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Title: “To First-Years: A Word Of Warning About Formula”

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To First-Years: Don’t join Formula. Or Rocketry. Or Baja. Or any other project team.

To preface, I do not despise Formula, nor any project team for that matter. I refer to Formula throughout this article simply because they are the most clear example, but most observations are true for all project teams. I also write this opinion piece in, well, an opinionated way, but I don’t think any project team is all awful. I think they have their good qualities and their bad qualities. Their triumphs and their failures. I certainly don’t have a problem with any of the people in them—many of whom I look up to and who are my close friends—and to be fair, in my conversations with project team leaders, most of them are relatively forthcoming about the shortcomings of their teams and receptive to criticism and change. 

But there is a difference between hearing those shortcomings from someone who likes project teams and who is trying to recruit you, and hearing the shortcomings from someone who dislikes them. And for all of the very, very vocal proponents of project teams abound at this school, I find there are very few vocal opponents. 

I’ll avoid most of the common critiques as best as I can: the interpersonal conflicts and drama caused by tightening the Olin bubble even further, the weirdly obsessive and borderline manipulative recruitment of first-years, the embarrassing gender ratios, the many, many safety hazards and near disasters that project teams have caused and then shrugged off, and others that I’m sure we’ve all heard. I’ll instead focus on what I feel are the three main interconnected problems in Formula: the work culture, the trends in leadership, and the subsequent definition of engineering that it gives to its members.  

The work culture is well known, so I won’t dwell on it for long. We’ve all had friends who can’t hang out because of an “important” deadline, teammates in class projects who have missed meetings for Formula, and we have all heard of the late, sleep deprived nights, where the LPB doors are propped long after 2am. I won’t try to prove that Formula members are often if not always overworked—just ask any of them. Hell, many have bragged to me about their sleepless nights showing their “work ethic and commitment”. I’ll get to that later.

This work culture affects all in the club, but I have seen it cause the most damage in the trends of the leadership for these teams. Leads have the responsibility of coordination, mentorship, lead engineering, project managing, and countless other tasks. Many go into it with very little experience leading and get “thrown in the deep end.” In theory it’s a valid enough tactic for learning, but Formula is going into this year with no upperclassmen leadership. Upperclassmen know well that sophomore year isn’t a walk in the park, and yet the upperclassmen members are so unpassionate or checked out or burned out to step into those roles. To me, that is not a smoking gun for any failure from any specific individual in Formula, but for a much larger, systemic problem with leadership culture and trends.

It makes me sad, but it doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen the story play out well over a dozen times now. Sophomore lead enters excited from a fun first year. They get thrown in the deep end. Classes ramp up. Stress ramps up. But they like Formula. They love the people or the project or whatever else but it just gets to be so much. They talk about it in the exact same way they would talk about a toxic relationship. And in every case, for every person I’ve seen fall by the wayside—guilty, miserable, and overworked—the last reason they won’t let go has always been feeling that they are letting the team down.

Honestly, it sometimes seems that overwhelming guilt at letting the team down is the lifeblood of what keeps people in Formula. But the guilt of leaving a club is not a reason to stay, and good friendships should hold whether they are team members or not—that is true whether you are a casual member or the project manager. You want my hot take? If any organization depends on one person to keep existing, it shouldn’t keep existing.

And all of this leads to what I have seen as the most pervasive effect of project teams: the definition of engineering it gives to its members and to the school. Because project teams’ main selling point is that, yes, they are learning mechanisms for engineering. My first year, each project team marketed itself as a different environment to learn engineering, and importantly, each one told me that I would learn more engineering with them than I would in any of my classes first year. I’ve heard this repeatedly every year since. That Formula will fast-track you on learning engineering, when you want more “engineering” than your classes provide. Which I totally get. When you’re a first-year and you are presented with going outside to draw a bug in DesNat and with building a car in Formula, one feels more engineering. 

But DesNat is an engineering class. And a good one at that. Formula feels more engineering because it matches more the conventional definition of engineering: move fast, build a car, get it to drive. But Olin’s education is not the conventional definition of engineering—we have specifically stood out as a top-ranked school because of an unconventional approach. One that puts DesNat hoppers before complex machinery analysis. That isn’t some half-thrown-together placeholder from the faculty. The entire curriculum is put together to build upon ideas and to build specifically an unconventional definition of engineering. 

But when the connotation is made in the first year that Formula is more engineering than classes, part of that buy-in is lost. That buy-in is important because it builds on itself all throughout Olin. I’ve seen a clear correlation between project team participation and generally having less buy-in for design courses like CD, for engaging in AHS concentrations, or participating in larger engineering reflections. It’s not the engineering they’re learning in their teams, so there’s less need to dedicate as much time and attention to it.

It’s not the engineering that goes on within project teams, so there’s less need to dedicate as much time and attention to it. 

And what is the engineering that supersedes the curriculum’s? What is Formula’s practiced definition of what it means to be an engineer? It is one that is defined by work and burnout. By spending sleepless nights to finish some arbitrary deadline for some arbitrary project. And that seeps into how everyone here defines engineering. I’m not denying that there is passion and learning, but an all-consuming work culture and guilt has been built into the foundation of what keeps Formula going. That anxiety—not work ethic, anxiety—affects what people perceive engineering should be. That “proper” engineering is inherently stress and late nights, and that the more stressed and overworked you are, the better an engineer you become. 

It’s a great way to get burnt out, I’ll say that much. If you keep it up after Olin, it’s a great way to get used by others. 

