[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og - Braindump of the Mel. Seek coherency and relevance at your own risk.

Now that I’ve gotten the babbling about engineering education out of my system…



Last week, Chris Myers Asch from the US Public Service Academy came to visit Olin, thanks to David Soo. (I’m going to miss him when he leaves Olin for grad school next year.) The PSA is a proposal for a government-funded 4-year liberal arts college geared towards public service, with full scholarships for all students with the stipulation that they serve at least 5 years in their chosen sector (education, public infrastructure, environment, healthcare…) and Mr. Asch is traveling across the country full-time now, asking people to help him start a school. It remains to be seen how well the PSA is implemented when it eventually comes into being, but I have great admiration for what Asch and his colleagues are doing and will be watching the project with great interest. I believe they will do a spectacular job.



Tonight: For someone who’s perpetually dehydrated (something I’m trying to change by walking around with a water bottle), I’m surprisingly dependent on running water. Needham’s cleaning out the H2O system again, which means that we have no water at night until about 5:30am for a while (hence the second part of the post title, which comes from a sanity-check wiki where Olin folks posted to make sure the water problem was consistent across all of campus – as you can tell from the title, it’s the third time we’ve experienced this). The failure of little reflex actions like sticking your toothbrush under the tap or leaning down towards a water fountain jolt you out of normalcy and make you realize how much you take water for granted.



I remember staying at my grandparents’ house in Manila and brushing my teeth out of water from a little jug and bathing by scooping water from a barrel over my head. And we were among the wealthy ones. That was luxury, to have a jug of filtered water to drink from.



To bed, slightly thirsty and mildly sweaty. Tomorrow morning, I shall rejoice at the tap.

Weird. As I become more of a hacker, I move farther and farther away from engineering. I still love it dearly, but it’s often through a thin fog now, a bit of distance – it’s like leaving behind your best friend from childhood when you move to another state. You write letters back and forth, and you know you’ll move back home someday, but that when you meet again you’ll have grown up so much as to barely recognize each other and that your relationship will grow all the richer for having to get to know each other over again. Puppy love, and then something more.



Yesterday I accidentally intimidated Chris Morse by posting a two-page dense ramble of engineering education resources in response to Nikki’s innocent query to the metaf07 list for thoughts on ways to do a 2-credit independent study on pedagogy at Olin. “Mel, you covered 10x more material than any 2-credit independent study could cover in a semester,” said Marco. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past 5 terms?” I replied. “I haven’t been studying engineering. I’ve been studying engineering education. I’m an E:E.”



The second ‘E’ stands for education. Or maybe ethnography. Or editing – I enjoy writing a great deal. (You’re not seeing me in top form in this blog, since everything I write here is basically a pure braindump with typos removed.)



All excited, I went and emailed Gill. “Gill! Can we talk to you about self-directed learning? About grading, about-” You could see him smiling and shaking his head in his email response. “Get back to work,” Gill said. “I won’t discuss this with you until you finish your work to graduate.” “Sweet,” I replied. “Now I actually have a good reason to get my work done.” It’s like a big carrot – I hate walking towards carrots, but gosh, this is one shiny carrot. And I have a topic for the OSS paper I’m about to write for Gill, too. Little does he know what my topic is…*



How did profs like Gill and Chris ever decide to waste their time teaching punk kids like me? I’ll never really understand it, even when I do it myself someday, but I’ll always be incredibly thankful for it.



I’ll be back, engineering. I’m going to go away and grow up for a while in some other fields, but I’ll be back.



*yeah, it’s got the words “engineering” and “education” in the title… but a couple more crucial ones, too.

(1) I’m really good at learning.

(2) I’m really bad at school.

Unless (2) comes incidentally from (1), that is. I love the atmosphere of a school, the resources, the people, the environment, the opportunities. I’m very bad at following the requirements now. I’m trying to get back the ability to buckle down and check off boxes I may not think I’m learning from, but it’s an uphill battle.

If you told me a few years ago that I’d be doing poorly in classes, thinking about dropping out (“but Gill, it’s not like I have finals or anything else I’ll learn content from”) and being really happy and learning and still completely in love with school, I would have laughed at you. I love school so much that it’s very difficult for me to be in school, knowing what it could be and seeing what it actually is.

So this is my real final exam: Stay. Stick it out. Find a way to love the checkboxes, a way to make them something that you love. Be responsible. Follow through. Fit in with the standard a little, not because you should be like the standard, but because you still need to communicate with it. Learn how to live as an adult in this world, and graduate. Instead of running away, turn around and try to change the situation.

