Some Decision-Making Strategies

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As college students, most of us have pretty big decisions we are responsible for, sometimes for the first time. (How should I prioritize my time? What kind of job aligns with my ethics? Do I drop this class?) Additionally, some of us recently made one of the biggest decisions of our lives: whether or not to attend Olin.

I want to share a couple of strategies I have used to make big decisions where I felt good about the outcomes. Hopefully these will be useful to you to gain traction on decisions where you don’t know where to start.

Before you begin

These things are pre-requisites for being able to think through a decision—if you don’t have them in place, you won’t be able to put any strategy to good use.

  1. Give yourself enough time to think. In the best case, this can be 2-3 weeks or more, so you can reflect on your decision prior to committing. If you don’t have weeks, give yourself a solid chunk of several hours to decide. Late night hours work well for me, because I can stay up and ponder without a definite deadline.
  2. Ask for advice. Not a requirement, but other people’s analysis can help give you context for your options. Try to talk to enough people (more than one) until you find at least one person recommending each option you’re considering. Another good rule of thumb is if you know what someone is going to say before you ask them, then they’re probably not a good person to ask if you want an honest opinion.
  3. Narrow down the list. Decision-making works best with two or at most three different options to choose from. If you have a large set of options, you can usually cross most of them off for easy reasons (too expensive, bad vibes, etc.). Make a list (physical or mental) of criteria that you care about, and use this to cross off options that are objectively worse. If there are still a lot of options that are equally good, you may need to spend more time thinking about what you really want—this is one of the steps that can take weeks. You can also use the strategies below to compare sets of options or one option against the rest.

What is decision-making?

When you make a decision, you are weighing variables. Even if you know the facts about every option, it’s often difficult for you to know how much to care about each factor (ask yourself—how much of a pay cut am I willing to take for a job that aligns with my values? It’s hard to put a number on it, no matter how specifically you define the job). The strategies below are helpful for making value judgments: determining what aspects of each option are really the most important to you, knowing how to weigh each of them, and ultimately comparing one combination of variables against another.

Strategy #1: Debate against yourself

Pick one option—it might be the option you are leaning more towards, if one exists—and convince yourself to choose that option. Pretend you know it is the right option, and you just need to tell the rest of your brain why it’s obviously the best choice. Give yourself time to lay out all the reasons for it in exhaustive detail. Talk to yourself until you’re out of arguments, and you don’t know what to say next. Take a deep breath.

Then take the opposite position and tear your first argument to shreds. Your job now is to convince yourself that the second option is really the best, and the first argument got everything wrong. Again, give yourself the time to build out your argument for the second option and to poke all the holes you can find into the first.

Now go back to the first option, and repeat the process. Talk yourself down; don’t hold back. Emphasize the good points of the option you are advocating for.

Go back and forth as many times as you need to. As someone who overthinks things, I often go three to six times on each side. Later rounds tend to go faster, because you’ve exhausted all the new arguments, and you’re just repeating things you’ve said earlier. This is how you’re making value judgments. Your arguments are coalescing around the points that matter most, and other details are falling out of the debate. At some point it will become clear which argument convinces you the most—congratulations, you have made a decision.

Strategy #2: Imagine you’ve already decided

Again, pick an option to try out first. Imagine that the deadline for your decision has already passed, and you have committed to choosing this option. It’s too late to go back. How do you feel?

Do you feel regret? Disappointed? Do you feel like you’re missing an opportunity you kind of wish you had?

On the other hand, do you feel excited? Relieved? If you’re lucky, you might realize that you always knew this was the right decision, you just never let yourself believe in it.

It can be subtle, so pay attention to yourself to judge your reaction. Give yourself time to sit with your imagined decision, and try hard to pretend it’s real. A few minutes may be enough time, but feel free to try out your decision for a couple of days or more. When you’re ready, pretend you chose the other option instead.

I have had good results with this method. I used it to decide whether to come to Olin or go to a traditional engineering school. I was lying in bed a week before decisions were due. I imagined going to OSU and convinced myself that I would be happy there. Then I imagined accepting my admission to Olin.“Shoot, am I really doing this? I mean, is this even a real school?” I remember thinking. “Shoot. Oh shoot. Oh… oh yeah.” I think I did an involuntary fist pump as I drifted off to sleep. The next day I committed to Olin. It was one of the best decisions of my life.