I’m not saying that Olin’s curriculum is perfect. While I think there’s something to be said about the difference between a learning experience crafted by Ph.D. professors versus overworked sophomore leads, Olin’s curricular definition of engineering is not perfect for anyone. That definition is something each person has to find on their own, but the activities and priorities you choose will inherently affect what engineering, work, and life all mean to you. 

I’m sure you can put any large group of Oliners together and with enough motivation—whether that motivation comes from passion or feelings of obligation or crippling stress—they’ll be able to make an electric car in a year. Or anything else they set their minds, time, bodies, and mental health to. But I also know that in that same time, they could learn and reflect about what actually makes them passionate. They could get more out of their classes, both in that time and in the future. And I know they could all still learn and demonstrate technical concepts that really interest them while still maintaining a work-life balance.

I admit that I write this from a position of bias. I’ve seen so many of my friends, my residents, my classmates delve into these project teams, work themselves to the bone, and burn out. It hurt me seeing them go through that and I knew it hurt them more. I don’t want to see it happen again, and I’ve held out hope each year that it would be the year where all the positives that these teams can bring shine and all the negatives get washed away. Those who know me know I’ve been wanting to write this article for two years now, and I’ve waited in optimism because I didn’t want to unnecessarily give any team a bad name as they were on the cusp of change. I have that same optimism this year, but I write this piece as a warning of trends that I cannot ignore.

Because I can’t take another year of standing by. Of supporting my friends as they gradually reach their breaking point, beat up and burnt out from project teams they once enjoyed. So for all the people yelling at you right now to “Join Formula! Or Rocketry! Or Baja!”, I will get up on my small soapbox here between the pages of this Frankly to shout as loud as I can: 

“DON’T join Formula! Or Rocketry! Or Baja! Or any other project team!” 

Am I biased? Sure. But I will be a vocal opponent this year. And if you’re a first-year who wants more perspectives before joining a project team, you can come find me. If you’re a sophomore in a leadership position who feels the tendrils of burnout start reaching out, you can come find me. And if you’re a junior or senior or anyone else who reads this and vehemently disagrees, you can come find me. I’ll happily talk about my observations and reflections, about where you are right and where I am decidedly wrong. But for all of the people surrounding you and declaring that project teams are the best ways to get good jobs or make friends or learn engineering, just know that you are always welcome to find me if you want to hear the opinion of someone who, frankly, doesn’t think they do a great job at really any of those things.

Learning To Grow On A Farm

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I stopped following politics after Trump got elected again. In 2020, I thought I was a part of a movement where everyone was growing in conscious. With every day a new headline, a new crime, a new impeachable offense, the country could clearly see the damage he dealt domestic and abroad. After 2021 there was quiet, and I thought we liked it that way. I thought I was part of a growing movement, but I wasn’t. I was terminally online, and I was out of touch. 

I stopped reading the news because the one way I thought real change could happen would not come. I thought great change must come from laws, government departments, political advocacy, and more radicals in government. But that got us the same old fascist, DOGE, and insert any other upheaval I’m not reading about. I couldn’t stay online.

This summer I touched grass, and I mean really touched grass, in a way I never had before. I did so by working on a farm.

I did research at Olin under Alessandra, and she asked a simple, yet challenging question for me to explore: what economic and ecological incentives align for farmers? After a bit of googling, one of the answers to this question is the concept of “regenerative agriculture”, a series of strategies that prioritize revitalizing the land and capturing carbon through farming practices. Broader research points to a variety of successful, well tested strategies for farms to implement, alongside being far more profitable in the long run. Now, the follow up question becomes: How can I contribute to enabling farmers to implement regenerative agriculture?

The answers to this new question are diverse, fascinating, and complicated, but one discovery was clear to me. The government could never “legally mandate regenerative agriculture”. Farms are too diverse for blanket standards, and guidelines are frequently unable to encompass the farmers they supervise. My aforementioned theory of change could not succeed under these conditions. This developed my first new understanding: Systemic change must be designed to empower its users at a granular level, and these systems do not need to be government supported.

The farming community in Massachusetts is beautiful and diverse, and every farmer is supported by relying on one another to teach and grow together. I saw farmers that depended on networks of mutual aid, and I could see how successful this strategy was. Farms hosted events to share how they found success, and how that impacted their perspectives about the industry. Systemic change must be enforced through a community’s dependence on their peers, not their dependence on authority figures. Farmers change their behavior through close community mentorship, and it is difficult for politicians, academics, or engineers to meaningfully contribute to a farmer’s operations.

My final project became a guidebook for farmers to compare success stories related to regenerative farming. It took the summer of engrossing myself in a new ecosystem, questioning my biases as an engineer, and exploring how I can support a community that already relies on an established system of aid. 

I want to farm more. Not just because the community is so welcoming, not just because the work is tangible and rewarding, but because farming makes me believe that change is still possible. What I learned might not resonate with you. But there are other ways to change the world that you may not be thinking about. I implore you to seek out these means of change and discover the greatest contributions you can provide. Your current theory of change does not encompass every impact one can make in this world. And if you’re like me, then you know your capacity to give is greater than support for movements that don’t feel successful. You deserve to discover how.

