Olin,

This is in many ways a letter to my younger self, and the students I went through Olin with. It is a letter to you, and in some sense it is a letter to the college itself, the principles it was founded on, and selfishly my hopes for the college in the coming decade. 

In the last 18 months, my context has dramatically expanded, both personally and professionally in ways that have called me out and restructured how I think about what is possible. I don’t have any answers, but there are a couple of things I wish I had known and held myself to earlier. 

I arrived at Olin enthusiastically optimistic about what engineering would let me do in the world. But a lot of us get through two months and realize the world’s problems are harder and more complicated than we thought, and only very partially technical problems (if not caused by technology), and resign ourselves to a belief that shifts are not possible and technology is in broad strokes bad. You do a two hour Products and Markets exercise on an assigned SDG and realize the solutions that you wanted to appear do not. You read one paragraph ethics in robotics and AI, realize you don’t have answers, and choose to not engage. 

I have been down this circle. I still go down it every now and then. The world is full of deeply unfair and extractive things. They make me ill. And I don’t know how to answer to them. But this conclusion is intellectually lazy. Because when we look back, over the course of history and the moments in which technological and political shifts have rapidly occurred, it becomes undeniably clear that the world is malleable. The things that you care about are possible. Not perfectly, and not with ease. But be serious - the thing that you will spend your life chasing and building for was never going to be solved at first glance. It demands you to sit with uncertainty, to engage, and to wrestle. 

Hunt it. 

The second overlapping but separate dynamic I want to address is how victimization dominates the narrative of how people move through campus and academic life at Olin. Circumstance is blamed constantly. We create logical narratives of some injustice that has been done to us that allows us to sit comfortably in having been wronged and aggrieved in some permanent or structurally damaging way. People (including me), do this with everything from the social scene, to the administration, to a foundational introduction course. The school, if not enables, at the very least allows this to happen, making exceptions, being understanding. And the outcome is that we are allowed to do nothing. So many Olin students sit in this emotional burnout, weighed down, and captured.

This victimization leads to a full removal of agency.

And agency is very hard to get back. I am not here to say this issues aren’t real - they very much are, and are worth acknowledgement, and accountability where possible, but life is not operating on principles of justice. Things are brutal, a tilt, and only get less fair from here. 

By blaming whatever the object of the day is, you are spared of agency. You have no imperative to hold yourself to your own standards or desires for yourself, and fully pardoned. This place hurts only you. 

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The people that are crafting the future right now are our peers, and are the ones doing it not because they are special but because they are trying, and meeting each other, and moving forward. They are doing it in San Francisco, and New York, and kansas city, and Canada. They are doing it in government, and startups, and through art. 

You are them. Start acting like it. 

Everything is more possible than you think. Everything is more work than you think. 

It is all worth it.

Ally