Who am I?

Adding to the pile:

who: Gui Cavalcanti, a (now) Class of 2009 E:Robotics major.

why: I’m not satisfied yet. I’m not good enough yet. I look at the robots I’ve made, and I see plastic toys that run for 5 minutes, then die. I see lots of “proofs of concept”. I see myself still designing robots largely by intuition, not using much of any of my engineering education from the past three years. I don’t see the point in getting an engineering education if I don’t know how to use it, and I don’t see myself having the time at Olin to learn how to use it in the real world (go figure). I’m tired of hacking, I want to learn how to do things right. I’m taking the year off to get really, really good at building robots.

where: Boston Dynamics. The company is the entrepreneurial spin-off of the old MIT Leg Lab, applying lessons learned about dynamic balance and legged locomotion to commercial products.

what (generally): Think of it as a year-long internship. A lot of schools have co-op programs (Drexel, Northeastern, and RIT, to name a few) whose purpose is to provide students with an opportunity to integrate real work experience into their education. I’d love to see Olin officially encourage and support students to do the same – maybe I’ll join a committee to make it happen when I get back. For the time being, though, I’m just going to go ahead and do it myself.

what (specifically): So far I’ve worked on Big Dog and RiSE. Big Dog is a four-legged robot the size of a small horse, whose entire purpose in life is to carry soldiers’ equipment for them and follow them around wherever they go. RiSE is a six-legged climbing robot (think Design Nature on significant amounts of crack) that has interchangeable feet, fully adjustable gaits and a tail. Other Boston Dynamics projects include Little Dog (a faux Big Dog for gait analysis in robotics labs across the country) and RHex (a really cool six-legged robot modelled off a cockroach).

Who Am I?

Who am I to break tradition?

who: Matthew Ritter, Systems major at Olin. In practical terms, Systems is basically half of the MechE curriculum and half of the EE curriculum, but in conjunction with my humanities depth in Entrepreneurship, I’m trying to understand the entire context of the implimentation of new technology, particularly with regard to environmental sustainability. After I finish my year off, I will graduate in the class of 2010.

Why (originally): I think that internships are awesome, and it’s a shame that most college kids just do two or three summers of them. By taking a year off, I get two terms, plus an extra summer. That’s significantly more experience and connections by the time I’m looking for jobs ‘for real’. In addition, I was very aware of the fact that I had no idea what an engineer did. What can an engineer do that an untrained person can’t? Every study shows that students lose a vast majority of the information that they acquire during their time at school, and I wanted to know which parts were worth keeping a hold of.

Why (now): Destiny has taken a bit of a hold of me, and I’ve gotten myself tangled up into three time-sensitive opportunities, none of which are exactly internships.

• The first is my work on MIT’s Solar Decathlon team, where they called me in at the last minute to figure out their sensor systems (their last sensor guy flaked out, apparently, without giving any sort of warning that he wouldn’t deliver). I’m fairly well locked in at this point, since the deadline is so close, and I’m the only one with enough free time to actually make these sensors work. It’ s a testament to the utility of a systems degree that I was contacted to figure out these electronics while completing my internship at a mechanical engineering firm (specializing in green energy!), from someone who I’d met while doing business/management stuff last year.
• My second adventure is a continued involvement with this very same ‘stuff’, which is more commonly referred to as the Vehicle Design Summit. I spent the summer after my frosh year on the management team for VDS 1.0, which was extremely successful from many angles. Fortunately, one of these angles was media attention to the possibilities of alternatively powered vehicles, including a documentary and website by the Discovery Channel. This year they’re significantly changing their structure in an attempt to produce a vehicle that’s not only efficient, but has a dramatically lower lifecycle cost (the environmental impact of the vehicle’s production and disposal, which takes as much energy as the average car uses during its lifetime and releases substantially more harmful chemicals). I’m super excited to help organize such an ambitious effort, though I hope that we’re not overextending ourselves this year. This is also my opportunity to decide whether project management is something that I’m interested in, since it seems like a logical intersection of broad (but shallow) engineering knowledge and business sense.
• The other direction that such an intersection could take (although, being a point, a real intersection could hardly be expected to have a direction) is entrepreneurship. To that end, I’m starting Green Canary Sensors. Green Canary takes measurements of the environmental fitness of a house before it’s sold, raising the value of the home if it turns out to be clean (as it will in a vast majority of cases). I’m hoping to be part of Olin’s Foundry, and will send in my application after I finish this post!

