment. Given the time commitment required by the entire faculty body for these searches to be successful, Olin faculty end up having less time to do the work of building and sustaining the college and building strong relationships within the faculty. 

Reputational costs. Perhaps most concerning is that Olin could develop a reputation as an unstable place to work and learn. A high faculty turnover rate means students have uncertainty about what classes will be available, which faculty will be around to teach those classes, and more broadly increases the perception that the college is at risk of closing. Although departing faculty often gave polite reasons for departure (“moving close to family,” “a great opportunity”), the broader trend is telling– sixteen departures over eight years in a school with only roughly forty faculty members. In private conversations with Olin AAUP members, some departing faculty cited, among other reasons, lack of faculty representation and transparency in decision-making as stressors that contributed to their ultimate departure. Many faculty members made lateral moves to similar jobs at other institutions and were not motivated by possible advancement. Academia is a small world, and we may soon be unable to hire top candidates due to an adverse reputation.

There’s much work to be done to increase faculty retention. To start, faculty perspectives should be considered in institutional decision-making. Therefore, we ask that two faculty members, elected by the faculty, be invited as non-voting participants to every full Board of Trustees meeting. At the time of publication of this article, we are in conversation with members of the Board of Trustees regarding the participation of faculty members in their meetings.

Sincerely,

Olin College Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)
85% (17/20) of members endorsed

  1. Regular faculty refers to faculty on long-term contracts, the closest to what institutions that grant tenure call “tenure-track.” ↩︎
  2. Higher Ed Workforce Turnover, https://www.cupahr.org/surveys/workforce-data/higher-ed-workforce-turnover/. We compare our turnover rate to tenure-track faculty data. While Olin has no formal tenure process, our roles are culturally tenure-like. ↩︎

The Wood Shop is Moving!

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Greetings Olin community; the Shop has very exciting news! The Wood Shop is migrating from MAC 129 to MAC 113! The moving process will occur over the Summer of 2025 and the space will be open for use in the Fall of 2025. This change will provide space for more Wood Shop users, tools, and accessibility. Additionally, there will be an office between MAC 109 and MAC 113, and two of the Shop Instructors (Shop Adults) will work there: supervising the two rooms. This will mean increased access to the Wood Shop and the CNC Shop, so students can work there in a similar manner to the main shops (Welding, Spinning Metal, and Laser) during the weekdays. 

The Wood Shop is relatively new. It seems like it has always been a part of Olin’s campus, but Robin Graham-Hayes, a 2022 graduate, helped create it. Robin used to begin every Wood Shop Orientation with the phrase: “Welcome to the Wood Shop; it is the youngest Shop space at Olin!” That line has been revised since then, as the Proto room and the CNC Shop have opened more recently. Since its creation, the Wood Shop has obtained additional tools, shop assistants to hold open hours, and a suite of trainings to ensure that everyone knows how to use the tools safely. 

The Wood Shop is now used for a variety of class projects. Courses that use the space regularly include: DesNat, MechProto, PIE, MechDes, and Form, Space, Grain: Wood as a Sculptural Medium, but many other classes have cases where students make use of the Wood Shop. While the capabilities of the Wood Shop partly overlap with the Green Shop, more specialized tools allow for students to foray into more advanced techniques. This space is perfect for prototyping and revising, but it is also used for precise cutting and thorough finishing. 

The Wood Shop receives a lot of traffic for personal projects, passionate pursuits, and non-class related matters as well. Cutting boards, rolling pins, chairs, spoons, shelves, and much more, can all be made in this space.  

The Wood Shop has been integral to my time at Olin. It is a place to develop my technical skills, but it is also a place where I can create more than just functional pieces. I’m a maker by nature and came to engineering for a profession. The confluence of these two is most evident here at Olin and in the shops. In high school, I woodworked by experimentation. I carried that drive to create here, learning so much more than I ever could on my own. 

As a Shop Assistant, I have seen the community that the Shop builds around it. People who are shy and self conscious about their lack of experience realizing that they don’t need to know everything. They just need to be kind, curious, and ready to grow. In my Shop Assistant interview, Jordan asked, “Why do you want to be a Shop Assistant?” And I answered, “The Shop makes me feel like I belong at Olin. It quiets imposter syndrome voices, and I want to help others feel this way as well.” One of my greatest accomplishments at Olin is contributing to the Shop’s accessibility. 