Hear Me Out

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I’ve come to realize that every opinion has importance. We live in a country where having an opinion is a fundamental right, but I think we take this right for granted. Whether intentionally or not, we are inclined to block out opinions that fundamentally misalign with our values or worldview. This is human nature. Am I saying all other opinions are correct and we should welcome them with open arms? Of course not. But, they are opinions nonetheless, and even if we disagree with the substance of what someone says, I would like to give the person the benefit of the doubt that they are coming from a good place. 

When someone shares an opinion with me, I see it as a form of respect. They did not have to say anything to me and it takes far more effort to convey a point of view than to not say anything at all. I could have gone on living my life without ever encountering what they thought at that moment, but they chose to share an intimate part of themselves. Shouldn’t I at least hear them out?

It matters not their creed, upbringing, or experience. None of those are prerequisites for having an opinion. But they do absolutely matter. Whereas they do not dictate whether someone can have an opinion, they do allow us to weigh how compelling an opinion is. Even if you believe you know a person, we are walking enigmas that hide large parts of ourselves, and an opinion often comes out long before we know enough about the person to properly weigh their opinion against our own understanding. 

At this point, you may be thinking I am beating around the bush, but I want to make this point painfully clear: please hear people out. When you preemptively tell someone they are not entitled to an opinion because you believe you know their entire creed, upbringing, or experience, you are making an assumption and doing something incredibly hurtful. I know opinions can be wrong and painful, but please at least hear them out. They respected you enough to convey them in the first place.

Phillip Post, Class of 2025

P.S.

If anyone wishes to discuss any of this or anything else with me. I welcome you and I value your opinion. Thank you!

The Two Planets

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The sun shone weakly before it dipped behind the silhouette of the White Planet, but the heat still pounded up from the ground, sending mirages flickering through the night sky like the thought of clouds in a wetter world. Night fell, stars shone brightly through the haze of heat, and a startled Acuña woke from the hammock inside his house to the sound of sand crickets chirping the start of the day.

For day was night on Venus, the yellow planet; or rather, night was day, for the true “day” when the sun was shining was too hot for work, and the bulbous fireflies that blanketed the sky for their night-time mating rituals provided plenty of light to see by.

Acuña dressed in the deep navy garb of the Venus Ferry Commission, breakfasted, kissed his sleeping wife goodbye, and stepped outside into the still-blazing heat. His home was one of many expertly constructed mud-brick houses near the center of town, and it could be recognized from the breath of cold air that left with him that its owner was a well-salaried man. He strolled through streets waking up for the day shift, merchants drawing up carts of chickpeas on horseback, hawking fresh pita breads and olives and little trays of ice to the growing numbers of passers-by. Next to each display of goods was an insulated tank of cool gas about the size of a stout man’s leg. Acuña entered the short queue at the water station and filled a bottle with lukewarm water from the cart. He pulled a small cylinder from his purse and connected it to the water lady’s large tank. She turned a knob until the dial read out the price of the water in Kelvins, smiled, and handed the cylinder back to Acuña. He left an ice cube as a tip, which she melted and fed its coldness into her tank to add to the cold air he had already paid.

When he reached the station, he stepped aboard a slow trolley which took him to the outskirts of town, the site of his work and that of a thousand of the most talented men and women from the far reaches of the Yellow Planet. Acuña looked up past the fireflies at the sky dominated by the shining face of the White Planet, dark now because the sun was behind it, and taking up half the sky. He was in radio contact with his counterparts on that planet, at a site he could not see without a telescope but which he knew he could point at by sticking his finger straight up in the air. The place he stood now and the place he could point to were the spots on the respective planets that were closest together. The Yellow and White Planets were geosynchronously locked—they orbited each other with exactly the same speed so that they stayed in fixed positions relative to each other as they spun.

Acuña Deliari entered the complex of low adobe structures to a welcome blast of government-minted cool air that greeted him from inside the main building. Today was the first test run of the Interplanetary Ferry Commission’s work of nearly five decades: the first shuttle rocket to travel from the Yellow to the White Planet and back. Today would mark the first day since ancient times that the White and Yellow people had met face to face, and the first time when both prospered under peaceful, capitalist democracies.

The launch site was prepared; the diplomatic procession filed somberly toward the rocket on horses draped with navy and gold coats of arms; and a speech was read out by a young woman in scarlet whose excited inflections barely matched the trembling palpitations felt by Acuña and the rest of the Ferry Commission as they awaited the culmination of their life’s work. Two hours later, an ultrasonic loudspeaker that no human could hear sent the fireflies scattering as a dark hole appeared in the sky through which the magnificent face of Cyro the White Planet glinted in the peeking sunlight, and the rocket lifted off with a rumble like an earthquake and disappeared into the sky. Applause erupted from all sides.

