Tag Archives: personal narrative

Author recounting an experience (or experiences), autobiographical pieces

Greg

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Every Saturday, I work 7AM to 7PM as an EMT doing inter-facility transports. These Saturdays have taught me something: the moment people stop walking, they start dying.

Because once most people stop walking, they give up taking care of themselves. And in modern American society, once someone who doesn’t have money stops taking care of themselves, they get sent somewhere like “Garden Grove Skilled Nursing” where they are kept alive, but just barely, by techs making ten cents above minimum wage and nurses assigned three times the legally mandated maximum number of patients. 

And living at Garden Grove* is a life worse than death. You lie in your bed and watch your TV and eat your gruel and digest it and then soil yourself and lie in your filth and call out for help but none comes until two hours later when a manager yells to “fix that smell” and they find you and clean you up. And you watch your mind unravel and degenerate and slowly come apart because nobody with a normal, functioning brain could ever last at Garden Grove. And then, after a few weeks or months or years or decades of life without living, you eventually die. 

Unless you’re Greg*. Greg is a white man in his early 40s with tattoos on both shoulder caps wearing a sleeveless tee and lying on a gurney in the emergency room hallway near the corner they usually put the drunks. He’s got a barrel chest, thick arms, and skinny, atrophied legs—he was paralyzed from the waist down in an accident that broke his neck about five years ago. That was the second time he’s broken his neck, and this time, the doctors and physical therapists couldn’t fix it. Greg’s about 250 pounds and was probably a little under six feet tall when he could still stand. In other words: he’s built like a tank. 

Greg came to the hospital because he was moving himself to his manual wheelchair since his powered one was broken and felt a sudden recoil and a sharp pain in his shoulder. He tried to push through the pain for a few days, and then went to physical therapy and got told that they would not do any normal PT because he obviously needed to go to the damn hospital. And so now here he is, and they scanned his shoulder and told him that he did indeed injure it, and now he’s going to need to make an appointment with orthopedics so that they can get him started on getting all fixed up. He’s pissed off about it—now his shoulder is fucked and he’s going to have to go through months of rehab before he gets it back to full function, and he needs his shoulders working so that he can be properly independent because Greg doesn’t live at a place like Garden Grove—Greg lives at home. 

Actually, that statement is far too passive. Greg fights to live at home. Aggressively. Voraciously. Constantly. He keeps up the strength to move his 250 pounds of bulk from the wheelchair to the commode and back. He refuses to allow anyone else to clean him. He showers himself and cooks for himself and feeds himself and goes to the bathroom without assistance. He asserts his own dignity and independence in a situation where such an assertion is a radical act. 

The system is not built to support someone like Greg; it is built to funnel people into Garden Grove because Garden Grove is a much simpler, neater way of “handling” the Gregs of the world. But Greg has pushed back against the pressures of this system. He’s pushed for referrals, resources, tools, and people who can help him to live his life with dignity. He has to fight tooth and nail for these things! People don’t want to help him do this because figuring out how to help this man maintain his dignity and independence while still living in his own home is a lot harder and more legally risky than just shipping him off to Garden Grove like they do with all the others. Because as Greg told me, if you’re paralyzed “they treat you like you’re intellectually disabled”—like you are someone who is not capable of adding a relevant, meaningful voice to the conversation. 

But Greg keeps fighting. He demands to be taught how to give himself the enema he needs to have a bowel movement. He wears down his insurance until they give him the powered wheelchair which enables him to reach high shelves. He goes to physical therapy most days of the week and keeps up his strength because he will be independent and he will maintain his dignity and nobody is going to make that happen but him. 

I learned all of this about Greg in the back of the ambulance, taking him home from the hospital. As we worked our way back to his apartment, he was brainstorming how he’d handle the new challenge of only having one usable shoulder—he was pretty pissed about it all, but he was thinking out how it could work. He talked through how physical therapy would be different now with one working arm, and complained that it would probably take him weeks to find an opening for an appointment about his shoulder. He also mentioned his job search—he’s trying to find a 9-to-5 where he can work remotely, and he was recently talking with one of his doctors about becoming a patient advocate; the work appealed to him. 

Maybe if Greg’s powered wheelchair wasn’t broken, or if it had gotten fixed faster, he wouldn’t have overtired his shoulders and gotten injured. Maybe if the healthcare system was designed to support people in living independently instead of consigning them to a life of dependence, he wouldn’t have to fight as much as he does for every inch. Lots of maybes, but Greg doesn’t seem to dwell in them—he just does whatever needs to be done. 

On my Saturday night drives home from my EMT job, I typically call my mom; that night, I told her about Greg. She was as impressed as I was—the sentiment was colored by the fact that my younger sister has Down Syndrome, and so my parents have been fighting for the last eighteen years so that my sister can have that same self-determination that Greg is striving for. 