The new Wood Shop is an amazing development for everyone who works there and people who use the space, but it will also help to draw more people who haven’t used it in the past, and who may not have used it in its current state. It will serve as a space where more people can create great things and grow their confidence. While I’ll be graduating in a couple of weeks, I’m confident it will contribute to the Olin experience of many students to come.

The Lifelong Quest of Becoming the Greatest Side Character

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I used to think I needed a lead role. I got my role as Scarecrow in my middle school’s Wizard of Oz, but when I was in my freshman year of high school, all the leads went to the upperclassmen. Of course, I cared about doing a good job. But I had no named parts, and I was surrounded by actors who I considered vastly more talented than I. Even so, I was stopped by a stranger after one of the performances. They grabbed my shoulder and said, “I don’t know who you are, but you were my favorite character. Don’t stop doing what you did up there tonight,” before disappearing into the after-show crowd. I will never forget this compliment.

When I was a kid, I would watch superhero movies and imagine myself in their place. I would imagine having the power, the attention, and the story. That was the person I wanted to be: The Hero. When I was a late teenager, I watched an anime called Mob Psycho 100, a show about a main character who is not very expressive. He is supported by ‘the body improvement club’, which only appears sporadically. They would exercise with the scrawny protagonist and be proud when he runs just a bit longer than the day before. After I saw the body improvement club, it became clear that I was wrong. I did not want to be a hero. I knew my calling: I wanted to become a side character.

Side characters serve two roles in a story. They interact with the main character(s) to progress the plot, and they expand the world that gets to be seen. I want to convince you of how fun it is to serve both purposes in other people’s stories. 

You’ve probably heard the slogan “there are no small roles, only small actors”. I stand by this claim not only because it makes the story more engaging, it also reminds actors that side characters are equally deserving of depth, understanding, characterization, and analysis. As a side character, you can embody a wider range of experiences. You can be a rival, a lover, a mentor, and more—all in the same show. Legally Blonde is full of one-off, high-impact characters: the Harvard administration from “What You Want”, the gawking guys in “Bend and Snap”, the department store workers in “Take it Like a Man”, the Judge in the various court scenes, and of course, Carlos, from “Gay or European”. They are the characters that make this play so fun to me. 

Out in the world, I try to embody this ideal. I question the role I get to play when I meet a new stranger. I see people walk by and wonder what worldbuilding I am facilitating by being in their space. To take the place of a side character is to take on the responsibility of enhancing the moment in support of someone else’s chance in the spotlight.

To me, being a side character is the freedom and confidence to know you have changed a person’s life simply by being a part of it. I don’t need to always be a main character to make an impact. It empowers me to accept the way other people enter and leave my life. All I need to do is appear, give a little exposition, provide a little inspiration, and I have changed the path of another protagonist’s story. And now and then, I get to appear, make a big splash, and disappear into the crowd knowing that I’ve made a difference and earned a powerful round of applause.

Advice: Be Careful About Advice

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tldr: if someone comes to you about a relationship in their life, know that the risk of encouraging them to move towards forgiveness and love is that they might listen to you.

I called up a family member recently for advice. The last time I asked this family member for advice, I was calling them from a 7/11 employee’s personal phone. I was 18 (I am 21 now), stuck at a gas station I had trekked to from a broken-down car, armed with a dead phone of my own, and the only other phone number I could remember was my mom’s, who was at work. This family member told me he’d call someone else to come help me, forgot to do so, and proceeded to take a nap. Suffice to say, I try to avoid leaning on this family member. It tends to be a bad play.

In this moment, I called him because I truly felt there was no one else I could turn to. Why? I wanted to talk to someone about feeling like a friend had crossed my boundaries recently. Everyone I had talked to felt strongly that I should give this friend another chance because I knew his intentions had been good. I began to worry that anyone who supported me and had my best interest at heart— as in, anyone I could talk to at Olin— would tell me the same thing. Yes, this was black-and-white thinking on my part. I felt that, for me in that moment, one more person encouraging me to forgive would push me from my place of indecision to fully reincorporating this friend back into my life. I felt emotionally dysregulated, and I worried any path I could take would prove to be extreme.