The view from the shuttle was spectacular as it passed through the thick atmosphere of Venus and the portholes opened up on the wide slice of space sandwiched between the two worlds, one yellow and familiar, pulsating with constellations of fireflies, growing more sphere-like and smaller by the minute, and the other snow-white and ominous, looming ever larger. Delray, the lead diplomat among the crew of five, clutched her seat tightly as the rocket spun around at the midpoint between the planets and began preparing for the descent. It struck her suddenly how small her own planet was, and how utterly real the one she was approaching seemed in contrast. She had learned everything there was to know about Cyro through conversations over radio, but there is only so much you can learn from talking about a place, and photographs could do little to aid in communication because the camera had not yet been invented.

When they touched down on the icy ground in the middle of the Cyro Ferry landing site, the Venusian diplomats looked around themselves in awe. They looked first at the earth, blanketed in a thick frost though recently cleared, then at their reflection in the blinding white horizon, then up at the dawn sky and the streaks of pink in the clouds—”Clouds!” they exclaimed with astonished glee—then up at the burning yellow sands of their home planet Venus. Then they turned slightly and gazed up and down again two or three more times, shivering with what could be mistaken for amazement, until one of them tried to speak, and by the time the Cyroans had realized something was wrong, their hearts had nearly stopped and they had to be treated for second-degree frostbite under a lamp of the kind they used for hatching chickens.

For through all their many years of detailed accounts of life on their respective planets, no one had bothered to mention that Cyro’s ambient temperature was minus thirty-five Celsius, while the Venusians had never experienced anything below a sweltering thirty degrees!

Once recovered, Delray and her delegation were given parkas and shawls and kept under close watch by a bemused doctor with a thermometer, with which he prodded them occasionally without warning. They were led by a man named Akunai Delar on a brief official tour of the launching facility, which was comparable in technological sophistication with its Venusian counterpart. They learned that the buildings were heated by immense boiler systems underground in much the same way expensive buildings were cooled on Venus. When Delray asked how they paid for the heat, their guide replied: 

“It’s government funded. All the heat sources on Cyro are regulated by the government, you know. We use it as a currency, just the way you pay for things with the cold.”

“But heat is so abundant—” Delray began, before she realized that on Cyro, things worked quite the opposite way than on Venus. The thought sent a shiver down her spine, and the doctor poked her again in the ribs with the thermometer.“Imagine,” Delray whispered to herself as she was herded back onto the shuttle along with the first Cyroan delegation for the return journey, “just imagine if we could move some of that cold air back to Venus! There would be not a poorhouse that went uncooled in summer, not a crop that would fail from drought, not one more death from heat stroke in any city south of Saõlo!” And the Cyroans nodded gravely, no doubt thinking of the benefits of Venus’s prolific temperature to their freezing planet where the generators could barely keep the cities warm in the winter and where heat was a commodity to be hoarded like gold.

Drunk Horoscopes

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Aries –  You’re going to choke on spicy dining hall food. You might think the dining hall food isn’t spicy, but you’re going to choke on the bland beef.

Taurus – Don’t take the elevator from the ground floor. You  will get stuck. 

Gemini – Your professor knows you didn’t do the homework. They see through your request for an extension. 

Cancer – You’re going to get hand foot mouth. Sorry. At least now you know.

Leo- Sexy good hair days for you. Enjoy. 

Virgo – We know you took a bite out of the toilet. Maybe eat breakfast instead. It’s the most important meal of the day.

Libra – You will fall down the library stairs. 

Scorpio – Get that tattoo. The one you’ve been thinking about. It’s a good idea. You won’t regret it.

Sagittarius – Take a nap. Go the fuck to sleep. Just, take a break you Oliner.

Capricorn – If you have blonde hair, you look like an inverted candy corn. Prove me wrong. If you don’t have blonde hair, you’re a Reese’s Pieces. 

Aquarius  – Every time you try to get tea from the dining hall soda machine it will be water. No tea for you. Try again next month. Sorry.

Pisces – Cry during office hours. You’ll get the extension. Girlboss moment.

Stop Silencing Us

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Last week, all student activist work was removed from the campus center and other buildings around campus. Administration cited the posting policy as the reason, a policy which has only been referenced previously in the last four years as a reason to tear down other student activism. Under the guise of cleaning up campus, postings were removed with no alternative being given, and the student option for speaking out was taken away just as all students printer emails had been. They tore down everything about sexual misconduct and silencing student voices, everything about all gender bathrooms, even all of the Palestinian activism anywhere outside of the dorms. Students had already requested that this work be left alone or given more information prior to removal, but the work was taken down overnight. All of these topics had previously faced censorship on campus, and this was a new tactic from admin aimed at removing our work to create a nice and sanitized Olin in advance of inauguration. 

