The Two Planets

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Second installment (see the October issue online for Chapter 1).

Chapter 2

Within ten years the first civilians made the trip from Venus to Cyro; within twenty years twenty ships a day ferried passengers and goods; and within fifty years it was two hundred ships a day. In a hundred years, the ships were as big as container ships carrying kilotons of cargo from one planet where it was abundant to the other where it was scarce.

Contrary to the imagination of the first diplomats, the cargo did not consist primarily of containers of hot and cold air from the respective planets’ atmospheres. To be sure, there were forms of bulk heat transfer to power the refrigeration units at Venus’ chemical plants and parts of Cyro’s steel industry, but even with advanced heat transfer mechanisms, ferrying Kelvins via rocket was hardly economical. In the words of a would-be entrepreneur, “Schlepping gold just isn’t lucrative when the gold in question is lighter than air.”

However, the two planets had natural resources and industries that complemented each other quite perfectly in many ways, and the expedience of the new avenue of trade would have brought tears of delight to any economist of the period. Cyro churned out coal and iron ore and sent it to Venus where the furnaces were cheaper to operate. Venus had the sand to make glass but not the technology to make it strong and insulated like the marble windows Cyro’s cities were known for. Cyro had advanced research in pulmonology after an airborne disease had ravaged their population generations ago; Venusian teeth sparkled and seduced because Venus was home to acclaimed schools of dentistry. On and on the examples went, without limit, and increasing all the time.

Bi-globalization, as it was called, brought on another industrial revolution for both planets. Prosperity increased for everyone, but especially for the wealthy, and life expectancies rose across the board. New diseases naturally spread from one culture to the other after millenia without contact, but with them spread new cures, new drugs, and new vaccines, the subsidized sale of which generated enough money for the pharmaceuticals that they could parley the official number of cases down to about ten percent so that nobody knew exactly how much they were paying.

Around this time, a new currency was minted by Venus’ Planetary Government to mirror the system in place on Cyro: not so much a currency as a communal ledger, to replace the old custom of carrying around a tank of cold gas to pay for things. Every house in every city on Venus was by now connected to a central cold reservoir which was maintained by the government at great cost using the most sophisticated refrigeration system known to humankind. Everyone was allocated a share of the cold reservoir, according to their wealth, and anyone could make purchases or transfer their currency to another person by flipping a switch on their wall and receiving a blast of hot air into their living room as coldness was sucked into the system, or they could withdraw funds to bathe at their leisure in chilly air.

When they made the switch to the communal ledger, there was quite an uproar from certain posh parts of the capital city, because the government’s assessment of each person’s wealth—on which allocations of the new currency were made out—was based on information collected from the last year’s tax returns. It came to light that certain individuals’ actual wealth exceeded the numbers reflected on their tax forms by a factor of at least tenfold, and those individuals made a swine’s stink about being swindled by the government’s allocation scheme. The mayor pointed out that if they wanted the government to allocate the new currency correctly, perhaps they should not have deceived the government on their tax returns, and the certain individuals hired lawyers and went on a witch hunt as the press called it for other anomalies in accounting. They found a handful of isolated cases where other people, mostly lower class, had been paid too little, but overall the lawyers only made a fool of themselves, and even still they sued the government and won.

The transport ships were owned by a private company named Guildman, which had gotten its start two centuries ago selling cooling mechanisms for Venus’ wealthiest homes. The first commercial devices used water for evaporative cooling, which made them prohibitively expensive; later, around the same time as the printing press, they learned to use an energy source to drive a reusable fluid through a compression cycle to take heat out of the air. (History textbooks, whose authors never disclosed how well they were paid, declared that it was the Air Conditioner, not the Printing Press, that marked the end of the Middle Ages on Venus.)

Harrison Guildman, the founder and namesake of the largest monopoly on both planets, was three hundred years old and had been dead for two hundred and thirty, but that did not bother him; to this day, he steered the company with an iron grip. Since the founder’s untimely death, no new chairman had ever been elected. None needed to be. For in his last days, spent alone without food nor drink nor certainly sleep, he had written out a strategic plan for the company which was so detailed and forward-thinking that no one had needed to take his place at the helm for two whole centuries. The actual plan remained highly classified and had only ever been read in its entirety by a dozen or so of its top executives as they carried out his words. But certain passages had been made public for promotional events, including for the first time when Guildman announced that it would be dedicating its facilities to supporting the Ferry Commission in its bid for building the first interplanetary shuttle. 