And so, when I called up this family member (this phone call itself being an extreme path)— who I personally consider to be tripping 24/7– I was very surprised to hear the strangest, best advice I felt I had received on the issue: “I don’t know you or anyone else like that— good luck, though.”

As someone who tends to see more red flags in retrospect than in the present, someone who doubts their decisions constantly, someone who believes wholeheartedly that we all have an infinite capacity to love no matter what we lose— this was very liberating for me.

I say this to say, sometimes people are tripping. The emotional warfare between friends is oftentimes more unintentional than it appears on the surface. I wish the world was a safer place every day— I wonder how much more beautiful we’d all be to each other if it was. And still, still, I give this caution: If someone comes to you feeling like their boundaries have been crossed, consider that you may be dealing with someone who doesn’t isn’t often believed about being in pain. Consider that the grace that they do (or do not) give might reflect the grace they have received. Give them the gift of admitting you don’t know where you can, however you can— have hope that by, in some part, refusing them your undying support or condemnation, you create space for them to look within and believe themselves about what they feel. Have hope that if you disagree with them, they will make a better choice tomorrow. That you will make a better choice tomorrow.

In the end, I came to my own peace about the situation. I found the forgiveness for that friend in my heart that had been there all along. Every piece of advice given to me, regardless of whether it felt high-quality to me at the time or not, helped me to get to that place.

I don’t know you or anyone else like that— good luck, though.

An Interview With Alisha

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[Quotes edited for clarity and brevity by Alisha and the editorial team.]

Quinn: To start us off, thank you for meeting with us. It’s super exciting.

Alisha: Thank you for inviting me! 

Quinn: It’s a great honor to be able to talk to you on your last couple of days at Olin, which is so sad. How’s it feeling getting ready to head off to something new?

Alisha: It’s pretty weird because I’ve been here for most of my professional life, which is longer than some of our students have been alive. I have a lot of different feelings. It was really nice having two going-away parties! At the faculty and staff party, it was really touching, because a bunch of people, some I’ve worked with for decades, talked about ways that I had impacted their life. It was really nice to realize I’ve had an impact. People have always asked, “why do you stay so long?” I’ve always said, ”because of the people!” And because I’ve gotten to keep growing personally, and to make positive change. It’s been nice reflecting back on that and having it reflected to me. 

Quinn: In what ways do you think you’ve grown? In the many, many years you’ve been here. What are the notable growth moments?

Alisha: From a purely professional standpoint, I started as this regular faculty member doing bioengineering research, trying to figure out how to grow cells with undergraduates—which turns out to be really hard—and was hugely influenced by all these amazing educators who were really thinking deeply about education and good pedagogy. And so I got to thinking about those things, but also figured out that I really like being an administrator. I have this distinct memory of Mark Somerville, as an associate dean, walking into my office in 2011 and asking me if I wanted to be the associate director of SCOPE. I still felt “new,” had never thought about leadership, and I was still pretty quiet, which I know is hard to believe. I went home and thought about it over the weekend, and I was like, “actually I do want to do that.” Back then, many students felt like it was very disconnected from the Olin curriculum, and had this feeling of kind of “selling your soul”.  As SCOPE director, I focused on how it really is a capstone to our curriculum (and I started drawing pictures of capstones, and telling the story of how the stuff in ModSim, ISIM, P&M, CD, design depths, major classes, et cetera, built up to this capstone experience, and how it was really different than the capstone experiences at other schools where they were like “yeah, do all this stuff at the very end.” But it also made me realize I liked doing that kind of culture change work, and program work, and figuring out how to have an impact on students and colleagues that was bigger than just teaching bioengineering classes with five students. That led to being an associate dean, and then more surprisingly to being a dean of student affairs. I got to do all of these different jobs, and that it made sense in the Olin context. I love that I can see my impact on these different areas. I also need to give a shout out to human-centered design as an approach that aligns with my values and has shaped my research as well as my work as an administrator.

