Oliners have a lot of thoughts. Frankly Speaking aims to be a platform for Oliners to share some of those thoughts with the broader Olin community, beyond their immediate social circles. By contributing your writing to Frankly Speaking, you are empowered to help shape our community through narrative and conversation: sparking widespread discussion, challenging assumptions, lightening someone’s mood, and more. 

Writing is an important act of creation and discovery, through which we can achieve greater understanding of ourselves and the world around us. Even when you’re not the author, critically engaging with written opinions and narratives is a crucial part of staying connected with your community. Through our distribution process, the publication team hopes to encourage this aspect of participating in a community.

We have entered a new era of Olin, one in which the needs of our community and the conversations we need to have are changing rapidly. Frankly Speaking was built to fit a different set of community needs, during a time when we were asking the question: “What should Olin contribute to the world?” However, the Olin we know today is one where we are looking inward more than ever, evaluating our existing infrastructure and the once-dormant tensions that are now bubbling to the surface. The rift between leaders and the broader community requires trust that can only be built with greater transparency, communication, and clarity. Over two decades after Frankly Speaking was founded, Oliners find themselves asking a more urgent and fundamental question: “What should Olin be to itself?” Olin was created as a response to problems intrinsic to traditional engineering education, but now we are faced with problems intrinsic to Olin. 

We are lucky to reach a broad audience: students, staff, faculty, board members, and even people outside the Olin community. Because of this, we have a responsibility to uphold the legitimacy and integrity of our publication. Historically, this structure has rarely been explicit, or came about during a time when there were different and more avenues for communication. But our community has changed, and so too has the role of Frankly Speaking. So, let’s start building a model that can better serve us.

One way we hope to increase clarity is by defining what types of writing might be seen in Frankly Speaking. Submissions tend to fall into a few categories. These differ greatly from each other and should be held to different content standards. Here’s how you’ll see this going into the next academic year:

• First-person experience
  • Opinion pieces and/or calls to action 
  • Reviews 
  • Narratives, or pieces with no explicit takeaway
• Fact-based reporting
• Informational 
• Interview
• Games, comedy, satire, etc. 

When a member of the Olin community submits a piece, they must classify that piece as one of the above categories and acknowledge that they have, to the best of their ability, held their writing to its respective standard. (Official guidelines changes are in the works!)

As with everything at Olin, Frankly Speaking will never see a final version. Our work as a publication team is never done. To keep doing it, we need your involvement! Tell us what you think about a recent issue, or walk us through an article you’d love to write. Better yet, join us in producing Frankly Speaking by becoming a staff writer or editor. If you’re interested, we would love to hear from you. Most of all, don’t stop being an active member of the community that makes Olin such a special place. 

Happy reading, 

Maddy Fahey ‘27, Executive Editor

Quinn Verrill ‘27, Editor

Gia-Uyen Tran ‘25, Editor