At around 8 p.m. I leave my room to see what the students are up to. I walk by a lounge with sofas, fireplace, big-screen television, DVD player, and game systems--one of every game console I know of and a few that I don't. But it turns out I can hardly find anyone around. One tall student in blue pajamas tells me most people are out to see the latest Star Wars installment, which has just hit theaters. I chat with some students, and they say they are packing for the summer break. I go back to my room, and later that night I hear doors slamming and hysterical laughter well past midnight. Some things about the college experience are universal, apparently.
But the school's small size also has its drawbacks. People learn more than they want to about each other. Dating in such a small circle means scarce options. And competition sometimes runs high in a place with so many bright people, each wanting to take the lead. The students call this isolation the "Olin bubble." In fact, Olin is not the place for those who want to blend into the crowd. The school looks for adventurous, risk-taking students who show initiative and teamwork skills. And in addition to being academically exceptional, students also have to have a passion, "something they can't not do," as Sherra E. Kerns, vice president for innovation and research, puts it.
For the class of 2009, 546 students applied and 177 were invited to candidates' weekends, when they came to the campus to participate in team activities to get a better idea what Olin is about. After that, 134 were admitted and 77 enrolled. That 24.5 percent acceptance rate puts Olin in a category with, for example, Caltech and Cornell, which accept 20 and 27 percent of applicants, respectively, for all undergraduate majors.
But despite the "Olin bubble" isolation, I get a strong feeling that Olin students are having fun. Are they happier than engineering students at other places? It's hard to say. At places such as MIT, students often have a love-hate relationship with their school. But that's not exactly the case at Olin. Says Jessica Townsend, a mechanical engineering professor who got her Ph.D. at MIT: "You still see a little bit of what you may call the MIT attitude, particularly as the semester goes on and finals are coming and everything is starting to wrap up and, wow, it's craziness." But she adds: "The relative happiness level of the Olin students--if you ask them, they're a pretty happy bunch."
"People here are amazing," says Mikell Taylor, a senior from Ohio who is a black belt in tae kwon do and who turned down MIT for Olin. "Whatever you think you're good at, there's someone who is better than you at it. It's extremely humbling, but it's really cool at the same time, because you have access to all these really cool people."
The hands-on projects, the extracurricular activities, and the well-equipped campus are definitely important factors in the happiness level. But there's another key element: the faculty. Of Olin's 32 professors, 22 are younger than 40. Eighteen are men and 14 women. One is a concert pianist; another is a yoga teacher; a third speaks Sinhalese. One looks like Kevin Kline. They come from places as diverse as NASA, Disney, and the National Security Agency. They are energetic, articulate, and attractive. As one student puts it, "Is it just me, or can every professor do stand-up comedy?"
During Olin's very first semester, a major roadblock paralyzed the school. Perhaps too excited about the idea of project-based classes and interdisciplinary interactions, the faculty underestimated the effort and time that students would need to complete tasks and do the teamwork. One day, about a month after classes had started, a group of students descended on the president's office and said things were not going well. They complained they had been working until 4 o'clock in the morning for several days and couldn't stay awake in class anymore. Some were thinking about leaving.
Miller responded by declaring a moratorium on classes. He then talked to the faculty, who talked to the students, and all tried to figure out how much time to devote to different activities. "Let's recalibrate; let's relaunch this semester," Miller recalls saying. And then the school did the sort of thing that makes Olin, well, Olin: it rented a giant inflatable bouncing castle and put it in the middle of the oval. "The kids went on the lawn, just stress relief, and the faculty members were out there, and students could throw eggs at the faculty and all kinds of things," Miller says. "And we restarted. We got it better next time."
Professors and students told me Olin got better and is still getting better. And it is also trying to assess how well it is doing. Sherra Kerns says Olin is defining the competencies its graduates should acquire, skills such as leadership and entrepreneurship, and thinking about how to measure such competencies. And even though that study is not yet complete, one early way of measuring Olin's success will be seeing how students do after they get out of school. Will Olin's alumni land desirable jobs? Will they be accepted in top graduate programs?
Judging by some of their internships, it seems the answer will be yes. Last summer, the class of seniors that is graduating this month did internships at Boeing, IBM, Lockheed, Motorola, Raytheon, and top university labs. At press time, Curtis was accepted to a Ph.D. program in quantum computing at the University of Oxford, in England; Taylor was waiting to hear from robotics companies and graduate programs; and Ige was working on a company he founded to manufacture meditation chairs.
Meanwhile, lots of folks will be keeping an eye on Olin's first graduates as they make their way in the world. The NSF has funded a research project by a group of MIT social scientists studying the outcome of innovative engineering programs at Olin and at Vassar, says Susan Kemnitzer, deputy director of engineering education and centers at the NSF. "Everyone is very hopeful and watching closely what Olin is doing," she says. "We're still running the experiment, so we don't have any data yet. But we will. And I think people should take a look at the data."
That Olin graduates will be successful there's not much doubt; but whether Olin will accomplish its long-term aspiration of fomenting change at other engineering schools remains an open question. "That's actually a much bigger measure of our success or failure," says electrical engineering professor Gill Pratt, a roboticist who came to Olin after 21 years at MIT. "It makes it even more important that we do a really good job. And it's sometimes scary. There are so many eyes on us."
To Probe Further
To see more photos of Olin's campus and classes, and also a dictionary of "Olinese" terms like "Things That Go Bang" and "Olin Triangle," see article, "The Olin Lingo."
"Educating the Engineer of 2020," a recent report on engineering education by the National Academy of Engineering, is available at http://fermat.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html.
For more on the history of engineering education, see "The paradox of 'engineering science'--a cold war debate about education in the U.S.," by Ronald Kline, in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine (Fall 2000), as well as America by Design, by David F. Noble (Oxford University Press, 1979).