On a more personal note, it has been getting to work with all these cool people—colleagues and students—to have so many different conversations and learn from them. This part about the close-knit community has been incredible. There are still former students who are grown adults with children and lives, and we’re still in touch. Being able to learn from people and also have a positive impact on individuals has been so rewarding.  

Quinn: Do you think you’re gonna miss doing that sort of nitty-gritty technical teaching, like about specific subjects?

Alisha: I haven’t done that in a long time. The last class I taught was Biomedical Device Design in the spring of 2021. I do think I’m gonna miss working super closely with students; that’s gonna be a really big change going forward, because my primary focus will be faculty development. But I also know that if I’m thinking about faculty development, it’s about teaching students, so I’m still going to figure out how to get where the students are. I probably won’t miss having to deal with the shenanigans part of it! I’m excited to go back to focusing on the teaching and learning piece of it, as much as I’ve been an educator when having different conversations with individual students or groups. As Dean of Student Affairs, sometimes that educational conversation is something like, “maybe doing that thing was not a good idea, and let’s look at the bigger picture, and the impact on other people and the community.” Bringing all of that knowledge of what’s going on for students outside the classroom, at school, with their family, in the world, is going to be huge, because it’s not a vantage that most faculty get. 

Quinn: Can you tell us about what you’re doing after Olin and how that relates to what you have been doing here?

Alisha: I’m going to be the executive director of the ATLAS Center—Advancing Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship – at Wentworth Institute of Technology (WIT). The teaching and learning center already exists at WIT, but right now it lives in IT, so they’re kind of seen by the community as the tech support for their learning management system (ours is Canvas). But they’re also trying to do all this great instructional design and support for faculty teaching and learning scholarship. There’s all this great stuff happening, so they’re rebranding it with a new name and moving it under the provost’s office so it’s seen as a more academic department. I’m excited to think about how to elevate that teaching and learning piece, and about faculty development and student outcomes. This comes back to the culture change piece that I enjoy doing.  Wentworth is all about student outcomes, in an OG hands-on learning way, focused on preparing students for engineering careers.  Being mission-driven in this very pragmatic way that makes STEM education more accessible is very values-aligned for me.

Gia: You’ve been exposed to many kinds of – you used the word – shenanigans in your shifting roles at Olin. What shenanigans make Olin “Olin”? How has that informed your work, what you’ll take with you to Wentworth, etc.?

Alisha: I’m going to try to come back to your actual question, but I wanted to reflect on something interesting that’s embedded in that. It’s something I’ve thought about at many different stages, but especially as I’ve gotten involved in the student affairs community: we’re not that special. There are some really funky things about how our culture plays out, mostly with our size, but in terms of the overall stuff that we’re dealing with, I think we collectively have a tendency to think that we’re very different, and therefore we need to do things differently. Going to student affairs conferences and talking to people from all kinds of other schools—everyone’s dealing with the same stuff. People who are 18 to 22 are always pushing boundaries and trying stuff, and people at engineering schools tend to be problem solvers in all sorts of interesting ways. I think our uniqueness comes from a somewhat intentional and somewhat organically-grown lack of certain pieces of infrastructure. Our culture has fostered a real feeling of “students need to do all these things themselves”. This can cause many difficulties and tensions in how students are encouraged to spend their time and energy. 

My biggest focus in the last four years has been trying to build trust. When I started, the thing I heard over and over was “we don’t trust StAR.” And if Oliners don’t trust this entire set of people, even if it’s about one or two people, they’re not going to come for the resources. And we know they need the resources! It’s not all perfect; it’s not sunshine and flowers all of the time, but a lot of progress has been made in that space. 

Back to your question: some of the specific shenanigans are around different opinions about what is appropriate behavior, and what is appropriate for students to do. In some ways, that’s true everywhere. Sometimes when you have those conversations, it’s a total surprise. Whereas I think at other schools, people would be like, “yeah, okay, I kind of knew I broke the rules.” Olin students are like, “There are RULES?!” I mean, I’m overstating that, but I think that’s some of the funny stuff to figure out. 

