Category Archives: 09 (September) 2025

A Conversation with President May

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On Thursday, September 28th, Maddy (‘27) and Quinn (‘27) sat down with Olin’s newly appointed president, R. May Lee. Despite it only being the 9th business day of May’s new role, she had plenty to say and share about herself and how she’s approaching new horizons with Olin.

Quinn: 

Can you tell us about yourself, what you like to do for fun, and why you came to Olin?

May: 

I’ve been around for so long, it’s hard to know where to start. So I will start with the last of your questions, which is what I like to do for fun. I love to hike and be outside, and I’m excited to explore this whole area. There seem to be a lot of trails, and I hear Parcel B is excellent for bird watching. I love to read, knit, be with my family—although I don’t love arguing with them about what we should watch on Netflix, but that’s part of being a family!

I came to Olin because I heard so much about the innovation in engineering education that it’s been doing for the last 25 years. In Shanghai, as a dean, I sent some of my faculty from the School of Entrepreneurship and Management to Babson. I wandered over and learned about what Olin was doing for engineering faculty. I went back to Shanghai and told my fellow deans, “You really need to send your faculty to summer boot camp at Olin.” And it turns out that a few years later, they did. I was inspired by the idea that somebody would actually start a new college focused on improving engineering education. That obviously resonates with my own history, having been the person who led the team to start NYU Shanghai, and then being part of the inaugural team at Shanghai Tech. So I love the idea of folks in higher ed trying to do something new and different, that’s focused really on the students. And when this opportunity came up, I was just blown away by the ethos and sense of culture. I thought, “Oh, okay, this feels like a good fit.”

Maddy: 

You touched on some of your work with Shanghai, but we also know that you’re coming from RPI as Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer for Institutional Impact. What aspects of this work are you excited to carry with you to Olin, and how do you see your presidency at Olin as unique from that? 

May: 

One of the things that struck me over the summer as I was transitioning out of RPI and started meeting people at Olin: I realized I was going from the oldest engineering school in the country to the newest. Depending on your perspective, one funny or not funny similarity is the maintenance issues. As a 200-year old institution, RPI is constantly replacing pipes and walkways. Imagine my surprise when I received the email update about the big trench. I saw the pictures of the pipes in the parking lot and I thought, “Oh, this must be my RPI email.” And I looked at it and realized, “Oh, no, that’s actually happening at Olin too!” Maybe it feels like a non-material kind of similarity, but to me, I found it ironic that the 200-year-old and the 25-year-old institutions were wrestling with very similar things. My work at RPI was unusual in that I created a new position focused on strategy.  That was possible because I had a great relationship with the president who understood the importance of strategy and focus. And when you’re looking at a 200-year-old institution, you have a lot of DNA to work with. He pledged to start a brand new strategic planning process. I joined him to do that, and it gave me an opportunity to really introduce a whole new process of dialogue with the community. These are things that you’re really familiar with at Olin, but were really new to RPI. It’s a much bigger place, so there were more people to talk to and more iteration. Over the course of two and a half years, we managed to put together a terrific ten-year vision and three-to-five-year plan under his leadership. To some extent, I think that task also needs to be done here at Olin. You know, Olin was formed 25 years ago and we had a sort of infancy with a partner class and the first-years in the Class of 2006. Extending that metaphor, in preschool and toddlerhood, we were getting the school up and running while being innovative and amazing. Now it’s like we’re in middle school, right? The school’s been up and running long enough that we have to replace the pipes. And we need to think about, “Okay, what do we want to be for the next 25 years?” I know that we have Engineering for Everyone and CALL, which is fantastic. I hope we can refine and focus our efforts a bit across campus as to what we want to spend the next five years working towards. So in that sense, there’s a clear carryover from the work I was doing. I think the difference is maybe I won’t be the person doing all of that work, but I’ll have a team of great faculty, staff, and students. I’m hoping that I can sit in the dining hall, I can go to DesNat, I can be in the Shop, we can have informal conversations and do a bunch of those things with all the members of the community. 

Quinn: 

You talked a little bit about this, but Olin has had a lot of growing pains as the college is trying to find its footing and identity in the higher education space. How do you approach the tensions that come up when an institution tries to change its infrastructure and culture while maintaining the trust that’s necessary throughout this process with the community and the constituency of the college?

