Tag Archives: op-ed

Opinions and such

Toilet Reading

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In light of the Eagles’ recent ‘huge dub’ at the Super Bowl, I present to you, dear Frankly Speaking reader, a hacky allegory: I grew up in Philadelphia, and there’s a certain reputation our city has for sports hooliganism. Some may say it represents a larger city-wide ethos of sorts, others find it annoying—take your pick. There is a Philadelphian habit of climbing poles during major sports-related events in Center City. So much so that the PPD regularly greases the poles in anticipation of any such event. However, as the NFC championship game loomed, no such poles were greased. The implicit message being: “please don’t misbehave… because we asked you to.” This approach certainly has its merits, but on that very same day, an eighteen-year-old Temple University student fell to his death climbing a pole near City Hall. This is in no way to say that this tragedy could have in some way been avoided by a greasy pole, but does speak to the extent to which asking people to modify their habits for the greater good has its limits. 

I might add here that I, being a complete ‘woosie’ with a limited interest in professional sports, do not climb poles. The presence or absence of grease on a pole does not compel me one way or the other. As someone who already has a lifetime subscription to the tendencies of risk aversion, someone telling me not to climb a pole and someone making it hard for me to are indistinguishable. For those Philadelphians or visitors living out the image of a die-hard Eagles fan though, the behavior may as well be instinctual—it is part and parcel what you do in Center City when the Eagles play, win or lose—that, or cheering it on.

This idea of behavior modification came to me once again when visiting a Milas Hall bathroom and glancing upon the sustainability-green flusher on the toilet, complete with usage instructions printed above. For those unacquainted, a traditional downwards push on the lever uses a higher volume flush, and an upwards pull uses less water, for liquid waste. Let’s say, for example, that you don’t like to read stuff. You go to the bathroom, turn around, and push the lever the way you’re conditioned to do by years upon years of bathroom usage, regardless of what you’ve left in the toilet. Does this mean the lean green handle doesn’t work? Certainly not; there is simply a mismatch between the desired behavior change and the underlying behavior. Different example: you do like reading, but even having parsed the instructions behind the flusher, you just push it down like you’re used to. It saves water, sure, but for a large institution you don’t balance the books for, and you’re in a rush. Now, of course, we shouldn’t need an incentive to do something that’s ‘good’ and ‘green’–we should all have a vested interest in conservation of resources and what is good for the planet. But, as I think we can all attest to on some level, that’s not an attitude ‘we’ truly all share, or ‘we’ truly act on at all moments in our lives. 

‘We’ should of course not wring our hands and self-flagellate over this, but perhaps we can take the time to think about how these interventions might be re-designed. In this silly example of the toilet, what if the ‘default’ behavior saved water, and the ‘alternative’ behavior expended more? For our undesirable behaviors, would it not make more sense to make the behavior more challenging to continue, rather than say ‘please don’t do that’? 

Olin Is Racist

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I came to Olin so excited to learn and innovate. I had high hopes of becoming a great engineer, making great friends, and doing important research with kind professors. Overall, I have been satisfied with my classes and this community. I have great and understanding professors and strong friendships. I am learning in a way that finally fits me, and for once I don’t feel out of place. But I am not okay and not happy. I have been holding this in for a while to avoid causing trouble, but I won’t be silent anymore. 

Once, when I first got to Olin, I was in the library reviewing some course material. As I was studying, an upperclassman who I had never met approached me and stood next to my seat, looking at me very intently. I greeted them and asked if I could help them with anything. They responded curtly, “People like you don’t belong here.” 

I was shaken and said the first logical thing to come to mind: “If you mean here at Olin, I am here to become an engineer.”

The upperclassman smirked, then remarked before walking away, “People like you don’t seem like they would be good engineers.”

For a second, I was confused by what they meant by “people like me”. Women? Did they think I was a BOW student? Why me over anybody else in the library?  

I then took a good look around and realized what that upperclassman meant. I was the only black student in the library. I was the only black woman in the library. 

