This is the school I want to go to: http://olin.edu/
When
I arrived on campus in December, I met Colin, who was the student who
had replied immediately to my post to the Olin OLPC mailing list a
month before. "Oh, it's cool you're doing Sugar on a Stick - want to
meet up when you're around?" So I talked Colin and some other folks in
the OLPC chapter about SoaS and open source and education.
The people there are generally really, really open - they throw questions at you, they are interested in what you're doing.
It's
a small place. You run across the same people all over again - "Oh, hi!
What are you doing?" "We're doing this cool project!" "Let me see!"
People are hilariously busy over there. I don't know how this is at
other colleges, but you can walk into the Academic Center at midnight
and work on projects... when I went to bed, at 1 or 2 AM, it was "Wait,
you're already going to bed? We're just starting to work!"
In
the evening, there was something I'd never heard of before, "Professors
Storytelling." Everybody sat down in the dorms; one professor had his
kids read a Dutch book for children and was translating that into
English. Another professor told the story about how he met his wife
when she bailed him out of jail for a college prank. It's like a huge
family sitting together and talking about all this stuff they have been
doing when they were young.
It's hard to put it in words.
Fast forward three months to Candidates' Weekend, the final step in the Olin admissions process. This weekend is not about your academic abilities, but rather about the cultural
fit. You find yourself talking a lot to students and professors,
exploring Olin, while everybody is out there, trying to figure out how
you'd do at Olin. My friend Greg DeKoenigsberg accompanied me on this trip.
When we got there, a couple of students I had been talking to before in
December came by and went "Oh, hi! You're back! Good to see you! What
have you been up to?"
And this is where Sebastian thinks "this place is it" again.
I
went to the entrepreneurship session, where a student named Matt Ritter
was giving a presentation on how FAIL belongs in your time at Olin and
how FAILING and learning from all this FAIL is a good experience. FAIL
FASTER. (http://blogs.olin.edu/pgp/2010/03/taking-a-leave-of-absence-loa-from-olin--matts-story.html)
Greg
and I went to the robotics lab. There were girls building some robots
to be able to crawl and walk on a surface like Mars. "You want to
control him?" they asked, and they pushed the XBox controller into
Greg's hands. We started a conversation on how they had trouble putting
all the code chunks on the robot because LabView compiled all these
libraries together until the program couldn't execute any more...
We
did student-led projects under hilarious time pressure, with strange
materials and arbitrary limitations and requirements - some way of
transporting water... almost all teams failed epically, constructions
collapsed even before the organization started - FAIL FASTER!
I
was talking to Allen Downey, a professor there. He wrote an open source
textbook called "How To Think Like A Java Programmer," and then someone
took his textbook and applied it for a different language (Python).
"Yeah, this was Jeff Elkner," said Allen, and Greg and I jumped around
and went "Jeff Elkner! We know him!" The world is pretty small. We
talked about getting students more into open source projects and having
them actually do something during the time they were studying.
When
we were talking about the different majors you could take at Olin - you
could do electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and a different
number of concentrations like computing, bioengineering... you could
also design your own concentration. And Greg and I looked at each other
and went "OPEN SOURCE!"
And that is what I want to do there.
