Major Distributions of Oliners

Posted on 30. Apr, 2012 by Geoff Pleiss

Note: Figures are not included in the online version of this article. For a pdf copy of the newspaper, email submit at franklyspeakingnews.com and ask for one!

Earlier this month, a survey was sent out to Olin students asking about choice of major and involvement in Olin clubs and organizations. For this issue, we focused on the distribution of students’ current majors, as well as what students’ intended majors were prior to starting Olin.

A Candid Conversation with Ursula Wolz

Posted on 30. Apr, 2012 by Harold Jaffe

Ursula Wolz is a visiting professor from The College of New Jersey (TCNJ). She began her education in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology, then transitioned over to a master’s in Computing Education and finally a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Columbia University. It is no wonder, then, that her experience and acclaim are in computer science education, interdisciplinary computer science, and “interactive storytelling,” all of which involve combining narrative with computer programming.

She is teaching two sections of Software Design and one of Game design this semester at Olin.

Summer Reading from the Editor

Posted on 26. Apr, 2012 by Kelsey Breseman

None of these are light reading, as such. They’re not fluffy; they’re not “beach reads”. But they are bite-sized; each piece of writing is short, so you can dip in and out of the books between your summer adventures. You’ve probably read at least one of these, but you should stick around to read the other ones. They’re mind-blowing.

The Second Tree from the Corner (E. B. White)

Oliners Compete in Tae Kwon Do

Posted on 26. Apr, 2012 by Hari Iyer

Editor's note: The author has requested that the full, unedited version of this article be made available to the public. Scroll down to see the full text.

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This year, five Olin students competed in the National Collegiate Taekwondo Championship held at MIT. Stephanie Northway, Chaz Gwennap, Sasha Sproch, Mark-Robin Giolando, and Hari Iyer trained under Professor Shan-Yuan Ho, a former Taekwondo champion, Master Instructor of Olympic-style TKD, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics from MIT.

With Love, Nicholas Monje

Posted on 26. Apr, 2012 by Nicholas Monje

I, along with Gwyn Davidoff, recently directed The Laramie Project here at Olin. For those of you who didn’t come to see the show, it deals with the beating and death of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student, in Laramie, Wyoming. This article is a highly abbreviated version of my director’s note. If you’d like to read the original note, please email me at nicholas.monje at gmail.com.

The Honor Code: Think About It

Posted on 26. Apr, 2012 by Jeffrey Holzgrafe

I sent out an all students email a few weeks ago about a movement to rethink, revise, and rewrite the Honor Code. Some things were left off from that email for the sake of brevity. I want to use this article to fill in any gaps and answer some common questions.

The idea to rethink the Honor Code started a month ago in CORe. Your class representatives felt that the Code had become stagnant. It is not that it is failing, or that the student body does not follow it, but that the student body as a whole does not feel ownership over the Code in the way that it once did.

A Perfectly Polite Proposal

Posted on 26. Apr, 2012 by Harold Jaffe

No doubt you are familiar with the tragedy of the commons (1) —the idea that multiple individuals with access to an unregulated public resource will gradually use it up or ruin it (2). It is with great sadness, increasing cynicism, and frequent exclamations of profanities (3) that I have come to the conclusion that the East Hall kitchen constitutes one such situation.

Do Something: Register to Vote

Posted on 26. Apr, 2012 by Elizabeth Mahon

Note: Figures are not included in the online version of this article. For a pdf copy of the newspaper, email submit at franklyspeakingnews.com and ask for one!

Hey, you. Yeah, you, with the U.S. citizenship. I heard you’re over 18. Have you registered to vote yet? No? Why not?

There’s no difference between the politicians!

Be a Partner Somewhere Else

Posted on 26. Apr, 2012 by Eric Schneider

Last month Shane and I attended President Miller’s dessert social, where we talked about Olin’s relationships with other engineering schools. He explained that more and more schools are coming to Olin asking for help. Some want to innovate how they teach, while others are new schools that hope to build upon the Olin model. The problem is, our teachers are stretched ridiculously thin as it is.So we thought: can students take this on?

What it Means to Be an Oliner

Posted on 26. Apr, 2012 by James Nee

As a child, I had one really special toy. It wasn’t pretty, or the most interesting, but it was special to me. It was a little wooden action figure that I had cobbled together from bits of scrap wood I found in the garage. The joints were pipe cleaners, the face scribbled on in pencil, and the torso a rough bit of scrap wood from some 2x4 that had broken off the house.Yet I treated this toy better than anything else I owned; I would even sleep with it like a teddy bear at times. I had a deep connection with this conglomeration of misfit bits.