What the upperclassman meant was: Black women shouldn’t be engineers and don’t belong at Olin. 

That hurt me more than I could ever express in words. After that interaction, I ran to the bathroom and threw up. Someone felt so strongly that I didn’t belong at Olin that they went out of their way to tell me, just so I would know my place. And no one else in the library piped up to defend me, came to comfort me, or even shot me a sympathetic look. Most even turned away. 

To some, this might not seem like a big deal, but it was. I am no stranger to racism and sexism in the STEM world: I was bullied out of coding camp at age 10 by a group of boys who insisted that girls are “too sissy to handle computers.” In 7th grade, a teacher had students pass around my perfect score test while announcing “if someone like [my name] can get a perfect score, then anyone can succeed in my class”. When I got a spot in AP Computer Science in 11th grade, some boys at my school started an online campaign against me, saying that the “diversity spot was taking away seats from guys who actually deserved it”. 

I came to Olin because I hoped that a STEM school run by an esteemed black female engineer would be better, and would be an inclusive and uplifting environment. Yet someone felt so much hate at the idea of a black woman being at Olin and becoming an engineer that they had to tell me that the community I worked so hard to become a part of didn’t fully accept me and never would. That broke my heart because my dream, my safe space, my community, were now gone. Despite this, I will stay in a space that is set against me and I can’t change it alone. 

Despite my crushing disappointment, I pushed my doubts from that interaction aside and let myself believe that it was just one person and the culture at Olin is different, but it’s not. 

In my time at Olin, I have experienced more microaggressions than I can count, been left out of team talks because my input “didn’t seem necessary”, and my mental health has been ignored by both students and staff alike. I even had another interaction with a different student who told me that I “don’t seem like the typical engineer”, and that maybe I should “reconsider if Olin is the right place for me”. This prejudiced culture has had horrible impacts on my mental and emotional health. I frequently had panic attacks last semester and developed an eating disorder from pent-up discomfort, rage, and insecurity that I felt nobody noticed. I have been close to fainting and no one ever asked me if I was okay. 

I never said anything because I knew that if I told others, no one would care. People don’t care if the black girl is unhappy, if she is in a bad place mentally, because to most, we are forgettable and negligible. That is just a historical fact. I have seen students see me have a panic attack and walk past me laughing about how I’m “so extra”. And when I have shared my story people zone out, say I “overreacted”, or pretend to care only to forget the next day. 

The first person who listened to me about the library incident was Gilda. She was the first person who noticed I was struggling and took the time to talk to me and share her own experiences, so I didn’t feel so alone. I was surprised by the fact that Gilda, an esteemed and respected engineer and certifiable genius, also faces racism at Olin and has also had many students come up to her and tell her “you don’t belong at Olin” and yet they are never able to explain why.  

It is crazy to me how someone as wonderfully kind as her receives so much hate from the student body, but I have noticed the ones most vocal with this hate are white.

Now, I am not trying to imply that all students at Olin are racist and discriminative. I think there are a few who are, but the majority of the student body and some of the staff have clear internal racism that they haven’t addressed. They need to examine their own bias or truly think about where some of their opinions come from. Everyone holds some prejudice—it’s a sad fact about our world. If you don’t work to dismantle your own prejudice, then you are part of the problem. 

Olin as a community is racist, and we can’t keep ignoring it.  

As a community, we value black students less than other students and lack open spaces where black students feel safe enough to express these feelings. This is what Olin is, and we need to change.

CORe Needs to Change

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When I came to Olin in Fall of 2021, it was the tail end of the pandemic and clubs were starting to rebuild from the previous year. I am an avid coffee drinker, and Acronym was a large part of the reason why I chose Olin. Joining Acronym allowed me to deepen friendships and get to know older students who I wouldn’t have spoken to otherwise. As a senior, the majority of first years that I interact with are the active Acronym members. I don’t believe that this is a unique experience, and clubs have been the most important experience for me to engage with the Olin community. 