May: 

Somebody wise once said that you can only move at the speed of trust, and sometimes you have to go slow to go fast. People have asked me the same question in various forms—”What dramatic change are you going to make? What plans do you have?” My answer is that I don’t know. I’ve only been here for eight days. I have the data points that I’ve been able to accrue over eight days of these kinds of conversations. What I’m really hoping to do is ask a lot of dramatic questions and engage in a lot of active listening to get more data and to start to connect the dots and hear what people care about and what’s really core to the essence of Olin. I think it’s gonna take us some time to actually get to the place that you’re referring to. And I have to say that I’m really pleased that you have identified that getting to the essence of Olin’s identity feels like a challenge at the moment, because I think that’s one of the questions I’d like to answer with everybody. 

Maddy: 

There are, as you mentioned, a lot of things that are unique to Olin and they can also often be fun and quirky. What are some favorite weird Olin things that you’ve noticed since you’ve been here? 

May: 

You mean other than the avalanche of post-its that surround me starting with my front door? I walked up and said, “Oh, look, there’s Post-its covering my door that spell Olin, that’s cool.” I think that’s how this whole place feels to me. I’ll give you one example. I don’t know that it’s weird and quirky, but it did make me feel very welcome. When I first used the term co-creation at RPI, everyone looked at me with befuddled stares. And they’re really smart people, but that’s not the realm within which they operate. I’ve come from that world, but when I said it in my conversation with the search committee for Olin, everybody’s face lit up and I said, “Oh, this must be the place where I belong, these are my kind of peeps.” So it’s not weird and quirky so much as a pleasant surprise to actually enter a community where people were actively engaged in the practice of really ideating, prototyping, learning, trying again. I think that feels like so much a part of what Olin is about. And that is weird and quirky for a higher education institution, right? That’s not something that’s in the muscle memory of many other places. 

Quinn: 

Something that really struck me when I got to Olin was the difference in power structure with faculty and students. I mean, we talk about flipped classrooms all the time, but it’s really a flipped institution. Like professors will come and sit down in the dining hall and eat lunch with us. That wouldn’t happen at most other institutions that I’ve been at. Was that surprising and appealing for you? 

May: 

It’s definitely appealing. I was in the dining hall yesterday, and I’m hoping to be in the dining hall at least once a week for lunch. It does happen in other places, but I don’t think it happens in the same way. I think there is a kind of relationship that the faculty hope to create with the students, likely because of our size, and because of our ethos. Other places do have it, but it’s not consistent, either because of size or some other reasons. I’ve certainly experienced it elsewhere, because when you have talented educators, they’re going to create that kind of relationship, because they understand that their job is about learning. The best teachers are always learning. And the relationship between people who do high-level research and who teach, they understand that’s a holistic circle. That is an ecosystem that feeds itself. The difference here is that you really have that across the board—that’s one of the special things about Olin. 

Quinn: 

Could you tell us about a time that you felt really at home in a community and what you learned from that experience and what you took away from it?

May: 

Something important to know about me is that I grew up moving every couple of years, and it will surprise you to know that I was a very shy child. My mother would tell stories about how I was too embarrassed to say anything to anyone for the first many years of my life. But I think that the exercise of moving so frequently taught me to prioritize understanding the culture of the place that I was in and what was happening around me. I worked to understand the slang, the favorite foods, the habits—things that make up a community. It gives me comfort, and also it helps me meet people and make friends. Over time, I have learned to be comfortable with who I am, and therefore I feel at home in most places, though it took me a while to understand that it was within me and not something that I needed the community to give me. I realized if I could alter my own sense of perspective to be embracing and curious, in most cases it would be paid back. I don’t mean to paint the picture that I’m welcomed by every person in every place, but at least in my own lived experience, over time I’ve managed to feel some sense of community where ever I’ve landed. And I’m certainly feeling very welcome at Olin. I’m feeling very at home, even if I never would have expected that it would be in a suburb of Boston. 

Maddy: 

Life takes us crazy places, like Needham Massachusetts. 

