I have fucking had it with this college’s leadership.

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I came to this school because I wanted to make an impact on society through my future engineering career. I thought that this was a community of people that cared about doing good in the world. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve met lots of people like that here. But Olin College’s leadership, like Gilda, Al, and Donna, the people who seem to be calling all the real shots, aren’t those people.

I’m going to be honest, my time here has been stressful. Courses, clubs, halfhearted attempts to socialize with the little energy I have left, and caring about this college and about a planet that’s burning in front of our eyes is mentally and emotionally draining. But it might be bearable if this place felt like a place where I could actually make a difference. I’m frustrated and tired by screaming into the void, trying to communicate what we want and getting ignored every single time. All those meetings, trying to bring up my concerns, taking notes, ignoring the many problematic ways that Al interacts with or describes people who aren’t white cisgender men… only to have our concerns completely ignored. Why do they even pretend to care about what we have to say anymore?

Sometimes, to find a bit of escape and entertainment, I imagine Gilda, Al, Donna, and the board huddled together in smoke-filled back rooms, spinning a roulette wheel where each number is some aspect of student life or the campus community’s well-being that they want to get rid of. I picture them grinning, rubbing their hands together as they count the thousands of dollars they’ll save with this “inevitable” cost-saving measure.

I know they’re not like this in real life; they aren’t monsters purposely trying to make life horrible for all 350 (soon to be 600) of us. But they are out of touch with the community. They don’t value our time, our well-being, our culture, or people who have been here long enough to understand Olin – anything that isn’t dollars, really. And they don’t live by our values. They don’t respect us, aren’t open to new ideas, and they don’t act with integrity or have our best interests in mind.

In some ways, I can understand the way they got to this place. Maybe they came with some grand ideas of how to change this place for the better, and found out that real change is hard. But in the face of that reality, rather than listening to us and understanding what we needed beyond “financial sustainability”, they decided to put their own interests, their jobs, their public image, and their own ways of doing things (read: from much bigger and more traditional schools) before all of that. Olin is a college that prides itself on training its students to do good in the world and make “engineering for everyone”, but it’s led by leaders who aren’t good role models of those things, and who don’t understand or live out our values.

Let me start by highlighting some of the many out-of-touch things that our leadership has said. You can find these quotes from Gilda’s “Key Speeches, Writings + Appearances” page.

“We will continue to value equity, inclusion, and diversity, and we will continue to be a strong and vital institution if we live by these values.” It doesn’t take much time to learn to pronounce people’s names correctly, or to learn and use their pronouns. Why can’t our leadership even invest that little effort to live by these values, while calling on us to be “inclusive” by packing us into increasingly cramped living spaces or bringing Babson students into our dorms?

“The students, faculty and community partners in Technology, Accessibility, and Design who work together to design a technology that enhances accessibility for users with disabilities.” So our students and faculty are doing amazing work in accessibility, while our facilities staff (which leadership could easily hire more of if they just cut a high-paid, “crucial” admin position) are stretched so thin that half of our automatic doors don’t work and people regularly get trapped in elevators. Got it.

“Joy is a choice, and making the choice to approach even stressful experiences from an attitude of joy is an investment in our well-being.” Oh right, choosing joy is what I was missing from my well-being. That’s all I need to ignore the fact that the world is on fire, that a literal fascist is running for president for the third time, that you slashed our scholarship by over 60% while continuing to raise our tuition far beyond inflation, or that you housed Babson students in our dorms after we repeatedly told you no.

“We will continue to strive to provide a safe environment that supports freedom of inquiry, protects diversity, and fosters a sense of health and well-being among all Oliners…” Right, that’s why we have things like the protest policy, smaller suite lounges, tons of triples, and heavy restrictions on our ability to email the class.

“…I know many of you, particularly our students, will be moved by this decision and will be driven to advocate for change. I urge you to do so peacefully and with respect for all viewpoints, because even amid upheaval, respect for others must remain a core value of both our campus community, and our national one.” Then why do you keep putting restrictions on our peaceful advocacy for change? Because you “respect us?” Or does “respect for others” only mean “students respect the administration?”

“As we move forward towards realizing our vision of College as a Living Lab, we are springing to action in inspiring new ways, coalescing around execution in service of our vision and society.” Can anyone on the leadership team explain what College as a Living Lab means or what it actually looks like? Does “coalescing around execution” mean “the leadership ignores the committees, decides whatever it wants and then forces the rest of the community to do its bidding?” What even is the vision, beyond revenue at the cost of all well-being?