This silencing of our voices feels discrediting and invalidating of our pleas for safety on campus. We feel excluded from the space we deserve. It feels frustrating to be caught in a cycle of StAR acting first without consulting students. StAR needs to directly consult students before taking action. StAR has the potential to greatly change things at Olin if they follow through with their proposed changes and what the working group has been working on. However, we know there have been many times these proposed changes have been dropped through the transition of semesters.

 We are speaking up for ourselves and our peers out of necessity, all in an attempt to curtail the silence and suffering of others now and in the future. This has gone on long enough, we are asking you, begging you, to join us in speaking up and speaking out, in not taking no for an answer, in demanding kindness and respect and dignity as human beings in this world. So support us in our work, sign in agreement, and refuse to tolerate the repetition of these failing cycles of change. We need real changes and it can only come from us.

We’ve compiled a short list of demands in response to the ongoing sexual misconduct issues that have been discussed for the last two months as well as the silencing of student voices. You can find this google doc at https://tinyurl.com/olinchange and sign your name to show support. As a small group we have been unable to get the attention and recognition from Olin’s administration in a way that will convince them to act, so we are sharing our cause to bring more attention to these issues. We are using our voices to create much needed change, speaking out against our institution and pushing for lasting change to processes and not just placating conversations and singular initiatives. 

Hey, Class of 2022

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Shit is rough, but you are wonderful. And the wonderfulness of you will endure, in the exact way that the rain pouring in my backyard right now will not. Uncertainty defines everything these days, yes, but I believe in your enduring wonder because I’ve seen who you are and what you can do.

I remember I had a conversation with some of you in March 2020 about how you come to trust people and the expectations you have for the relationships you’ve got and the ones you’ll build, and the courage that taught you how to understand and embrace criticism, and to speak truth to power. Since then, I’ve heard many of you express your concerns about holding onto the selves you’ve built here after you leave this place. Though it may not happen immediately, you will one day find places – jobs, community groups, bands, theater troupes, whatever – that do not see your brave curiosity as a liability, but rather as a beautiful, beneficial thing. Whether your work fulfills you or you yearn for something more, you can become – perhaps you already are – an activist. You can engage with your future communities in so many ways that are sorely needed. You can volunteer, teach, discuss, mentor, build. The skills you have brought with you to your learning and then honed throughout your education will keep you going in this work.

If you struggle to find your feet beneath you as you move on to this next stage, fear not; this is the natural course of things. Maybe the most important things geriatric millennials like me can bestow upon Gen Z are these four points: 1) the “insert college degree, expect economic prosperity” model has proven to be a myth for some time now, 2) your life is going to feel like a series of fits and starts, forever delayed, 3) it’s really alright if you don’t go straight from point A to points B and C, etc., and 4) all of this, friends, is not a personal indictment of you.

Let me tell you a story. I finished my undergraduate program in 2009. Shit was rough then, too, but there at least was no global pandemic to contend with. I moved just outside Boston a few weeks after I received my degree on a frigid day in upstate New York. I tagged along to Massachusetts with a group of people I hardly knew because I had no other plans lined up. That was a cruel summer; it rained a record-setting 27 of 30 days in June. I had nothing much to do, though, no job and no prospects, so I walked the flat streets of Waltham until I knew them like the hilly, curving roads of my hometown.

Eventually my money ran out and I took a job at a CVS in Wellesley, the small one on 135. I was the photo lab manager, but because I wasn’t working in a “professional” job utilizing my degree, I felt a shame that I carried around like an unshakeable aura. I felt like I’d failed so many people: myself, my parents, my brother who was currently working on a PhD in computer science, my partner at the time, a chemistry major who had snagged a job downtown. At CVS, we didn’t have a proper darkroom at the store so I used to have to go down to the basement with the lights all turned off, stumbling over the off-season merchandise, to change the photo printer paper cartridges. The baffling precariousness of that situation is a fitting metaphor for this whole period of my life.

I quit a couple weeks into the new year, 2010. At this point, I had decided to go back to school to get my Masters in Library and Information Science, in part because I grew tired of men throwing newspapers at me when I asked them to walk five feet over to an open checkout station (silly me, I should have anticipated grumpy dudes throwing stuff at people would also be a problem in public libraries). I obviously still needed money, so I took a job north of Boston at a hair salon software company and built websites for stylists and spas in New England for a few months, and yes, it was exactly as ridiculous as it sounds, and then I started my MLIS almost exactly a year to the day after I arrived in Massachusetts. I lived in a different apartment with different people by then. I’d lost some old friends and made some new ones. I got my cats, who you’ve probably seen on Discord or Instagram.

