says Krimmel. They spent the first year helping design the curriculum before embarking on their freshman year with 45 others. So the first graduation ceremony was in 2006.
Morikawa, who is returning this fall after taking a year off with five other students to launch an educational software company called Alight Learning, told me about the User Oriented Collaborative Design course, a sophomore year requirement. His group started a project to help firefighters by interviewing fire department personnel about the sticking points where a new device or technology might make their jobs easier, better, or safer. The students then came up with a bunch of ideas and winnowed them down to nine top candidates, which they took back to firefighters in the form of blue foam mockups and computer screenshots. Morikawa says they got some things wrong and some right, and with the feedback winnowed things down to three ideas the firefighters might really use.
The course had no tests. Instead, the team appeared before a faculty group every two weeks and had eight minutes to present its progress. The final consisted of a similar presentation to a different set of faculty team members hadn’t worked with before.
Morikawa’s team produced something called the Integrated Visual Alarm Network (Ivan). Firefighters told the group that one bottleneck was the crackly station speakers used to relay instructions. An alarm would come in and they would have to listen for a minute to figure out what to do, Morikawa explains. Ivan was designed to augment the existing audio with screens placed in the firehouse and on trucks. “They can get all that information at a glance on the way down to the trucks and inside the trucks as well,” Morikawa says.
That’s just one example of the kind of work Olin students do. For an Expo at the end of each semester students put together a poster session on a class project or personal interest. Some 200-300 guests are invited to review the posters.
Everyone at Olin takes a course called Fundamentals of Business Entrepreneurship, which involves starting a real business, producing something, marketing it, and selling it—reporting along the way to a board of directors comprised of faculty members. And finally, the senior year includes the Senior Capstone Program in Engineering, a year-long project for real clients.
One big aim of all this is to teach students about engineering commercial products. That way, Krimmel says, “The students feel…that, ‘Geez I can go off and build anything,'” he says.
Roughly 25 percent of Olin students go on to graduate school. In four years, the school has also produced four Fulbright scholars. There are seven Olin Googlers, and a like number at Athenahealth. Microsoft has hired four graduates. Other employers of Olin grads include Akamai, Boston Scientific, Analog Devices, DEKA Research, IBM, General Electric, and Genzyme.
A survey of employers of the Class of 2006 asked how Olin students stacked up against graduates of other schools. A majority responded that after one year on the job, Olin grads performed as well as other employees who had 2-5 years of work experience, Guerriero reports.
Not everything has gone as anticipated, of course. Most notably, as I mentioned early on, the free tuition experiment hasn’t worked out. In the face of falling endowment due to the current financial crisis, officials have decided that the school can only cover 50 percent of tuition beginning with the class arriving in August of 2010. Still, as Krimmel points out, with tuition running about $40,000 a year, that is an $80,000 savings over four years. “The dream is to go back to full tuition scholarships,” he says. But he thinks that could take 10 years or longer. [This paragraph originally stated that the changes in tuition coverage began this fall, not in 2010. Other language has been adjusted to reflect changes noted higher in the story.]
Free tuition notwithstanding, Olin’s overall experiment seems to have been extremely successful to date. Next summer the school plans to launch the Center for Transformation of Engineering Education to share its approach more widely through summer workshops for faculty from other engineering schools. The center is still in the planning stages, but Guerriero says it will not be “a cooking school,” where visitors are taught the Olin way. Instead, it will be an interactive workshop where guests can come for a few days of immersion in Olin’s approach, including mock classes, as well as a like period on reforms attendees are trying to implement at their institutions—so that both parties can learn from each other.
No one says Olin’s model is the only way to improve engineering education. Still, I believe the country needs more schools like Olin trying different approaches. Some students will shine in these environments who wouldn’t shine otherwise—and so will some faculty. And if I were hiring engineers at Microsoft, HP, Analog Devices, or wherever, I would want to make sure I drew some talent from this pool, as well as more traditional programs. Excellence, after all, often comes from a diversity of approaches.