And now, let me go through the Honor Code values, as defined on the college website, and talk about how leadership has repeatedly failed to live up to these values.

“Integrity: I will represent myself accurately and completely in my work, my words, and my actions in academic and in non-academic affairs.” I’ve heard leadership constantly misquote us, only getting input from their favorite few students or cherry-picking quotes from us and then representing it as “the students’ opinion” to support any point they want to make. But of course, they never want to put anything in writing themselves. Maybe they’re afraid of being misquoted.

“Respect for Others: I will be patient with and understanding of fellow community members, and considerate of their inherent dignity and personal property. I will care for community resources and facilities so others may effectively use them.” I’ve already talked about how leadership doesn’t listen to our input, doesn’t respect trans and nonbinary identities, and doesn’t care for our college facilities. There’s just no money for these things, but they’re very important, sure. I’m especially sad that they don’t respect our faculty and staff, who work hard and care for our well-being despite being short-staffed. So much so that we are currently experiencing a great resignation of the people who run the day-to-day of this place. How can our leadership possibly say they respect others and live with themselves?

“Passion for the Welfare of Olin College: I will be a steward for the welfare of Olin College through a spirit of cooperation, concern for others, and responsibility for the reputation of Olin College.” After reading all of this, do you really think that our leadership cares about anything except the financials of this college? The community is a big reason I came here, and it’s built on the work of the students, faculty, and staff before me who understood Olin well and collaboratively designed systems that work. They’ve destroyed so much of that community, taking away suite walls, packing us into dorm rooms like sardines, cutting off our ability to email the student body, and suppressing a lot of open honest discussion.

“Openness to Change: I will be receptive to change, supportive of innovation, and willing to take risks for the benefit of the community.” Leadership has constantly ignored our ideas, failed to work with us on anything except their own ideas, and they’ve consistently tried to make us “more like other colleges,” showing that they aren’t interested in taking any real risks for the benefit of the community. Instead, they want to fall back on boring ideas from their time at schools that were much bigger than Olin will ever be.

“Do Something: I will strive to be an active advocate for the well-being of my community. I will seek to understand, and then act on, issues I perceive around me that are specific to both Olin and beyond. I will engage in open, self-reflective discussion with my peers and support them in their efforts to do the same.” Honestly, this article is getting long enough as it is, but I think it’s clear that college leadership doesn’t listen to us and doesn’t act with our best interests in mind. Any changes they make aren’t solving issues that we actually have with Olin, and the only discussion they have is just for show so they can say that they talked about their ideas with us before implementing them.

I’ll end by saying that I don’t think all hope is lost. Like I said, our leadership aren’t monsters, but they’ve been heading in the wrong direction for a long time, and they aren’t listening to us. So to students, faculty, staff, and the board: we need to do something. I hope that you’ll stand with me in saying that we won’t let our leadership continue to destroy this place for a few more dollars. If they’re not willing to change their ways, or if all they’ll commit to are empty promises like “holding a community forum to discuss our thoughts,” or showing up to serve cupcakes as a PR stunt, then frankly, they need to step down and we need to have leadership that actually cares about the spirit and welfare of this college. But if they’re willing to commit to real change, like empowering elected groups of students, faculty, and staff with real decision-making power, then maybe there’s still hope.

If any of this resonated with you, I encourage you to support this effort and share your own stories about why you’re concerned about our leadership. You can fill out the form here:  https://forms.gle/YTcy7Pd6ZvKXbEuYA

Green Space: Choosing The Rails

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Green Space is a column dedicated to sustainability-related writing, initially written from 2012-2014 and revived in 2023.

Olin has been home to plenty of brilliant engineers working on novel green technologies, but I believe we can’t just engineer ourselves a sustainable future without significant changes to how we live our lives. Many luxuries we have become accustomed to are only possible because of exploitative, extractionist, environmentally unfriendly practices, from cheap industrial meat to 2-day shipping to fast fashion. To build a truly sustainable future, we need to be willing to adapt our consumption habits.

One significant aspect of our lives where overconsumption has become the norm is air travel. Cheap fares incentivize us to jet off to Europe for a conference or the Caribbean for spring break. If we are to live a sustainable future, we must consider traveling with intention. Embracing slow travel by utilizing green transportation, practicing mindful consumption, and engaging with local businesses, peoples, and cultures will allow us to create a future of travel that is environmentally and socially sustainable.