Tragedy of the Project Team II (I Was Wrong)

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Two years ago, I published an article titled “Tragedy of the Project Team” in Frankly Speaking, which was a slight vent on how project teams at Olin were operated. If you haven’t read that article, I do strongly recommend it for context to the following. The article served as the framework for how I approached team leadership during my time as PM/lead on AERO and Rocketry, and it has been quoted back to me by future leads who have bought into its conclusions. In one unique instance, a sophomore told me that the article made him decide to come to Olin to co-create that kind of future. I am honored by the support I have received and Oliners’ eagerness to co-create, but I want to explore that article’s pitfalls by teaching you what I’ve learnt in the past two years about how to build a team and a culture.

How can a company with a small name, competitive-yet-not-extravagant compensation, and greater-than-average volatility to market performance attract and maintain top-notch employees? This is what I was asking myself this summer while I worked at Second Order Effects, a small engineering services firm based out of LA. The employees (and founders) had stacked resumes including SpaceX, Google, and the rest of Big Aerospace and FAANG. These phenomenal engineers had no shortage of opportunities, yet they came to SOE, they stayed, and they rated it well on Glassdoor. The company had amazing culture and morale, teams that executed in harmony, and a respect for the individuality and humanity of its employees. I think we can learn a lot from SOE and apply it back to Olin project teams to understand retention and loyalty precisely because SOE has to rely heavily on team culture to survive in a world of Goliaths. 

SOE has something I haven’t seen on Olin’s project teams or seen executed properly at other companies I’ve worked at—people management. Oftentimes this role is folded into engineering management, so you don’t see it advertised, but you can always feel its effects. Let’s talk about some definitions. Project management, which you all are familiar with, is making sure deadlines are met, budgets are kept, and quality is assured. People management is about managing team dynamics and hiring, career growth and development, and creating a team/company vision. Project managers become senior project managers, people managers become CTOs. Both of these are critical roles for any team—at SOE, like many firms, they’re kept separate. Each project has an assigned project manager and each employee has a direct mentor/manager that does the people management. Lower-level managers balance managerial duties and day-to-day engineering, while higher-level managers do only mentorship/management.

Having strong people management is the key to a better culture and reduced turnover—it creates lasting loyalty between the team and the individual and vice versa. At Olin you often hear project teams leading with their projects; contrastingly, you rarely hear them lead with a people-before-project focus. In this article I will dive into five factors of people management I learned from SOE: team bonding, learning opportunities, mentorship, goal setting, and reflection. Then, I will focus on how we can improve in these areas without changing our team structures or adding significant work for our leads. Even tiny shifts in the ways we think about our teams can make a huge impact.

At Olin we do a good job with team bonding; unfortunately, we often look to it as a one-size-fits-all Band-Aid for our other problems. While it can support social cohesion on a team, it does not tackle structural issues or promote behaviors that drive loyalty. While team bonding is critical at companies and larger schools, Olin’s small size reduces its efficacy by eliminating two major value propositions: networking and friendship. At a larger school, you won’t have these same people in your classes, projects, and the dining hall—so team bonding builds strong friendships and expands your professional network. At Olin, project teams don’t have to position themselves to be friend groups—attempting to force that is time better spent on the other factors.

The second factor, learning opportunities, is where I need to discuss my conclusions from “Tragedy of the Project Team.” I had claimed that the solution to member retention and interest boiled down to novel projects, more engineering freedom, and less structure. I have seen this in action; SOE as a services firm has rotating projects and these novel projects can spur co-learning amongst engineers across all levels. But in the article, this was mistakenly presented as the sole factor; I was reflecting on what I thought motivated me and gave me purpose. At Olin, I think we can still improve on project novelty and rotation, but this is no longer my main concern regarding our teams’ health.

The third factor is mentorship. This is the chicken-and-egg problem of project teams; mentorship supports retention, and retention creates mentors. A team needs to provide strong mentorship across all fields from technical to operational. Right now, this is the factor that scares me, seeing that in my time at Olin we have had a massive upperclassman exodus from project teams and now have almost ubiquitously sophomore leads. In order to improve here, we need access to upperclassmen who give mini lectures, explanations at whiteboards, and tutorials. While this necessitates focusing less on their own projects, mentorship should be considered desirable, especially for the type of engineers Olin attracts. Teaching and leadership are both rewarding experiences that make for well-rounded engineers. Often these come with learnings of their own; for instance, teaching can help foster a deeper understanding of the subject and allow for exploration of new ideas. How do we jumpstart our way out of this Catch-22? I hope that by focusing on the remaining factors, a stronger team culture and loyalty will emerge, and in turn naturally grow mentors from within.

The fourth factor is goal setting, which is critical to career and technical development. This involves a difficult, but pivotal decision: put people over projects. A team should assign tasks and deliverables based on individual goals and create new projects off the critical path if necessary. It should not sacrifice a person’s goals for timeline or to fit to a Gantt chart—especially those of new members. Loyal members will pay it back by occasionally doing tasks which do not align with their goals, but a new member given an arbitrary task will simply leave and never feel any loyalty. At SOE, I clearly outlined my goals to learn Altium over the summer and when a quick-turn project from a client came through, I was assigned to it despite never having used the software. My coworkers respected my autonomy and never got involved beyond reviewing my work. Did the schedule slip slightly? Yes. Did the final product have some minor issues and inaccuracies? Yes. But do they now have a skilled employee who can operate independently and is loyal to the team? YES. Investing in your people builds a strong set of dedicated future engineers, leaders, and team-builders. 

Lastly, we have perhaps the most important factor: reflection by design. As humans we suck at being optimistic, and we also suck at remembering what has happened (side note: this is why we all should write gratitude journals). Reflecting on learning highlights the value and growth in the experience, reflecting on goals better directs personal focus, and reflecting on areas of improvement creates space to act upon growth opportunities in a safe environment.