And with that, my diploma transforms from a rubber stamp to a meaningful rite of passage.

This is one of those posts that I’ll look back on and laugh at years down the road.

Joe Kendall and I presented our theory of design this afternoon; it’s a triangular space between Functionality, Aesthetics, and Value that grows and then shrinks in time (so it’s really two tetrahedons joined at the base, a shape for which I swear there’s a name I’m not thinking of) along with a series of names and ways to move within that space. The talk was inspired by our trip to the Osaka competition in January and grew out of our frustration at not having an adequate vocabulary to talk about design with. We’re reworking our talk for Expo, and I’d like to write a paper on it to see if we can solidify the theory we’ve come up with, maybe even do some research on it.



It seems so… fuzzy. And fuzziness is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s a difficult, complex field we’re talking about. To claim we can solidify terms at this point would be to dismiss the richness of the design terrain. This is where we need to be, wandering in a fog of ideas and absorbing and appreciating the haze while still moving forward towards a hill we can see things better by.



As a student who once dreamed of being an art major – and still does sometimes – I have a love-hate relationship with “artsiness.” On the one hand, it’s a wellspring of meaning and creativity. Personal expression, sublime beauty, raw emotion, precise articulation. On the other hand… “shininess” is not strictly necessary for functionality. And the engineer half of my brain says, “why bother?” When Eric Munsing talked about how Ben Linder reminded him to fine-tune the font on his resume, half of me went “yeah, noticing those details is great!” and the other half blanched and thought “what a waste of time.”



“Well, you have to think about those sorts of things,” Eric explained, “because designers – they make every little thing mean something. They don’t just wake up in the morning and put on clothes. They look at what the clothes say, what the font says about you. And it’s not that they’re obsessed with [surface] appearances, but they’re aware of it.”



“So part of being a designer is being aware of things, being able to be in the present moment,” I said, before realizing I’d heard those words before. “It’s like this weird western consumerism form of zen meditation.” Eric nodded. “Capitalist zen.” And it is, if you look at it a certain way. We’ve combined Western-style intellectual analysis frameworks with an Eastern-style depth of now-awareness. It’s a connection I’m going to keep an eye out for, this idea of design as zen.



In other news, I’m definitely sick (nope, the sore throat on Monday was not just dehydration) and having to blow my nose every few minutes is making it hard to write my papers. Whee. The routine is “write a few sentences, blow nose, drink water, cough, write, sneeze, repeat.



In other-other news, I’m starting to find a happy place in social science research – it’s an entire fleld where everybody, the whole point, is to be meta. The more meta you are, the better work you do. You collect data, then analyze it, then analyze your analysis, then analyze the analysis of your… it’s tons of information, all going around, whirling around, looking for small places to build solidity from, but it’s like walking in a swarm of idea-butterflies and thought-leaves, rippling through your hair in a way that’s just exhilarating. It’s stretching the boundaries of my mind in a way that engineering alone isn’t doing at the moment – I get more depth out of engineering if I approach it from this oblique angle of the social sciences. It’s almost as if engineering has become too orthogonal, too algorithmic… too oversimplified. I wanted to say “too easy,” but that would be dismissive of a tremendously difficult field that I love and respect a great deal, and hope to do more work in someday. It’s just that I want to understand around engineering for a little while, not plunging straight into it yet. Yet.



I want to learn more sociology. I don’t know very much about it, but I’m really sparking up on what I’ve experienced so far and I want – maybe to go to grad school and do social science research on engineering education, even. Get a doctorate in that before I get a doctorate in engineering. The current degree-wishlist stands at one master’s in product design, one doctorate related to education (either education, sociology, anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, technology in society, or something that will allow me to study engineering education) and one doctorate in either engineering or computer science. With the route I’m headed in, I think I’ll need all three to do what I want to do – partly for the credentials they’ll give me, but mostly for the depth and experience in the formal field that I’ll need to get if I want to change that field itself.



It’s the old argument, right? Sell out a little if you can remember who you are, because change comes from within… you have a bigger impact if you can change a system from the inside. You need to grok what you want to transform, you need to become part of it and have it become a part of you, and then transform yourself – and that is how you really change the world.

After anthropology class today I was doing research and read this note from the Futurepaths study.

Research from the neo-institutional perspective suggests that despite the effort to innovate, Smith and Olin are likely to develop programs that are isomorphic with the existing institutions. Despite efforts to hire and retain “non-traditional”professionals, the faculty at Smith and Olin, socialized and educated in the dominant, institutional culture of engineering, are likely to mimic and replicate the values, pedagogies, professional orientations, and taken-for-granted assumptions of conventional engineering through their teaching.

