“Engineering is not a body of knowledge. Engineering is a process,” declares RichardMiller, the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering’s spirited president, succinctly summarizing the college’s raison d’être.
If this sounds different from the objective of your
engineering school, that’s because it is.
Founded by a board of directors who felt that today’s engineering
education needed to be electric-shocked into the 21st century, Olin
recruited Richard Miller to kick-start a new teaching program—an experiment,
really— based on the oldest of philosophies (Confucius himself gets the
credit): “Tell me, and I’ll forget; show me, and I may remember; involve me,
and I’ll understand.”
And the experiment is working. Students are turning down offers from MIT,
Stanford, and Harvard for the privilege of being one of the 50 students accepted
out of the roughly 500 students who apply each year. Here, students pay a maximum of $38,000 in
tuition for a full four years of education, develop a patent by the age of 19,
have a business (with investors) set up by graduation, as well as a job offer with a starting salary
$25,000 above other engineering graduates.
What’s more, they have a gender neutral student body—nearly unheard of
in today’s engineering classes—and all this is accomplished with a non-tenured
faculty and zero academic departments.
How does Olin do it?
By using a design-based curriculum (which includes taking art, music,
business, and humanitarian courses at nearby Babson and Wellesley Colleges),
Olin leaves behind the “books-first-hardware-later” mindset of today’s most
elite schools for a more hands-on approach.
It began with an unlikely undertaking. After meeting with his faculty to discuss
what they remembered about their experiences in college, Miller found a common
theme: most of them remembered nothing significant in their early freshman and
sophomore science and mathematics classes, but all of them remembered—most in
great detail—their senior projects, in which they actually had to create
something. This got Miller
thinking: why not have students complete
projects first?
So the first assignment for the just-out-high-school
students at Olin? Create a working pulse
oximeter in five weeks. Resources? Only the library and a patent drawing.
The faculty, expecting the students to come complaining that
they didn’t understand the physics behind the making of the machine, were
shocked to find an ugly, grey wire thing show up in their classroom five weeks
later: it was a pulse oximeter (sort
of)—but, more important, it worked! They
retrieved a pulse oximeter from a hospital, and the readings between the two machines
were in sync. The students had done it—all
without one math or science or physics prerequisite.
The epiphany that accompanied this accomplishment was
game-changing: “Uniformly, across education, we underestimate what students can
do,” says Miller. And Miller was
determined that his school would not repeat the mistakes of others.
Now, Olin is on the forefront of engineering education,
creating some of the most in-demand graduates in the nation. With its design-centered curriculum, students
are expected to complete 20 projects in four years. “They don’t just learn about engineering,”
Miller states. “They learn to be an engineer.”
Ultimately, Miller wants a new kind of engineer that focuses
on people—meeting their needs and solving their problems. “Our hope is that
Olin students will be a force for innovation and change no matter where they go
or what they do.” So far, it looks like
Olin is doing just that.
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