May: 

Yes, exactly. What you learn is sometimes it’s about the geographical place, and sometimes it’s about the spiritual place, right? People say, “Where do you consider home?” My family would say New York City. Sometimes that’s how we define home. For me, home right now is Olin. It happens to be in Massachusetts. And I’m committed to learning about Boston and this whole area. I was really confounded by the idea that I had spent my whole life committed to living in cities and living in New York, and now I would be in the suburb of all suburbs. It’s very quiet at 8 pm here. You can’t walk out and go to the corner deli and get a quart of milk. It took me a while to go from being anxious or worried about that to thinking “Okay, this is going to be an adventure.” I did get lost on my first run. I went out without a phone thinking I’d just run straight and come back… that’s not what happened. Then I realized that every street was looking the same. Every house was looking the same. I had no idea where I was. 

Quinn:

Have you gotten to explore any parts of Boston at all? Have you taken the T?

May: 

Our daughter is a rising sophomore at Tufts, so we have spent some time navigating the Somerville, Medford, Cambridge part of Boston. And last year when we were here visiting, you know, we took the T, explored some areas of Boston, went to the Isabella Gardner Museum. I would not say that I am fluent in Boston yet. I think that will come with time. 

Quinn: 

Understandable!

[As our interview devolved into delightful conversation, the topic of Collaborative Design at Olin came up.]

May: 

I taught a version of Collaborative Design when I was in Shanghai, so I kind of have a sense of the class. I’d love to see how it’s taught here. 

Quinn: 

That’s awesome. What are some highlights from that experience, teaching that class similar to CD? 

May: 

I taught it in Shanghai to Chinese students who were engineers and scientists. They weren’t like you guys. You came into this excited about that, but they came to the class thinking, “Oh my God, this has nothing to do with math or engineering. Why are they making us take this?” The first semester was an unmitigated disaster. They hated it! And I had folks from IDEO teaching all the things that you love—the Post-its, the brainstorming, the put-yourselves-in another’s shoes, go out and do the field interviews, all that—my students hated it. To them, it just was a giant waste of time, and they were not shy in saying that. So I had to cancel the spring semester classes and redesign the whole class. I had to start from scratch. I had to really think about what was the essence of what we were trying to teach. Who were we trying to teach? What was it going to take to kind of get them there? What was the balance of direction versus exploration? They had a much longer road to get to the  starting point for most Oliners, and culturally, they were in a very different place. Asking people about their feelings is not something that really happens in Asian cultures and certainly not in China, right? So there was a lot of just going back to the brass tacks of, well, what are we really trying to achieve here? And then the second piece of that was how big the class was. How many students are there in CD here? 

Quinn: 

About 100, with teams of four to five. 

May: 

Right. Where I came from, you’d have 24 people in a section, and then they would break up into teams of four or five. The leadership in China said to me, “We have over a billion people here, so doing things 25 people at a time is not very sustainable.” And so what they said was, you have to do it with 100 kids in one classroom at a time. So I had to figure out how to break them into teams, and then I had to figure out how to manage the teams. Just think about what you do in CD if you are in a team, and you’re reporting back out and getting feedback. If you have 20 teams and you have one hour to do that, it’s not very much. 

Quinn: 

Here, there’s four faculty dedicated to that process and a whole host of student workers. 

May: 

Right. So I got to a place where I thought, okay, I can do this with two teaching faculty members, but we had no student workers. But it was really gratifying. It was amazing to see when we finally got it right, the “Oh, this is why it matters”. That was almost 10 years ago when I started, and now those students in those first two or three classes are all getting their PhD’s, and I think really embracing the spirit of what we taught them. As a teacher, the most gratifying thing that you can see is that somehow it made a difference in their lives and how they think about their work, which I think is how faculty members here feel about you guys. 

Quinn: 

Yeah, definitely. I hope you get to see part of the CD process in the spring because it’s really quite magical, I think, to see all of that just sort of unfold.

May: 

Yeah, I mean, I’m hoping that I get to. I’m going to sit in on DesNat, and ModSim. I thought my first couple weeks I’d spend more time with the team and the faculty and the students, just trying to get a sense of the place. 

Quinn: 

Is there stuff that you’re going to do to try to maintain that connection, aside from the first couple of weeks? Because students graduate, faculty turnover, and staff turnover. How are you going to keep that fire going throughout your time here?

May: 

My hope is to have at least one lunch a week in the dining hall. When my schedule settles down—let’s say after the first three months—my hope is that I also have regular office hours, one afternoon a week for students who can just drop by and chat about anything. Though it’s also a good learning for people to think, “Oh, I can actually make an appointment and go to the president.” So we’ll see. I think having regular sessions where people could attend, and then opening up so that, whether it’s for Halloween or Chinese New Year—maybe trying to do parties at the President’s house so students have a place to come and be social more than 15 feet away from West Hall. I’m thinking about those things and I’m open to ideas if folks have suggestions.