It’s… true. At least I think it’s true. Everything I’ve heard, seen, read, and done at Olin, coupled with everything I’ve read about the history of education and higher education, about pedagogy and classroom techniques, about educational philosophies and engineering philosophies and social theories and descriptions of engineering subcultures… all that has led me to the same conclusion no matter how hard I try to escape it. Finally reading someone else’s words saying the same thing I’d been thinking for months – and subtly, years – was like a blow to the gut.

Now, this doesn’t mean that being isomorphic is bad, even if it’s true (and I’m starting to believe that it is, although I can’t yet articulate it with a solid body of non-hearsay, non-biased evidence… that’s what research projects are for). It’s an opportunity. A tremendous chance to reexamine the foundations of our beliefs and assumptions. What have we taken for granted? What is engineering, and what does it mean to teach engineers? Become more aware of what we’re doing, what we’re not doing, why… and then, if we feel it is needed, we can change it. If we don’t change it, we will still know what we are doing and what effect it has, and that’s fantastic as well.

The trouble, in my opinion, is when a school does “magic,” which I’ll define as having something that functionally works while simultaneously baffling everyone as to why it does. Inertia starts because of “magic.” You don’t want to spoil this thing that’s working; touch it and who knows what will happen and whether you can put it back together again? (Think of the hesitancy some non-techies display when faced with the controls of a complex machine, no matter how robust the device actually is.) If you get to the root of the “magic” and understand the system and the tradeoffs you’re making, you gain the power and confidence to change it, and the power and confidence to keep it the same out of conscious knowledge, not fear.

That’s an important point I don’t think is brought up often enough nowadays in the Age of Innovation-As-Buzzword. “Innovation” doesn’t necessarily mean WHOA NEW SHINY THING LOOK AT ME ME ME! Sometimes it means understanding old things in different ways. Quiet, subtle musings are just as important as outrageously bold actions.

After the earthquake there was fire–but the LORD was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave. A voice said to him, “Elijah, why are you here?”

Last night was my mother’s birthday. I won’t say which one, but she’s doing remarkably well for having put up with a pair of young whippersnappers like me and Jason for 20 (or 18) years. Apparently, my family’s finally found my blog after months of me telling them they ought to read it if they want to find out what’s happening in my world. Huzzah! (And hello to my cousins, aunts, uncles, parents, brother, and whatever other kin may be out there.) I plan on writing the same stuff I’ve been writing; I’m not good at censoring myself at all, so I won’t.



Lunch took several hours, partly because it was smoothie day but mostly because of a long conversation with Allison and Emma from the Admissions department about staff innovation at Olin. Of all the people at our school, staff have the least encouragement and free time to try out and do wonderful things; they’re so busy triaging the daily grind that it wears away and their innate awesomeness doesn’t get much of a chance to shine through. We need to give them more space. In order to allow all staff members to devote one-fifth of their work hours towards personal projects they think will improve Olin (yes, this is an echo of Google’s 20 percent time) we need to make their workloads achievable within 32 hours a week, no small feat since most of them are probably pulling over 40 hour weeks now.



I believe that one possible answer is investing in better information management tools for staff so they don’t spend so much time wrestling with data, and will be talking with Admissions in the upcoming weeks about simple ways we can make this start to happen. I told her about my side project last summer at Design Continuum where I looked at the usability and efficiency of timesheets (which I started after hearing so many people complain about them) and came up with a report on the financial costs of timesheet inefficiencies and how the company could save thousands of dollars a year by streamlining the process. “Olin students can do this,” I told her. “You mentioned you don’t utilize your student workers fully over the summer – well, what if you had this be one of their projects?” Basically, act as an efficiency consultant for the Admissions department… and then branch out into other departments if time allows. So we’re going to see if we can make this happen. If any Olin students are reading this blog and looking for something to do over the summer, let Allison know.



Why aren’t we changing as much? “Why do you think we have so much bureaucracy?” Allison asked. “I think we’ve become too damn smart,” I told her. Risk-taking is inherently a stupid thing to do. You want to minimize it, cut your losses, know pretty much what you’re going to get. Starting a brand-new engineering school with no buildings, no faculty, no students – expecting the best faculty and students to come, expecting people to give credibility and support to something that wasn’t even a raw patch of ground – that’s really dumb. Smart people would never have started Olin. Only brilliant people brave enough to be stupid could have taken the risk to make this place.



And now we’ve gotten too smart, in many aspects, and need to teach ourselves how to be stupid again.