Gia: Can you tell me more about what you mean by policy and risk? [mentioned in ramblings that were cut]

Alisha: Student group safety! That’s the thing I worked on a lot last year. This has been interesting because I do have a lab safety background and a project advising background through SCOPE, and so I was able to bring some of that in a way that spans some of the different areas, which is not typical in student affairs. But we had not built enough of an integrated infrastructure to provide appropriate oversight of some of the things students are working on. Something hard, and sometimes novel at Olin is that sometimes we’ve had to say “no, we can’t actually support this thing, because we don’t have the space or it’s actually hazardous in a way we cannot support.” I do think it’s this thing where we were okay in the beginning, and then we just didn’t really… stay…

Quinn: We didn’t stay with the times.

Alisha: We didn’t stay with the times! And now we’re sort of trying to catch up. Especially with all of the continuity lost during COVID, there’s been a little bit of a “wild west.” Trying to get that under control in a way that maintains student autonomy and all the things that are beautiful about having these groups, and also brings us into the modern world in a way that creates a manageable infrastructure is super challenging. Because of that, in my last weeks I’ve been working on all these transition documents and trying to pass stuff on for the next dean.

Quinn: You can feel it out?

Alisha: Yeah. I kind of know what’s going on. And there’s so much transition and work that spans student affairs. I think Frankly Speaking is a great example of the evolution of things. There’s a thing that Frankly Speaking used to be, and that doesn’t have to be exactly the thing Frankly Speaking is in the future, while also keeping the really important essence of what Frankly Speaking is. I think that’s what you all have shepherded so well this year, thinking about that, and really leaning into “we don’t have to stick to this tradition—we can keep the stuff that’s integral and modernize.” 

Quinn: How has being in this administrative role, dean of student affairs, changed your perspective of Olin academia and academia as a whole?

Alisha: I think it’s really rare to have both a faculty perspective and a staff perspective. While I always have that faculty perspective, I feel fully immersed in the staff world. In higher ed, there’s usually a divide—it’s a lot smaller between faculty and staff at Olin, but it still exists, and I think it’s something that staff tend to be much more aware of than faculty. I know I was totally clueless when I was purely a faculty. We often talk about how support work is like an iceberg. You see the top stuff, but there’s all this stuff happening underneath that tends to be invisible if it’s going well. 

Quinn: Given all of this context and development and learning that you’ve done, what do you hope to see Olin do with all of that in the next five, ten years?

Alisha: I do hope that folks continue to understand the important role that student affairs plays in the student experience, and that resource that appropriately. I think understanding how much the high-touch services are part of what we are offering to students, and part of that value proposition that students and their families are really looking at with their money and their choices about where they go—that’s an important piece of the puzzle.

Gia: Looking back, what are some things that you’re proud of? You said that you feel like you have your fingerprints in a lot of places, what are places that you look at like “wow, I’m super proud that I did this; this is something that I’m glad has happened here”?

Quinn: Things that current Olin students might not know about at all.

Gia: Yeah, big or small.

Alisha: I think there’s so many phases. I’m super proud of the stuff I did in SCOPE. I led changing the faculty advising model, and grading to make it more consistent for both students and faculty. I started the work to shift the narrative of “SCOPE is all defense and robotics” by really focusing on a broader portfolio of projects to match the interests and values of more students. So much of what I’ve done over my time here is in the equity and inclusion space, starting from when I was a visiting professor. I got immediately involved in the gender and engineering co-curricular. I was one of the people who was focused on that work inside and outside of Olin. When we had our first openly trans student, I put together a training, and I was like “okay we’re gonna do Trans 101, friends!” Initially, there were just these ad hoc things, and then that was a big part of my portfolio when I became associate dean of faculty—faculty development, but also really thinking about equity and inclusion in the classroom. When we had the new strategic plan, we formed a group called the “DEI Champions”, and a lot of what we did is more focused strategic planning of like “here’s what we need—here’s the path for thinking about cultural competency for advising, here’s the path for making sure people are getting the training and education they need for thinking about inclusivity of belonging in classrooms,” and I think that’s been a really core part of what I’ve done, and obviously a core part of what I’ve brought into my work in student affairs. Many of my colleagues are doing incredible work, but I think that’s one of the biggest places I’ve had formal and informal impact. 