So how can our teams focus on these factors with minimal extra effort? First, we can implement regular 15-minute meetings between each member and mentors, keeping in mind that mentors should be different from one’s subteam lead and generally not PM. One-on-ones are opportunities for reflection, goal-setting, and feedback both for the team and for the member. This article is too short to go into the art of running one-on-ones—contact me to learn more. Members should be empowered to set varied goals across: domain-specific technical learning, cross-disciplinary skills that make for well-rounded engineers, soft skills, networking, etc. Members should be required to brainstorm and work towards 4-6 concurrent goals, refreshed and updated as they are completed or need changes throughout the year. Importantly, their tasking should reflect these goals, not a Gantt chart. Next, we can focus on making learning opportunities more explicit, obvious, and efficient through mini-lectures at the start of meetings. This can give people the guarantee that they will learn something new every time. These could be as little effort as 15-minute brain dumps about whatever one of the leads finds cool and insightful (even if completely irrelevant to the team’s project, such as a LinkedIn workshop). If nothing comes to mind, try polling members about blockers on their projects and expand on those as a team. Need help getting a loft working? Continue that CAD tutorial with a lecture on swept bodies and guide curves. Consequently, this reduces open work time at meetings—we should embrace this and prioritize learning and planning over unstructured work time. In a team with strong people management and loyalty, work is mostly done outside of meetings and blockers are resolved impromptu by sending an Outlook invite or DM to relevant resources like a coworking group or leads. Hence, this should not be viewed as a sacrifice, but an investment. Lastly, we can provide notebooks/journals for members and encourage note-taking during lectures and research/project work. These can be filled front-back technically and back-front with goals and reflections. This can ground learning in a quantitative medium. All of the above suggestions are low-effort for the leadership team, but are incredibly impactful to the overall team culture.

I hope that this article serves to highlight some of the ways in which we can think differently about team-building and team culture on project teams, and perhaps Olin in general. I have explained why factors like team bonding play a minimal role and how factors like learning opportunities, mentorship, goal setting, and reflection need to be more thoughtfully engaged with. I don’t believe Olin project teams have ever had a people manager (AKA engineering people manager or engineering manager) and it shows. Recently, our project teams have dwindled due to factors within our control such as culture, and factors outside our control such as difficulty fundraising, problematic space allocations, and time-consuming safety audits. It is now more important than ever to turn our focus inward as project team leadership. To ride out these external turmoils we need people and cohesion more than ever. Thankfully, those are outcomes we can influence directly when we put our minds and hearts into those around us. Even if it means making sacrifices elsewhere on timelines, scope, complexity, etc., start being people-obsessed, not project-obsessed, and slowly, success shall blossom.

Remember Why You Came To Olin

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Three years ago, I stepped on campus, suitcase in hand, to move into my home for the next four years. I was excited to meet new people, explore the local area, and work in the machine shop. Since that day, there have been many life-changing moments, favorite memories made, and days that went on for too long. There were times when Olin and life were very frustrating. I got tired of being here and wanted a break. I felt that Olin was far from what I loved it to be. 

When you have these days, I urge you to remember why you came to Olin. Reflect on what made you excited in your first few weeks. Remind yourself of your favorite moments. Who were you with? What were you doing? Why were you doing it? Now go do those things! See those people. Take a break from your schoolwork and extracurriculars. Enjoy this college that you will have attended for four years. Experience your favorite parts of Olin again. 

Here is a list of what I do to remember why I love Olin, reset, and take a breath:

  • Go on a night walk around Needham with friends
  • Read or join OCF in prayer on the benches overlooking the marsh
  • Cut out a fun shape out of scrap wood in the green shop and paint it
  • Sew a new dress or skirt in the library
  • Take an early morning walk in Parcel B
  • Get lunch with my favorite faculty or staff member
  • Ice cream trip to one of many local ice cream shops
  • Walk around Milas Hall offices and meet new people
  • Double-decker hammocks between CC and West Hall
  • Visit my communities outside of Olin (e.g. my church)

These are my favorite things to do on those long days. I hope you can find your own things, share them with others, and remember why you want to be here.

The Lifelong Quest of Becoming the Greatest Side Character

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I used to think I needed a lead role. I got my role as Scarecrow in my middle school’s Wizard of Oz, but when I was in my freshman year of high school, all the leads went to the upperclassmen. Of course, I cared about doing a good job. But I had no named parts, and I was surrounded by actors who I considered vastly more talented than I. Even so, I was stopped by a stranger after one of the performances. They grabbed my shoulder and said, “I don’t know who you are, but you were my favorite character. Don’t stop doing what you did up there tonight,” before disappearing into the after-show crowd. I will never forget this compliment.

When I was a kid, I would watch superhero movies and imagine myself in their place. I would imagine having the power, the attention, and the story. That was the person I wanted to be: The Hero. When I was a late teenager, I watched an anime called Mob Psycho 100, a show about a main character who is not very expressive. He is supported by ‘the body improvement club’, which only appears sporadically. They would exercise with the scrawny protagonist and be proud when he runs just a bit longer than the day before. After I saw the body improvement club, it became clear that I was wrong. I did not want to be a hero. I knew my calling: I wanted to become a side character.

Side characters serve two roles in a story. They interact with the main character(s) to progress the plot, and they expand the world that gets to be seen. I want to convince you of how fun it is to serve both purposes in other people’s stories. 

