Olin Is Racist

I came to Olin so excited to learn and innovate. I had high hopes of becoming a great engineer, making great friends, and doing important research with kind professors. Overall, I have been satisfied with my classes and this community. I have great and understanding professors and strong friendships. I am learning in a way that finally fits me, and for once I don’t feel out of place. But I am not okay and not happy. I have been holding this in for a while to avoid causing trouble, but I won’t be silent anymore. 

Once, when I first got to Olin, I was in the library reviewing some course material. As I was studying, an upperclassman who I had never met approached me and stood next to my seat, looking at me very intently. I greeted them and asked if I could help them with anything. They responded curtly, “People like you don’t belong here.” 

I was shaken and said the first logical thing to come to mind: “If you mean here at Olin, I am here to become an engineer.”

The upperclassman smirked, then remarked before walking away, “People like you don’t seem like they would be good engineers.”

For a second, I was confused by what they meant by “people like me”. Women? Did they think I was a BOW student? Why me over anybody else in the library?  

I then took a good look around and realized what that upperclassman meant. I was the only black student in the library. I was the only black woman in the library. 

What the upperclassman meant was: Black women shouldn’t be engineers and don’t belong at Olin. 

That hurt me more than I could ever express in words. After that interaction, I ran to the bathroom and threw up. Someone felt so strongly that I didn’t belong at Olin that they went out of their way to tell me, just so I would know my place. And no one else in the library piped up to defend me, came to comfort me, or even shot me a sympathetic look. Most even turned away. 

To some, this might not seem like a big deal, but it was. I am no stranger to racism and sexism in the STEM world: I was bullied out of coding camp at age 10 by a group of boys who insisted that girls are “too sissy to handle computers.” In 7th grade, a teacher had students pass around my perfect score test while announcing “if someone like [my name] can get a perfect score, then anyone can succeed in my class”. When I got a spot in AP Computer Science in 11th grade, some boys at my school started an online campaign against me, saying that the “diversity spot was taking away seats from guys who actually deserved it”. 

I came to Olin because I hoped that a STEM school run by an esteemed black female engineer would be better, and would be an inclusive and uplifting environment. Yet someone felt so much hate at the idea of a black woman being at Olin and becoming an engineer that they had to tell me that the community I worked so hard to become a part of didn’t fully accept me and never would. That broke my heart because my dream, my safe space, my community, were now gone. Despite this, I will stay in a space that is set against me and I can’t change it alone. 

Despite my crushing disappointment, I pushed my doubts from that interaction aside and let myself believe that it was just one person and the culture at Olin is different, but it’s not. 

In my time at Olin, I have experienced more microaggressions than I can count, been left out of team talks because my input “didn’t seem necessary”, and my mental health has been ignored by both students and staff alike. I even had another interaction with a different student who told me that I “don’t seem like the typical engineer”, and that maybe I should “reconsider if Olin is the right place for me”. This prejudiced culture has had horrible impacts on my mental and emotional health. I frequently had panic attacks last semester and developed an eating disorder from pent-up discomfort, rage, and insecurity that I felt nobody noticed. I have been close to fainting and no one ever asked me if I was okay. 

I never said anything because I knew that if I told others, no one would care. People don’t care if the black girl is unhappy, if she is in a bad place mentally, because to most, we are forgettable and negligible. That is just a historical fact. I have seen students see me have a panic attack and walk past me laughing about how I’m “so extra”. And when I have shared my story people zone out, say I “overreacted”, or pretend to care only to forget the next day. 

The first person who listened to me about the library incident was Gilda. She was the first person who noticed I was struggling and took the time to talk to me and share her own experiences, so I didn’t feel so alone. I was surprised by the fact that Gilda, an esteemed and respected engineer and certifiable genius, also faces racism at Olin and has also had many students come up to her and tell her “you don’t belong at Olin” and yet they are never able to explain why.  

It is crazy to me how someone as wonderfully kind as her receives so much hate from the student body, but I have noticed the ones most vocal with this hate are white.

Now, I am not trying to imply that all students at Olin are racist and discriminative. I think there are a few who are, but the majority of the student body and some of the staff have clear internal racism that they haven’t addressed. They need to examine their own bias or truly think about where some of their opinions come from. Everyone holds some prejudice—it’s a sad fact about our world. If you don’t work to dismantle your own prejudice, then you are part of the problem. 

