But that said, I've got a kid looking at colleges and I'm gonna suggest he look at Olin.
You're more likely to think something a large percentage of your cohort (and people you closely know personally) goes and does is cool, doable and worthwhile. A chunk of your peers at Olin will go found meaningful companies (startups or "just" businesses) and you will think of taking it up too. I never considered being a founder before going, or even most of my life attending Olin, but it became something I considered very seriously and eventually diving into after graduating, and needless to say best choice of my life.
The other cool thing is even if you don't start your own company, you are part of such a small and tight-knit community with all these founders, and founders-to-be! I have personally worked on projects, lived, or had drinks with all but 3 of the founders mentioned in this article, and I am definitely one of the more introverted people who went there.
My guess is that they only accept kids with a track record of making stuff, like the kids that are in the robotics club.
I've got a sharp kid who I would like to turn into a maker kid but he's currently not that kid. He's a math guy, wants to try and get a PhD in math. I'd be happier for him if he became a maker of things, that's what I am and it's worked out well for me, both financially and it was satisfying.
So I'm wondering if Olin would take on a kid and try and form them into a maker or is that just asking way too much. His GPA is so so, 3.6 something, his ACT is 32 I think, I know the math part was 34. That was his only try at the ACT, he can do better. He's taking a gap year and working on retaking the ACT, he's shooting for a 34-35 overall.
Thanks for any insight and congrats on going to that college, it looks sweet!
They should apply. Many are not makers or robotics. Smart kinds with grit, determination and a willingness to fail to succeed.
That said, the classes aren't going to all be about math and only math, a lot of classes have physical projects. But the projects are tightly integrated with theory. I learned multivariable calculus by modeling a boat with some curves, and then building the boat out of foam to see if the calculated angle at which it tips was the same as reality.
If you kid can get excited about project-based learning, Olin is an awesome option.
I'd be happy to talk to you more if you have more questions.
1) To be completely honest I can't speak to the current admission climate and criteria, I enrolled in 2007 with the 5th class. Things have likely changed a lot (they do when the institute is that young and application and admission demographics change rapidly at this age).
2) Myself, I grew up in a quiet conservative Middle Eastern city (first international cohort rep!), never "made" things that I could put on a resume, and mostly just had solid grades in math/sci/compsci. I had solid SAT scores, never took the ACT, and my GPA was hard to translate (I didn't attend an AP/IB curriculum) for direct comparisons. The admissions team emphasizes that individual scores are of low relevance, as are aggregate GPAs -- Olin is primarily looking for kids who show a passion and/or aptitude in STEM/entrepreneurship which can't always be represented by scores. This is why the final stage of the admission process is a weekend-long in-person interview+team builds+campus tours where they (and you) try to evaluate whether you will survive/flourish/despise Olin's pedagogical practices, and this is ultimately the deciding factor. Parents are welcome.
3) As Olin grows older, the graduating classes have polarized more and more into founders, and pure scientists. My class ('11) had ~35% join PhD programs in everything from solar power to cancer biology, over half with prestigious grants such as NSF. And more people are becoming not only founders, but embarking on various philanthropic and/or entrepreneurial journeys, from SV startups to building solar cookers in West Africa. This is a shift away from joining Google/Microsoft/Facebook/IBM/etc, which clumped was previously the largest cohort of a graduating class (and has shrunk to ~20% now).
The hypothesis is that both these people are actually the same -- they absorb skills, look at the world, try to reason from first principles and their recently gained knowledge whether something could/should exist and improve human lives, and then just goes and does it. Pure academics is the long-term pursuit of human improvement, contributing to the greater corpus of human awareness, and entrepreneurship/makerhood is the near-term, fast-moving version. They are just essentially the same mindset applied on different timeframes.
My point is that I think you shouldn't worry about which of these perspectives he pursues at this point -- if he's the kind of kid who'll like it at Olin (he may not), the path he'll eventually take will be influenced by where he feels he can contribute the most effectively. Olin will give him some exposure to more people on the maker-side of that spectrum.