Quinn: 

It’s awesome that you’re thinking about this; it’s really encouraging. 

May: 

Yeah, I’m thinking a lot about it. I feel that being in community physically together is an important thing for us. 

Quinn: 

Looking broadly in five years when it comes to the end of your term as president, regardless of whether you continue—I hope you do. You seem really awesome and great for this community. What things do you think you’ll be thinking about to determine whether you’ve had a successful term as president of all? 

May: 

I think if we can successfully answer the question, “What is Olin’s identity for the next 25 years?”, and we have some clarity about how we want to do that in five years, that would be a success. So I would include in that, getting us to a place where we’re feeling financially resilient. We’re running an operating deficit right now; we’re spending more money than we’re bringing in. And I’m not saying that every decision has to be driven by financials, but we can’t make decisions without thinking about financials. Getting that balance right and having the community see that and understand it, and getting us to a place in five years where we’re spending what we bring in, or we’re bringing in more than we’re spending, is a really important goal for us to hit in five years. If we want to be responsible stewards of this institution that we love, then we want to make sure that it’s here for another 25, 50, or 100 years. You don’t spend more money than what’s in your bank account; it’s not responsible. And then I think really being able to execute on Olin’s identity and who we are in the next five years, whatever those two or three things are, would feel successful. I would say the final piece, and I don’t want to be presumptuous, but I do sense—both in your questions and what I’ve heard—a sort of yearning for us to be together more as a community, to have a degree of trust and to really be able to have a dialogue. I think if we get to that place in five years, I would be really happy. 

Quinn: 

I would also be very happy to see that. 

Maddy: 

That is definitely important to us. Probably one of the top things on everybody’s minds right now is having that. 

May: 

The other thing that I said to another large group is that as great as some aspects of the Olin culture are, I think that we are not as fluent as we could be in addressing conflict. Often people think, “Oh, I don’t want to speak up because people won’t like me,” or “They’ll disagree” or “They’ll yell at me” or whatever it is. I would like us to work on that. In this moment, we need to learn how to disagree with each other and still be in community. There are many people in my life who, they may not be my best friends, but they are people with whom I’m friendly. They are neighbors. They didn’t vote for the same person, they probably don’t believe necessarily in the things that I believe in, I don’t believe in the things that they believe in, but we’re in the same community, and so we have to find ways to be able to do that. I think that happens less and less. I don’t know if you’ve seen the work that’s been done on migration patterns in this country, but what you’re starting to see is people are moving to places where other people agree with them. If I look back at all the places where I grew up, I realize we likely lived with folks with a totally different worldview t, and yet we were still neighbors. We had potlucks together. We had block parties together. We played with their kids. The adults carpooled. Whatever it was, we managed to live together, even though I’m pretty sure now you would find us completely different in almost everything. But we were neighbors. That’s important for us to do here at Olin. And the truth is, we’re a lot alike here because we all co-create, and so meeting somebody who has no patience in co-creation says, “Look, I just want to decide.” What do you do when you’re faced with that? 

Quinn: 

And how do you resolve that conflict?

May: 

That’s the question. I think the answer is that yes, you won’t always get what you want, and they won’t always get what they want, but understanding how to do that is important. 

Quinn: 

It’s really awesome to hear that you’re thinking about this in a transparent way. Hearing from the next leader of the college that we need as a community to be better at conflict is really encouraging. 

May: 

I have said that to other people. So far, nobody has hit me (literally or metaphorically speaking). So I think that’s a good sign. 

Quinn: 

Well, thank you so much!

May: 

No, thank you guys. Thank you for making the effort. I’m glad we could make it work. I look forward to seeing how silly I look in print.

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.

Learning To Grow On A Farm

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I stopped following politics after Trump got elected again. In 2020, I thought I was a part of a movement where everyone was growing in conscious. With every day a new headline, a new crime, a new impeachable offense, the country could clearly see the damage he dealt domestic and abroad. After 2021 there was quiet, and I thought we liked it that way. I thought I was part of a growing movement, but I wasn’t. I was terminally online, and I was out of touch. 