Olin as a community is racist, and we can’t keep ignoring it.  

As a community, we value black students less than other students and lack open spaces where black students feel safe enough to express these feelings. This is what Olin is, and we need to change.

CORe Needs to Change

When I came to Olin in Fall of 2021, it was the tail end of the pandemic and clubs were starting to rebuild from the previous year. I am an avid coffee drinker, and Acronym was a large part of the reason why I chose Olin. Joining Acronym allowed me to deepen friendships and get to know older students who I wouldn’t have spoken to otherwise. As a senior, the majority of first years that I interact with are the active Acronym members. I don’t believe that this is a unique experience, and clubs have been the most important experience for me to engage with the Olin community. 

At the beginning of my sophomore year, a friend and I were told that we were now in charge of Acronym. We were told that we could no longer use the Admissions desk, and changed the location to the library. Through the location change, we doubled attendance and made Acronym a space for casual conversations with professors and course assistants. 

At this point, Acronym was classified as an organization. All organizations had to exist for at least a year and received a budget. Clubs were generally smaller and met less often. Clubs had to request money from CCO whenever they wanted to spend, as they were not given a budget. In the ‘22-’23 school year, there were only twelve organizations and twenty-two clubs. 

After running Acronym, I wanted to join CCO to help provide others with the same positive experience that I had from my clubs. I was the Vice Club Chair last year and was the Club Chair until my resignation last semester. My job as Vice Club Chair was to fill out reimbursement forms for all of the clubs, and I normally processed only a couple hundred dollars a week. Last year was the first year that CCO got rid of the clubs and orgs structure, and every group received a budget. There were forty-two groups last year, with an overall budget of $28,000. Most groups did not receive enough money, and the student activity fee was increased. 

This year, there are sixty registered groups that receive funding from CCO and the overall budget is $55,000. My job was to work with the Vice Club Chair to allocate budgets, process all p-card payments, and make sure groups are spending their money. I also ended up filling out reimbursement forms, and all reimbursement requests were completed up to my resignation. I was processing thousands of dollars each week and constantly stressed over making sure I was filling out forms correctly. 

I received limited support from the Student Government Advisors. There was a significant amount of misspending in the fall, and the advisors were too busy to help me. They also asked me to not use the Honor Board to deal with misspending, because they told me they would handle it. They completely forgot about helping me for a month, and more incidents kept happening. 

I was spending at least 20 hours per week doing CCO work. I devalued my homework, wasn’t able to apply to grad school, and delayed my search for full-time jobs. On the date of my resignation, I received an email from my design depth professor saying that I didn’t have enough completed assignments to pass the class, which means I wouldn’t graduate. I was considering resigning for two weeks and this email solidified my decision to resign. I was able to catch up on work, and I am on track to graduate this spring.

This shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Student Government should not be burning students out the way it has this year. 

For Staff:

  1. Hire a full-time person to support Student Government. Stop making students do the work of full-time employees. Be upfront about your bandwidth to help students. 
  2. Pay Student Government positions. Students involved lose time to have other paid positions or take more classes.
  3. Hire a new Academic Life Administrative Assistant.

For Students:

  1. Be more understanding and respectful when engaging with CORe.
  2. Go back to the clubs and orgs system. Cap the number of student groups allowed. There does not need to be this many groups for a student body this small. This needs to be done through a constitution change, as the advisors are not willing to deny creation of groups. 
  3. Do not allow for a system that might compromise students ability to graduate and have a future after Olin.
  4. Blame the system for the current reimbursement procedure. There are many reimbursements to be done, but individual students don’t cause the underlying problems of CORe. 
  5. Recognize when something is causing harm to your wellbeing and stop doing it.

My Olin Mad Libs Adventure: Getting Dressed for a Day at Olin

By Hugh Keenan, Ava Possidente, and  ___(first name)___   ___(last name)___!