At the beginning of my sophomore year, a friend and I were told that we were now in charge of Acronym. We were told that we could no longer use the Admissions desk, and changed the location to the library. Through the location change, we doubled attendance and made Acronym a space for casual conversations with professors and course assistants. 

At this point, Acronym was classified as an organization. All organizations had to exist for at least a year and received a budget. Clubs were generally smaller and met less often. Clubs had to request money from CCO whenever they wanted to spend, as they were not given a budget. In the ‘22-’23 school year, there were only twelve organizations and twenty-two clubs. 

After running Acronym, I wanted to join CCO to help provide others with the same positive experience that I had from my clubs. I was the Vice Club Chair last year and was the Club Chair until my resignation last semester. My job as Vice Club Chair was to fill out reimbursement forms for all of the clubs, and I normally processed only a couple hundred dollars a week. Last year was the first year that CCO got rid of the clubs and orgs structure, and every group received a budget. There were forty-two groups last year, with an overall budget of $28,000. Most groups did not receive enough money, and the student activity fee was increased. 

This year, there are sixty registered groups that receive funding from CCO and the overall budget is $55,000. My job was to work with the Vice Club Chair to allocate budgets, process all p-card payments, and make sure groups are spending their money. I also ended up filling out reimbursement forms, and all reimbursement requests were completed up to my resignation. I was processing thousands of dollars each week and constantly stressed over making sure I was filling out forms correctly. 

I received limited support from the Student Government Advisors. There was a significant amount of misspending in the fall, and the advisors were too busy to help me. They also asked me to not use the Honor Board to deal with misspending, because they told me they would handle it. They completely forgot about helping me for a month, and more incidents kept happening. 

I was spending at least 20 hours per week doing CCO work. I devalued my homework, wasn’t able to apply to grad school, and delayed my search for full-time jobs. On the date of my resignation, I received an email from my design depth professor saying that I didn’t have enough completed assignments to pass the class, which means I wouldn’t graduate. I was considering resigning for two weeks and this email solidified my decision to resign. I was able to catch up on work, and I am on track to graduate this spring.

This shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Student Government should not be burning students out the way it has this year. 

For Staff:

  1. Hire a full-time person to support Student Government. Stop making students do the work of full-time employees. Be upfront about your bandwidth to help students. 
  2. Pay Student Government positions. Students involved lose time to have other paid positions or take more classes.
  3. Hire a new Academic Life Administrative Assistant.

For Students:

  1. Be more understanding and respectful when engaging with CORe.
  2. Go back to the clubs and orgs system. Cap the number of student groups allowed. There does not need to be this many groups for a student body this small. This needs to be done through a constitution change, as the advisors are not willing to deny creation of groups. 
  3. Do not allow for a system that might compromise students ability to graduate and have a future after Olin.
  4. Blame the system for the current reimbursement procedure. There are many reimbursements to be done, but individual students don’t cause the underlying problems of CORe. 
  5. Recognize when something is causing harm to your wellbeing and stop doing it.

Faults of Spiral Learning

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“Spiral learning” is a rationalization for ineffective pedagogy and a self-fulfilling prophesy of poor educational outcomes.

The idea of spiral learning is that students should learn the basics of a topic without getting into details, then come back to it later, deepening their understanding while reinforcing the basics. It’s hard to object to that. And many of us recognize the pattern, in our own education, of struggling with a topic on the first attempt and really getting it only after several iterations.

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Identity Politics: Being Queer

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I’ve been seeing a lot of strong emotions surrounding identity politics, particularly on queer-related topics, like sex, gender, and sexuality. I’ve seen a lot of limited perspective on gender and sexual variation. Perhaps I get so much of this because of the people I’m around, or the fact that I put on The Laramie Project, but regardless, I think a little bit of queer theory is in order. Because the easiest way to explain the philosophical is to ground it in the personal, I’m going to start with my own identity.