On a completely separate topic: Gui got his folding bike today. It’s a Dahon Boardwalk, about $200 on Amazon. It’s awfully shiny. I still need to figure out what I’m doing for transport this summer; I want a bike, but don’t know where I’m going to get an utilitarian city bike I can afford and maintain. It would be nice to have a Brompton, but the kind I’d want costs over $1,500, well beyond any budget I’ll ever have for the next couple of years. All the same, I wasted an hour today looking at folding bikes that I can’t afford, agonizing about what the “best” one would be. I need to stop doing that; sometimes it’s best to just make a decision, live with what you have, and improve it when you get the next good chance. Why do I care about the best $1,500 bike when I don’t have $1,500? I shouldn’t.



Or I should somehow obtain $1,500. I’ve had a number of good friends yell at me over the past few weeks because I’m undervaluing myself to the point where it cripples what I can do. I feel bad about asking for money, for a decent salary, and I need to convince myself that I’m worth more than $10/hr. Trouble is, I want to be available to help whoever needs helping without expecting much more than some food and a roof in exchange. I wish I could retire young and be able to spend the rest of my life pitching in on wherever I think I’ll be helpful without having to worry about the economics of having enough money to survive. Trouble is that in order to do that, I need money first, and the way I’m going, I’m not going to get it.



Anyone have any suggestions for how to get over this? Is there anyone I can go to and sit down with for a couple of hours to (for lack of better words) “figure out what I’m worth” so I can justify not being ashamed of asking for decent compensation?



And as I type this, I feel ashamed, because $10 an hour is amazingly high compared to what many adults around the world are making. People have to support families on a dollar a day, and here’s this college kid complaining about making ten times as much in an hour and I certainly don’t have kids to feed. But still; my getting a higher salary won’t make them get lower ones (at least not directly), and the best way for me to help people is to ground myself in a position of stability first, and financial stability will be a big part of that.



So if you have any suggestions for this, please let me know. And if you’re interested in joining me in a personal finance marathon day on May 8th, let me know. I plan on setting up money management software, starting a retirement account (index funds!) for investments, making a budget, creating an emergency fund, and figuring out my bank accounts and credit card. If other people are interested, we can have a little party.

Came up with these rules at MetaOlin tonight to make our group run smoother with fewer collisions and meetings needed.

1. When in doubt, email.
2. If you have something to say, say it.
3. Ask forgiveness, not permission.
4. Six to freeze.
5. Point trumps.

Here’s the rationale behind each.



When in doubt, email. Get information out to the entire group as quickly and easily as possible. Don’t worry about polishing it, or even about it being terribly useful; sometimes it’s not so much about edifying everyone else as it is expressing yourself in a way that enables you to move forward. Also note that this is about getting information out, not waiting for a reply back; it’s a “tell, don’t ask” philosophy. Email is mentioned here because it’s a medium guaranteed to reach all members of the group with equal clarity and roughly equal latency, and also creates a record of the transmission; other media may be used as well.



If you have something to say, say it. We’re all smart and thick-skinned, and we trust each other to have everyone’s best interests in mind. We need to be honest, we need to be blunt, and we need to be able to say things right away and fast and trust that our teammates will take it in context and handle it in stride. If you spend more time publicly agonizing in front of your team over whether to communicate something than it would actually take for you to communicate it, then just say it already; sometimes pushing words out there just takes less time.



Ask forgiveness, not permission. All actions have to start with someone, so they might as well start with you. Unless your actions will directly harm someone or prevent them from getting their work done, go ahead and do what you’re thinking of doing (and as per precept #1, email everyone and let them know). If someone has an issue with what you’ve done, they’ll let you know, as per precept #2. It’s also easier to modify and critique an existing artifact than it is to start one from scratch.



Six to freeze.  This refers to the the agreement we have that all actions/features/etc are subject to debate, revision, and criticism unless it’s gotten a thumbs-up by all six teammates in some way. If you decide not to ask permission (#3), do something, then let the group know (#1), recognize that some teammates may disagree and be blunt about it (#2) and that you’ll have to react constructively and nondefensively to their feedback. This is intended to develop the strategy “hack early and hack often.” Make quick releases, send them out for feedback, and release again; don’t sink 100 solo hours into a deliverable without somehow making sure you’re on the right track, or knowing that you’re willing to risk not being on the right track.



Point trumps. Every project or subcomponent of a project has a point person who is responsible for making sure the task gets done whether that’s through doing it themselves or getting others to do it. For matters related to a given task, the point person has the power to override all other comments, including the previous 4 precepts. We trust each other to exercise this power wisely.