I am currently mentally masturbating. As I begin to write this piece, it is 10:31AM and I am at Wellesley—I’m planning to go to office hours for my chemistry class, and I got here a half-hour early to have a meeting which ended about ten minutes ago. This week is going to be crazy busy with Passover, a CD design review, biology catch-up, and other silliness—I should be using this time to work! But instead, I am doing none of those things because I saw Maddy’s email about Frankly Speaking submissions being due and decided to write this piece—it’s an indulgence, and a fun one, too.

 I initially heard this concept from my father. In his first year of residency, the attending surgeons kept telling him to “stop mentally masturbating and just start cutting people up.” The concept can be summarized as the practice of doing indulgent, meandering intellectual tasks when more direct action could be taken. 

At Olin, this seemingly meaningless exploration and indulgence often is the real work; mental masturbation is an essential part of the Olin experience. Being a student at Olin means getting sidetracked. It often involves horrendously overscoping your QEA project because you think it would be cool, or staying up until the sun rises to get your Mech Proto automata working. 

Olin’s pedagogy heavily promotes a unique combination of whimsy, grit, and intellectual indulgence, and provides a beautiful example of how this exploration can be used to develop highly effective engineers. At its core, Olin is a college of mental masturbators, and I am proud to be one of them.

However, this culture of intellectual exploration is breaking down into preprofessionalism, and it’s not a pretty sight. Take the rise of 20-crediting. The social pressure to take 20 credits a semester is a new concept—according to professors, even a few years back, an Oliner taking more than 4 classes was a rare exception. Now, it is commonplace.

This is absurd, and entirely against the values of Olin. Instead of spending their time diving deep into concepts, overscoping and gaining the application-based intellectual flexibility which helps Oliners distinguish themselves, many students taking 20 credits end up shoving in content through a firehose without having enough space to truly understand or dive deep, much less actually breathe. 

I learned this lesson from experience—last semester, I was taking 22 credits including PIE, QEA 3, Mech Solids, Organic Chemistry 1, Wellesley poetry, and an ISR. The sheer volume of work prevented me from diving deep into any one particular concept, diluting the value of the courses I was taking. Without unstructured time to recover, breathe, and develop deeper intellectual curiosity in my coursework, I simply did the minimum to achieve a good grade for each class. I cheated myself of the curiosity, learning, and intellectual indulgence which a proper Olin semester should entail. 

Overcommitting yourself gives you the academic equivalent of erectile dysfunction—you become so constantly stressed that you just can’t get it up; you lose all interest in the kind of unstructured learning and growth which is so central to Olin’s curriculum.

As I finish (re)writing this article, it is currently 9:08PM. The official fall course schedule came out a few days ago, and people are beginning to pick out their classes for their fall semesters. 

Inevitably, many rising sophomores will try and take 20 credits, or set themselves up for Mech-E Hell Semester, or plan to do some other ridiculous set of commitments which will make it substantially more difficult to have a good overall learning experience. They’ll get through it—Oliners are aggressively competent, and we know how to check the boxes to achieve outward-facing success. 

So I urge you to consider, if you will, make the time to actually learn—to indulge yourself in self-exploration, curiosity, and joy.

*If you want help planning out your course schedule, please feel free to reach out. It is not an exaggeration to say that I have spent more time planning out my courses than literally any other student at Olin, and I find great joy in helping other people figure out their own path for classes.