I wake up on a day like any other. I’m feelin’ snazzy, sassy, and ___(adjective)___. ___(exclamation)___! I yell as I awaken from my ___(noun)___! The room is ___(adjective)___, the shower is ___(adjective)___, and with ___(noun)___ in my sink, I know today is going to be as ___(adjective)___ as the days before it. I ___(verb)___ my wardrobe and take a look to see what ___(noun)___ I could wear today. Sequins are a must. I ___(verb)___ the weather ___(noun)___, and it forecast a ___(noun)___ storm and a temperature of __(number)__degrees ___(unit of temperature)___, so I know I need to ___(verb)___ up and wear __(number)__ pairs of pants. First I find pants. My favorite. Then I pick out my sparkliest ___(article of clothing)___ and wiggle it onto my ___(body part)___. I am going to ___(activity of Oliner)___ later so I should probably also wear my ___(article of clothing)___. First ___(noun)___ I see goes right on my ___(body part)___. And for the last touches, I put on a(n) ___(article of clothing)___ just to look nice for the ___(mythical animal)___ tribe in Parcel B. Putting on makeup is a ___(noun)___. It makes me look so ___(adjective)___ that I have to do it at least once per ___(unit of time)___. I’m sure I’ll get so many compliments. My friends will probably say things like “I love the glitter on your  ___(bodypart)___.” or “your  ___(animal)___print  ___(noun)___really pulls the look together.” or “your  ___(noun)___ glows with the radiance of  ___(periodic element)___ going through fission.”  I look in the mirror and strike a little pose. I look flipping ___(adjective)___.  And with that, I am ready to ___(verb)___ the day with my ___(adjective)___ outfit. Now out the ___(noun)___ I go!

Drunk Horoscopes

Aries: March 21 – April 19

New Year’s Resolutions? Sorry the LGRAC is so crowded. More like New Year’s Revolutions. What’s your RPM bro?

Taurus: April 20 – May 20

Have you heard about Project 2025? At least they have a plan. That’s more than we can say for Olin.

Gemini: May 21 – June 20

Trump said our sex is assigned at contraception, so everyone is a condom now. drill baby drill.

Cancer: June 21 – July 22

As a country, we are making such great strides towards a racially diverse society. The richest African-American man is white. We did nazi that coming. 

Leo: July 23 – August 22

Do you have an internship for the summer? Try the tried-and-true strategy: Live Laugh Lockheed. God knows they’ve sent enough emails. 

Virgo: August 23 – September 22

If they get to storm the capitol, we should be allowed to storm the Hot Topic at Natick Mall. Happy 4 year anniversary! Would you like to get a choker?

Libra: September 23 – October 22

What if Olin took over Canada? What if Olin took over Greenland? Dave Barrett’s pool has now expanded to the Panama Canal, and North Hall is on the coast of the Gulf of Gilda.

Scorpio: October 23 – November 21

Oliners need to stop whining, start boxed wine-ing instead. Have they tried Nighthawk Lush Pinot Noir? Tastes a lot better than powdered eggs. 

Sagittarius: November 22 – December 21

Time to bring joy! Wanna hang out with life-sized Tim Sauder? Or throw snowballs at the Californian first year who only wears shorts? 

Capricorn: December 22 – January 19

Have you ever considered writing a Frankly Speaking article? There’s about a 50% chance it ends up online. Hundreds of alumni probably agree with you. 

Aquarius: January 20 – February 18

Get ready for Valentine’s Day! Enjoy a wonderful evening full of ESA, SoftDes, and tears. Love letter? More like RUOK letter.

Pisces: February 19 – March 20

Have you considered being a whore? I heard the job market is tough right now. You might need more options. There’s a stripper pole in the 2N closet. 

Notice re: Volume 17, Issue 3

This article has been removed from the Frankly Speaking website at the request of the President of Olin College. The publication team would like to further clarify the circumstances of this removal. 

Why did we choose to publish the article “I Still Believe in Olin”? 

We want to remind our readers that Frankly Speaking does not endorse the opinions expressed in any particular article. We are dedicated to sharing all perspectives of the Olin community, including and especially those that highlight difficult issues that affect the college at large. We believed that the article would spark important conversation among students, staff, faculty, and administration. The inclusion of anonymous sources in this article was a deliberate decision made to protect vulnerable parties from retaliation. 

Why did we take it offline?

The article made serious allegations against an employee, and we recognize that the anonymous survey reports included in the article did not present sufficient evidence to conclude that the employee definitively violated policy. While we stand by our decision to share this information with the Olin community, we also acknowledge that this sensitive information should not be publicly available on the internet.