I stopped reading the news because the one way I thought real change could happen would not come. I thought great change must come from laws, government departments, political advocacy, and more radicals in government. But that got us the same old fascist, DOGE, and insert any other upheaval I’m not reading about. I couldn’t stay online.

This summer I touched grass, and I mean really touched grass, in a way I never had before. I did so by working on a farm.

I did research at Olin under Alessandra, and she asked a simple, yet challenging question for me to explore: what economic and ecological incentives align for farmers? After a bit of googling, one of the answers to this question is the concept of “regenerative agriculture”, a series of strategies that prioritize revitalizing the land and capturing carbon through farming practices. Broader research points to a variety of successful, well tested strategies for farms to implement, alongside being far more profitable in the long run. Now, the follow up question becomes: How can I contribute to enabling farmers to implement regenerative agriculture?

The answers to this new question are diverse, fascinating, and complicated, but one discovery was clear to me. The government could never “legally mandate regenerative agriculture”. Farms are too diverse for blanket standards, and guidelines are frequently unable to encompass the farmers they supervise. My aforementioned theory of change could not succeed under these conditions. This developed my first new understanding: Systemic change must be designed to empower its users at a granular level, and these systems do not need to be government supported.

The farming community in Massachusetts is beautiful and diverse, and every farmer is supported by relying on one another to teach and grow together. I saw farmers that depended on networks of mutual aid, and I could see how successful this strategy was. Farms hosted events to share how they found success, and how that impacted their perspectives about the industry. Systemic change must be enforced through a community’s dependence on their peers, not their dependence on authority figures. Farmers change their behavior through close community mentorship, and it is difficult for politicians, academics, or engineers to meaningfully contribute to a farmer’s operations.

My final project became a guidebook for farmers to compare success stories related to regenerative farming. It took the summer of engrossing myself in a new ecosystem, questioning my biases as an engineer, and exploring how I can support a community that already relies on an established system of aid. 

I want to farm more. Not just because the community is so welcoming, not just because the work is tangible and rewarding, but because farming makes me believe that change is still possible. What I learned might not resonate with you. But there are other ways to change the world that you may not be thinking about. I implore you to seek out these means of change and discover the greatest contributions you can provide. Your current theory of change does not encompass every impact one can make in this world. And if you’re like me, then you know your capacity to give is greater than support for movements that don’t feel successful. You deserve to discover how.

Ivy Reviews Olin Library Books #1

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Fiction: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman, 1995

Forty women are locked in a cage deep underground. Watched by silent guards, with no sense of how they got there or why they are imprisoned, the women are denied even the most basic of human experiences, including sunlight, physical touch, and a sense of time. What comes next is an exploration of how humans find meaning in senseless and inexplicable cruelty. Through this story, author Jacqueline Harpman asks the reader over and over again: what does it mean to be a human without history, community, knowledge, nature, or future? What does it mean to be a human without purpose?

Harpman’s nameless protagonist is a young girl with no memory of the world before the cage. Selecting a child character to narrate this story was no mistake: children are deeply curious by nature, which this story reveals as the characteristic that keeps us human, even in the bleakest of circumstances. During the women’s imprisonment, the girl battles her own dehumanizing environment with curiosity: imagining romance, the outside world, and even the passage of time. Telling this story from a youthful perspective makes even more sense upon learning that Harpman, who was born in 1929 Belgium to Jewish parents, was only eleven years old when she was forced to flee the violence of the Holocaust. She watched from afar as the majority of her family in Belgium was killed in the senseless murders of the Auschwitz concentration camp. In a sense, this story is therefore autobiographical: a story of a young girl trying to explain an unexplainably cruel world.

I particularly resonated with the protagonist’s generational disconnect from the other women, who cling to memories of a world that she has never known and may no longer exist. As a young person in the United States, I feel a similar inability to rationalize the stories I hear of decency, bipartisanship, and cultural sanity with the bizarre and nonsensical political age that has reigned since the beginning of my adolescence. But the adults in the story seem lost in the past, the girl’s insistence to understand their present reality is what keeps the women alive – and eventually, what leads them aboveground. The girl’s cynical (but justified) lesson to readers is to let go of the desire to return to a safer world that has long since passed, and instead to go out and discover what lies ahead.