So, happily ever after, right? Lol, no. It took me years – ones that contained a cross-country move, a stint in a very modestly successful electronic rock band, a failed marriage, and several family tragedies – before I felt “on track.” I went from point A to point Q to some point not even identifiable in this alphabetic system before I got to point B. These are the fits and starts I mentioned. Things got especially confusing from 2016-2018, when I took on a very stressful job and had a big falling out with my main friend group. I spent much of that time being a jerk, taking unnecessary risks, and making mistakes that I thought I had learned from – and mind you, this was the very end of my 20s, over seven years after I’d entered “the real world.” The day some sense got knocked into me wasn’t even when I woke up in the hospital after a driver hit and left me while I was biking in Brighton, but probably the night three months after that when a set of stairs collapsed under me in Allston as I was carrying my bike out of the house of a person who didn’t deserve one more second of my time. (Yes, this must be a scene in one or more redemptive indie romcoms with a strong female lead and a lot of ukulele strumming.) And even after that, I have continued to mess up. I have messed up prodigiously in these 13 years since I got my bachelor’s degree, and I know I’ll mess up routinely forever, but you know what? That’s the deal. We’re all on board for this. There’s nothing you can do to stop many of your own screwups until you’ve been on earth long enough to practice avoiding them, but you can do one thing to help you through it. You can remember point 4 from the above. Point 4: “All of this, friends, is not a personal indictment of you.”

I have gotten to know some of you better than others, but you are all impressive to me. The things I’ve seen you build, the teams I’ve seen you working with, the art I’ve seen you make – it’s been a joy. I’m a little weepy as I sit here and imagine not seeing you on campus anymore; your shoes are unfillable by anyone but you. But that’s part of the deal, too – you must go on, and you must mess up outside the bounds of our campus, and you must be the change you want to see in the world, the big one out there beyond our wee bubble.

I’ve been sitting here staring out at the rainy dark for a while without many ideas for a good closing paragraph, so I’ll leave you with someone else’s words. They are a more eloquent way of stating the first sentence of this letter: “Shit is rough, but you are wonderful.” You were, after all, challenged to “do something” when you came to us, and I share this in the spirit of challenging you to keep at it after you go, even if you’re feeling like a mess because you’re stuck in the dark at the CVS stockroom of life, trying not to trip over last year’s Halloween decorations.

“Nature teaches persistence and perseverance, because in the end nothing stops nature. If a rose can grow out of the concrete, so can we.”

– Micah Hobbes Frazier, racial justice activist, kind of quoting rapper Tupac Shakur, quoted in adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy

So go forth and grow, you wonderful little roses, you.

What’s on your mind?

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Whenever I write for a large audience, I try to center my writing around one key value: inclusivity. I seek to write in a way that everyone can connect with, not seeking agreement but at least an invitation that “Hey, it’s okay to disagree.”

This month, I’ve spent a long time thinking about how to do that. I’ve seen people in so much pain, anger, exhaustion, curiosity, and joy, and I don’t know how to write about it. I knew that I wanted to write something, I was simply bursting with opinions and thoughts. I wanted to move beyond the dining hall conversations about course registration and housing, into something that was new and somehow fresh. I spent days deliberating how to do this, how to create a representative opinion, how to process the frayed fabric of Olin that I honestly feel is best typified by its website – too many unexpected pangs of disappointment with the “Oops! This page cannot be found.” A missing connection that really should be there. 

And then I realized – what if I just ask? Find people in the Olin community, and simply ask them, “What’s on your mind?” Note – the question isn’t, “What do you feel about the OlinTM issues?”, but rather, “What are you thinking about right now?” And that’s intentional. I didn’t want this to be a platform for opinions, but rather a candid reflection of what Oliners are frankly thinking. 100 words. 11 people.

