Tag Archives: personal narrative

Author recounting an experience (or experiences), autobiographical pieces

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.

Dribbles

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Submitted Anonymously

He sits at his cluttered desk in his room. Taps a pen to his desk, looks at his iPhone, checks Facebook, has no updates. Thinks about doing homework, but instead goes on Reddit. The next day, he will remember none of what he reads.
…
Looks at his outlook, has a meeting with his design team in a half-hour but he must eat first.
Instead, he takes a nap, wakes up late for the meeting, then goes to the dining hall to grab a calzone.
He arrives to the meeting late and apologizes, but he mostly just feels sorry for himself.
…
He walks out of class on Friday. “Man, I need to drink” He thinks. The emptiness in his stomach pulls at him. Wheaty, bitter beer—that is what he needs. He eats a large dinner so he can drink more. At the party, he talks to people, and successfully lands a few jokes. He drinks a lot of water before going to bed, and wakes up without a hangover. Damn, what a champ! But really he cannot carry the feeling of winning for long, recalling the beer pong loss the night before, and—aughhhh!–the person that he wanted to talk to but didn’t have the courage to.
…
Monday night, he tries to do homework. He looks out the window and watches people walking past the Great Lawn in the rain. Their feet are moving quickly, pressing the fallen leaves into the pavement. The cold air and fall leaves remind him of that night freshman year, walking back to the train station at the end of the line, the scent of crushed, dry rot filling his nostrils, feeling the cold air pulling at his flesh. What a night, the last night he saw Taylor. It was skin, Bananagrams, hipster hip hop, dinner in Newton and clothes on the floor. Was this the beginning of something? Taylor—What if?
But unfortunately, no. Taylor had an idea of him, and loved that idea. But ideas are ideas, and one can’t hold the hand of an idea or kiss an idea.
He falls asleep, dribbling a bit on his paper, blurring the ink. Ohhhh, damn. Another meeting! He wakes up, prints out pictures for his personas and rushes to the studio.
…
Weekend Wednesday, walking through Parcel B, he tries to be profound. He looks at the colors of the leaves, the layers of colors and shapes, mixed together by the sunlight. Nature, and Nature and—well, not really. But trees. He’s walking in an area with a lot of trees, so yeah, that kind of counts. A branch brushes against his arm, and he pulls his arm in, imagining an itch where there’s none.
He walks to the lake that he heard about on Carpe, and it really is there! It shines and sparkles in the sunlight, as bodies of water do, and he feels a little more beautiful and peaceful inside. But this is an odd feeling. It makes him anxious.
He kicks a rock into the water, and it splashes. Not much, but enough to disturb the surface. He smiles.
…
Thursday evening, he’s biking to back to Olin after picking up food at Roche Bros. In the poor lighting, he sees a smudge on the road–a squirrel, flattened on the pavement. Its guts are drying as dark red lumps and strings, stuck to tufts of fur. Gruesome, but visually fascinating. He stares at it in shock, and rather than steer away he just goes bump over the body. He shivers. That body felt real.
The dry air is making his lips crack so he licks them and pulls them together, focusing on Olin just a few minutes away.

Living a Life Without Love

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We all are familiar the different types of “love”: platonic, heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, pansexual, etc. But many often exclude the possibility that being aromantic or asexual is one of them.

Love is everywhere. You grow up with it on television. You read about it in books. You start dreaming about it sometime in puberty. You hear about it every single day of your life. People who lack that desire are depicted as twisted or deprived: they’re either the villains bent on world destruction (like He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) or someone who has not yet met that special someone (like Batman before Catwoman). People seem to forget that there ARE people in this world who have no desire to experience the “joys” of a relationship.

I am one of them.

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Relay for Life: Hope and Community

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Community is a sense of being a part of something larger than you, being surrounded by individuals with passion for change. I participate in Relay for Life for the sense of community that grows in such a short period of time. We become linked by our connections to cancer as we join to fight against it.

On March 10th, 45 Olin students participated in the Wellesley-MIT Relay for Life, and the strong sense of community was most definitely present.

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How to Succeed in Business

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The careers of many successful individuals are represented in some regard by the following paradigm: Go to high school. Work hard in high school to get into a most respectable college. Work hard in college to land esteemed internships. Using well-built resume, land esteemed job or entrance into esteemed graduate school. If job, work. If graduate school, graduate, then work. This pattern succeeds in that with the proper inputs of ambition, work ethic, and luck, it outputs a well-rounded engineer with a respectable salary and a bright future.

