Student Blog

I don’t think I’ve ever gotten around to actually talking about what I do on a regular basis. This weekend was particularly fun:

Friday:

• Dinner with all of the women who do Bio Research at Joanne Pratt’s (bio professor) house, with Russian food organized by Kate!
• Seeing 21 with friends
• Dropping in at Casino Night hosted by SAC- a new event this year with real dealers and ipods to win!
• Off to MIT to see new friends over there during CPW- including meeting their Prefrosh

Saturday:

• Studying for Sig Sys Test
• Enjoying the nice weather!
• Visiting MIT to “celebrate” a friends’ anniversary- of when they met at CPW

Sunday:

• Studying more for Sig Sys
• Sig Sys Test
• Homework/Dinner at Panera with a friend
• More homework
• Design meeting
• Meeting for LOA next year!!!!!
• To do list stuff.

Saturday was also supposed to be populated by an exciting visit out to see a friend at Clark- but that never materialized. On the upside I got to study more as a result, and I think my test went pretty well.

So moving on- LOA!! LOA= Leave of Absence= I won’t be on campus next semester. Nor will I be graduating on time. (This makes me wonder, how old will the average holder of a 2011 diploma be? between deferred years and LOAs, I estimate quite high).

Regardless, myself, and 5 friends have put a deposit down on a house to lease for next year. We’ll be living there and pursuing our own interests, projects, and businesses, rather than having another year of class immediately. It will hopefully help us to refocus what we’re interested in and what we want to be moving towards with out final two years.

It wasn’t an easy decision to pursue- it means a year of uncertainty and risk, and not graduating with our class. However, I think it will be worthwhile on the whole. Here’s where you come in- I have tons of ideas on what to pursue, but I’m always open to more. Have ideas for what I should do on my LOA? Let me know!

-Ellen

Taking a breath long enough to leave this note:

My second vacation of the semester starts Friday. I have a lot I’d like to write about, but in the rush to organize the 2 weeks of travel and finish the first draft of the Organic Agriculture research paper for International Marketing, and telecommunicate myself both into a dorm living arrangement for next year and a summer job, I’ve had to stick with observation and put off on the synthesis. To add another significant planning task to the docket, Olin’s online registration period will fall right in the middle of my wanderings; This is the sort of situation when one calls upon the good will of a fellow Oliner and lends them the keys to one’s student account to click the buttons in their stead.
I’m brewing up a story on a cool entrepreneurial experience I had recently: I got the chance to watch some masters students in business management deliver the final presentations of their year long entrepreneurial consulting projects. I’ll tell you about in when I get back to Nantes at the end of the month.

Until then- bc

Curious how I’m spending two weeks of break?

Hey all!

After a long long sojourn from blogging, I’ve finally got another report on life at Olin as a senior — here my take on some of the big themes!

• I think I can speak for a lot of my class in saying that I’m still a little surprised by how freaking FAST the past ~ four years have gone — graduation is in a month and 21 days!! Just a couple weeks ago, the Parent and Alumni Relations Office hosted a senior night event for us at Roger’s pub over at Babson. The event was called 2008 Hours Till Graduation, to, yes, celebrate the fact that we hit the 2008 hours till graduation mark!! Here are some pictures from the night: (more…)

Now that decisions are coming out (congrats to the future class of 2012!), I thought I’d take the chance to blog about how Candidates’ Weekend appeared to me, an old sophomore. While last year I worked Design Build, the unevaluated team activity that candidates start out their Saturday with, this year I was a student interviewer.

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First of all, let me apologize for my sporadic blogging. It’s extremely easy to say “oh, this is a great project! I’ll talk about it in my blog!” and then forget to blog for awhile. So one thing I’ve been meaning to talk about this semester is my Software Design course. I think the course is great because it’s the perfect blend of instruction, self-teaching, implementation, and projects.

It also has one of my favorite tools thus far, that I get to experience four times per week- one hour lectures. Both my Software Design class and my Circuits class have one hour lectures. These times are nice because it’s really easy to tune in and focus for an hour, and it’s enough information that you can keep it in your head without forgetting half of it.

So the point we’re at right now is the transition between the learning phase with lectures, homework, and labs, and then the large project that we’re starting. The homework was a lot of fun because it ranged from things like moving turtles around a drawing canvas to create letters and pictures in various ways, analyze words and letters building up to a Markov generator, and programming a Monte Carlo simulation.

Now we’re moving into the project phase. I’ll be working with blogger Jeff Moore (’10) and Nick Hobbs (’11) to develop something that Jeff and I have been talking about for over a year, without enough time to do it. We’re going to be building an inventory tracking system for the student government, CORe.

Our overall goal for the system is to be able to give an object a barcode, read in that barcode so items can be checked out to a specific student using a mag strip reader and our student ID cards, and then keep a complete database of all of the items that CORe owns so people can find out what they are, and where they are, to keep people from buying duplicate items, or renting things that we already own. I’m excited for making something so tangible for a class, particularly since I know exactly how it will be applied.

Ellen

PS- All of the away blogging makes me extremely jealous. I am planning on studying away next Spring. It’s between Australia and France…

So one of my roommate’s parents are in town and we spent the afternoon touring around the Citadel (a major tourist attraction in Cairo) with them. Talking with her parents, who had never been to Cairo before, made me realize how much I’ve adapted to life here. I no longer worry about basic things like hailing a cab or buying food and I’ve grown to tolerate a lot of Cairo’s more irritating idiosyncrasies like the congestion, smog, and harassment much better. But when I was talking with her dad about living in Cairo and he asked me what I missed from the US while living in Cairo and what I would miss from Cairo once I returned to the US it sort of floored me. I guess I’d thought about it before, but I couldn’t really come up with anything to say at the time so it got me thinking.

I’ve been here in Cairo for almost two months to the day which means, as much as I hate to say it, that I’m almost halfway done with my time here. Realistically I know that the next two months and change will fly by faster than I can really know.

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Including:

• Marketing Project Piques Organic Curiosity
• Weekend in Normandy Heralds Historic Reflection
• Don’t Stress Out, Career Building is for Americans

The Cold War exhibit, the Caen Memorial, Caen, Normandy.

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Bennett @ 10:01 am

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