I think it’s a lot of little things too, the stuff that I’m proud of. What people have been reflecting over the last weeks, I’m like “oh wow, I didn’t even think about that.” A student was like “yeah, I was going through my emails and my first email from you was doing name change stuff before I came.” Sending 15 emails back and forth to get it right is at the core of how to do this work for me.

Quinn: As we’re wrapping up here, is there anything you want to say to the Olin community as sort of a last goodbye?

Alisha: I think my primary feeling towards the bulk of the Olin community is just a real sense of gratitude. Especially to students, who don’t have to trust me with their shit. For all of it, for the vitriol, and the thanks, and moments of getting things, and being able to witness people grow and change. Because I see it as passion for this community, and that is a shared value that I appreciate. 

Quinn: Thank you so much. We are going to miss you.

Alisha: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure.

Quinn: I hope that you keep reading Frankly Speaking. :)

Alisha: Oh, I will.

Poem: Just In The Mirror

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Sometimes I look in the mirror
But instead of me, I see you
My vision blurry, so I only see the outline
You have my eyes, my skin, my history
But it’s different for you
What would you make of it? 

Do you wear your hair short like mine?
Do you wear dresses?
Do you have a favorite season?
What do you want to be?
Who do you want to be?

I imagine another world
Where you and I would laugh
Where we could have inside jokes
Where you and I could argue
A world where you can see the dragonflies

I would know you
Beyond more than a name

But that’s just in the mirror
And in the dim light
My eyes focus again
I see my own face staring back
And you’re not here
And you are just a feeling I remember

& Farewell To Our Seniors

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In our final edition of the ‘24-’25 year, we wanted to shout out the incredible seniors who have worked with us to shape Frankly Speaking into what it is today.

Thank you to Gia, our fiercest editor, for helping our articles be the best they can be, and for always asking the questions we didn’t even know we had. She brings a charmingly critical energy to our monthly formatting sessions that will be sorely missed. 

Thank you to Kelly, our previous executive editor and stellar big SIBB, for paving the way for Maddy to take the reins in her first year. From editing to formatting to writing, they’ve been through it all with Frankly Speaking in their time here, and we believe their dedication will be felt for generations of editing teams.

Thank you to Brooke, our intermittent webmaster, for all the late nights (early mornings?) spent waiting for our last-minute edits and formatting. Her attention to detail and passion for categorization has led us down many delightful archival rabbit holes. 

Thank you all, we will miss you dearly!

(And if you, dear reader, would like to be involved with Frankly Speaking next year, please let us know!)

The Reason I’m Scared of DOGE

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There is a whirlwind of news that we are bombarded with each day, and it can be difficult to find any grasp of what is happening in our country. There is a piece that I want to emphasize as especially important to us as engineers though: The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the head of DOGE, Elon Musk is employing an intentional strategy: choosing to have most of its members, lieutenants, and grunts be engineers, especially young engineers. As young engineers ourselves, I ask everyone to reflect on why that is. 

My theory is this: as engineers, we’re trained to dive headfirst into things we don’t know about and work our way out to understand, change, and optimize. Yet we are primarily—if not solely—trained to see through a technical lens. I see it manifest in countless ways in myself and at Olin. There’s a problem: Let me try to fix it! Something is inefficient: Let me optimize it! Build this thing: Learn enough about it to experiment with! There’s a constant desire to dive right into solving the problem before we step back and look at the pool: is it worth diving in? And how far might our ripples flow? It limits our awareness of the world and our perception of the impact we have on it. I reflect on CD, the class that encourages us most to engage with non-technical concepts of impact. For all of the care and understanding we were taught to search for, how many concluded that society itself had a fundamental necessity for change? Our designs were limited by the implicit conception of what we could offer as engineers—what products we could create within established systems, not what larger change or impact we could dwell upon. And CD is the core class that most centers a non-technical impact approach to our education! Our other engineering experiences are about finely polishing our technical lenses. Any larger evaluation of non-technical impacts are briefly tacked onto a class or two, if addressed at all. Intentional or not, and no matter what values we state, those experiences train us to not dwell long upon the larger societal impact of our work.