You’ve probably heard the slogan “there are no small roles, only small actors”. I stand by this claim not only because it makes the story more engaging, it also reminds actors that side characters are equally deserving of depth, understanding, characterization, and analysis. As a side character, you can embody a wider range of experiences. You can be a rival, a lover, a mentor, and more—all in the same show. Legally Blonde is full of one-off, high-impact characters: the Harvard administration from “What You Want”, the gawking guys in “Bend and Snap”, the department store workers in “Take it Like a Man”, the Judge in the various court scenes, and of course, Carlos, from “Gay or European”. They are the characters that make this play so fun to me. 

Out in the world, I try to embody this ideal. I question the role I get to play when I meet a new stranger. I see people walk by and wonder what worldbuilding I am facilitating by being in their space. To take the place of a side character is to take on the responsibility of enhancing the moment in support of someone else’s chance in the spotlight.

To me, being a side character is the freedom and confidence to know you have changed a person’s life simply by being a part of it. I don’t need to always be a main character to make an impact. It empowers me to accept the way other people enter and leave my life. All I need to do is appear, give a little exposition, provide a little inspiration, and I have changed the path of another protagonist’s story. And now and then, I get to appear, make a big splash, and disappear into the crowd knowing that I’ve made a difference and earned a powerful round of applause.

The Reason I’m Scared of DOGE

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There is a whirlwind of news that we are bombarded with each day, and it can be difficult to find any grasp of what is happening in our country. There is a piece that I want to emphasize as especially important to us as engineers though: The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). As the head of DOGE, Elon Musk is employing an intentional strategy: choosing to have most of its members, lieutenants, and grunts be engineers, especially young engineers. As young engineers ourselves, I ask everyone to reflect on why that is. 

My theory is this: as engineers, we’re trained to dive headfirst into things we don’t know about and work our way out to understand, change, and optimize. Yet we are primarily—if not solely—trained to see through a technical lens. I see it manifest in countless ways in myself and at Olin. There’s a problem: Let me try to fix it! Something is inefficient: Let me optimize it! Build this thing: Learn enough about it to experiment with! There’s a constant desire to dive right into solving the problem before we step back and look at the pool: is it worth diving in? And how far might our ripples flow? It limits our awareness of the world and our perception of the impact we have on it. I reflect on CD, the class that encourages us most to engage with non-technical concepts of impact. For all of the care and understanding we were taught to search for, how many concluded that society itself had a fundamental necessity for change? Our designs were limited by the implicit conception of what we could offer as engineers—what products we could create within established systems, not what larger change or impact we could dwell upon. And CD is the core class that most centers a non-technical impact approach to our education! Our other engineering experiences are about finely polishing our technical lenses. Any larger evaluation of non-technical impacts are briefly tacked onto a class or two, if addressed at all. Intentional or not, and no matter what values we state, those experiences train us to not dwell long upon the larger societal impact of our work.

Many DOGE engineers did not shape their lives around the larger societal impact they would have, but on doing the technical work that was best for themselves. I know this because they didn’t go to create non-profits or change policy or improve public interest technologies after college. They went to study engineering, then they went to intern or work at Tesla and SpaceX, likely because it would pay them the most or give them the best technical experience or was simply just cool engineering work. They shaped their lives around honing their technical, problem-solving abilities, then choosing the work that was most personally profitable. When they were offered a spot in DOGE, it made sense economically to bind themselves to Musk and if nothing else, they got a new exciting optimization problem: the government.

In the face of a dauntingly complex and competitive world, we all have been conditioned to look after ourselves: it is the very foundation of our economic system. Especially as engineers, we’re told, implicitly or explicitly, that we are justified in finding what will be the most profitable for us, the impact is for others to decide. I understand there are financial realities, and I acknowledge that I speak from a place of privilege, but an awareness of impact is something that constitutes the very foundation of what makes any person a responsible member of society—a respect and acknowledgement that your choices will unavoidably impact others. In the absence of that awareness of broader perspectives arises an absence of empathy, humility, and understanding.

And that is why I am afraid of DOGE.

The invocation of Nazism is a heavy, overused trope which risks diminishing its true horror. But in observing DOGE, I see a clear parallel of how engineers become the mechanisms of hate, of how an indifferent and banal evil arises when technical education is divorced from broader perspectives. 

The parallel is of Albert Speer.1 Young and ambitious, he graduated in architecture from the Technical University of Berlin but lacked any real political fervor. He aligned himself with the Nazi Party in the 30’s largely because their promise to reinvent German culture would afford him more opportunities to do the grand architecture he envisioned creating. By 1933, he was lucratively involved in designing pageantry and building plans, and when war broke out, Speer was chosen as the Minister of Armaments and War Production. In 1943, the London Observer examined him: 

“Speer is, in a sense, more important for Germany today than Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels or the generals. Speer is not one of the flamboyant and picturesque Nazis. Whether he has any other than conventional political opinions is unknown. He might have joined any other political party that gave him a job and a career. He is very much the average man, well dressed, civil, non-corrupt, very middle class in his style of life, with a wife and six children. Much less than any of the other German leaders does he stand for anything particularly German or particularly Nazi. He rather symbolizes a type which has become increasingly important in all belligerent countries; the pure technician, the classless, bright young man, without background, with no other original aim than to make his way in the world, and no other means than his technical and managerial ability. It is the lack of psychological and spiritual balast and the ease with which he handles the terrifying technical and organizational machinery of our age which makes this slight type go extremely far nowadays … This is their age; the Hitlers and the Himmlers we may get rid of, but the Speers, whatever happens to this particular man, will be long with us.”