I spent the Spring 2024 semester in Copenhagen, Denmark, taking courses in sustainable cities and transportation. My classmates hopped on flights to a different European capital each weekend, but I wanted an alternate way to experience the continent. My reputation as a train-lover precedes me at Olin, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that dedicated my breaks to exploring Europe by train. Throughout the semester, I covered about 7000 miles by train, from the far northern reaches of Norway, Sweden, and Finland to the Mediterranean in both Barcelona and Venice. The allure of these trips was largely in the trains themselves and in the pure joy of watching beautiful landscapes pass by the window. On my trip to Norway, I took 11 trains, 6 buses, and a boat. I followed my curiosity wherever it wandered. I saw and experienced so much along the way that I never would have if I had just flown north and booked a hotel. By taking the train, I emitted just 3% of the carbon dioxide I would have otherwise, spent about the same amount of money, and was able to engage with and gain an appreciation for the countries through which I traveled.

My travel abroad was pretty extreme because I wanted to experience as many trains as possible, but the true strength of slow travel comes when you design your travel around destinations that are a more reasonable distance away. My core course while abroad, Sustainable Development in Northern Europe, traveled by train to Stockholm for our study tour week, which took about 6 hours. I am confident that my class learned just as much on our trip as the other section of this course that flew to Spain. We had an amazing week, without so much as stepping foot on a plane.

How can you put this into practice in your life? Olin students and faculty engage in all kinds of exciting research work, so it is common for members of our community to travel to conferences. This kind of travel is incredibly valuable to the academic experience, an opinion likely shared by families who donate to send students to networking conferences and Olin administrators who sign off on grants to send delegations to present research. However, directly-financed air travel accounted for 7.18% of Olin’s total emissions in 2021.

Not all conferences are created equal, and sometimes there are few options for relevant conferences. However, we must consider location if the goal is to reduce the carbon emissions caused by academic travel. Choosing a conference with a medium-distance flight rather than a long-haul flight significantly reduces the impact of attending. My Olin research group attended the 2023 OCEANS conference, two of which are hosted each year. In 2023, the conferences were hosted in Biloxi, Mississippi and Limerick, Ireland. Our group of 3 student researchers attended the Limerick conference. If we had flown to Mississippi from Boston, we would have generated almost exactly half of the emissions that we generated by flying to Ireland. Looking back, I realize that I could have had effectively the same conference experience with half the same carbon impact. Even better, we could have sought out a closer conference that we could attend without flying.

Now, you’ve chosen a conference closer to home, great! The easiest way to further reduce the impact is to substitute ground transport instead of a flight. For conferences in cities with rail service, the barrier becomes the cost or convenience of booking a train. Let’s take the 2024 Society of Women Engineers conference, to be hosted in Chicago, as an example. One option is to attend the local conferences, but let’s focus on the national conference for the sake of this article. Most Oliners wouldn’t consider anything besides air travel to attend this conference, but please entertain me for a moment. Amtrak runs a once-daily service between Boston and Chicago, known as the Lake Shore Limited. The train stops at Framingham Station and terminates at Chicago Union Station, making it a convenient end-to-end journey. I will admit that the train isn’t particularly quick, departing Framingham at 1:30pm and arriving in Chicago at 10:15am the next day (a travel time of 21:45). However, Amtrak offers both seats and sleeper cabins for this journey, albeit at a premium compared to airfare. Choosing to fly this route instead of taking the Lake Shore Limited emits at least 6 times as much carbon dioxide. 

What is the role of Olin administration and others who fund this conference travel? What if we were willing to subsidize students and faculty who prioritize sustainable transportation when traveling to conferences? Incentivizing rail travel by making up the cost gap is an opportunity for the college to make good on our sustainability ambitions.

By choosing conferences closer to home and choosing to minimize the flights necessary to reach them, we can become more mindful consumers and reduce the carbon emissions associated with our academic and professional careers. This is not a call to never attend distant conferences, but merely an encouragement to consider the impacts of your travel as you make these decisions.

You can apply these same principles to your leisure travel. I fell in love with long-distance train travel during my semester abroad, but there are many other ways to embrace slow travel as you explore our amazing world. Instead of jetting across the world for spring break, consider hopping on a train to Montreal, the Adirondacks of upstate New York, picturesque coastal Maine, historical Philadelphia, or any number of other destinations. I guarantee that a train journey to any of these places, especially with a group of Oliners, will forge lasting memories. You may even fall in love with train travel as I have.