I’m relieved that the semester is ending. I’m sad that the semester is ending. I’m curious to see what’s next. I’m anxious about what will happen next. I’m excited to celebrate Gilda’s inauguration. I’m hopeful that big things are coming. I’m exhausted. I’m eager to be outside, away from email and Zoom. I’m enchanted by blue skies and forsythia and flowering trees. I’m trying to just experience it all. – Alison Wood

Lately with finals, obviously, and the fiasco with suites- that took up a lot of my mind at the time, and eventually I was like, “I’m not going to get a suite”. And then finals are happening. I have a large project to do there that I just came from a meeting. We feel behind but we’re not sure if we’re behind yada yada. And I have other responsibilities and other jobs. I CA, as you know. I’m currently dogsitting, which is a whole lot of work and a ton of back and forth and running from place to place. I haven’t really had space to think so this is nice. – Ben Morris

“How do you disrupt a downward spiral of being disconnected in a way that makes things better? I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Especially because I think there are pent-up frustrations that people have been carrying around. If you don’t know how to release what’s been pent up, or can’t find an outlet, then what? In our culture, we look to our community for support. We seek solace from our community when things aren’t working well, when the rest of the world is chaotic. The community is supposed to be where we can lift each other up. And that doesn’t seem to be happening as much as it should.” – Gilda Barabino

What I’m thinking about is, that the price of Ubers going into Boston is getting ridiculously expensive. Like my first year, it was like 18-20 bucks, maybe 25 on average. That’s expensive, but you’re like “I can make it work”. And I came back from Boston today, and it was 45 bucks. And I was tearing my hair out – like this is ridiculous, it’s a lot of money. And so then I went to Boston three times this weekend, and each time I went it was like “UGH, my bank account is crying”. And it’s not even the stuff I’m doing in Boston it’s just for getting there. – Shashank Swaminathan

What’s on my mind?  Storm clouds and weeping willows.  After this extremely difficult year, I have so many things on my mind and it’s left me overwhelmed.  But I chose images that may represent hard feelings, but are also beautiful in and of themselves.  And that really is what is on my mind – incredible fatigue from a tumultuous year and compassionate acknowledgment that it takes energy to weather a storm and there is comfort to be found in the shade of the weeping willow.  We are tired and strong, stressed and still breathing.  We are here together still.  Adva Waranyuwat

Each of us experiences Olin differently, both because of our own individual vantage point and our roles at Olin. Thus, there is no “the students,” “the faculty,” “the staff,” or “the administration.” The number of people in each of those categories is small, yet none of them are monolithic. We are a collection of individuals, having these very different experiences. At the same time, we are often much more aligned in our goals and desires than we realize. I hope that we can continue to work towards finding a common space, so that we can bring our individual perspectives and strengths to be a better whole made up of all of our glorious, messy, passionate, and brilliant parts. – Anonymous

When the weather’s nice, a man sits on a bench all day blasting music near my house. The other morning a song from the Breakfast Club movie was followed by Olivia Rodrigo’s “Driver’s License.” It’s almost like he’s DJing for the neighborhood; it’s like a soundtrack to his life. You can almost tell his emotions by the songs that he chooses to play. So this has been on my mind: relating to music. Everyone can somehow relate to music, and that got me thinking: “What would I play if people could hear in the morning how I was feeling, and if my music choices would change day-to-day?” – Courtney Beach

There’s a lot of things on my mind. I’m relieved that all my tech weeks are done. I’m sad that all my tech weeks are done. I’m very excited to graduate. I also don’t know where I’m going to live. This weekend was really fun, and I did a lot of cool things, and I feel like I’m really enjoying Olin right now and I’m really vibing, but I’m also so ready to leave. I can’t believe I’m graduating. It still feels fake. SCOPE is a lot of work. And not always fun work. But it’s exciting. A lot of my favorite classes have been not in my major. Like I feel like my favorite classes are not engineering classes. That’s it really. – Shirin Kuppusamy

Graduation. This will be my 17th Olin graduation (that’s all the graduations). That’s a 17th year of saying goodbye to people with whom I’ve grown close. These are people I’ve had the great joy and honor of teaching, learning with and from, growing with, sharing in sadness and joy, talking through topics big (life, justice, futures, and the present) and small (vegetables, shoes, memes). Again, I brace myself for tangled emotions: pride, joy, curiosity, gratitude, and hope plus a definite sadness and self-consciousness about my selfishness as I mourn relationships that will never be the same. – Caitrin Lynch

Something that’s been on my mind a lot recently has been, what do I want to do after graduation? And a tension with what do I feel responsible to do? I feel this responsibility to go into like, climate crisis mitigation. But that’s doesn’t necessarily bring me a lot of joy? It’s necessary, but also really heavy on my soul to do that work? Part of me wants to screw around and do aerospace or robotics or things that feel fun but not meaningful. Yet I feel this responsibility to do meaningful work because I have a skillset for that. Kind of that tension of doing things for me vs. doing things for others and like what my responsibility is as an engineer? – k