In terms of living situation, I’ve got a place in Somerville with fellow LOA Gui, who is working at Boston Dynamics. However, I spent most of my time at pika, an Independent Living Group just off MIT’s campus. I’ve lived there for the last two summers and really love the house and people. My claim to fame there is that I’m the only person in recent memory to have slept in every room of the house, both porches and the roof. If you’re in the Cambridge area around 6:15, give me a call and come over for dinner!

 

Who am I?

To follow in Tim’s footsteps:

who:Ben Salinas, an Engineering with Design (E:Design) major from Olin. I was in the Class of 2009… in a few months, I’ll be in the Class of 2010.

passions: Design of all flavors, International Development, Appropriate Technology, “Awesome”, Social Entrepreneurship, Math Education (particularly at the middle school age)

why: I find myself at a crossroads in my life. I could easily go down a bunch of different paths, and I want to figure out what best suits me (if anything). There just isn’t enough time at Olin for me to explore in depth my various options.

what: Ahh… this is the million dollar question. The plan is that I’ll be working on various projects that interest me (see “passions”) to figure out what I like best. Some of these projects are companies at The Foundry. Some of them are contracted work through Texas Mathworks, an organization I spend my summers working with. Some of them will be random ideas that we come up with in the Barn at Natick House. Some of them I can’t yet begin to imagine.
Basically, I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing, but I do know why I am doing it. I can’t list to you what I’ll be doing on a daily basis, because I plan to do new things as they come up.

philosophy:Live life in the moment. If you are happy at each and every moment, then you’ll be happy when you integrate those moments together.

Hey Numba One

I vividly remember the moment I decided to take the year off.

Jessie and I were in the middle of a 5 day grant writing marathon at the Foundry, and I was headed back up the hill to take a break and possibly get some sleep after stopping by Chester’s room for some Lost. The walk back to Olin proper is one I have enjoyed since I started working at the Foundry; it is short enough that it isn’t too long and long enough to allow for some useful reflection on the events of the time by which it is preceded. On this night I was deep in thought regarding the dilemma of whether or not to take a year off – I had been struggling with the decision for a few weeks without making any headway, and was beginning to face other decisions hinging on what I would be doing for the next year of my life. It was in the middle of the soccer field where it hit me: if I didn’t do this, I would very likely regret it. I walked straight to the grundle, sat down on the couch, and told Chester that I had made up my mind – I would be taking the year off.

There were, of course, many factors in the decision to leave Olin for a year. Although it wasn’t what was pulling me towards taking the time off, the fact that people like Chester and Ben had decided to do so and would be doing things along the lines of what I wanted to do opened up the possibility for me. Simply put, I don’t feel like spending this time like I am would be possible alone.

The next was a desire to explore. I had recently begun work on TB Tester at the Foundry, and seeing all of these people pursuing their Big Ideas – things that they are passionate about, things that could change the world – was starting to pull me irresistably towards entrepreneurship. I was also nearing the end of UOCD, a course which, likely due to my incredible group, I had immensely enjoyed and from which I had gained good idea of what exactly design is and how incredibly useful and enjoyable it can be. I had no real world experience in either of these areas, and I had no idea as to whether or not they were actually things I wanted to do, but I couldn’t go forward without giving them some real exploration. This simply wasn’t possible for me to do in the context of being a student at Olin and still both live and graduate.

So here I am. I will save the details regarding exactly what I will be doing for another post for fear of making this one longer than it already is (Ha! Can’t do a damn thing about that…), but I have little doubt that I made the right decision. In the words of Ben (here’s the part where I repeat something he said), stay tuned.