Next time you are planning to travel for leisure, academics, or work, I hope you consider slow travel and experience for yourself why to choose the rails.

“Chairs” In Museums

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I’m going to lose it. Look at this:

Chairs, in museums, caged behind ropes and standing lines, displayed as pieces of art. Among the petty things I care about, this perhaps makes me the most angry. If you don’t care about this yet, and you will, then bear with me as I scream this question from the rafters: why do they keep putting stuff I can’t sit on in museums? I’m disgusted.

The crux of the issue is simple. You cannot display a chair in a museum because the second you do, it stops being a chair. A chair is an object defined by action. If you cannot sit, it cannot be a chair. If the chair is durable and wide, that is part of the chair. If it is uncomfortable, that is part of the chair. And if the chair breaks after just one person sits in it, then that is part of the chair as well. When a chair is divorced from the context of its being, when you remove the mechanism that demands its existence – it stops being a chair and becomes a crude and confusing piece of abstract visual art. If a museum “displayed” a painting that you could only perceive by listening to the artist throw tomatoes at it from behind a curtain would you call it a painting? It would certainly be interesting; it would probably even be art, but would it be a painting? I don’t think so. Any designer who has had the pleasure of sitting down on something in their lives (as I imagine the vast majority have) should understand this: a seat should never be put behind bars. Function is a part of form and designing a piece of seating for a museum fundamentally denies its purpose.

It isn’t hard to fix the problem either. Most chairs are not particularly hard to build, even those that use premium materials can be adequately replicated (albeit at a lesser quality) with imitation leathers and silks. Modern furniture with particular design value often falls into this category. If it is a historical piece then it’s even easier, wood is more readily available than ever before and we certainly didn’t lose the technology to make dovetails. In these cases, a newer representation of a historical artifact would actually add to the exhibit. I promise you the Vikings did not sit in the crusty, splintered relic laid out in the exhibit, at least not in the state it is presented. “Where would we put it?” – In the exhibit, people already need seating for accessibility reasons, if your museum doesn’t have seats already then you have much bigger problems. Make a second chair. It is only through laziness that we have been forced to understand touch as a visual medium.

I have already stated my case enough to make the word chair lose all meaning. You might agree with me and you might even care, I hope you do. You might only care a little bit; I want you to care a lot. If you’re still on the fence then maybe gaining a greater appreciation for the beauty and complexity of seating could help. I think the crux of the issue here lies in the difficulty of actually designing a chair. 

If you’ve gone through your entire life, somehow managing to never feel uncomfortable in a chair, then I envy you, but have you ever tried to design a chair? Have you ever even tried to build one? It is impossible to do right. Sure, if you design in a world composed solely of 5’10”, able-bodied men, you might be able to nail down a solution. But unless you are designing crash test dummies or stocking grocery shelves, those kinds of assumptions just don’t fly in the real world. It is so incredibly difficult. People do not come in standard heights or widths, they are not all able to sit down or stand back up, and the “irregular” things that can be true of some people’s spines would shock you. What if a child or elderly person needs to sit? This is all before taking into account the environment of the object or the context of its use. The human body is beautiful, complicated, and infuriating. Designing a chair means making a fundamental piece of human architecture public; to analyze such a thing you must take into account the whole disturbed majesty of the human experience. You cannot do this solely with your eyes. You must sit in the chair. 

Here is a photo that I took at the Museum of Islamic Science in Istanbul. It is a row of imitation Wassily chairs just sitting in the lobby. This is a chair that could be in a museum but to enjoy it here is free. 

If you are an artist about to send your cool new chair to a museum or a historian setting up an antique bench for display, maybe just put in the effort to make a second one.

Who Are the PAs?

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You might have noticed that the signs in the bathroom stalls have been updated with a LOT of new names.

The PAs, or the Peer Advocates for Sexual Respect, are happy to announce that we have nearly doubled our size this semester! We are a diverse group of people who are committed to being a support network for any students struggling with sexual misconduct. 

For some brief history, the PAs began as an AHS Capstone in 2014. The motivation to start the PAs stemmed from a climate survey* and a Frankly Speaking article from 2013 that stressed that sexual assault happens at Olin and affects the same percentage of students as other colleges around the country.

The PA program ensures that people feel safe and respected at Olin. As a completely independent, student-led group, we aim to be a resource and response to the evolving situation of sexual respect at Olin.

We recognize that it can be tough to approach anyone with personal and sensitive issues, so we hope to connect with the community and break social barriers when it comes to topics like consent, sexual health, and relationships as a whole. Be on the lookout for PA Jeopardy, “It Happens Here”, and PA Wellness events!