After hearing about Greg and his battles, my mom asked me something which stuck with me. She asked me if I’d asked Greg what tools he was missing—tools he thought could be useful for him in the future to continue maintaining his independence. And I realized that I never did. 

I am twenty-one years old, and I don’t know what my career will look like in the future. All I know is that I want to give people the tools to help themselves—to give themselves agency, dignity, and independence. I don’t want to “fix” them—people are not problems to be solved. I want to work with the people who will never be all-the-way “normal,” and I want to help them take and keep control of their lives. 

I want to design for Greg. 

*pseudonyms

Thank you, Olin

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My time at Olin has been overshadowed by conflict with my parents. At first, it was manageable. I could ignore them. I could fake and tolerate them during the infrequent calls. But with each month, things got worse. A new demand. A new threat. A new ultimatum. As they pushed harder, I grew increasingly distant from them. Eventually, the only thing keeping me in their orbit was money—money to pay for Olin. I finally broke this summer when they pulled that string and used the money as a weapon against me. I felt the floor rip from beneath me. I lost hope in reconciliation when I sent a letter explaining my needs, and their only response was, “You have a severe anxiety condition.” This semester, they became more erratic and more delusional. When my mental health struggles took on physical manifestations, I knew I could not sustain this relationship any longer. Having fully lost hope, I finally estranged myself from my parents. No more communication. No more returning home. No more money.

With no other way to pay for the full cost of attendance, I turned to Olin financial aid. With a letter from my therapist and a 5,000-word document detailing my parents’ emotional abuse and my resultant mental health struggles, I was hopeful things would turn out all right. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Three weeks ago, I was denied my FAFSA Dependency Override request by Olin’s Financial Aid Administrator. In a conversation with said administrator, they recommended that I learn to cope or try communicating with my parents, despite my written and verbal explanations as to why this was not feasible for my mental health. (Please read into FAFSA Unusual Circumstances and FAFSA Professional Judgement—you’ll find there is no way to appeal.) To put the nail in the coffin, I was told earlier that becoming self-supporting was insufficient to justify a new Dependency Override decision for later semesters. Thus, because I cannot bear to take on $150,000 of debt, I find myself unable to afford the remainder of my Olin education. I have been in a scramble to get a job, a car, and housing, and Engineering for Everyone feels so far away.

As I have been preparing for my departure from Olin, I have come to appreciate all the great things about this community that I will soon miss. I’ll miss playing Blood on the Clocktower and Coup on weekends. I’ll miss being Olin’s leading Egyptian War (Egyptian Rat Slap, ERS) player. I’ll miss all the good times playing table tennis. I’ll miss the pool room. Soccer. The wild conversations and napkin drawings in the dining hall. Causing a spectacle with a fork and knife. Being that crazy Californian still in shorts and flip-flops. Spectating Spoon Assassins. Volunteering at Candidates’ Weekend. 30-Second Videos. All the emails. The acronyms. The drama. Joking about Olin infrastructure while living in it. Collectively suffering with Olin courses. Being in the shop. Fixing up the Baja car in the LPB. Welding. Walking through the O at night. The busy weekends and late nights working on projects. I’ll miss having a shoulder to lean on. I’ll miss this community. Being surrounded by so many genuinely good people has truly changed me for the better. To those I have worked with, hung out with, suffered with, had crazy conversations with, I’m so grateful to have known you. I’ll never forget my time here at Olin and this community which has served me so well. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being with me.

All the best,

Austin “live free or die” Strahm

Follow-up: Why Olin Is Racist

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Hi again, here is another article from Olin’s resident angry black lady (a title I’ve heard around campus used to describe me). For freshmen I would suggest reading my previous two Frankly Speaking articles, “Olin Is Racist” and “Follow Up On Olin Is Racist”, before this one to best understand my points and perspective. For those of you who don’t want to go read old articles, I’ll give a quick summary here:

I’m a black female student at Olin and last year I sent an article to Frankly Speaking describing all the ways I have been mistreated, discriminated against, and insulted at Olin for my race. highlighting an instance where another Oliner told me to my face that, “people like you don’t belong here,” insinuating it was about my race. It is an undeniable fact that Olin is racist and needs to be improved, but recently I was asked about my article and I started thinking about why Olin is racist. It’s a good question, and while there is no one decisive answer, I have a few reasons that contribute to racism on campus. 

