None of these are light reading, as such. They’re not fluffy; they’re not “beach reads”. But they are bite-sized; each piece of writing is short, so you can dip in and out of the books between your summer adventures. You’ve probably read at least one of these, but you should stick around to read the other ones. They’re mind-blowing.

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Last month Shane and I attended President Miller’s dessert social, where we talked about Olin’s relationships with other engineering schools. He explained that more and more schools are coming to Olin asking for help. Some want to innovate how they teach, while others are new schools that hope to build upon the Olin model. The problem is, our teachers are stretched ridiculously thin as it is.So we thought: can students take this on?

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As a child, I had one really special toy. It wasn’t pretty, or the most interesting, but it was special to me. It was a little wooden action figure that I had cobbled together from bits of scrap wood I found in the garage. The joints were pipe cleaners, the face scribbled on in pencil, and the torso a rough bit of scrap wood from some 2×4 that had broken off the house.Yet I treated this toy better than anything else I owned; I would even sleep with it like a teddy bear at times. I had a deep connection with this conglomeration of misfit bits. This object won my affection by being solely of my own creation, a physical item forged by my imagination and labor. Looking back I realize that this is love. Not a romantic love, but a passion for building and creating that burns just as bright.

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