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The Biology Requirement is Broken

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I chose to study bioengineering. I love biology, but I did not love Modern Biology. It had nothing to do with the teacher (she was awesome) or the subject. It was simply that I was bored. I’d just taken the AP bio exam and the SAT II in biology. Everything we learned in Modern Biology, besides specific interests of the professor, was a review for me.

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The Honor Code: Think About It

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I sent out an all students email a few weeks ago about a movement to rethink, revise, and rewrite the Honor Code. Some things were left off from that email for the sake of brevity. I want to use this article to fill in any gaps and answer some common questions.

The idea to rethink the Honor Code started a month ago in CORe. Your class representatives felt that the Code had become stagnant. It is not that it is failing, or that the student body does not follow it, but that the student body as a whole does not feel ownership over the Code in the way that it once did.

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A Perfectly Polite Proposal

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No doubt you are familiar with the tragedy of the commons (1) —the idea that multiple individuals with access to an unregulated public resource will gradually use it up or ruin it (2). It is with great sadness, increasing cynicism, and frequent exclamations of profanities (3) that I have come to the conclusion that the East Hall kitchen constitutes one such situation.

In the hope that positive change might yet be effected in this state of affairs, I propose the institution of a set of kitchen training procedures, akin to the training anyone who wishes to access and use the machine shops must undergo (4). The primary reason for such a training program would of course be the safety of all kitchen users; but, as is the case with the machine shops, an important secondary concern is the maintenance of clean, well-organized facilities. Relevant to this situation are no fewer than three core values of the Honor Code—Integrity (5), Respect for Others, and Passion for the Welfare of the College—though I am sure arguments could be made relating it to the other principles as well.

If at some point I believed that anyone able to attend and progress through engineering school would naturally also be able to make use of an oven; a stove; a microwave; a blender; an electric mixer; or a drying rack; consider me disillusioned. If I thought the process of washing a dish so that food would not still be stuck to it was common knowledge, I now realize I was flabbergastingly naïve. But just as we have learned to take integrals and derivatives, to design from nature and for users, I believe it is within the power of every student at Olin to master the skills of proper kitchen use.

The kitchen training procedures I would propose need not be complicated or time-consuming. At the outside, I envision the current kitchen czar demonstrating, for the interested individual, the proper use of the aforementioned devices and giving a general description of what the kitchen should look like when clean, while at the same time impressing upon them the shared responsibility of keeping it that way. However, more than any training, the key to keeping the kitchens safe, clean, and in working order is a principle Carter Chang or Ben Tatar could easily understand and explain:
Clean up after yourself.

Perhaps it is optimistic to the point of foolishness to imagine that we might implement, in the kitchen, the machine shops’ ideal of leaving the area nicer than when you came in; but surely cleaning up our own messes is not beyond a group of college-trained engineers.

Endnotes:
1. Not to be confused with my Harry Potter fan fiction detailing Charlie Weasley’s adventures in Romania, The Comedy of the Dragons.

2. As Wikipedia puts it, “a dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, will ultimately deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen.”

3. Mostly invocations of the male offspring of female dogs

4. Indeed, people can and have hurt themselves pretty badly in the kitchen because they didn’t know how to properly use the equipment therein.

5. “Each member of the college community will accept responsibility for and represent accurately and completely oneself, one’s work, and one’s actions.”

With Love, Nicholas Monje

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I, along with Gwyn Davidoff, recently directed The Laramie Project here at Olin. For those of you who didn’t come to see the show, it deals with the beating and death of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, in Laramie, Wyoming. This article is a highly abbreviated version of my director’s note. If you’d like to read the original note, please email me at nicholas.monje at gmail.com.

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Do Something with Frankly Speaking

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Frankly Speaking is important. It is extremely valuable to communication within the Olin community as a forum for people to bring issues to discussion. I’m worried, because as important as the paper is, Frankly Speaking doesn’t seem sustainable.

Most of Olin’s written communication takes place over email. Important issues are brought up and discussed on ThinkTank, Radical Notion, even Therapy and Sexuality. But there are two major problems with these email lists as public forums: they are self-selecting, and they are not fully developed as pieces of writing.

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