This quote serves as a constant, shuddering reminder of what a technical education can mean, and is what we have a responsibility to reckon with as engineers. The employment of technically focused, ambitious youth is the strategy that Elon Musk and the Trump Administration are employing with DOGE members. They were given a directive to make huge cuts, to root out DEI, and to report back. They excel at it. This is not a random coincidence, but an intentional tactic. We’ve seen it used before, and we have to ask ourselves what we must do as we see it now.

I am not saying to eschew engineering as an evil, but know that engineers who do not actively grapple with and work to change their impact are engineers that function as tools, and there will always be those that will seek to use us as such. This can be for good, sure, but more often it is used for extraction, exploitation, and oppression. No movement, no organization, no company, and no regime is possible without the support or, more pertinently, the complicity of its engineers. 

We cannot run behind the justification of a non-partisan and impartial self-interest. We cannot hide behind the thought that someone else would do it anyways. We more than anyone have an obligation to systems-level understanding, knowing what we are building and for whom we are building it. Creating an electric car to learn in college is different from creating an electric car that profits a white supremacist. Optimizing a drone to evaluate infrastructure health is different from optimizing a drone that is going to be used for urban warfare. Building trains is different if you know what, or who, those trains will hold. Your work will not result in the creation of apolitical technologies—it will be placed in the hands of people and organizations that will seek to use them for their own purposes. 

I do not say this to exclude any companies from your job search, but none of us are exempt from confronting the deeper impacts of the work that we do, because that is how we are used. If you plan to work for an organization that you know is not doing good, then actively reflect on the power that you have to change that work from within and strive to do so. Theories of change differ from outside change to inside change and from issue to issue, but no matter what your theory is, you cannot bury your head from your impact for your own self interest. Complicity is exactly what they desire of you.

When I look at DOGE, I don’t see a group of conniving masterminds. I see a group of engineers who I am familiar with: who when they get their directive, see it only as the problem they’ve been given. And the tool gets to work. 

The reason I am afraid of DOGE is not because it is a group of intentionally evil or malicious people, it’s because I see a clear parallel to the worst of history: a clear warning of how technically focused, ambitious people are used. It reminds me of lessons from the past, and it gives me shudders of the future. 

I am afraid of DOGE because it is a group of people that I know well, and who have been trained in the same way that I have been. I am afraid because they demonstrate clearly what can happen if I stop striving to grapple with the complexity of the world and the impact that I am having on it. I urge you to heed the same warning.

  1. Summarizing a person’s life and motivations is hard to do briefly. I do not claim this is a definitive account of Albert Speer, but is what I have found as the impression from the account of a Nuremberg Prosecutor (King) who wrote a book on him and the below quote, as well as other online sources. ↩︎

Transferring and the Sunk Cost Fallacy

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I spent a number of years at Olin. During that time, I had a lot of conversations about how Olin wasn’t a good fit. There are plenty of valid academic and non-academic reasons to want to transfer, ranging from “I need to be closer to home to support relatives” to “Olin can’t really support my major,” to just not vibing with the campus culture. Yet, whenever the possibility of transferring to another college came up, everyone just assumed that Olin credits would not be accepted (“what even is a QEA cycle”), that it would be a huge waste of time and money.

That’s why I’m writing this article, to let people know it is possible. If this article were published during my first or second years, I would have started the transfer application process then. Sunk cost is a fallacy.

Can I actually transfer Olin credit?

Yes! You will lose some time, but nowhere near as much as I originally thought.

Let’s use UMass Amherst as an example (because they were the first school to send a credit evaluation).

UMass Amherst accepted 3 years worth of Olin courses… with the sole exception of Circuits. Some courses were marked as satisfying a general education requirement; for example, TLAB1 was marked as satisfying the Biology requirement. Unfortunately, for the courses that were not marked as general education, I do not know how many of these I can apply towards a major. They run a more detailed evaluation after you accept (and I’m still weighing my options).

Don’t forget about potential credits that Olin didn’t accept from high school: community college, AP exams, credits from another institution earned through a high school program (for example, RIT takes credits from PLTW2… if you had to endure PLTW in high school, I offer my condolences).

In the end, if UMass is my final choice, I can probably graduate in 2 years if I choose so. If I returned to Olin, it would most likely take 1.5.

I can’t tell you about any private institutions yet, sorry. They don’t handle transfers on the same rolling basis state schools do. From what I understand, most private institutions limit transfer credits to four semesters, so I will lose two years.

So, you want to transfer:

Here’s some advice that you can’t just Google.

  • Download important records that are behind Microsoft Single Sign On. IT will disable yournamehere@olin.edu. Most important for transferring is to download every syllabus from Canvas (or the course website). Some schools require a syllabus when evaluating your courses for transfer—I forgot to do this, and have been reaching out to professors and my remaining student contacts. This is frustrating.
  • Olin has a prepared letter explaining what the QEA+ISIM+ModSim cycle covers. This was intended for people applying to graduate school, but you can add it as an additional document upload in your transfer applications.
  • Don’t re-use your high school college application essays. One of mine literally made me vomit upon rereading it.
  • Visit campuses. I applied to college during peak ‘rona, and online “tours” really did not influence my top choices. It actually helps to have a sense of the neighborhood (or lack thereof), and how alive the campus feels.
  1. Think Like a Biologist ↩︎
  2. Project Lead the Way ↩︎

