The OLINsider

Uh oh. My calendar informs me that there are only 12 days until the end of classes and about 3 weeks until all of my projects are due. That also means about 3 weeks until I am half-way through my time at Olin. Not really sure which of those is scarier.

Last month was FULL of awesome community service projects!  This post will be mostly photos, partially because I love pictures, and partially because I am pressed for time =].

The first thing that happened [of high importance] was Relay for Life, the American Cancer Society's number 1 fundraiser.  The idea behind this amazing fundraiser is that cancer never sleeps, so neither do we.  Members of teams take turns walking around the track overnight.  We celebrate our survivors, remember those we've lost, and fight back against this disease, to try and make a world with less cancer and more birthdays.  I'm a member of the Wellesley College committee [pictured here, at approximately 4 am]

Despite being fairly busy, this past weekend has had lots of opportunities for de-stressing and having fun, starting with double holidays, since it was both Easter and Passover. Saturday night, some friends invited me to eat the Seder meal-and kindly accompanied it with a follow-along transliterated flow chart.This was a first for me, and something I'm glad I got to experience. Later that evening I went to the Vigil (a late-night Easter church service) and ran into some Needham-ites I know and hadn't seen in a while-it's always nice to feel like I know local people. The next day, OCF had Easter dinner-and just as I was recovering from the jelly-bean induced coma, SAO/CORe (student government) stepped in to prepare for elections with a study break featuring blocks of chocolate so big we had to take a hammer to them.






So, Christos Anesti, Happy Passover and remember to vote!

Not really. But the Class of 2013 did have the chance to watch a fight to the death a few days ago.

Not really. But we did watch a theatrical fight to the death. Together!

Olin asks for a bit of money from students every semester (welcome to college, folks!), but student representatives always find a good way to strategically give it back. Each class has a fund to pull from throughout the year, and our reps thought the class might enjoy a ride on the Hunger Games bandwagon, and substantially subsidized the ride using class moolah. The result: a mental break on a Friday night, the ability to talk somewhat intelligently about current pop culture (reaching outside the Bubble, perhaps), and quite the car ride with some classmates.

Here's the group before heading out (photo graciously taken by Jacob '12, an innocent passer-by). See if you can spot the costumes -- Hunger Games characters and otherwise.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I ran a brief life-hack experiment regarding treating college as a 9-5 job. I can't claim originality of the idea-I know I've heard it mentioned a couple of times before, but I don't remember where I first encountered it.

As you may have noticed, Oliners are a busy bunch. We take challenging-is-an-understatement classes with enthusiasm, pursue extracurricular interests passionately and usually can't resist getting involved in any good project. This semester alone I've been regularly involved in 4 classes, teaching engineering at a high school, a Spanish language co-curricular, the student Catholic association, writing this blog, job searching for the summer, a three-college culture and leadership group, and getting sucked (very willingly!) into late-night conversations about politics, philosophy, meta-Olin and "woah, how does that work!".

I have two key observations to set the context for this experiment:

1. There are so many awesome things to do and learn in the world!
2. I'm happier when I eat and sleep and have quiet-time regularly.

In order to maximize my ability to do both of those things, I've decided to just try a couple different time management/work theories and see what happens.

The 9-5 theory is pretty simple-treat classes as a clock-in/clock-out job. No wasting time on the job; no putting things off until midnight; but at 5pm, you're done.

I can't believe the weather right now. It was 85 yesterday. 85 EIGHTY-FIVE. IN MARCH. </mindblown>