Who I am at Olin, who I’m expected to be at Olin, who I let myself be at Olin? What parts of me are core and recognized, and what parts of me are not, and neglected a little bit? And especially if you think about – being in the flow of love. Love for myself, love for one another. Without that necessarily looking like the care that I show whenever I’m a good R2. Or the sort of care that I show if I sit down one on one and have a meaningful conversation with someone. That’s a tendency that I have that I feel very valued in. And I value it a lot in myself. And at the same time it’s felt like as I transition away from this place and have 23 years of living and will have many decades to come, there’s something spreading that – I don’t know – doesn’t quite cut it. – David Freeman

If you made it to the end, congratulations! Looking back, I’m not quite sure why I did it. I guess I learned, I connected, and I grew. And you probably got something different out of it. Um, I didn’t have time for a fancy reflective conclusion (which I suppose is how the seniors feel) – come tell me what you think about it!

Drunk Horoscopes

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Taurus (Apr. 20 – May 20): Is this real life or is this just fantasy? Why not test it out? Pinch yourself. Ask your best friend on a date. Stand on a table dining hall and sing a song. Mix all the sodas with sriracha. Eat floor wax. But I don’t need to draw more attention to myself than I already am. All the tests came back negative. Therefore, Connecticut.

Gemini (May 21 – Jun. 20): You are the eye of the tiger. Or the knee of the lizard. It’s okay if you are still figuring yourself out. You have so many options, think for a minute. You can be any animal body part you like. 

Cancer (Jun. 21 – Jul. 22): Don’t stop believing, hold onto that feeling. That feeling of a tickle slowly dissolving into dread. You know what else is weird about horses?

Leo (Jul. 23 – Aug. 22): Take me on a trip, I’d like to go someday. Take me to New York, I’d love to see L.A. Take me on a trip in my favorite rocket ship. You’ll be my American rocket ship. I love you, Saturn V. 

Virgo (Aug. 23 – Sep. 22): Ain’t no mountain high enough. Ain’t no valley low enough. Ain’t no river wide enough. Man, this minecraft world sucks. But there is no global warming in minecraft. We can do whatever we want.

Libra (Sep. 23 – Oct. 22): At first I was afraid, I was petrified, then I asked for an extension and my professor was on my side. Then I spent so many nights working on the assignment. I went to CA hours and got all my questions answered. And I grew strong. And I learned how to get along.

Scorpio (Oct. 23 – Nov. 21): You can set yourself on fire, but you’re never gonna burn burn burn. Like the pride flags in the dining hall, you are not particularly flammable but still against the Olin fire code. You can look up the fire code on the internet. But it is dense and unclear, so you’re never gonna learn learn learn.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22 – Dec. 21): Hey Jude, don’t make it worse. Make sure to avoid saturated fats, eat fruits and vegetables, and avoid the consumption of processed food. Increase your physical activity to at least 2.5 hours of moderate physical activity per week. Don’t smoke or drink alcohol. Remember to make regular visits with your cardiologist and let her into your heart so she can start to make it better. 

Capricorn (Dec. 22 – Jan. 19): It’s gonna take a lot to drag me away from you. There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do. Don’t worry baby, it’s really hard to kidnap a blue whale. 

Aquarius (Jan. 20 – Feb. 18): She wears short skirts, I wear T-Shirts, she wears socks, I also wear socks. She buys her socks from Costco, don’t ask me how I know that. Don’t buy socks from Costco this week, someone put itching powder in all of them.

Pisces (Feb. 19 – Mar. 20): Here comes the sun. Why are you so cool?! You are the weather at Spring Soiree, too cool for real school. Be like summer in the spring, and do the thing halfway. You can always duct tape your tits. Remember that. It’s all right. 

Aries (Mar. 21 – Apr. 19): Do you like pina coladas? With or without rum? It’s fine either way, I was making a new batch anyway, I can make it any way you like. Wait, you don’t like coconut? Well then is it even a pina colada? Well I guess pina colada means strained pineapple, so I can just give you pineapple juice with ice if you want. No, we’re not actually making pina coladas, it’s just for the drunk horoscope. 

Assorted other stuff: 

What could an elephant really give you? 

I’m Not Talking About Bathrooms

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I’m going to be honest: it’s because I’m angry, and I’m tired.