It was right there in Harrison Guildman’s own handwriting, on parchment cracked and the ink of two hundred years ago faint but still legible: “Shall the government of Venus ever deem it of national importance to establish communication and trade with the White Planet through the means of space travel, the Guildman Corporation shall be the first to announce its full support for the program and dedicate at least one-half of its research facilities and budget to the mission.” As soon as the project was underway, and Guildman’s indispensability to the project had been established, it was revealed that the document in fact continued: “In exchange, the Guildman Corporation will demand full ownership of the space vehicles under development, although the ports themselves, being a matter of national security, may remain under government operation and control.” And no one had much choice but to go along.

To accommodate the boom in trade, the Venus-Cyro Transportation Authority (the first inter-planetary, bi-governmental body) worked frantically to expand its ports on both planets. Another super-port was built from the ground up every five years, along with a whole new city to match. At first they kept up with demand, but the ports’ infrastructure was built hastily and not to last, so they soon fell into debt and Guildman took over the operation of the ports, too.

It was never established whether this final consolidation had been prophesied in the founding documents, but cynics didn’t put it past the man who had thought of every possibility at once, while at the same time thinking of nothing at all but his company’s own insatiable expansion.

Drunk Horoscopes

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-Oliver (none of the above)

-Kate (all of the above)

-Jadelin (your pronouns are become mine)

-Audrey (you know)

-Reuben (yes)

-Clark (you know em/you love em)

-Anna (she/her but I don’t think we’re actually writing our pronouns on here)

-Beli (I use she/her but I guess you can use dumb and dumber)

Capricorn – You are made out of snakes. All snakes are you. There are so many snakes inside of you. You should not think about this too much. sssssssssssssssssssssssss

Aquarius – You should send spreadsheet poetry to your crush. They will appreciate the data and your formulas. And the plots. The more plots the better: plots are the purest form of love.

Taurus – Eat a delicious ham that has been unearthed from parcel B. Burrow into the ground, you will find what you are looking for. After a thousand years of waiting, now is your chance.

Virgo – Don’t do crypto currency. Do cryptocurrency if you are snorting it with your nose. Or with your elbow. Don’t even think about that, just focus on the sweet sweet smell of cryptocurrency entering your nasal passages.

Aemini – Ask Chris Lee to slow down. Slow down like a slug running from a speeding train. Slither on the train tracks. MechSolids and dynamics are hard but they don’t have to be that hard. Solids can be soft and slimy like your slug self.

Libra – Don’t date people. Go out into the woods on a rainy night and look for frogs. Befriend french frogs. Just don’t be French. Don’t french kiss the frogs, you might get chytrid.

Pieces – Don’t spray perfume. don’t spray any aeroilized or pressurized things unless you are in the LPB paint bay. With the fume extractor on. Just don’t use the damper because it was never connected in the first place. Open the bay doors instead.

Cancer – It’s can crabssoint day. You should venmo @oilver $0.15 please help us bully Oliver it will be funny I swear

Cancer – Once in a while you are a green sour skittle. But sometimes you are the sexy m&m. Consider dissolving skittles in vodka if you like your vodka tasting like skittles

Scorpio – You are bioluminescent, you just haven’t noticed yet. Spend more time in the dark or the bio lab. If you have questions, talk to Jean. Shine bright like a diamond babey!! ;) :diamond_emoji:

Aries – Learn to weld. Snow IS a weldable material. Build a fantastic igloo. Think about the possibilities – you could weld anything if you put your mind to it. You could weld a snow table. You could weld a bird bath. You could even weld a SAE clean snowmobile.

Leo – By the time you graduate Olin you will have become a solar house. We know it is your fault that the mac gets so hot during the day. Maybe chill out a little bit. Maybe install blinds. But remember to wear safety glasses.

Sagittarius – Set something on fire this month. Commit arson. Burn down the tent in the O. You won’t do it. You coward. Maybe light a candle then I guess. It’s not the same but you can pretend that it is.

It’s Olin’s Turn to Divest

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“Olin is a community striving to change the world and positively impact people’s lives […]. What change do you hope to be a part of?”