This paradigm is deeply flawed. Students in this system waste their time always pushing towards future, socially mainstream goals rather than pursuing their own dreams. Striving for distant plans often requires us to meet others’ expectations rather than our own. Though often the path of least resistance, appeasing others produces unsatisfied individuals who make tangible sacrifices for little gain in areas they find meaningful.

I can’t criticize others without first acknowledging my own guilt. My high school branch of National Honor Society could have been named “Volunteer or your resume won’t look good enough to get into college”. I volunteered, and here I am, but the resume-building didn’t stop there.

Last summer, I was offered an internship position at an esteemed company. The only caveats were that I’d have to program computer graphics in a language nobody uses, and I’d have to turn down a position at a summer camp that I was excited about.

At the time, the decision was obvious: I worked for Westinghouse Electric, the largest technical employer in the United States.

Nobody would care if I worked at a summer camp for two years in a row, but if I had a manager that could say I was a respectable worker, I’d be worth something. I valued my resume and recommendations over my own interests, passions, and desires. This is fundamentally wrong. This flawed reasoning, and the realization that I never wanted to repeat it, is the most valuable bit of knowledge I’ve taken from my experience as an intern.
Searching for jobs this summer, I took an entirely different approach. I first pointed myself in a direction that excited me, then picked a subset that I thought had worth to society: the sustainable agriculture movement.

Next came the hard part, finding a job. Internships are most often sought through supply side economics, which play out as follows in students’ heads. “It’s time to find a job. Let me see what is available and apply to the most interesting options. I’ll accept the offer that excites me most.” At times, interests align and happy employees result. Alternatively, applicants will take an undesired position “because it is a job”, setting the stage for minimal satisfaction.

Finding work on a farm was fundamentally different. Because no farms came to me actively seeking help, and because there were no social expectations in this field of work, I had the freedom to find my ideal position.
It was far simpler to let someone come to me offering employment. However, working harder to find a job that excited me has been well worth the effort.

I will be working as a farmer in the mountains of Colorado this summer. I couldn’t be more thrilled, and I’d love to tell you about it.

And what’s more, I’d love to tell future employers of how my experiences give me insight that sets me apart from all other applicants.

Aligning my work with my passions seems to be the ultimate resume-builder for employment down the road after all. And even if I’m wrong, even if it doesn’t land me a dream job later on, I will have spent three months passionately working towards admirable goals in an exciting field.

Thank You Jesus! Tro-Tro

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The door of the 15-seater van nearly falls off as it scratches along its track. The Mate hangs out and yells,
“ADUM-adum-adum-adum,”

A mass of bodies push into the Tro-Tro: Men in business suits, women in brightly colored swaths of cloth, a mechanic with half a transmission, kids in school uniforms. Before I, too, am swept into the van, I notice the bright yellow decal on the back window, “Thank you Jesus!” The door slams shuts.

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Drowning in Attentions

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This time last year, I was filling out the last of the application materials for my study away program, located in Rabat, Morocco. I knew it would be no walk in the park. The Arab Spring uprisings, threatening violence and upheaval even in typically stable Morocco, had me crossing my fingers that the program wouldn’t be cancelled before my flight took off. My advisor was against it, though she signed the papers amid talks of a “plan b” and “looking at options”. She may have known a little of what I would face, but for me there was no “plan b”. I didn’t want a walk in the park; I wanted a challenge-and I got one.

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A Safe Conversation Space

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At the beginning of high school, I had the feeling I was gay, and I was very worried about this possibility. I had seen flamboyant gay men on TV and heard about bear culture [overweight, hairy gay men that are usually dressed in shiny black leather and chains] from friends who knew the internet. I did not feel that I had much in common with these people. I felt misrepresented and confused. If I was not “gay,” how could I be gay? By the end of the year, I was more convinced I was gay, and with this realization I had to resolve the disconnection between my idea of myself and what I knew about “gayness.”

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The Struggle for Good Enough

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I was angry. I was right. And as usual, it didn’t make a bit of difference.

We were building a woodshed to earn our keep, and my father Rick and I were each adamant about our own, contradicting design decisions. My way would make the roof stronger. His would get the job done faster. Either way, our materials were poor salvage and the sun was too hot.

And Rick’s way was wrong.

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