Harpman herself makes a point to lay bare the readers’ yearning for meaning alongside her characters’: just as the protagonist never stops seeking an explanation for her imprisonment, you as the reader will keep turning the book’s pages to find those same answers. We the readers, alongside the nameless girl, answer Harpman’s question: to be human is to want to know.

Author’s Note

I’m starting this run of articles in the hopes that it will encourage everyone to explore the Olin library’s stacks more often. I was skeptical of the library when I first arrived – it seemed so much smaller than a traditional college library. It is, but I’ve discovered this is because we simply got rid of all the bad books and only have good books. I normally read a lot of science fiction, but our library has helped me explore political science, sociology, literary fiction, and more (the sci-fi collection is pretty impressive too). I’m starting small with this issue, but going forward I hope to include a fiction and nonfiction review so there is something for everyone. If you read any of the books I talk about, or just like talking about books, come find me!

Tragedy of the Project Team II (I Was Wrong)

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Two years ago, I published an article titled “Tragedy of the Project Team” in Frankly Speaking, which was a slight vent on how project teams at Olin were operated. If you haven’t read that article, I do strongly recommend it for context to the following. The article served as the framework for how I approached team leadership during my time as PM/lead on AERO and Rocketry, and it has been quoted back to me by future leads who have bought into its conclusions. In one unique instance, a sophomore told me that the article made him decide to come to Olin to co-create that kind of future. I am honored by the support I have received and Oliners’ eagerness to co-create, but I want to explore that article’s pitfalls by teaching you what I’ve learnt in the past two years about how to build a team and a culture.

How can a company with a small name, competitive-yet-not-extravagant compensation, and greater-than-average volatility to market performance attract and maintain top-notch employees? This is what I was asking myself this summer while I worked at Second Order Effects, a small engineering services firm based out of LA. The employees (and founders) had stacked resumes including SpaceX, Google, and the rest of Big Aerospace and FAANG. These phenomenal engineers had no shortage of opportunities, yet they came to SOE, they stayed, and they rated it well on Glassdoor. The company had amazing culture and morale, teams that executed in harmony, and a respect for the individuality and humanity of its employees. I think we can learn a lot from SOE and apply it back to Olin project teams to understand retention and loyalty precisely because SOE has to rely heavily on team culture to survive in a world of Goliaths. 

SOE has something I haven’t seen on Olin’s project teams or seen executed properly at other companies I’ve worked at—people management. Oftentimes this role is folded into engineering management, so you don’t see it advertised, but you can always feel its effects. Let’s talk about some definitions. Project management, which you all are familiar with, is making sure deadlines are met, budgets are kept, and quality is assured. People management is about managing team dynamics and hiring, career growth and development, and creating a team/company vision. Project managers become senior project managers, people managers become CTOs. Both of these are critical roles for any team—at SOE, like many firms, they’re kept separate. Each project has an assigned project manager and each employee has a direct mentor/manager that does the people management. Lower-level managers balance managerial duties and day-to-day engineering, while higher-level managers do only mentorship/management.

Having strong people management is the key to a better culture and reduced turnover—it creates lasting loyalty between the team and the individual and vice versa. At Olin you often hear project teams leading with their projects; contrastingly, you rarely hear them lead with a people-before-project focus. In this article I will dive into five factors of people management I learned from SOE: team bonding, learning opportunities, mentorship, goal setting, and reflection. Then, I will focus on how we can improve in these areas without changing our team structures or adding significant work for our leads. Even tiny shifts in the ways we think about our teams can make a huge impact.

At Olin we do a good job with team bonding; unfortunately, we often look to it as a one-size-fits-all Band-Aid for our other problems. While it can support social cohesion on a team, it does not tackle structural issues or promote behaviors that drive loyalty. While team bonding is critical at companies and larger schools, Olin’s small size reduces its efficacy by eliminating two major value propositions: networking and friendship. At a larger school, you won’t have these same people in your classes, projects, and the dining hall—so team bonding builds strong friendships and expands your professional network. At Olin, project teams don’t have to position themselves to be friend groups—attempting to force that is time better spent on the other factors.

The second factor, learning opportunities, is where I need to discuss my conclusions from “Tragedy of the Project Team.” I had claimed that the solution to member retention and interest boiled down to novel projects, more engineering freedom, and less structure. I have seen this in action; SOE as a services firm has rotating projects and these novel projects can spur co-learning amongst engineers across all levels. But in the article, this was mistakenly presented as the sole factor; I was reflecting on what I thought motivated me and gave me purpose. At Olin, I think we can still improve on project novelty and rotation, but this is no longer my main concern regarding our teams’ health.