Remember this?

You might recall this question from Olin’s common app. Even if you’re not a student, you’ve probably had this question rattling around in your head for some time.

Well, here’s a change for you: we are calling on Olin to eliminate its investments in fossil fuels, or divest. Our new strategic plan states a commitment to sustainability, equity, and justice, bringing into question our endowment’s investments in fossil fuel companies.

Over 1,500 institutions have already committed to divestment, totaling over $40 trillion in divested funds, including Harvard, Princeton, Wellesley, Boston University, Brandeis, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Columbia, the University of California system, U Mass, and 200 other colleges with all sizes of endowments.

$40 trillion is not inconsequential. Fossil fuel companies are stating on record that divestment poses a material risk to their business. Peabody Coal, the largest coal producer in the world, declared bankruptcy in 2016, citing divestment as one of the main reasons; divestment was also the key reason for the coal sector’s credit de-rating between 2013 and 2018.

The writing is on the wall: fossil fuels are a sunsetting industry. The global effort to prevent climate catastrophe will require an enormous, unprecedented decrease in fossil fuel usage, guaranteeing that fossil fuels will be poor long-term investments. If Olin hopes to “protect and sustain our natural, built, and financial resources so that they might equitably benefit future generations”, as stated in our strategic plan, divestment is the smart choice economically, too.

So how much do we have invested in fossil fuels? According to past conversations with Olin’s board of trustees, we have between 1-2% of our $450 million endowment, or $4-9 million, invested in fossil fuel companies.

“Only $9 million?” we hear you ask. The fossil fuel industry has trillions of dollars, what difference will that make?

While our student body may be tiny, Olin is influentially huge. Our model of impact-centered education is emulated by many institutions around the world. As leaders in engineering education, we set an example. 

Olin is in an unusual position: we are an engineering school without petroleum engineering programs, that doesn’t receive fossil fuel research funding, or send alumni to fossil fuel companies. While we’ve fallen behind so many of our liberal arts peers, we can be one of the first engineering schools to commit to divestment. Morally, we can send a clear message that if it’s wrong to wreck the planet, it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage.

As Gilda has stated, “the climate crisis is one of the biggest, most complex challenges that we’re facing”. It’s already here. As you read this, people in Pakistan are mourning loved ones lost to floods, Californians are fleeing ever-worsening wildfires, and Florida’s residents are just beginning to assess the damage from Hurricane Ian. Let’s show that we’re committed to sustainability, equity, and justice.

So what are we doing about it? We have started a new group, Olin Climate Justice, to work towards divestment and broader institutional change to combat the climate crisis. We spent the summer talking to over 30 faculty, staff, alumni, trustees, as well as divestment activists at other schools, and we’ve compiled our research into a 50-page proposal outlining the importance of divestment, the history of divestment efforts at Olin, and how we can make it happen here. 

We’ll be doing a lot this semester—you’ll hear from us very soon!

What can you do?

  • If you’re a current student, know that this is your college and you have the power to create change. We plan to hold one of Olin’s first-ever formal full student body social referendums. Keep an eye out for this in late November—your participation will be essential. Want to get involved? Show up to our meetings happening every Thursday at 6 PM in the MAC 3rd floor endcap!
  • If you’re a faculty or staff member, your opinion matters. If you’re interested in getting involved or just learning more, we ask you to reach out to us or show up at our meetings! Your support and experience are invaluable, and we are working on ways to involve you.
  • If you’re an alum, we ask for your support. You have an outsized influence on the direction and future of Olin. Many successful divestment campaigns at other colleges involved the critical backing of passionate alumni. Contact us if you want to get involved!  
  • If you’re an Olin parent, we haven’t forgotten about you! Climate activism isn’t only for college campuses. We invite you to engage in this process with us—we’d love to hear from you. 
  • If you’re an Olin board of trustee member, you are the final decision-makers on divestment, and we ask you to raise this issue. We are here to work with you. We understand that this decision takes fortitude and consensus, and we want to find out the best way to make this happen for all of us.

Questions, concerns, or comments? Join the climatejustice@lists.olin.edu mailing list, and/or reach out to Olivia at ochang@olin.edu and Vedaant at vkuchhal@olin.edu! 

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!