Apathy at Olin & crunch time

Late: [Alt + Shift]

So today I wanted to rant about Olin. Particularly apathy at Olin. So I was at an spc (strategic planning committee) meeting and looked around the room. During the meeting there were 8 people who were current members of the e-board or candidates for the e-board. There were as many as 27 people and as few as 19 people total at the meeting. That's not so bad. The real problem is that it's always these same people who go to all of the committee meetings, town meetings, informal discussions etc. etc.

We are a school of 300 people. There is no reason that people should be completely unrepresented. I don't know how one even goes about trying to represent people who do not show up to discuss their opinions. We end up with systematic bias.

Guess what? The people who go to meetings about strategy for the school want things to change. No duh. I'd really like to know what the silent majority thinks. What do they see Olin as?

Are we a school that pumps out great engineers? Engineers with context? Leaders? Socially conscious world citizens? Are we a school that wants to effect change in engineering education? Is our main goal to influence other schools through our experimental methods of education? Or are we looking to better the world via graduates who help out?

I think the students at Olin do not matter. We are not the focus. There is a higher cause. 300 students don't matter at all when compared to all of the students that stand to gain from our ability experiment. This doesn't mean that I think our students should get a bad education; we need well-educated students to have meaningful experiments.

I just think we should be aware that our education won't be perfect because we will be experimenting. I don't think we want to have good proven classes. This is against our nature. We are meant to experiment. We can try a method, document its progress, do some tweaking and come up with results on what we thought. Then we can move on. Stable classes that are only taught one way year after year should not be our realm. Leave that to MIT and friends. We are quick, we are nimble. We can be inspirational. We can change engineering education and the world. If we have graduates who serve their communities, great. This is the proof that some of our experiments went right. This proves our credibility in the field of experimental learning.

At spc they asked us what we'd like to see our graduates doing in 10 years for us to consider Olin successful. I'd be satisfied with nothing short of our graduates being emulated.

My big bro is coming tomorrow for 4 days. Man... when am I going to get my work done. Oh well. I trust I'll get it done at some point. I generally do.