(As of yesterday, all my notebooks - save the current one I'm writing in - have been processed. That backlog's gone. Hurrah!)

I was taking notes at an Olin Presidents' Council meeting. The best phrase from those notes is "Learn to be, not learn to know," which seems to be the crux of the notes of that particular discussion on "what makes Olin different?"

There's also a note on "who has not spoken [about what we can do to make our school better]? What have we not talked about? Who stays silent [in these conversations]?"

And another one, from the middle of a rousing discussion on (again) what Olin should do more of. "This is what Olin should do more. We are coming here to ask how to reinvent our school. Well, asking [the question] is how we do it [reinvent our school]." Followed by a less hurriedly-written memo saying I need to learn how to have better handwriting.

And then there's this diagram, after the note "being small forces us to be reactive. We have a low C(apacitor) constant. Don't low-pass too much! Want to learn how to cope with change." The conversation was on using Olin as an in-between system that would amplify the good things that came of its experiments with engineering education and output that to "the world" - vague term, I know. In any case, I then drew this...

Following this diagram are the words "I have spent too much time on ECS." I think it was meant to illustrate that despite Olin's touted flexibility and wackiness, we have our limitations, and a not-insignificant slew rate (that is, we can't change instantaneously). Also, we're not the only world-component that can do this. Other op-amps exist.

I also have a page where I tell myself to "get over the whole 'but I'm not an engineer' identity crisis by reading about the arbitrariness of categorizations and labels," which is a good example of how the qualitative research methods class with Prof. Silbey had affected my thinking about how engineering society works.

Interspersed between these pages are some sketches of Madge and Lauren Hafford giving their AHS capstone presentations, with notes on the presentations floating around them. Man. That was a year ago?

There's also the conversation from when I was this close to not graduating.

Mel: (paraphrased) I've already learned a lot, and I've learned that learning is something internal - why do I need the rubber stamp of a degree?
Gill: (paraphrased) To change the system you need to do it from the inside. The "rubber stamp" is your key.
Lynn: "If you want to be able to be effective in a culture, you need to understand and speak the language even if you don't buy it. This is what Gill said, and I know you understand it. Speaking the language != selling out."

It's odd to think that I've taken most of this year to trickle through the impact of the last few months of my undergraduate education (which included a lot more than the formal learning specified in the curriculum I was going through). A one-year time-out seems, really, just about right.