Slashdot Mirror
Olin College — Re-Engineering Engineering
theodp writes "In its College Issue, the NYT Magazine profiles tuition-free Olin College, which is building a different breed of engineer, stressing creativity, teamwork, and entrepreneurship — and, in no small part, courage. But questions remain as to whether the industry is ready for the freethinking products of Olin, and vice versa. Few of the class of 2006 are going on to grad study in engineering or jobs in the field."
I guess they don't teach either counting or spelling at Olin.
Watch the graduates !
They will have trouble with the established firms set in their ways.
Thus they will be unemployed at a high rate.
And because of that they will start their own companies !
And Profit !
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
2 stories after the "why are no American kids going to grad school?" article, we have an article that explains how Engineering is teamwork, enthusiasm, and feeling good about yourself. Coincidence?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm not that old, 43, but feel like an old timer in engineering. Son of a EE gone Chief Engineer and trained as a GeolE (1987).
Olin is not inventing a new kind of engineer, they are trying to bring back the engineers of my father's generation. But they can put out the finest people on earth and it won't matter. Bean counters run companies now and they don't like what a good engineer has to say. Horrible things like "we need money to develop this idea", "saving ten cents per item will not save you money in the long run when it breaks and you have to replace it" and the ever-popular "outsourcing production to the cheapest labor you can find is not a good idea because it takes a little bit of skill and QA/QC to build it right".
Now, let's see it at other levels of communication.
I, as a student of a public high school in America, take in more force-fed facts that are expected to be regurgitated, and get fewer and fewer chances to let my creative juices flow. Rather than writing that a person thinks something happened, I think someone could get more of a benefit out of writing about why it happened.
Perhaps that's why all forms of math are just so hard for me to wrap my head around; I know that things work, but I don't see why it's useful.
That aside, in a post-No-Child-Left-Educated world, would there be any creativity left to teach anything like this?
I'm not a teacher, nor am I always a realist, so I might just be thinking too optimistically about this. I guess it'd be best to just wait and see.
- How to change Wall St. to stop looking only at the next quarter's results?
- How to deal with PHB's and bean counters?
- How to persuade the customer to fund your "freethinking" idea instead of the customer's idea?
If not, Olin is producing useless misfits. Oh, I agree that "misfit" is something "good" to be sought after in a certain sense -- creativity is what makes us human. But that's not what the economy needs in the post-Industrial Revolution world.Or they can start their own companies right away and get short term success, maybe even long term success. Engineers without some amount of business sense might be long term failures too, or even short term failures. It's all a gamble in many ways.
Oooh! Oooh! An exciting new paradigm. Is the world really ready for this exciting new paradigm yet. I bet it isn't!
Well, best of luck to them. My exciting new paradigm of sleeping in until midday every day hasn't caught on in the stoic and unchanging business world. They just haven't caught on to my forward and freethinking ways. But just you wait... my Slashdot story is coming soon!
Courage always helped me build the best bridges!
;)
It certainly allows you to cross the worst ones.
Interesting :-).
Y-combinator seems to be generating 40 quickie get-big-or-die-trying companies a year. What I found interesting is that in a few years 'Alumnus of Y-combinator' is going to have a very good cachet associated with it - just as an MS from a good college does. There're going to be a bunch of successes and even those who don't succeed will have the associated aura. The guys who put themselves through Y-combinator are a self-selected bunch of motivated people, who might even have an above average chance of succeeding in life.
Olin students might have similar self-selected characteristics. And in a few years, the results of that experiment - with widespread Olin alumni support - are going to be worth watching.
Note, I'm in no way related to either. Just speculating on a correlation that I see.
All bow to his Noodliness!! His Noodle Appendage has touched me!
Engineering based firms that hire Computer Science and Computer Engineering undergraduates are struggling to meet their recruitment goals today. Although coming up with new ways to shape the skills and experiences of engineering undergraduates is noble and necessary. It hardly helps with the overall lack of new students majoring in those subjects at university in the first place. This program is an interesting experiment at an elite school. But it hardly has any impact on the lack of students choosing this field.
The other problem I have with it is that the ideas espoused are not terribly new. At the University of Nebraska's School of Engineering students can enter the JD Edwards Honors program with an emphasis in Business.
http://jdedwards.unl.edu/
I tend to not hire CompSci or CompE students from this program because as entry level hires they have incredibly unrealistic expectations about their first job. They all want to transition to management right away before cutting their teeth on engineering design. So we tend to skip them over when we get resumes.
Sean
And Profit !
Perhaps this is the missing intermediate step in the underwear gnomes' formula?
It's just like programming. Every company is turbo-stupid in only taking interns and people with 5+ years of experience for any real programming job. So the fresh grads write their own software and a big company buys and and then they get hired.
I like engineering being like that too cuz then you get more inventions. It takes a company forever to invent something new with all the budgeting and paperwork and meetings and higher ups and blah blah blah. If engineers can't get hired, they just invent something and sell it and they do it waaaaaaaaay faster.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Few of the class of 2006 are going on to grad study in engineering or jobs in the field.
This is no surprise since engineering job opportunities for US citizens have been dwindling in 21st century.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
EVERY admitted student gets the full tuition Olin scholarship.
I'm one of the Olin Alumni (Class of '07).