At the same time, we are disappointed that the college reacted to the publication of this article with an immediate request for removal instead of expressing concern for the allegations brought to light. Olin College must ensure that members of the community are able to bring forward concerns without fear of retaliation.

We want to be clear that the removal of this article from our website was not because of pressure from administration. However, the request gave us an opportunity to reflect on our role in public discourse. Our responsibility as a publication team is to ensure the integrity of claims, especially given their severity. These allegations could not be verified with the degree of certainty necessary to disseminate them widely on the internet.

Sincerely, 

The Frankly Speaking Publication Team

Statement from the Lucy Platt ‘25, author of the article:
President Barabino once said, in her letter Lessons Learned from Trombone Shorty, “Let’s all do our part to practice what we preach, to do what it takes to make the world better, and, as the lyrics suggest, to earn our right to complain.” I feel that I embodied this and the spirit of Olin. To all those who feel hurt, silenced, or scared, my door is still open and Outlook calendar is still to date.

Some Financial Suggestions

It feels like most of Olin’s recent full-system change prioritizes money. I’m here with some thoughts on what we could do about our financial crisis.

Sell naming rights

Our college is named the same as Babson’s Olin Hall because the money came from the same rich dude with an ideal. So far, we only have names on Milas Hall, the Norden Auditorium, and the Miller Academic Center. Sure, that’s three people important in the founding of Olin – nice and personal. But we could totally sell out.

Let’s have a McMoneybags Campus Center. Jane Smith Dormitory. Company Name Chem Lab. We already installed a bench named after the repeat Scope sponsor Santos. My time touring colleges taught me that rich people like having their names on buildings. Hell, it even works for the car-based project teams: donate enough and your (personal or company) name goes on the vehicle.

We can get super petty with it. Comparatively small donors can get little plastic plaques on a dining hall chair. If we set a capitalistic, money-first goal, we could divvy out plenty of real estate. Who doesn’t want to live on a campus inundated with names of people and corporations far wealthier than we’ll ever be?

Profit from our fancy equipment

I’ve heard people touring the shop spaces jokingly ask if they could use them. I bet some of them would pay money for that. What about the labs? They’re not all in use 24/7.

People could pay a subscription fee for access. Make a complex calendar of when classes need things. Even after setting an expectation that students get priority over subscribers, I think there would be takers. 

What about our SCOPE sponsors? Instead of selling seniors’ time and labor, can we do physical work for them? Better yet, can we do it on free student labor in exchange for course credit? Olin has high-spec equipment that we’re not using to their monetary potential. We could sell scans on the SEM or parts made on the waterjet (which already takes work orders), the CNC machines, and even the 3D printers.

Different student demographic

Leadership, I see your idea of 600 students and raise you the idea of any student over the age of 25. I don’t know of a single Oliner who wasn’t in the traditional college age range. Let’s advertise to people in their 30s looking to change careers, to 60-year-olds who are retired and have time for college. Charge them all full tuition like state schools do to out-of-state students.

Olin could use the age diversity. What little we have now is the occasional grade-skipper who’s extra young. I see a divide between ‘students’ and ‘grown-ups’ (that calling our professors by first name doesn’t change). Personally, my high school karate classes helped me learn how to befriend and respect adults as equals rather than superiors. I think that benefits me, and I can tell that hasn’t clicked for everyone.

Non-matriculated options

Olin classes are unique! Experimental! Hands-on! Cross-disciplinary! Non-traditional! Exclusively for Oliners!!!

So let’s burst the bubble. Let people come to take one class. Make their tuition disproportionately high because we’d be ‘increasing professor workload’ (the goal here is to make money). I think this would get tons of engagement from people who want to experience an Olin class for themselves, from people who want to learn a one-skill-one-class like coding in CompSci, from some company sending a cohort to take CD and change their approach to product design.

It could even tie into the Summer Institute, where we pull in professors from other colleges and teach them how to be more like Olin. If part of Olin’s mission is to put our version of teaching out there, let’s share that exact teaching with more than 100 students per year. Oliners would benefit from learning to work with people who aren’t all up on the Oliner high horse. Do any of us remember how to work with non-engineers? I don’t.