So to finally answer the burning question, here are the PAs. Please come talk to us!

  • Please see the PDF version of this article in your email or take a look in any Olin bathroom for the list of contacts!

* Refer to this Princeton Article for what a climate survey is: https://academicinclusion.princeton.edu/get-started/consider-climate-survey

Why I Am a “Real” Engineer

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We talk a lot about engineering identities at Olin. I would like to offer how I came to find mine. This is not prescriptive nor definitive; I am still grappling with the ways that I shape my identity even as I write this. I offer this because I have had many similar conversations with people at various stages of their identity-forming journey. I am hoping that some of you might read this and relate, or at the very least reflect. 

I came to Olin thinking I was going to be a “woman in STEM”. I took all the requisite math and science classes, and I performed well in them. Thanks to my high school engineering program, I could classify fasteners with fluency and talked about how many “thou” off my lathe parts were. This fit with my image of a “woman in STEM”, and I enjoyed it, but it didn’t fully feel like me. I loved my French and English classes and Jane Austen novels. I was drawn to Olin because it proudly proclaimed that Arts, Humanities, and Social Science were centrally important. I was excited that I could be getting a “practical” degree in engineering without letting go of the humanist that I was deep down. I felt validated by the fact that Olin seemed to value this part of me as well. 

When I finally came to Olin, I discovered that I might be an oddball. I engaged with ravenous interest in my AHS foundation (Infrastructure Studies) and gave my all to the DesNat play project, but noticed that the people around me largely did the opposite. What I found most fascinating and important to the real work of engineering – understanding the emotional and societal side effects of things we engineer – was seen as “extra” or “easy” by others, and therefore not worth their time. My first year I was in angry tears many times over this mismatch, and over the fact that I could not force myself to be interested in the “real engineering” that I was told we were learning in ModSim and QEA. 

I thought that with time and practice, I would develop an interest in technical subjects. I followed a vague inclination into Mechanical Engineering. On a whim, I also enrolled in Architecture and Urbanism. This came to be one of the transformational influences of my Olin career. It was my first taste of Design as an identity. In this seminar-style class, design was presented to me in a way that felt expansive, generous, powerful. It was exactly what I had hoped to get out of my engineering education: a field that provided the connective tissue between behavior and culture and environment and built forms, between complex issues and playful solutions. The focus of the class was ostensibly on architecture and urban design, but the real intention of the class was to make us reflect on our identities. We were frequently invited to place ourselves on various spectra: “critique vs repair” or “wonder vs urgency” or “art vs engineering”. It was in those in-between spaces that I started to find myself. 

E:Design was calling to me, but I could not ignore the signals I was getting that this was not a valid choice. Jokes about “fake major” combined with warnings I had received my entire upbringing that I should not turn away from difficult things just because I’m a woman. I thought that being a good feminist meant excelling in traditionally male roles. I had never stopped to ask myself:  is that what the world needed me to be, or what I actually wanted to be? 

After ArchUrb, I was fully convinced that design was valuable and impactful. The next thing I had to grapple with was the fear that by choosing to pursue something that I had an affinity for I was being lazy, a bad feminist, or failing to repay my debt to my parents. I turned to just about every person who would listen for wisdom on this. Some of the soundest advice I got came from Deb Chachra, who said, “Don’t get good at something you hate.” Eventually, I chose to switch to design. 

I might get emotional about this. It is emotionally taxing to be told in so many different ways that you are not valid. That you are naive, idealistic, ideological. I sometimes argue with my peers and myself in order to assert that I am a “real engineer”. The most validating role models I have had are the professors and alumni who lead by example in being absolute badasses in their fields and who hold the “difficult sciences” as equal to the “hard sciences” (to use Deb’s words). 

Design, social science, interpersonal communication, are all coded feminine in many contexts. Why are the activities that touch on these fields not “real”? My definition of an engineer is a connector between the realms of social science, culture, human experience, and “technology” in its broadest sense. Don’t tell me that isn’t “hard” because that is the hardest thing of all. It is squishy and vague and resistant to labeling. And it is valuable. You are valuable. Not because of a neat project portfolio, but because you have an Olin education which gives you the unique opportunity to grapple with the slippery, complicated, beautiful interaction between people and what you make. If you feel a curiosity for those things, don’t shut that interest down. Nurture it. Artificial Intelligence will never be able to do it. 