This anger has been bubbling for years. Did you know that I can prevent myself from peeing for nine hours at a time? I know, because I did it every day for four years when I was in high school. Skipping breakfast and not eating lunch helps, though you’ll have a harder time paying attention in classes, having conversations, and you’ll be slightly angry all of the time. The bathroom for me, a nonbinary person, was somewhere I was explicitly not allowed to go—it says right there on the sign. In high school, I had nowhere to have a moment’s respite from the busy halls, nowhere to sit and cry when overwhelmed, nowhere to fix my outfit or hair if it got messed up. Sure, technically I *could* have used a gendered bathroom, if I looked enough like a cisgender boy or cisgender girl to use one without getting strange looks, or questioned, or harassed, or attacked. But the choice was between looking cisgender and having the illustrious privilege of being able to shit in a dirty gray rectangle with slurs scrawled on the walls, and looking like myself. And it’s not easy to forget you don’t look like yourself in a room full of mirrors. Really, that gendered bathroom sign to me may as well read “ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.” I’d prefer that, actually. Then, at least, it’d have a bit of camp.

Bathrooms are a recurring motif in my nightmares.

This last week has been tiring. It’s such a little thing. A square of plastic. Yet people will pay to keep it in place, and it’s illegal to take it down. It’s *illegal* to *not* misgender me. And sure, we could just ignore it, make the bathrooms *socially* all-gender even if *legally* they can’t be. But I don’t have nightmares about getting lost in a labyrinthine public toilet because I wasn’t able to share a bathroom with all of you. There is still a sign hanging there that says I don’t have a place here—that I don’t even exist in the first place. I have been told that I don’t have a place here, that I don’t even exist, every single day of my life.

I’m tired. And I’m angry. And I’m tired. So I’m checking out: I haven’t been to any of the discussions with administration about this, because the conversation really boils down to “look, WE know you exist, but it’s just really inconvenient for us so we have to continue to publicly pretend that you don’t.” Weren’t pride parades originally something about not keeping your queerness behind closed doors at a time when it was illegal to be publicly queer? But that’s long past: now pride is about rainbows, and about showing how LGBT+ friendly you are, #loveislove! It’s about being visibly queer out in that street, just as long as you don’t come near our bathrooms, you pervert! It’s about consistently ranking in the list of most LGBT+ friendly colleges, and pride flags in the dining hall! All this talk about our software Jenzabar putting students’ deadnames on class rosters, and publicly reporting our student body makeup by “legal sex” to show how “gender balanced” we are, and this stuff about bathrooms, all that’s just talk. We’re accepting! We promise!

I’ll save us both some time, then: that’s not a conversation I’m going to have with you. If you can’t take five minutes out of your day to remove a piece of plastic from a wall, then you don’t deserve to have five minutes out of mine so I can listen to you try and convince me of how good a person you are, actually. It’s not that complicated: gendered bathrooms prevent trans people from existing in public. That’s wrong. And after more than 20 years of being told I don’t exist every single day of my life, I don’t have the energy to argue that with you. Though I may be tempted, because you get angry when you’ve been holding it in for this long.

Do You Even Care?

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By an anonymous nonbinary student

The ongoing conversations about all-gender restrooms have led me to conclude that Olin administrators care more about protecting Olin as an institution than they do about my well-being as a person.

I face situations that remind me of my trauma every single day at this school. Although logically I believe I am safe in gendered restrooms at Olin, deciding whether to use a convenient restroom or to spend my time going to an all-gender restroom brings up traumatic past experiences. Knowing that I am safe doesn’t prevent me from remembering the time a friend mentioned that I should be careful using a women’s restroom so I am not accused of rape, or the time I was told to be careful using a men’s restroom so that I do not become a victim of rape again. Knowing that I am safe doesn’t prevent me from remembering the time someone pulled a knife on me in a public restroom due to my perceived gender, and I was terrified I was going to be assaulted or murdered. And knowing that I am safe doesn’t prevent me from irrationally fearing that today could be the day my sense of safety in Olin restrooms is proven wrong.

The school’s reason for not converting more restrooms to be gender inclusive is that it is illegal and the school could face penalties for defying this law. Members of Olin’s administration need to understand that their responses to students’ requests for more all-gender restrooms have shown me that they care more about the possible risk of fines than reducing the suffering caused by my trauma.

Improving access to all-gender restrooms matters. I should not have to decide whether to prioritize my classwork or my mental health. I should not have to decide whether I’m willing to risk a panic attack to minimize the amount of class I miss. And I should not have to decide whether to advocate for myself or protect myself from my trauma. As such, I call on all Olin administrators to reconsider their priorities. Prioritize the health of your students over unjust laws and financial risks. Show that you care about me as a fellow Oliner. Show me that you care about me as a person.