Everyone who is admitted receives the scholarship. In fact, for 06 and 07s, room was included as well.
However, we do not offer graduate degrees. Olin is undergrad only.
www.olin.edu
Several of the Olin faculty members are fantastic teachers who were denied tenure at MIT because (in my opinion) their devotion to teaching cut into their research, which is all that counts toward MIT tenure. (This includes my advisor, Lynn Stein.) I'd be proud to teach at Olin or to send my children (if I had any) there.
One of the key ways that money is made is by disrupting the status quo. Take something that is good, and make it much better. Take something that is thought of as important, and replace it completely. Think of every great product that you know - the kind of products that changed everything how people live and work. The hammer, the wheel, the model-T, the plow, the longbow, the musket, the steam engine, the computer, automated mfg, the internet. Hell, even simple things, like the ipod. These creations have improved the possibilities of the human experience (except, maybe, the ipod ;). This is what Olin college is attempting to inspire.
Industry is floundering because it has stopped giving engineers and creative types the responsibility of actual creation. If we, as a society, wish to bring engineering and manufacturing back to our side of the world, we need colleges and programs like the ones that Olin is taking on. We need engineers who will develop & create beyond our expectations. This is important to the future success of America.
- DaftShadow
A couple of times a year, I pull up the following and read it, trying to realign my thinking process. I don't know who originally wrote it; I've had it for years. I apologize for the long post, but it's worth it. ++++++++++++++++++++ Some time ago I received a call from a colleague. He was about to give a student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the student claimed a perfect score. The instructor and the student agreed to an impartial arbiter, and I was selected.I read the examination question: "SHOW HOW IT IS POSSIBLE TO DETERMINE THE HEIGHT OF A TALL BUILDING WITH THE AID OF A BAROMETER." The student had answered, "Take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it,lower it to the street, and then bring it up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building." The student really had a strong case for full credit since he had really answered the question completely and correctly! On the other hand, if full credit were given, it could well contribute to a high grade in his physics course and to certify competence in physics, but the answer did not confirm this. I suggested that the student have another try. I gave the student six minutes to answer the question with the warning that the answer should show some knowledge of physics. At the end of five minutes, he had not written anything. I asked if he wished to give up, but he said he had many answers to this problem; he was just thinking of the best one. I excused myself for interrupting him and asked him to please go on. In the next minute, he dashed off his answer which read: "Take the barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge of the roof. Drop the barometer, timing its fall with a stopwatch.Then, using the formula x=0.5*a*t^^2, calculate the height of the building." At this point, I asked my colleague if he would give up. He conceded,and gave the student almost full credit. While leaving my colleague's office, I recalled that the student had said that he had other answers to the problem,so I asked him what they were. "Well," said the student, "there are many ways of getting the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer. For example, you could take the barometer out on a sunny day and measure the height of the barometer, the length of its shadow, and the length of the shadow of the building,and by the use of simple proportion, determine the height of the building." "Fine," I said, "and others?" "Yes," said the student, "there is a very basic measurement method you will like. In this method, you take the barometer and begin to walk up the stairs. As you climb the stairs, you mark off the length of the barometer along the wall. You then count the number of marks, and this will give you the height of the building in barometer units." "A very direct method." "Of course. If you want a more sophisticated method, you can tie the barometer to the end of a string, swing it as a pendulum, and determine the value of g at the street level and at the top of the building. From the difference between the two values of g, the height of the building,in principle, can be calculated." "On this same tact, you could take the barometer to the top of the building,attach a long rope to it, lower it to just above the street, and then swing it as a pendulum. You could then calculate the height of the building by the period of the precession". "Finally," he concluded, "there are many other ways of solving the problem.Probably the best," he said, "is to take the barometer to the basement and knock on the superintendent's door. When the superintendent answers, you speak to him as follows: 'Mr. Superintendent, here is a fine barometer. If you will tell me the height of the building, I will give you this barometer." At this point, I asked the student if he really did not know the conventional answer to this question. He admitted that he did, but said that he was fed up with high school and college instructors trying to teach him how to think. The student was Neils Bohr.
And they are by far some of the most intelligent hands-on people I have ever met. Although I am in no way qualified to comment on their credentials and experience - I am a Junior at Babson College - most of the successful v.c./angel pitches that are done by groups of Babson students at any one of our yearly events events include students from Olin as part of the founding team.
Like I said, I am not qualified on their engineering talent. I do know that they only accept students who can demonstrate a committed dedication to engineering - from what I have heard, if you haven't built anything in your spare time you don't have a chance in hell of getting in. I also know that you can generally find a couple of Olin students at any one time testing one thing or another down by the lower athletic fields. To be honest, I was more under the impression that Olin's curriculum was more pragmatic than the Slashdot summery made out. Although Olin is dedicated to entrepreneurship, (Olin was started by a Babson alum with funds that originated with another Babson alum, on Babson's campus. Given that Babson is largely focused on entrepreneurship, this is pretty much a given.) their students all appear, at least, to have a solid grasp of mathematics, the sciences, and so on. They also haven't had any issues finding their graduates jobs over the past year. What all of this means - I don't know, I'm a Business major.
Well, it helped me tell someone higher up that the bridge he approved would collapse.