The third factor is mentorship. This is the chicken-and-egg problem of project teams; mentorship supports retention, and retention creates mentors. A team needs to provide strong mentorship across all fields from technical to operational. Right now, this is the factor that scares me, seeing that in my time at Olin we have had a massive upperclassman exodus from project teams and now have almost ubiquitously sophomore leads. In order to improve here, we need access to upperclassmen who give mini lectures, explanations at whiteboards, and tutorials. While this necessitates focusing less on their own projects, mentorship should be considered desirable, especially for the type of engineers Olin attracts. Teaching and leadership are both rewarding experiences that make for well-rounded engineers. Often these come with learnings of their own; for instance, teaching can help foster a deeper understanding of the subject and allow for exploration of new ideas. How do we jumpstart our way out of this Catch-22? I hope that by focusing on the remaining factors, a stronger team culture and loyalty will emerge, and in turn naturally grow mentors from within.

The fourth factor is goal setting, which is critical to career and technical development. This involves a difficult, but pivotal decision: put people over projects. A team should assign tasks and deliverables based on individual goals and create new projects off the critical path if necessary. It should not sacrifice a person’s goals for timeline or to fit to a Gantt chart—especially those of new members. Loyal members will pay it back by occasionally doing tasks which do not align with their goals, but a new member given an arbitrary task will simply leave and never feel any loyalty. At SOE, I clearly outlined my goals to learn Altium over the summer and when a quick-turn project from a client came through, I was assigned to it despite never having used the software. My coworkers respected my autonomy and never got involved beyond reviewing my work. Did the schedule slip slightly? Yes. Did the final product have some minor issues and inaccuracies? Yes. But do they now have a skilled employee who can operate independently and is loyal to the team? YES. Investing in your people builds a strong set of dedicated future engineers, leaders, and team-builders. 

Lastly, we have perhaps the most important factor: reflection by design. As humans we suck at being optimistic, and we also suck at remembering what has happened (side note: this is why we all should write gratitude journals). Reflecting on learning highlights the value and growth in the experience, reflecting on goals better directs personal focus, and reflecting on areas of improvement creates space to act upon growth opportunities in a safe environment.

So how can our teams focus on these factors with minimal extra effort? First, we can implement regular 15-minute meetings between each member and mentors, keeping in mind that mentors should be different from one’s subteam lead and generally not PM. One-on-ones are opportunities for reflection, goal-setting, and feedback both for the team and for the member. This article is too short to go into the art of running one-on-ones—contact me to learn more. Members should be empowered to set varied goals across: domain-specific technical learning, cross-disciplinary skills that make for well-rounded engineers, soft skills, networking, etc. Members should be required to brainstorm and work towards 4-6 concurrent goals, refreshed and updated as they are completed or need changes throughout the year. Importantly, their tasking should reflect these goals, not a Gantt chart. Next, we can focus on making learning opportunities more explicit, obvious, and efficient through mini-lectures at the start of meetings. This can give people the guarantee that they will learn something new every time. These could be as little effort as 15-minute brain dumps about whatever one of the leads finds cool and insightful (even if completely irrelevant to the team’s project, such as a LinkedIn workshop). If nothing comes to mind, try polling members about blockers on their projects and expand on those as a team. Need help getting a loft working? Continue that CAD tutorial with a lecture on swept bodies and guide curves. Consequently, this reduces open work time at meetings—we should embrace this and prioritize learning and planning over unstructured work time. In a team with strong people management and loyalty, work is mostly done outside of meetings and blockers are resolved impromptu by sending an Outlook invite or DM to relevant resources like a coworking group or leads. Hence, this should not be viewed as a sacrifice, but an investment. Lastly, we can provide notebooks/journals for members and encourage note-taking during lectures and research/project work. These can be filled front-back technically and back-front with goals and reflections. This can ground learning in a quantitative medium. All of the above suggestions are low-effort for the leadership team, but are incredibly impactful to the overall team culture.