Blaze of Glory

If we’re so financially done for, let’s just admit that. Stop trying to pull money from higher tuition payments, and let’s go down like a phoenix. Declare an end date for Olin College and increase our annual spending so the endowment lasts just long enough. Leave behind a way smaller pool that pays one person for an extra few decades to send out our transcripts or whatever else we need to prove we went to a real-but-dead college.

Committing to spending the endowment would open up money to do so many important things. They don’t have to be complicated: take on fewer students and go back to full-tuition scholarships. Pay faculty better. Add more professors, more wacky and interesting classes, more funding to do research and co-curricular projects.

What do I want to see? Use the endowment to commit to another round of ‘experimental’ college. Have a fresh partner year to ideate what we want Olin to become in its final years. Rewrite our curriculum from zero based on student and faculty input. Olin’s rhetoric claims to be ‘redefining engineering education’, but our definition hasn’t changed since 2006. CALL seems to be a sad attempt to renew that experimental drive from the top down. I think instead we need to commit – as a whole community – to burn Olin down and rise from the ashes.

If you find this discussion-worthy, the FS editors can share my contact.

“Just a Thing We Do”

I’m sitting in the backseat of my family’s minivan, dozing off as my parents make some light chatter in the front. When all of a sudden I’m jerked awake as the car swerves frantically to avoid colliding with someone who was in too much of a rush to kindly provide a blinker.

And somewhat uncharacteristically, my dad drops a casual, 

“Jo kuch bhi hota hai, acche ke liye hota hai. Destiny hai”

“Whatever happens, happens for the best. It’s destiny”

That’s just what we humans do. We’re born to make sense of the world around us. Even when things are shy of disaster, we find a single puzzle piece slotting into place by pure coincidence…

And we call it destiny.

The Autistic Battle Against Apotheosis

I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon for a Babson class this semester, and I swear it’s relevant to The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals. The book’s main character, Christopher, opens his story saying: 

“…when I first met Siobhan, she showed me this picture:

and I knew that it meant ‘happy’… she drew some other pictures

but I was unable to say what these meant.”

I love theater for many reasons. The first is because I get to make heightened expressions to convey characters’ feelings to the audience. A simple smile goes unrecognized because of how far the audience sits. Instead, a performer must convey a more pronounced emotion—elation:

Without context, these expressions look exaggerated, uncanny, or even grotesque – but in order to effectively communicate the story, it is necessary. 

It’s often said about musicals, “when your character cannot express their feelings with words, they sing.” It’s a sweet sentiment, but if you don’t relate to emotions the same way, the experience can feel uncanny. The aliens from The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals weaponize songs, lighting, and most interestingly, their facial expressions, to sell their otherworldliness. The aliens, like actors, are unnervingly over-expressive. Professor Hidgens questions how the aliens could wordlessly choreograph their song and dance. Christopher, similarly, asks how we could relate to each other so seamlessly just by using the shape of our face. The people in Christopher’s story operate under an unspoken assumption that their mode of expression is not only normal, but correct, excluding those who do not understand. The aliens in TGWDLM make that assumption explicit.

The most interesting line in TGWDLM to me is from the song, “Let It Out”, when Paul sings solo, “I’ve never been happy. Wouldn’t that be nice?” When he makes that proclamation, I don’t see a man who isn’t happy. I see someone who has been given a definition of happiness he cannot attain. Paul has never “been happy” because the world around him invented a concept of happiness that doesn’t apply to him. In the real world, it enforces conformity, and the contagion in TGWDLM repurposes the aesthetic of happiness to convince everyone to join the hive. 

The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals speaks to the social understanding of health and wellness. This perspective suggests that wellness is oriented around being a productive worker. Imagine ADHD not as a unique inability to focus, but instead a natural state of being that has only been given a diagnosis because the world forces adults and children to primarily work at computers.

When the hive entices the world to consume its ‘blue shit’, it reminds me of the mood-stabilizing drugs I took when I was 10. The pills came in shades of green and blue. My friends from back then have said it made me look like this:

The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals argues that separation from the neurodivergent self is inherently violating. We are genetically reconstructed from the inside out, given new personas that others will find palatable. Some people are forced to take medicine or receive surgery so they can conform to the standard of “normal”. For many of us like Professor Hidgens, the resulting identity is worth that pain. It is a worthy second chance. For others, like Paul and Emma, with this conformity we see the death of unique, interesting, authentic, and happy experiences.