Spaces at Olin

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We, as Olin students, are afforded countless luxuries in the form of communal spaces,; the Library workspaces and machine shops being the most obvious examples. Less obvious, however, are places like the Wellness Room in the Campus Center, or Parcel B just behind the dorms. In addition to simply having access to these things, we also have nearly unrestricted access to them. It’s not typical for a college to give their students 24/7 access to spaces like a kitchen, or bike room – both things that I think most of us tend to take for granted.

All of these luxuries exist in the way that they do because of one thing: trust. Trust that comes from a social contract between the stewards who build, maintain, and care for these spaces, and the students who use them. This contract is a simple give-and-take, really. Someone puts their time, energy, and money into making a space the best it can be. In return, they trust that we will respect their hard work. For a while, I thought that this give-and-take worked great at Olin. 

Having recently been hired to help steward a space in the Olin Shop, I have now seen the other side of this social contract. In a very short amount of time, I’ve experienced what must be a fraction of the frustration and confusion that a full-time steward feels when tools disappear, or when a huge mess appears overnight without as much as a note. 

I can now see how continuing to care can become difficult when every day, someone intentionally puts their self-interest above the social contract of trust that we have all implicitly signed. 

The cause of this issue could be explained by the “Tragedy of the Commons” framing. For example, one person decides it’s in their best interest to take a tool back to their dorm. As a result, some tools become scarce for others, instead of a common resource, which leads others to follow suit. 

None of this is to say that every student at Olin treats communal spaces horribly. Overall, we tend to do a good job of respecting rules and guidelines. If we didn’t, places like the Shop or the Library would stop trusting us to collectively respect their spaces. 

This article is my plea to you to hold up your end of the social contract of trust. The next time you need to mill something for a project or do some cooking, think about how you interact with those resources. Think of how you can serve the space, rather than how the space can serve you. Take the extra time to fix a problem or clean a mess, even if it’s not strictly your responsibility. 

On Sexism: Bursting the Bubble

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Disclaimer: I refer to Olin students in the typical gender binary as “men” and “women”. This is not to exclude anyone in the transgender community. While I believe that gender cannot be split into the male-female categories, the binary is still how many people are perceived. “Men” and “women”, in this case, are useful labels to describe our social reality on the population level, even if they cannot capture the vast diversity of gender expression. If you have questions, please contact the editor.

One of my favorite games growing up was Skylanders. I collected every single Skylander in the first game and spent most of my time playing on my Xbox – I distinctly remember my favorite being Hex (my goth queen). So when McDonald’s came out with the Skylanders: Trap Team toy when I was ten, I was excited. I begged my mom to take me to McDonald’s to get a Trap Team toy; as usual, my mom fed my autism and drove me to McDonald’s after my dance practice.

We walked into the restaurant and asked the cashier for a boy’s Happy Meal. That cashier took one look at me in my leotard and pink skirt and said that they couldn’t give that to me. My mom asked why and they said (verbatim), “She’s a girl, so she gets the girl McDonald’s toy”. My mom asked, once again, for the boy’s Happy Meal toy, and they took our order. I got my Happy Meal and excitedly opened it to see… a Littlest Pet Shop toy. Not my boy Wallop or my dude Pain Yatta. A Littlest Pet Shop character. I didn’t even like The Littlest Pet Shop, not nearly as much as Skylanders. We couldn’t return it because we knew they would give us a hard time. So I went with my dad to a different McDonald’s the next day and actually got a Skylanders toy, probably because they didn’t care as much or maybe because they thought it was for my dad. Either way, still too much of a hassle for a plastic toy.

Looking back, I now realize how much McDonald’s – a place I went to often – completely influenced how I perceive gender, and it probably influenced a lot of other McDonald’s regulars too. I recognize a little bit too much how I have to be very careful about what I tell people what my interests are because no matter what I say, people will not expect it and react too strongly – either negatively or positively. Very recently, I had to explain to people how I enjoy watching sports – not necessarily to watch cute guys get sweaty but because I love the strategy and especially how excited everyone around me gets for a tiny ball being thrown around a field. Notice how I just explained my love for sports? I’ve done this more times than I can count. If a guy said the same thing he wouldn’t have to explain or defend himself – he would just say “I like watching sports” and everyone would think, “Yeah, that makes sense”. They wouldn’t question anything and he wouldn’t have to validate his statements.