There’s never enough time!

me: Tim Smith, from Olin ’09. I’m an E:Bio major with aspirations towards grad school in the life sciences. I spent this last summer in the Roberts lab at Caltech doing a physical organic chemistry project about solvent effects on small-molecule conformations using NMR spectroscopy.

where: This fall, I’ll be working at the Human Rights Campaign headquarters in Washington, DC, near Dupont Circle. I’m only taking a semester off. I’ll be back at Olin for the spring, and I’ll graduate in-between 2009 and 2010.

what: I’ll be a field intern. I’m about to find out what that really means — I start work on Monday.

why: I’ve always been interested in politics and I’ve longed to see how it works on the ground, and to see how interest groups relate to their constituencies and to Congress. I really wanted to take some time to experience advocacy seriously, so I started looking at the possibility of doing a domestic study away to take classes in political science. The more I started thinking about it, the more working on an internship seemed like a better use of time and money (I’m actually getting paid for this instead of spending thousands of dollars for tuition), particularly since I’m looking to go to grad school in an unrelated field and don’t really need the credits. I began by looking for Darfur-related internships, since most of the activist work I’ve been doing for the last year at Olin has been related to the ongoing genocide and related conflicts there… but they wouldn’t take me, and frankly aren’t that well organized. Applying to the HRC was a natural follow-up; I’m an avid supporter of civil rights and the struggle for LGBT equality is in many ways one of our generation’s defining cultural battles. Last summer, I volunteered a bit with the now-defunct Commonwealth Coalition, which attempted to defeat Virginia’s anti-marriage amendment (which, sadly, passed). It was a great introduction to both voter outreach and working with LGBT groups and I’m super-excited about the chance to work for the HRC.

I start work Monday, so I don’t have a lot to say about what it’s been like so far. It’s hot here, and I’ve depleted my meager reserve of Polar seltzer. And now the family dog (I’m living in Northern Virginia with my parents — free room & board is hard to turn down) is potentially Internet-famous, thanks to poodlecam. Starting work will be good for me.

Initial Thoughts on a Year Off

I’m not sure exactly when the idea first occurred to me, but I do remember what went through my head when I first thought about taking a year off. The conversation with myself went something like this:

Wow. All the people at Olin are so amazing
Yeah, and there is so many opportunities
I know… unfortunately no one has any time because everyone is busy taking really hard classes. It is quite ironic that when I suddenly have so many things that I could do, I have less time than ever.
What do you think you could do if you actually had time to do stuff
Well the possibilities are endless. Well, I guess I could take a year off from classes, find other people to take time off as well, and work on some of these projects

So basically, the idea stemmed as a potential solution to one of the large, unsolved problems at Olin (and colleges everywhere): “So many opportunities, and so little time”

As the year continued, I kept thinking about it, realizing it would probably stay just an idea and that I would never act upon it. By this time, it was December and I had an idea of what I’d do during a “year off.” At that point I was heavily engulfed in a project with The Full Belly Project and loving every minute of it. I knew that I’d love to spend a year working on projects that would make a difference, but at the same time I knew that sounded too sketchy and too unplanned to be at all plausible for a full year.

Then something happened. I spent two weeks in Uganda, and fell in love with their values and sense of time. This trip caused me to start questioning a lot of what I was doing, and made me really consider what I wanted to do in life. At the same time, something else happened: I worked with several other students to start a non-profit design firm called IdeaTree Design. All of a sudden, I had motivation to take a year off and I had an organization to channel my projects through.

At that point, I started talking with other students about it. Chester liked the idea, and later convinced George to join in. Tim had been keen on the idea from the very start. Matt also had liked the idea from the start, but was unsure of exactly what to do. All of a sudden, we had a statistically significant number of students planning to take the year off.

Though my plans have changed significantly in the past 6 months, I still very much have the same ideals at heart.

Tune in later for more on what I want to accomplish and how we convinced Olin to let us take a year off.