New college sends off class that engineered it

NEEDHAM -- When they applied to the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, the school was little more than a pile of dirt. Still, they accepted offers of admission, lured by the opportunity to create their own college, as much as by the free tuition.

They helped build a school where professors go by first names and eat lunch with students every day. A school so devoted to democratic principles that students sometimes vote about what voting procedures should be before they decide the issue at hand. A school where a central provision in the honor code demands ''openness to change."

On Sunday, these 66 students, Olin college's first graduating class, will accept their diplomas from a tiny, close-knit college that eschews traditional trappings.

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Eight of the original 75 transferred out, and one isn't graduating yet, but the rest have racked up successes that could rival the results at an engineering powerhouse like MIT. Some graduates will head to the nation's best graduate schools and famous corporations, while a few will work for start-ups they founded.

As they begin their professional lives, they cannot trade on the name of a venerable university. But they can tout a unique college experience.

''I put so much of myself into this place, it's going to be hard to leave," said Polina Segalova, 22, who will enter a doctoral program in mechanical engineering at Stanford University, paid for by a prestigious National Science Foundation fellowship. ''It's so crazy to think back to when we were kids right out of high school. We were working alongside faculty, and they were taking us seriously."

In 1997, the New York-based F.W. Olin Foundation announced plans to build a four-year engineering college, starting from scratch. Expressing the view that the American education system was failing to prepare engineers adequately for the 21st century, the foundation abandoned its tradition of funding engineering buildings on existing campuses. The foundation has given the college about $460 million, virtually all of its money, and is preparing to dissolve the charity.

The original idea was to quickly expand the student population, currently 300, to 650, but the school wound up spending about $75,000 to $100,000 per student each year. That was more than school officials anticipated to keep a 9-to-1 student-to-faculty ratio and purchase materials for the 15 to 20 major engineering projects that students do over four years. Whether the school will expand remains unresolved.

From the beginning, the college's main goal was to experiment, emulating its namesake, the late Franklin W. Olin, who died in 1951 after making his mark as an entrepreneur in ammunition in both world wars. The school was founded with no tenure or academic departments and emphasizes group projects over lectures.

Some of the nation's top high school graduates took up the challenge to help develop the school, turning down places like Harvard, MIT, and Yale. Olin committed to offering free tuition indefinitely, which helped win attention from potential applicants. The first two classes got free housing, but few students describe money as the key factor in their decisions, perhaps because many were offered hefty need-based or merit scholarships elsewhere. They came here to do something different.

Thirty new high school graduates, dubbed partners, arrived in fall 2001, a year before they became freshmen. They spent the year working with professors to design the school's curriculum, honor code, and governance structures. At the time, none of the five airy, contemporary buildings that now make up the suburban campus existed; the partners lived sandwiched together in modular housing.

In 2002, 45 more students arrived, joining the partners to form the first freshman class. After only a few weeks of classes, a dozen students approached the school president, Richard K. Miller, to tell him they were so overworked that they wondered if they might not be cut out for Olin. Miller canceled classes for a day and rented an inflatable ''bouncy castle" for students to blow off steam. What started as an egg toss ended with students pelting professors. Faculty cut down on homework, realizing they had been assigning work as if their class was the only one students were taking.

At the beginning of freshman year, there were no clubs, no standards for overseas study, no upperclass curriculum. Students and faculty, working in joint committees, had to invent it all.

''The first couple of years were a lot of work," said Katerina Blazek, 22, who is also heading to Stanford with an NSF fellowship to study mechanical engineering. ''There's a tension between building the college and being a student. How do you get your work done for calculus class when there's a curriculum that needs to be designed for junior year?"

Along the way, the students created an Olin culture. In the early days, students grew tired of so much discussion about every decision that they began signaling ''thumbs up" and ''thumbs down" to avoid repetition. Today, the gestures are a regular part of class discussion.

Any student or professor can modify a college Web page, known as Mr. Wiki. A professor might use it to solicit feedback on an idea, or a student might announce that he can ferry people in his car to ''free cone day" at Ben & Jerry's. Olin has a homegrown set of trading cards that feature professors and students. One card shows a giant cup of coffee with the line, ''Only two things at Olin are constant: work and caffeine."

Students rarely discuss their grades, and many opposed awarding honor classifications to the top graduates, seeing it as a blow to Olin's community spirit. There will be no honors awarded for this class, but the issue may be revisited later.

The curriculum that has emerged through faculty and student efforts emphasizes art and design more than traditional engineering, with the goal of educating a well-rounded ''renaissance engineer."

The students do more group projects than at most engineering schools, culminating with senior projects, most of them paid for by corporate sponsors.

One group designed a robotic tractor to spray organic pesticides in an orchard; another developed an automated tuberculosis test.

Future classes won't find their college as unformed, but Olin officials said they will keep urging students and professors to constantly rethink what should be taught and how.

They have even talked about not admitting a freshman class one year, in order to have another experimental partner year.

''I would hope Olin never looks completely safe," said Duncan C. Murdoch, vice president for enrollment.

''I hope we continue to attract the same kind of students who stepped out on the ice with us when the campus was under construction and building the curriculum was like laying down track in front of a running locomotive."

Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com.