Author Archives: Ike Walker (he/him)

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.

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. ↩︎

You Should Join An Activist Organization: A Response To Last Month’s Article

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To the person who wrote “I Have F***ing Had It With This College’s Leadership”,

You should join an organized activist group on campus.

Last month’s headlining story, reflected a sentiment that many of us have had at one point or another: Olin’s administration is prioritizing making money over student, faculty, and staff voices and values. This piece is not to debate the validity of the sentiment, nor to try to point to where it stems from. For now, I will leave those discussions to your personal experiences, thoughts, conversations, and opinions. This piece is not just addressed to the person who wrote last month’s article; it is written to anyone who has passionately disapproved of a decision that has been made at Olin, to anyone who has been subject to a change outside of their control, and to anyone who has tried making change within the school. It is written with the intent of providing some advice on how to channel whatever anger, tiredness, disillusionment, jadedness, sadness, or whatever other emotion has come out of it. So, with that established:

To the person who wrote last month’s article,

You should join an organized activist group on campus, and I will offer to you Olin Climate Justice. Let me expound. I know what you’re feeling and I’ve been there before. You came here expecting to be able to make change, to be able to have autonomy in shaping your experience at Olin. Heck, it might be the reason you came to Olin in the first place; we certainly market ourselves as a co-creation paradise. But when you got here, it seemed like that was false advertising, that the only control students have is performative at best because everything you try to do fails or falls upon deaf ears. Now I want to be fully clear: that anger comes from a power dynamic that exists between administration and the rest of the college. You’re feeling powerless because, as a single person, you have no formal power to make change, especially in contrast to the few at the top that make the final decision. Even as you talk with peers that are feeling the same thing, what can you do? I have been in this situation, and it makes you feel alone and powerless against a system that you can’t change.

And that is why I encourage you to join an activist organization. The goal of activism is to gather these voices and more importantly, to organize them. In organizing, you combine the experience and knowledge of others. Many voices are taken and empowered to speak out as one. Making change gets complicated fast. Thinking about what change needs to be made is the easy first step, but thinking about the strategy, goals, methods, motivations, and everything else involved in making that change will quickly become incredibly daunting. You need more knowledge. You need more time. Most importantly, you need more support. Luckily, it exists. 

You need more knowledge. Decades of activist philosophy and learning have been compiled specifically for higher education institutions within the United States. They include what has worked, what hasn’t, what strategies exist and how to use them, and everything else about structuring and organizing. It has all been picked apart and put together. It has been tried and refined. And it has been documented so that the rest of us can learn and think and act with them. Even at Olin, OCJ has in-depth resources and documentation of activist movements going back to 2016, along with alumni contacts. Since we began as an organization in 2022, we have intentionally noted changemaking strategies, processes of decision-making, and reflections on actions and their impacts. We have made changes to our structure and strategies as we’ve learned. We have noted what hasn’t worked, and more importantly, what has. This knowledge exists in countless documents and in the memories of leads of any activist organization; go ask them for it. You don’t have to figure it all out yourself.

You need more time. An activist group distributes the work of organizing and running a campaign, allowing people to utilize their strengths and not have to take on everything at once. Organizing takes work. Strategizing, drafting arguments, researching, attending meetings, and a thousand other things need to be done for a well-run campaign. The amount of time that it would take one person to do all of this – especially at the college that studies the most – would be nearly impossible. A campaign needs a graphic designer just as much as it needs a legal researcher. This division of effort means that a changemaking effort isn’t dependent on one person, but can be worked on by many at a time. You don’t have to do all the work yourself.

And you need more support. Challenging any power structure alone is terrifying. There is uncertainty. There is loneliness. Prominently, there is risk and its associated fear. You don’t know how your friends or community will react – if you will be ridiculed or ostracized – which leads to hesitation in expressing yourself. You don’t know if there will be formal retaliation in the power structure, leaving you isolated or even exiled from your community. You know so little about so much that could happen, and it feels like there is no safe place to express yourself. And while I hope you can find trust and confidence in your friends, almost all activist organizations will serve as this safe space. Organizing is stressful and emotionally draining. Trust me, I understand this. It is essential to the functioning of an activist group to be a safe place – there needs to be a solidarity that is only built with trust. These places are intentionally created. We understand that while it’s useful for knowledge to be shared and work to be delegated, it is necessary for the team to trust itself and be comfortable with each other. But you don’t have to be by yourself through it.

I find that we’re often tempted at Olin to fall into a “do it yourself” mentality – a mentality that we should have the spunk to be able to look at any problem and find its solution. But speaking from experience, that will only serve to burn you. Any community problem is incredibly complex. When it comes to making a change, you need to remember: you don’t have to figure it all out yourself, you don’t have to do all the work yourself, and most importantly, you don’t have to be by yourself through it.

I want to end by quoting something in your piece: “Maybe they came with some grand ideas of how to change this place for the better, and found out that real change is hard.” Reflecting on myself, I know that this is true. I came here with grand illusions of how easy it would be to make large-scale change and shape my community for the better. My rose-tinted lenses were promptly smashed off my face as I was repeatedly punched over and over again. It hurt. And while I can’t speak for the experience of others, you may be right, maybe the administration also had this experience. Maybe you did as well. 

I don’t want anyone to have to go through that experience. I see the cure to it lying in more knowledge, time, and support. I humbly offer OCJ as a place that can hopefully fill those three in some capacity, but it doesn’t have to be us. There are plenty of other resources and people, on and off campus, trying to create change in a way that is informed by activist methodology and strategy. I mention OCJ because we are the only officially established activist organization on campus (so we get better snacks off that sweet CCO budget), but you have other options. You can take a Wellesley course on activism (shoutout to Laura Grattan)! You can get involved in an organization in Boston! You can find cool people and events to reach out and go to! And you can do umpteen other different things! (Although I will also mention that OCJ always starts our meetings with a share out on some aspect of activism and an exercise that teaches some organizing skill, typically unrelated to climate justice. If you want to just show up for the start, you’re welcome to do that as well!)

Changemaking is hard, and no one should have to do it alone. Find a place where you will have years of knowledge backing you. Where you will have the time and effort of others aiding you. And where you will have the support to be able to get through the rough days. We have a stronger voice together, and that’s what organizing is fundamentally about.

Find a place where your frustrations of powerlessness can be channeled into forces of power. 

In solidarity,

Ike

And just to complete the shameless plug: OCJ meets in the PARC 6:30 – 8 every Tuesday. All are welcome :)