I hope that this article serves to highlight some of the ways in which we can think differently about team-building and team culture on project teams, and perhaps Olin in general. I have explained why factors like team bonding play a minimal role and how factors like learning opportunities, mentorship, goal setting, and reflection need to be more thoughtfully engaged with. I don’t believe Olin project teams have ever had a people manager (AKA engineering people manager or engineering manager) and it shows. Recently, our project teams have dwindled due to factors within our control such as culture, and factors outside our control such as difficulty fundraising, problematic space allocations, and time-consuming safety audits. It is now more important than ever to turn our focus inward as project team leadership. To ride out these external turmoils we need people and cohesion more than ever. Thankfully, those are outcomes we can influence directly when we put our minds and hearts into those around us. Even if it means making sacrifices elsewhere on timelines, scope, complexity, etc., start being people-obsessed, not project-obsessed, and slowly, success shall blossom.

From The Spankly Freaking Team…

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We hoped the summer would make it go away, but the heat seems to only have fermented and festered the insatiable appetite for evil that the Frankly Speaking editors so zealously cling upon. In our lengthy investigations, we have found them yet again spewing dark lies, frenetically hiding facts, and engaging in such deep and willing corruption so as to make their deceit and maleficence only comparable to an uneventful, on-par day in the Trump administration. 

So once again, after a summer apart, we, the Spankly Freaking team, humbly stoop to pick up the headlines so callously rejected by the Frankly Speaking editors and deliver Truth to you. Please enjoy…

Say A Big Welcome To The New President of Olin

‘s Cheese Club

After a fierce race between three club members, Parm Esan was proudly crowned the Third President Of Olin

‘s Cheese Club

How Did You All Enjoy The Summer Reading Book??

Reply Seniors, Juniors, and Sophomores: “It was interesting and insightful. Reflecting upon plagiarism and the ethics of AI usage certainly opened my eyes to the vast implications this might have for both my career and for society at large. If you would like a more detailed response to your prompt, writ a brief relfection on the AI Mirror, or some quick talking points, just let me know!”

New Dean of Student Affairs Installs Bouncy House In The Dining Hall “To Show I’m Going To Be A Cool Dean”

“I’ll even let you eat ice cream and stay up past 10 on the weekends” said Dean Harris, asking to be called Stace-Money or Dean-Slicko.

Now I’m Not Saying To Play In The Trenches…

I mean, me? No. I would not say that. That would be dangerous and something that I personally would not encourage. You wouldn’t be hearing that from me. I mean, the Trenches? They don’t look fun at ALL is what I would say. If I were asked.

No one should play in the Trenches, would be all that I would be saying if it came to the point of me being asked about it. The Trenches? Noooo…

“No you simply can’t, Doctor! That would be pushing too far into inhumanity!” Cries Assistant As Mad Scientist In Charge Of Olin Cackles, Cranks Up The Heat More

“I must see the limits of my creation!” they continued before putting a bunch of super fun looking Trenches on campus and forbidding students to play in them

Reminder About Referring To The New Class!

Remember when talking about the new class, try not to say “freshmen” as it’s a gendered term! Instead, you should use the gender-neutral “fresh meat”

Remember Why You Came To Olin

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Three years ago, I stepped on campus, suitcase in hand, to move into my home for the next four years. I was excited to meet new people, explore the local area, and work in the machine shop. Since that day, there have been many life-changing moments, favorite memories made, and days that went on for too long. There were times when Olin and life were very frustrating. I got tired of being here and wanted a break. I felt that Olin was far from what I loved it to be. 

When you have these days, I urge you to remember why you came to Olin. Reflect on what made you excited in your first few weeks. Remind yourself of your favorite moments. Who were you with? What were you doing? Why were you doing it? Now go do those things! See those people. Take a break from your schoolwork and extracurriculars. Enjoy this college that you will have attended for four years. Experience your favorite parts of Olin again. 

Here is a list of what I do to remember why I love Olin, reset, and take a breath:

  • Go on a night walk around Needham with friends
  • Read or join OCF in prayer on the benches overlooking the marsh
  • Cut out a fun shape out of scrap wood in the green shop and paint it
  • Sew a new dress or skirt in the library
  • Take an early morning walk in Parcel B
  • Get lunch with my favorite faculty or staff member
  • Ice cream trip to one of many local ice cream shops
  • Walk around Milas Hall offices and meet new people
  • Double-decker hammocks between CC and West Hall
  • Visit my communities outside of Olin (e.g. my church)

These are my favorite things to do on those long days. I hope you can find your own things, share them with others, and remember why you want to be here.