Here at Olin, it’s a bit better than what I’m used to at home. I’ve met so many people who break the gender barrier in so many ways that I’ve felt like my authentic self for the first time in a long time. However, I have still faced a lot of experiences where I had to defend myself on things I love. In fact, many of my negative experiences at Olin have been because of my gender. Very often, I and other women at this school have been in situations where our opinion was not valued, immediately shut down by the “biggest man in the room”, and then experienced another man saying the same exact thing and being listened to without second thought. When we voice this, there’s a pretty good chance they will say something along the lines of, “No way, that’s not possible, not here at Olin.” At Olin where there is a severe lack of women in project teams because there is an excess amount of this sexist and discriminatory behavior. At Olin where Pi Day is taken more seriously than International Women’s Day. At Olin where if a girl shows some sort of femininity she’s taken for a Wellesley student because there’s no way an engineering student can hold any sort of “womanhood” about them but a liberal arts student can. It frustrates me when people who are aware of this say:

“This happens a lot in the industry. You just have to get used to it.”

But why do we have to sit here and listen to a man talk and talk and talk all he wants while we have to fight for our voice? Why can’t we, as an “innovative” campus with the motto “engineering for everyone”, teach people how to respect everyone in the room? Especially when it comes to teaming: no matter how many group projects you put Olin students in, teaming alone won’t teach people to not be misogynistic. They expect us to be the ones to tell the perpetrators that what they’re doing is wrong, but after doing it a thousand times to no avail it gets tiring. Not only that, but us speaking out poses a real threat that women face every single day. If we claim that the person across from us is acting misogynistic, we are deemed insane, crazy, or dramatic, so we stay silent and discretely warn other women who to watch out for in a teaming situation.

This is not to say that every single man at Olin acts in this way, but this is to say that there’s behavior at Olin just like this that goes unchecked. Olin imagines itself to be too progressive, too evolved, too sophisticated a place for sexism to persist and as a result becomes blind to the subtle flavors that still exist. We cannot act as if sexism died with the feminist movement, because then the small things that happen now can grow into larger issues later on for gender minorities everywhere. Maybe if we finally stopped ignoring what’s going on, we might actually see some progress in our community and actually make it for everyone.

Drunk Horoscopes

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♈ Aries: March 21–April 19

  • You will encounter a Man—someone’s boyfriend—in the hallway while wearing nothing but a towel.

♉ Taurus: April 20–May 20

  • You are a swamp creature. They can tell.

♊ Gemini: May 21–June 21

  • USB stick? Used tampon? A crab? Use dryer with caution.

♋ Cancer: June 22–July 22

  • You will not get into your cross-reg. :(

♌ Leo: July 23–August 22

  • Missing Person Alert. Last seen wandering East Hall in a banana suit.

♍ Virgo: August 23–September 22

  • You will snipe Snillary Flinton from the Wellesley bell tower. Pew.

♎ Libra: September 23–October 23

  • Cupcakke is coming. So are we.

♏ Scorpio: October 24–November 21

  • If you lose your passport, check the Plan B bin.

♐ Sagittarius: November 22–December 21

  • You WILL get some dick. I believe in you.

♑ Capricorn: December 22–January 19

  • Drink the Baja Blast whiteboard cleaner. You know you want to.

♒ Aquarius: January 20–February 18

  • Get impeached, dumbass.

♓ Pisces: February 19–March 20

  • You’re doing ISIM week. Have fun.

“We” Are Not Winning The War

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A prelude: For months I debated whether to publish this. I ask over and over again: Is the information current? Is it balanced and palatable to every position? Does it have to be April 1st? The answers inevitably return to a resounding “no”.  I must settle with that fact. Moreover, I speculate that publishing this is a way to sidestep people who will disagree with me instead of initiating conversation. I’ve seen these mistakes made in the past. I could simply ignore these hesitations and hit send, but no consideration is a luxury. 

Nevertheless, as guest speakers visit to inform us, and faculty host discussion rooms, I can only view these months as a historical moment for Olin, for which the most recent physical artifacts around the school are the advocacy flyers, whose messages boil away the nuance around the most complicated social issue I am forced to contend with. April is when the conversation has become relevant, and so this is when I will publish.

Preparing for my bar mitzvah, I planned to wrap candies in the Israeli flag as a thank you gift. My mother prohibited it. I didn’t understand at that time, but that was my first experience learning about the difference between embracing Judaism, my religion, and embracing the state of Israel. 

