Life at Olin so far

Helloooo everybody! And when I say everybody, I mean the two, three, or five people that are going to ever read this.

So I've been getting all sorts of questions about life at Olin. And here are your answers.

Olin's great. The atmosphere is really great, everybody knows each other and really cares about each other. At parties, the hosts go around and hand out water and cut people off at the bar if they're too drunk, stuff like that. People also help each other with work the best they can, which is really helpful in such a hard school like this. At the same time, this small size is a down side. There's 300 people in the entire college and 80 people in my class. This creates a really different environment than what you'll get at any other college. If you do something, 297 people will know about it. And this has lead to an enormous enormous amount of drama (yeah, I know, what the hell) in the first few weeks of Olin.

Speaking of drama, who are my friends? To be honest, not a lot of people. Let me just put it out there, that everybody's extremely nice. But I find quite a lot of people to be...very weird. Some...hmm...have a younger mentality than me? Yeah, that's right, I did just avoid saying they're immature, but that word carries too much of a negative connotation than I think this situation deserves. So you know, they're all very nice, and they get along, it's just that I can't imagine having them as a good friend.

Of course, I do have some friends who are more like me. Unfortunately, they're mostly girls. I've found really only one or two guys who I can imagine being great friends with later in life. I'm sure this will change as the weeks go on, but life is life for now.

Here at Olin, there's something called a Sibb. It's like a sibling, but not. Every freshman gets paired up with another person in the school who isn't a freshman, and basically this program can help establish connections with upperclassmen, and help freshman get acquainted with this new life. My sibb is Kevin McGraths' old best friend from Moscow, so we both know the honorable McGrath family, which is kind of cool. He's also a partier like me, and I must say, he sure can down a few. And when I say a few, I mean a ton. He's a really fun person to have. To know that somebody in Olin is the complete opposite of a nerd is kind of nice. 

General life is excellent. Everything's open 24/7 (with the exception of the machine shop and the cafeteria). Food is excellent, dorms are very nice. Roommate is great. Parties are a lot of fun. Man Hall (East hall, 2nd floor, north wing hallway) is a really fun place to be. They're kind of like the frat in the school, but they're not. Anytime I go over there though it's always fun. Last night was a classy themed party, so everybody dressed up in suits and all that. Good stuff.

Academics. Work is pretty tough, I must say. Not killing, but it's tough.

• Design Nature - A class which students learn to relate designs in nature to designs in mechanical products. Right now we're working on a hopper project, where we must create a bio-inspired toy that jumps. We did a short study of how click-beetles and frog-hoppers jump, and now we are in the protoyping stage. We prototyped 2 or 3 models out of basic materials after we did sketches, and now we're modeling one of our prototype SolidWorks (3D CAD program), and doing a computer simulation of these to see how well they will jump. No math required, pretty much no physics knowledge required.
• Modeling and Simulation - Using MatLab (programming software) to create models (not physical) of different things. We just finished our first case study, and I chose to create a model which predicts how many new freshman Olin should admit for the next year based on dorm availability and many other factors. 75. This class doesn't deal with any physics or math, just programming and a bit of logic on how to program.
• Modeling and Control - A class in which we use a program called SimuLink to model physical systems. For example, take two graduated cylinders, cut a hole on the side of each at the bottom, and put a tube between them. Now fill up one of them to the top. The tube will drain into the other tube, but then the draining will stop when the two heights are equal. We modeled this and created a graph of the height vs. time for each for one of the first labs. This class requires a good amount of physics and math knowledge, especially calculus based physics, which isn't something we did at all in high school. It takes a bit to get used to, but it all makes sense in the end. I've learned a few new concepts in this class already.
• Seeing and Hearing - Exploring communication through the media of photography, video, and audio. Currently, we are doing our photography unit, which is very nice considering I love photography. However, we have also watched 3 documentaries about various things (Murderball was the best one by far. Watch it. It's great.), and wrote a bit about each. We've done one essay so far, but we have a 6 page one due on Friday. Of course, it's on the worst documentary of the three.

So there you have it. Until next time, I'll be repeatedly throwing my computer out the window because of SolidWorks, and going to IT and telling them that I'm covered under warranty so fix it.