  1. There are not enough black students: The other day a friend and I were wandering through the Campus Center and ended up in the 3rd floor hallway across from PGP. Shiny class portraits of past and current Olin classes hang on the wall with pride. Jokingly, we decided to look through each class picture and count up the number of black students we see. The game started out fun, like an Olin version of Where’s Waldo, but quickly got depressing when we realized how few black people there have been. Our final count was 52 students. In almost 20 years of graduating classes, only 52 black people have graduated from Olin. You might be thinking: “Olin is a small school, these numbers make sense,” but I did some research: Olin has had approximately 2000 students, so in the entire history of Olin, only 2.6% of students have been black. This is low even compared to other engineering schools. The percentage of black students in the history of MIT is 5%, and at CalTech, 7%. Around 14% of the American population is black, so a diverse school should have approximately 14% black students. Never in Olin’s history has there been a time where the percentage of black students in the student population was 14%. The percentage of black students currently at Olin is 4.5%, that is already an accomplishment for us. Many non-black Oliners will never meaningfully interact with a black Oliner, so how can they fix their internal racism without working with black engineers long-term?
  1. There are not enough black faculty: There are currently 2 black professors and 3 black associate professors at Olin. Out of 39 full time professors, only 12.8% are black. Even still, only in the past 5 years has the number of black professors at Olin dramatically increased, as originally this school was founded with no black professors involved. Non-black Oliners have less chances to interact with black engineers. Without exposure or a guiding hand, Oliners will never learn to let go of biases or hateful stereotypes. Furthermore, prospective black students don’t get to see themselves reflected or represented in the faculty, making this school unappealing to them, and contributing to reason 1. 
  1. Olin is designed to exclude black students: Olin college recruiters go to high schools that are majority white and Asian, and have historically avoided advertising at schools with majority black and brown students. Olin made a decision to not promote at those kinds of schools knowing that many prospective black engineers looking for a great college will not know about us and never apply. On top of this fact, to be admitted into Olin, prospective students are required to have taken calculus. Many schools in low-income neighborhoods that primarily serve black students don’t offer Calculus because of underfunding. When a black person goes to a mostly white high school like I did, it’s a battle for us to get into advanced math and science classes. In my senior year of high school I wanted to take AP Calculus, and requested it, but was placed in Statistics because my vice principal thought I wouldn’t be able to handle “the academic rigor of AP Calculus,” despite the fact I had a straight-A report card. I had to petition my school to put me into AP Calculus, and I ended up thriving in the class (I even got a perfect score on the AP exam, no joke). However, other black students at my school weren’t as lucky. They were also automatically placed in the lowest level classes, but most of them failed in their petition and never got to take advanced classes that could have helped their college applications. It is not a secret in the educational world that black students are systemically excluded from taking this class.  Last year, Olin ran a beta program that partnered with a math camp to sponsor incoming first-years to learn calculus before attending—but this option was not advertised anywhere online, and to access it, students had to personally reach out to admissions after acceptance and organize the lessons themselves. The fact that Olin was designed with a calculus requirement that directly disadvantages students of color demonstrates an internal attempt to keep black students from attending Olin.
  1. Black people at Olin are not respected: Every black student at Olin has been called by the wrong name repeatedly, even by the same people after correction. How would you feel if people don’t work hard enough to remember who you are? How would you feel if your own professors grouped you into a character in their head with all of the other students who share your pigmentation rather than taking the time to get to know you and differentiate you from other students who look like you? This is blatant disrespect and humiliation that black Oliners are forced to live with. People ignoring this issue spreads the internal belief that we are all the same and negligibly different from one another. But it’s more than just names. It’s hard to verbalise microaggressions and small acts of disrespect, but I have a story that I think conveys these effects. At the start of this semester my friend, another black Oliner, and I went on a grocery run together. When we were driving back to campus and turning into Lot B, a white woman stood in front of the car and asked “Are you guys lost? This is Olin College.” We told her we weren’t lost and her reply was “Well, this is student parking.” Once we corrected her and explained we were both students, she walked away with a confused look on her face. For those who can’t understand the racism in this situation, my friend and I were assumed to not be Olin students, which is an odd assumption to make about 2 college-aged students on Olin’s campus. And what’s worse was that we were at first assumed to not even have a reason to be at Olin. This woman’s first thought was that 2 black students shouldn’t be here and tried to shoo us away. We should not be harassed like this on our own campus. 

These are the simple reasons I can name without going into the larger history of deep rooted prejudice in education and eternal biases Americans are raised on. The main point is that Olin is a toxic environment towards black people, and in 25 years of operation has failed to make proper actions to address these issues. Olin needs to change, and until it does, expect more articles from Olin’s Resident Angry Black Lady. 

Olin is Not a Jewish Space

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Nearly 10% of Olin’s campus is Jewish. Consistently I can find between eight and ten Jewish students in every class. Compare that to the national population of two percent, and I expected a very different campus culture when I came to Olin. I would imagine people talking about the holidays in casual conversation, or find dining hall meals dedicated to the larger festivals. This does not happen at Olin—not in the years I’ve been here, and I don’t foresee this changing any time soon. 