Many DOGE engineers did not shape their lives around the larger societal impact they would have, but on doing the technical work that was best for themselves. I know this because they didn’t go to create non-profits or change policy or improve public interest technologies after college. They went to study engineering, then they went to intern or work at Tesla and SpaceX, likely because it would pay them the most or give them the best technical experience or was simply just cool engineering work. They shaped their lives around honing their technical, problem-solving abilities, then choosing the work that was most personally profitable. When they were offered a spot in DOGE, it made sense economically to bind themselves to Musk and if nothing else, they got a new exciting optimization problem: the government.

In the face of a dauntingly complex and competitive world, we all have been conditioned to look after ourselves: it is the very foundation of our economic system. Especially as engineers, we’re told, implicitly or explicitly, that we are justified in finding what will be the most profitable for us, the impact is for others to decide. I understand there are financial realities, and I acknowledge that I speak from a place of privilege, but an awareness of impact is something that constitutes the very foundation of what makes any person a responsible member of society—a respect and acknowledgement that your choices will unavoidably impact others. In the absence of that awareness of broader perspectives arises an absence of empathy, humility, and understanding.

And that is why I am afraid of DOGE.

The invocation of Nazism is a heavy, overused trope which risks diminishing its true horror. But in observing DOGE, I see a clear parallel of how engineers become the mechanisms of hate, of how an indifferent and banal evil arises when technical education is divorced from broader perspectives. 

The parallel is of Albert Speer.1 Young and ambitious, he graduated in architecture from the Technical University of Berlin but lacked any real political fervor. He aligned himself with the Nazi Party in the 30’s largely because their promise to reinvent German culture would afford him more opportunities to do the grand architecture he envisioned creating. By 1933, he was lucratively involved in designing pageantry and building plans, and when war broke out, Speer was chosen as the Minister of Armaments and War Production. In 1943, the London Observer examined him: 

“Speer is, in a sense, more important for Germany today than Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels or the generals. Speer is not one of the flamboyant and picturesque Nazis. Whether he has any other than conventional political opinions is unknown. He might have joined any other political party that gave him a job and a career. He is very much the average man, well dressed, civil, non-corrupt, very middle class in his style of life, with a wife and six children. Much less than any of the other German leaders does he stand for anything particularly German or particularly Nazi. He rather symbolizes a type which has become increasingly important in all belligerent countries; the pure technician, the classless, bright young man, without background, with no other original aim than to make his way in the world, and no other means than his technical and managerial ability. It is the lack of psychological and spiritual balast and the ease with which he handles the terrifying technical and organizational machinery of our age which makes this slight type go extremely far nowadays … This is their age; the Hitlers and the Himmlers we may get rid of, but the Speers, whatever happens to this particular man, will be long with us.”

This quote serves as a constant, shuddering reminder of what a technical education can mean, and is what we have a responsibility to reckon with as engineers. The employment of technically focused, ambitious youth is the strategy that Elon Musk and the Trump Administration are employing with DOGE members. They were given a directive to make huge cuts, to root out DEI, and to report back. They excel at it. This is not a random coincidence, but an intentional tactic. We’ve seen it used before, and we have to ask ourselves what we must do as we see it now.

I am not saying to eschew engineering as an evil, but know that engineers who do not actively grapple with and work to change their impact are engineers that function as tools, and there will always be those that will seek to use us as such. This can be for good, sure, but more often it is used for extraction, exploitation, and oppression. No movement, no organization, no company, and no regime is possible without the support or, more pertinently, the complicity of its engineers. 

We cannot run behind the justification of a non-partisan and impartial self-interest. We cannot hide behind the thought that someone else would do it anyways. We more than anyone have an obligation to systems-level understanding, knowing what we are building and for whom we are building it. Creating an electric car to learn in college is different from creating an electric car that profits a white supremacist. Optimizing a drone to evaluate infrastructure health is different from optimizing a drone that is going to be used for urban warfare. Building trains is different if you know what, or who, those trains will hold. Your work will not result in the creation of apolitical technologies—it will be placed in the hands of people and organizations that will seek to use them for their own purposes. 

