OLIN TURNS 10

If you were re-designing undergraduate engineering education, what would you do?

Olin College of Engineering, started 10 years old, focuses on the design process, collaborative teams, entrepreneurship, and real-world projects.  Olin recently won a $500,000 prize from the National Academy of Engineering in recognition of their experiments and success in developing effective engineering leaders. 

Mission:  Olin College prepares students to become exemplary engineering innovators who recognize needs, design solutions, and engage in creative enterprises for the good of the world.

Richard Miller, founding president, was interviewed by Jeffrey Mervis for an article  in Science Insider.  Miller's evocative quotes give a feel for Olin's philosophy:

An engineer is someone who envisions something that has never been, and does whatever it takes to make it happen. If you can't envision it, you can't create it.  And we're looking for people with passion, because nothing hard ever gets done without real passion behind it.

We set out to create a new paradigm for undergraduate engineering education, and I think we have made a good start. But the students were paying attention to something else. We thought we were talking about innovative engineering. They thought we were talking about education reform. 

An employer survey given out two times, after 6 months and 2 years, finds that new Olin graduates are equal to those with 3 to 5 years of experience. We believe that competency is a consequence of working in teams. Our kids are used to problems that are ill-defined. They develop practical solutions and get it done. And that's what most companies like.

The American aerospace industry was invented in a bicycle shop in Ohio. It wasn't invented in a physics lab. In the United States, in my view, we don't do a good enough job of teaching the process of creative design. And while there's obviously a place for the content and body of knowledge, assuming that is all education is about or the most important part is a distraction.

One of the challenges Olin addresses is the huge attrition rate in undergraduate engineering:

Only about 4.5% of the bachelor degrees awarded in the United States last year went to students studying engineering. And it's a declining market share. About half of the students who declared engineering upon entering any college in the U.S. will not graduate with an engineering degree. We think that this is largely a fixable problem. 

Professor Mark Somerville elaborates:  “I think the key thing that Olin does really well is recognizing the importance of creating an environment where students love to learn—where they are working really hard, but having fun doing it."  Every student, for example, must start and run a business. They also have to design and build something as a freshman, a project normally reserved for seniors at other schools.

Olin does not intend to participate in the current trend of online offerings from major universities:

You can learn a lot of the content from a book, or by interacting with the Internet. But you can't learn the process of engineering from a book. ...  A lot of it comes from direct experience. You have to learn to listen to that inner voice and shape it with reactions from other people.

Olin's Jeff Satwicz helped create the first solar trash compactor.

We think of engineering as a profession. And like all professions, it has less to do with what you know than with what you can do. To be good at a profession is the equivalent of being good at a performing art... I think you have to learn to perform in front of a live audience, to read the audience, how to deal with stage fright, and so on.

The NAE award cites the college's commitment to design process, collaborative teams, entrepreneurship and real-world projects, and also praises Olin's collaborative work. 

We have a higher calling, and that is to inspire other universities to think about the undergraduate education they are offering. The idea is to incorporate the latest learning in cognitive sciences and education and do a better job of inspiring the next generation of students in STEM education.  

We're hoping to help inspire and lead a transformation of engineering education in the U.S. and around the world. So we plan to ...work more with other universities in what we call consultation and co-design partnerships. The idea is for faculty members at other universities to come to us with their ideas about how to innovate, and give them a chance to try them out and plant them at Olin. There are about 10 universities that have already done that, and about 200 universities have contacted us to talk about their ideas.

Even problem-solving the start-up pains used an innovative approach (source):

During the first official school year, a dozen students descended upon Miller’s office to tell them that they were transferring out of the school. They said they were overwhelmed with work.  “I told them, wait, don’t go. So we set up a rubber castle on the soccer field and gave the students eggs to throw at the faculty members. We had fun for a day,” said Miller. “Then we told the students to count the hours they were studying. Let’s try and recalibrate.”

Enjoy reading the whole article or check out the college website for more detail on Olin's innovation in engineering education.  

Also of note:  45% of Olin students are female. This compares to a recent national statistic of only 17.8% female undergraduate engineering majors, a 15 year low.