Re-engineering Engineering at Olin College

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/magazine/30OLIN-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

IT ISN'T EASY TO BUILD a college from scratch, although, to listen to Miller, it’s a lot of fun. Miller recruited a leadership team, and the school invited 30 students (out of more than 600 applicants) to come in 2001 for a “partner year” in which they would help develop and test the curriculum. They helped come up with Olin’s DNA: project-based learning.

Alison Lee, a recent graduate now in South Korea on a Fulbright scholarship, said the process of solving seemingly insurmountable problems is an Olin rite of passage, like the project that was given to her and her fellow students: build a robot that can climb a wall. When it worked, she said, “it was the moment of realization that I could do anything.” (In a field where female students are traditionally scarce, more than 40 percent of Olin’s students are women.) The problem-based process is good preparation for the real world, said another student, Meenakshi Vembusubramanian. “You’re not going to go into a job and get a thermodynamics problem set,” she said. “You’re going to have a problem that’s badly defined.”

His classes have an art-school feel: students, dressed in T-shirts and jeans, shorts or pajama bottoms, are up and down and walking around the room, clustering around their projects and discussing them, cutting blue foam with a hot-wire cutter to make models. Linder told me he pushes his students not to just follow instructions. “Engineering,” he says, “has traditionally been focused on doing it right, but not on what’s the right thing to do.” That means designing products that are environmentally friendly and that respond to the needs of the people using them and not just to what the purchasing department wants. He urges his students to be more than team players. The goal, Linder said with utter earnestness, was to teach fledgling engineers “how to be bold.”

In some companies, he says, the freethinking products of Olin might have trouble fitting in. “Does industry want people like that? I think that’s a very good question, but I think this goes beyond what industry wants,” he said. “This is the right thing to do — this is what industry needs. If the country had more people like this, we’d be in a much better situation.”