I do not say this to exclude any companies from your job search, but none of us are exempt from confronting the deeper impacts of the work that we do, because that is how we are used. If you plan to work for an organization that you know is not doing good, then actively reflect on the power that you have to change that work from within and strive to do so. Theories of change differ from outside change to inside change and from issue to issue, but no matter what your theory is, you cannot bury your head from your impact for your own self interest. Complicity is exactly what they desire of you.

When I look at DOGE, I don’t see a group of conniving masterminds. I see a group of engineers who I am familiar with: who when they get their directive, see it only as the problem they’ve been given. And the tool gets to work. 

The reason I am afraid of DOGE is not because it is a group of intentionally evil or malicious people, it’s because I see a clear parallel to the worst of history: a clear warning of how technically focused, ambitious people are used. It reminds me of lessons from the past, and it gives me shudders of the future. 

I am afraid of DOGE because it is a group of people that I know well, and who have been trained in the same way that I have been. I am afraid because they demonstrate clearly what can happen if I stop striving to grapple with the complexity of the world and the impact that I am having on it. I urge you to heed the same warning.

  1. Summarizing a person’s life and motivations is hard to do briefly. I do not claim this is a definitive account of Albert Speer, but is what I have found as the impression from the account of a Nuremberg Prosecutor (King) who wrote a book on him and the below quote, as well as other online sources. ↩︎

Transferring and the Sunk Cost Fallacy

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I spent a number of years at Olin. During that time, I had a lot of conversations about how Olin wasn’t a good fit. There are plenty of valid academic and non-academic reasons to want to transfer, ranging from “I need to be closer to home to support relatives” to “Olin can’t really support my major,” to just not vibing with the campus culture. Yet, whenever the possibility of transferring to another college came up, everyone just assumed that Olin credits would not be accepted (“what even is a QEA cycle”), that it would be a huge waste of time and money.

That’s why I’m writing this article, to let people know it is possible. If this article were published during my first or second years, I would have started the transfer application process then. Sunk cost is a fallacy.

Can I actually transfer Olin credit?

Yes! You will lose some time, but nowhere near as much as I originally thought.

Let’s use UMass Amherst as an example (because they were the first school to send a credit evaluation).

UMass Amherst accepted 3 years worth of Olin courses… with the sole exception of Circuits. Some courses were marked as satisfying a general education requirement; for example, TLAB1 was marked as satisfying the Biology requirement. Unfortunately, for the courses that were not marked as general education, I do not know how many of these I can apply towards a major. They run a more detailed evaluation after you accept (and I’m still weighing my options).

Don’t forget about potential credits that Olin didn’t accept from high school: community college, AP exams, credits from another institution earned through a high school program (for example, RIT takes credits from PLTW2… if you had to endure PLTW in high school, I offer my condolences).

In the end, if UMass is my final choice, I can probably graduate in 2 years if I choose so. If I returned to Olin, it would most likely take 1.5.

I can’t tell you about any private institutions yet, sorry. They don’t handle transfers on the same rolling basis state schools do. From what I understand, most private institutions limit transfer credits to four semesters, so I will lose two years.

So, you want to transfer:

Here’s some advice that you can’t just Google.

  • Download important records that are behind Microsoft Single Sign On. IT will disable yournamehere@olin.edu. Most important for transferring is to download every syllabus from Canvas (or the course website). Some schools require a syllabus when evaluating your courses for transfer—I forgot to do this, and have been reaching out to professors and my remaining student contacts. This is frustrating.
  • Olin has a prepared letter explaining what the QEA+ISIM+ModSim cycle covers. This was intended for people applying to graduate school, but you can add it as an additional document upload in your transfer applications.
  • Don’t re-use your high school college application essays. One of mine literally made me vomit upon rereading it.
  • Visit campuses. I applied to college during peak ‘rona, and online “tours” really did not influence my top choices. It actually helps to have a sense of the neighborhood (or lack thereof), and how alive the campus feels.
  1. Think Like a Biologist ↩︎
  2. Project Lead the Way ↩︎