An Unpaid Opportunity to Respect Others

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It’s a beautiful Saturday morning here in one of the blander corners of New England. The sun is shining, we can finally see the grass again, Babson’s trees are looking fantastic, and I once again stumble into a community Go-Bike left outside leaning against a bike rack. My instinct, as the neighborhood bicycle hall-monitor, is to send a somewhat snarky email to one of my favorite list servs – once again not quite screaming, but recommending – into the void that is your collective Outlook inboxes. I mount the bicycle, point it towards East Hall, and start cruising. Wind blowing through my hair, I’m once again reminded how nice it is to ride a bike. When I return to my room though, my email-writing zeal is not where I left it. Instead, I’m left feeling something closer to reflection. The gist of which, as obvious as it may seem, is as follows: you don’t get anything for returning the bikes. Smug satisfaction is not a reward, nor is negotiating the often cluttered bike/ball room. And further, no one is going to get punished for not doing it; I’m not going to use my awesome detective skills to track you down and honor board you or otherwise scold your inaction.

As much as I would like to make this all about bikes, the issue at hand has nothing to do with them. How often do you think about how lucky we are to be here? Or more precisely, how astounding it is that we have as much latitude as we do? Take issue with admin all you want, I kvetch my heart out too, but don’t lose sight of how much faith and trust is endowed in us as a student body. 24-hour access to 3D printers, liquid nitrogen, a materials science lab, beautiful study spaces, a pool room, professional audio equipment, cameras, bikes, you name it. All with limited or zero oversight or restrictions. This is not inclusive of all the non-24-hour things we are trusted to use responsibly, and is certainly not an exhaustive list. The key word being: trusted. At the same time, it feels that year-over-year, this sense of community responsibility is eroded bit by bit. This is not the least bit speculative. For the second consecutive academic year, the shop has issued a lengthy email imploring more responsible use of the 3D printers. A trackable increase in emails sent by our wonderful library team points to a growingly ungovernable, irresponsible student body.

Most recently, it took the threat of an honor boarding for a lounge couch in East Hall to be returned. I won’t bore you with the numbers on missing bikes again. It’s easy to run this through the typical modern-times Olin student framework of redirecting the blame towards administration, which avoids the simpler explanation: that simply students lack respect for our communal resources. Nobody knows how to just ‘chill out’ anymore. Or perhaps we just can’t continue justifying paying for missing materials that would have been a blissful write-off in the “good old days” none of us personally experienced. In reality, though, it’s hard to deny that we have a role to play in all of this. It’s not in any way inconceivable that some of these open doors we all gleefully tell prospective students about will be under lock and key by the time we graduate. 

Trust is not something we are inherently endowed or owed. I am well aware that sincerity is uncool, and that what I am about to say is somehow even less cool than that, but do you remember that document we all signed during orientation? As jaded as you might feel, I would suggest that it does, at some level, mean something.

What Does It Mean To “Do Something”?

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To say there has been a lot of student upset towards the College is, perhaps, to put it mildly. There is a certain call-to-action in the air: Students at every point in their Olin journey want more dialogue, more power, and more institutional change. In this time of undeniable friction, what does it mean to Do Something as an Olin student? Is being a voice for change our right or our obligation? And, perhaps more pressingly, how does our answer to that question as a community change based on the identity of the Oliner in question?

This essayist presents Bipolar I: a tale of psychosis and, perhaps, the path of least resistance.

During my first involuntary hospitalization, a Bipolar I diagnosis and an unsolicited prognosis were given to me hand-in-hand: “College probably isn’t in the cards for you.”

As you might imagine, I took that advice and ran… far, far away from it. It may be an uphill battle more often than not, but I’m here at Olin. I’m here. More important to our discussion today, though, is that my psychosis is here with me.

Once I got to campus, I didn’t wait long to seek psychosis-related accommodations at Olin. I didn’t know what to even ask for, or if I should be asking for anything at all, but I knew I needed to try. I stumbled my way through that initial meeting best I could, both overexplaining and underexplaining the hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions that I knew would make my time here difficult.

I’m a junior currently—things may very well be different now. But what will always be true is that Olin College’s first accommodation offer to me was a smart pen: a note-taking accommodation. I’m not ashamed to say I cried real tears at that point in the meeting.

At the time, I was told that flexibility regarding my attendance would be considered an “unreasonable” accommodation. Reading through the Binder of Accommodations Past, few of the reasonable accommodations seemed like they would make a difference in my case—and of course, that makes sense, if we think about accommodations as a way for someone experiencing unique challenges to have a similar class experience as their peers. How can we accommodate psychosis in our classrooms? I don’t think it’s possible or desirable. While measures can certainly be taken to reduce a psychotic student’s stress, ideally reducing the likelihood of an episode, there is a certain amount of waiting-it-out and not-being-in-class that must be done should issues arise. So, I argue, psychotic students should be allowed leniency in their attendance. Nonetheless, I was on my own in this department, and I Did Nothing. I didn’t know how to express what I was feeling to Olin College, and the accommodation policies were reinforcing what I already felt: That I could only really be an engineering student as long as I had enough good days in a row.

When I came back to school from my second involuntary hospitalization this past Spring (we win some, we lose some), I was initially told I would need to have weekly check-ins with Olin College regarding my mental health for the rest of the semester. Whether these check-ins were intended for my benefit or to assess my stability is still not clear to me. What I can say is, they were certainly not to my benefit. I Did Something: During one of these check-ins, I expressed the stress I experienced over feeling like I had to give up more of my privacy than other students 100% of the time due to the more extreme experiences I encountered 1% of the time.

