Olin’s Bureaucracy

When telling people that I’m taking a year off, I’m always asked the question, “Was it hard to get the school to let you do that?”

The answer is definitely a huge “NO!”

And now, the story of convincing Olin to let me take a year off:

Chester and I figured the best way to go about taking a year off would be to start at the top. And so, we e-mailed Rick Miller and said, “We are thinking about taking a year off. We wanted to talk with you about this. Could we have lunch sometime in the next week?”

A few minutes later we received a reply from President Miller saying, “Sure. Go ahead and schedule it with Nancy Sullivan, my assistant.” We did, and the next day we had lunch with President Miller.

The meal started out with us explaining what we wanted to do. It then quickly, like many things at Olin, turned into a conversation about Olin and innovating engineering education. President Miller’s response to our proposition was, “This is great! How can we get more students to do this?”

We then continued to talk about how this could become a part of the Olin curriculum and how we wanted to make it a very common thing to do. President Miller also suggested that we talk with Rod Crafts.

A few days later, we went and met with Rod Crafts. As I walked in, he handed me a piece of paper and said, “You’ll need to fill this out. It needs an address, and your advisor’s signature. Keep in mind that we only let you declare a leave of absence a semester at a time. You’ll need to reapply next semester. Other than that, you’re good to go. Incidentally, what are you thinking about doing?”

I was absolutely amazed. I figured I’d have to explain in great detail my reasoning and defend my thoughts on this issue. When I expressed this to Rod he said, “At OSL, we don’t see our roll as pushing students to do this or as preventing students to do this. Rather, we want to help students do what they want to do.”

With that, it all made sense. And so I filled out my one page form (half of which is reserved for OSL), got my advisor’s signature, and was set to take a semester off. In a few months I’ll have to fill out the form again, and provide a brief progress report in order to get the next semester declared as a leave of absence as well.

Applying to Washington internships

Many Washington internships have really late application deadlines, and even later interviews, and even later notification dates.

On one hand, this is good: when it became clear that the opportunities I’d lined up weren’t going pan out, I was able to double back and land a totally sweet position at the HRC. I’m kind of astonished to note that there are still beaucoup internships for this fall appearing on Idealist on a daily basis. (It’s not too late for you to join us!)

On the other hand, this is bad: I’d been in touch with OSL about my plans, but I ended up calling poor Alison Black literally the day before the dorms opened to give her my final decision that I wasn’t coming back.

Advice: Take the plunge, tell Olin you’re leaving, and worry about the particulars later. Damn the torpedoes! Worry not, though: OSL has been really patient and flexible and a joy to work with. If something comes up, they’ve got your back.

Important caveat: If you’re not going to be a full-time student, make sure your health insurance will still cover you. It turns out that my plan lets students take a single semester off, so I’m OK for what I wanted to do. You might not be so lucky; call and find out before it becomes a crisis.

Also, briefly — in terms of actually nabbing jobs, the DC internship circuit is a little different from the engineering circuit. Chances are:

• nobody’s ever heard of Olin
• they don’t care (much) about your engineering work, and
• you’re competing against people who are actually majoring in relevant fields.

So you really need to position yourself in a way that makes you seem worth contacting. I restructured my resume pretty drastically, placing my campus leadership activities up front and only then following with my employment experience. I also included my political volunteer work in my work experience (nobody said you have to get paid for it to count). In my cover letter, I tried to explain how my engineering experiences, particularly at Olin, had given me a lot of skills that made me really useful in other fields (it’s true!). I had a really helpful phone conversation with Leslie Larocca, formerly head of Postgraduate Planning, who helped me figure a lot of this out. I don’t know if anyone else even wants to do a Washington internship but I’d be happy to show you a copy of my application materials if you think it’d help you.

Anyway. I hope that was interesting to someone. Good luck to y’all back at Olin; hope the semester’s treating you well so far. I start Monday! I’m kind of super-excited.