While I stayed in Edinburgh for a semester, I tried to reach out to the Jewish community in Scotland. I was not exceptionally active, but I went to one event. It was a Friday night Shabbat service, gathering Jewish societies from universities in the area. It was a pleasant service, and they invited an interesting speaker, a Scottish politician whose job it is to advise on Jewish affairs. He was an elegant speaker. Deceptively elegant, for he wove messages in his sentences that festered discord within me. He spoke about the success Scotland is making fighting hate crimes and hate speech. Then he said, “Right now, we are all fighting a war. And we are winning!” to a standing ovation… but that statement did not inspire applause from me. 

This ‘war’ refers to multiple conflicts, while similar, are separate in their goals. The first war is likely the one you are thinking of, the attacks in Israel and Palestine. The other ‘war’ is that of antisemitism, and the historical prejudices that perpetuate anti-Jewish sentiments. While both are systemic in nature, and the two are heavily intertwined, there are important differences. 

Israel is a country. Its actions should be treated as such, instead of pretending it acts on the will of the Jewish people. I, as a Jewish individual, do not necessarily align with the actions of Netanyahu and his cabinet simply because they head a predominantly Jewish state. My traditions and the way I was raised have little to do with Israel, if at all. My approach to antisemitism is never related to Israel. Not because of my alignment with the state, and not because I  strategically decide against invoking Israel. The fight for Israel is not the fight against antisemitism for me. 

This politician fused these two ‘wars’ together. He used the war in Israel to represent antisemitism at home and abroad. However, victory in one war does not necessitate the victory of the other. This is a common conflation, and a deliberate one. Israel the political body, the US, and other allied countries make this logical leap to expedite political support. They do this also to handwave political criticisms of Israel as bigotry: Align with Israel, or align with antisemitism. But I don’t need to agree with a government’s actions to advocate 

for my religious pride. I began learning this idea when I was thirteen. However, as I sat in the room with over 100 other Jews, I got a strange feeling that the sit-down from my mother is not one shared with the rest of my community. 

I thought I didn’t need to publish this for Olin. As I proofread these words, I speculate that I’m preaching too heavily to the congregation. Surely, I hoped, the people of this institution would equally make the distinction. However, I am confronted with flaws in that assumption. For many Jewish people, Israel is not a political entity, but a cultural entity. When interpreted from this view, an attack on Israel is an attack on the place that honors Jewish history in ways I cannot conceive. In this way, the tie between antizionism and antisemitism is recontextualized. I do not agree with this perspective, but I have learned it must be taken seriously.

After the service, I told a friend how the speaker’s words hit me so hard. Someone walking by missed the context, and asked what words they could have been. Providing the context, I repeated, ‘we are fighting a war, and we’re winning.”She paused, and replied, “No you’re not,” as she put a cigarette to her mouth. 

I don’t know what she meant by that. She could have referred to any of the things I talked about. But it doesn’t matter. I know it’s true regardless. 

Sure, Israel will win the ground war, no doubt about that, but Israel fights another war in the public eye. They are losing support from allies, with public support for Palestine in the US higher than it’s ever been. The UN condemns Israel’s actions, and now the country is under pressure for a ceasefire.‘We’ arenot winning this war.

The war against antisemitism persists, in stranger ways than you may expect. Of course, the anti-Israel voices are chock-full of antisemites, but Netenyahu protects them because he likes it this way. With these enemies, he can maintain the state’s image as the bastion against antisemitism, and he can pin dissent on alignment with Nazis. But there is antisemitism among zionists as well. John Hagee was a speaker at The March for Israel from last fall. He’s a televangelist, and his wikipedia has a whole section about his thoughts on Jews. My favorite line states, “[Hagee] claimed 

that the persecution of Jews throughout history, implicitly including the Holocaust, was due to the Jewish people’s disobedience of God”. It would take another 1200 words to explain why there are such prominent antisemitic zionists, but suffice it to say there’s more evidence to distinguish the two wars “we” are fighting. And we are not winning the war against antisemitism. 

But there’s one more war. It’s a war that I am fighting. I’m fighting for Jews and non Jews alike to thoughtfully continue the dialogue. I have seen the hostility from Oliners that keeps me from initiating more of these conversations. I’ve seen others fight this battle and lose their Jewish community over it. I’m scared to risk that. There are already so few Jews in the world to share solidarity, and every relationship like this is harder to find after one is destroyed. But this is a fight I must face, alongside other Jewish people who are torn between their nation of Judaism and the state of Israel. I hope I accurately described the difference between these battles, and how their conflation harms the success for Jews everywhere. And if I haven’t, well… 

then I’ve already lost this war.