I was told hospitalization “changes things.” I would come to understand in time how accurate, if vague, that statement was. While these in-person check-ins transformed into email correspondence as the semester progressed, the feeling that I was being tested remained, and the idea that the College was just waiting for me to slip up eventually morphed into one of my recurring paranoias.

Olin College has opened so many doors for me and truly given me some of the best opportunities, friendships, and faculty relationships of my life. I cannot express enough how grateful I am to attend this school, and I will be the first to say that my accommodations of flexible deadlines and being able to leave class unexpectedly have greatly benefitted me. At the same time, Olin College has failed me, too—and for me, the functional result of Doing Nothing and Doing Something regarding my disability was the same. 

Over time, I began to craft a new idea of what Doing Something in this department meant: Instead of trying to change how the institution responded to my psychosis, I invested more time in my own health and the health of my friends. I Did Something Quiet. I supported my friends and learned to accept their support in return—simply that.

So, we return to our fundamental questions: What does it mean to Do Something as an Olin student? Is being a voice for change our right or our obligation?

These days, with all the building pressure and dissatisfaction felt by the student body towards Olin College as an institution, I cannot deny that I feel an expectation to Do Something Institutional, both because I am an Oliner, which is its own conversation, and because I am disabled, which is this conversation. 

I believe that, as a student, being a voice for change is my right, not my obligation—so why, as a disabled student, do I so often feel pushed to speak?

Ultimately, yes, the College’s response to my disability has degraded my student experience to an extent. However, being told to Do Something Less Quiet in response to this—to Do Something Louder, Something Bolder, Something Inciting—makes me feel more like an outsider than an Oliner. And I wonder if other Oliners of other identities feel the same way. While I absolutely agree that speaking out is important, to say that Olin’s improper approach to my disability obligates me to speak out feels, to me, like it politicizes my identity as a disabled student. This seems dangerous: I carry my disabled identity with me everywhere I go. Do I then also carry the burden of representing psychotic people with me everywhere, too? A burden made even greater by the fact that there are so few psychotic students at Olin to even join the fight?

I take my right to my voice as a student seriously. And yet, why should my right to live my Olin life in quiet, treading my desire paths and supporting/being supported by friends along the way, be taken any less seriously? If I choose complacency for the rest it provides, am I less of an Oliner? What does it mean to Do Enough, and who decides?

I sit here, writing this article now because when times were at their toughest for me as a psychotic student at this school, I slept. Sleeping protected my mental stability and therefore my ability to be an Oliner. In a similar way, I believe Doing Something Quiet protects many students’ ability to be Oliners. I see no shame in it—and yet, I feel shame in having been quiet for so long. If that’s you—if you carry an identity with you as quietly as you can—keep going. Know that I have decided. I am Doing Enough. I am Oliner enough. You can decide the same, if you’d like.

Any and all thoughts appreciated: adeeter@olin.edu. Thanks for reading.

Follow-Up On “Olin Is Racist”

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When I sent in my first-ever article to Frankly Speaking a month ago, I didn’t expect people to care so much. It was mostly a vent and a way to call some people out on their actions and let them know they need to improve.

But people listened, and honestly, that restored a lot of my faith in Olin. I have been watching and listening, keeping track of how others have reacted, and some have improved their actions and even apologized to black students for their past micro and macro aggressions. 

I have been amazed by the way Oliners of all backgrounds have responded to my article. Some told me it made them finally feel seen, others said they weren’t surprised, but that it made them think more critically about this community, many sparked conversations because of it. Thank you for listening, and thank you for caring for those who chose to learn from my experience rather than see it an outlier.

Not all the responses to my article were positive, though, Some people forgot about the article immediately after reading it, some refused to read it after seeing the headline, some say it was exaggerated to cause drama—I’ve even heard some people believe that I’m not really black and that this was trying to smear Olin’s reputation. 

Let me make a few things clear: nothing was exaggerated, the experiences I described in my article were real, and I am currently a black female student at Olin. In fact, I left out some horrible details.

The best thing to come from this article was that this helped strengthen and bring the black community at Olin together. So, if you are struggling with racism at Olin, come to a USB-C meeting. We can’t fix the system, but we can support you and give you a space where you are heard. 

Other black students have shared with me that they faced similar experiences to mine. Many black students and staff have been told explicitly that they don’t belong here because they’re black. Many black students are called by the wrong name by their classmates and teachers, and we don’t say anything to avoid fights, but it hurts. When working on projects and research, our ideas are often ignored, and we have to push extra hard for a single idea to be considered. These racist practices have been normalized at Olin, and that is what makes for such a toxic environment. 

Many unconsciously believe that we can’t be racist because we are a small, liberal engineering school in Massachusetts. The answer is that everything is rooted in racism in the USA. Spaces like Olin that try to pretend systemic racism doesn’t exist, will only perpetuate the problem. The only way to actually combat racism is to talk about it. Acknowledge how your privilege will disadvantage others. Recognize the power you hold over others. Stop believing that you aren’t the problem. We all are, including me. If you want to learn more about confronting internal bias, I recommend reading some of Ibram X. Kendi’s books, many you can get through the library. To those who claim they want to change, here is your first step. 

Olin says it wants to get better, but know that I will keep watching. I will keep providing a safe space for other black students. I will follow intently everything the administration does to better support their students. 

Be better Olin, I’ll be watching.