From a top-down perspective, Olin is too small to appeal to observant Jewish students. There’s too much work for resting on the Sabbath. The dining hall doesn’t serve kosher meals. We don’t have a Hillel chapter. In case you don’t know, that’s an affiliation with the largest international organization dedicated to providing Jewish students resources on campus, and our school is too small to receive their services. 

Because of these top down limitations, students are restrained from creating their own bottom-up solutions. The school’s structure discourages observant Jews from attending Olin. The students here who try to run events operate on severe deficits in Jewish knowledge, and there’s no time at Olin to study up on how to properly run a celebration. Student initiatives barely get off the ground and seldom reach the broader Jewish community. Thus, Jewish life remains vacant. 

When I came to Olin, I wanted to explore more what it meant to be Jewish at college. I visited Jewish organizations at other schools, each with their pros and cons. Brandeis was too far away, Wellesley felt strange being a man, and the prayers at Babson were sexist sometimes. Then I went abroad for a semester and the one service I attended there made me so upset I wrote a FS article about it (It’s one of my proudest. You should read it if you haven’t). I gave up looking after that. 

Judaism at Olin is a journey traveled alone, and the institution will not help you through it. Heed my warning: The dining hall will NOT give you the food you need for Passover. 

That’s where JOO fits in. The Jewish Organization at Olin is left in a terrible position. The resources are sparse, the leadership lacks expertise, and our most active member is a baptised Catholic (we love you Azzy). Historically, JOO buys food from local Jewish vendors a few holidays a year and hosts small celebrations. However, these events could serve a greater purpose. These food events could gather Jewish students before the holidays, and we can popularize all the inter-school activities that happen in the near future. JOO doesn’t need to be a hub of Jewish culture at Olin. It can be a vehicle to transport Olin Jews to the communities they find solace with.

Serving as a guide instead of the host enables JOO to stay lean and serve the community with greater precision. It can focus its small events toward building something greater, and it can stay true to a mission instead of what I saw as failing to live up to its name. 

Seeing so many freshmen stop by on Rosh Hashanah for apples and honey filled me with hope. This FS would have been far more pessimistic otherwise. I hope to see more people going to Babson Chabad, and I recently became friends with a few members of the Wellesley Hillel e-board, so I’ve been going to their services every Friday. Let me know if you’d like to join.

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.

Advice: Be Careful About Advice

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tldr: if someone comes to you about a relationship in their life, know that the risk of encouraging them to move towards forgiveness and love is that they might listen to you.

I called up a family member recently for advice. The last time I asked this family member for advice, I was calling them from a 7/11 employee’s personal phone. I was 18 (I am 21 now), stuck at a gas station I had trekked to from a broken-down car, armed with a dead phone of my own, and the only other phone number I could remember was my mom’s, who was at work. This family member told me he’d call someone else to come help me, forgot to do so, and proceeded to take a nap. Suffice to say, I try to avoid leaning on this family member. It tends to be a bad play.

In this moment, I called him because I truly felt there was no one else I could turn to. Why? I wanted to talk to someone about feeling like a friend had crossed my boundaries recently. Everyone I had talked to felt strongly that I should give this friend another chance because I knew his intentions had been good. I began to worry that anyone who supported me and had my best interest at heart— as in, anyone I could talk to at Olin— would tell me the same thing. Yes, this was black-and-white thinking on my part. I felt that, for me in that moment, one more person encouraging me to forgive would push me from my place of indecision to fully reincorporating this friend back into my life. I felt emotionally dysregulated, and I worried any path I could take would prove to be extreme.

And so, when I called up this family member (this phone call itself being an extreme path)— who I personally consider to be tripping 24/7– I was very surprised to hear the strangest, best advice I felt I had received on the issue: “I don’t know you or anyone else like that— good luck, though.”

As someone who tends to see more red flags in retrospect than in the present, someone who doubts their decisions constantly, someone who believes wholeheartedly that we all have an infinite capacity to love no matter what we lose— this was very liberating for me.

I say this to say, sometimes people are tripping. The emotional warfare between friends is oftentimes more unintentional than it appears on the surface. I wish the world was a safer place every day— I wonder how much more beautiful we’d all be to each other if it was. And still, still, I give this caution: If someone comes to you feeling like their boundaries have been crossed, consider that you may be dealing with someone who doesn’t isn’t often believed about being in pain. Consider that the grace that they do (or do not) give might reflect the grace they have received. Give them the gift of admitting you don’t know where you can, however you can— have hope that by, in some part, refusing them your undying support or condemnation, you create space for them to look within and believe themselves about what they feel. Have hope that if you disagree with them, they will make a better choice tomorrow. That you will make a better choice tomorrow.

In the end, I came to my own peace about the situation. I found the forgiveness for that friend in my heart that had been there all along. Every piece of advice given to me, regardless of whether it felt high-quality to me at the time or not, helped me to get to that place.

I don’t know you or anyone else like that— good luck, though.

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.

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.