Spring 2026 Supplement and Course Offerings

Instructor: Earhardt Graeff

Credits: 4

Class Hours: 4-0-8

Curriculum Role: AHS Elective

Registration Note: Experimental Grading

Course Description: Tired of doomscrolling the news from Washington? Education, environmental action, transportation/infrastructure, jobs—these all happen somewhere—the place you live. From town meetings to school boards, community organizing to participatory planning, learning to navigate local government and politics can build common ground and unlock tremendous impact and resilience. In this seminar, you will: 1) cultivate your professional and personal identity in relation to civic life and the public good; 2) build confidence in navigating public meetings, advocacy, and decision-making; 3) gain practical skills in community engagement and democratic participation; and 4) strengthen your (and Olin’s) connection with the place we live. We will visit our democratic institutions in Needham and hear from local politicians, government officials, journalists, and activists in the Greater Boston area; learn the lingo of local politics (zoning, public records, NIMBYism); and make connections between local, national, and global issues through current events discussions and case studies. Expect fields trips and regular opportunities for personal and collective reflection.

Instructor: Jon Stolk

Credits: 4

Class Hours: 4-0-8

Curriculum Role: AHS Elective

Recommended Requisite: Junior or Senior standing

Registration Note: Experimental Grading

Course Description: What drives our desire to know and understand? What triggers our curiosity and sense of wonder? What promotes a sense of happiness and well-being? What helps us overcome obstacles and reach our full potential? What draws us toward beauty, love, and creative expression? In this course, we will explore what motivates people to engage in learning, and critically examine how learning conditions may promote a range of learner responses, from autonomous to controlled motivations or external to internal regulation. To deepen our understandings of motivation and self-regulation, we will study conceptual models and empirical research support for a range of motivation and self-regulation theories, e.g., attribution, self-efficacy, self-determination, achievement-goal, expectancy-value, social-cognitive. We will put these theories to work, by testing their usefulness and limitations in describing and explaining our own and others’ behaviors. With theoretical tools in hand, we will examine how course design and pedagogy influence motivations and self-regulation, and assess opportunities for positive change in educational systems, including those at Olin College. The semester will culminate in self-directed analytical or design projects that are shaped by self-determined goals, strategies, interactions, and outputs, and fueled by individual interest, passion, value, curiosity, and joy. Prepare yourselves for an adventure, as this is an entirely new and wholly experimental course.  

Instructor: Nguyen, Dyllan

Credits: 4

Hours: 4-2-6

Curriculum Role: AHS Elective

Recommended Requisite: Design Nature

Course Description: In this studio art course, we'll explore topics in contemporary art and create works using wood as a primary medium. We'll develop a foundational understanding of wood as a material, learn to safely operate a variety of tools, and consider the context of each individual’s work in the field of sculpture and contemporary art more broadly. Lectures and demonstrations will be complemented by readings, screenings, student presentations, and studio practice. Assignments will be structured so students may choose to work on teams or independently. Assessment of projects will be based on rubrics provided when assignments are set and will seek to balance the conceptual and technical development of each student, with an emphasis on process engagement.

Instructor: Zach del Rosario

Credits: 4

Curriculum Role: Design Depth, ME Elective, ECE Elective, E:C Elective

Course Description: 

Optimization is ubiquitous in engineering practice: Structural engineers optimize structural layouts, control engineers use optimization to do path planning for robots and spacecraft, materials scientists use optimization for materials selection, and machine learning is enabled by a suite of highly-efficient optimization algorithms. However, optimization is not a silver bullet: Running a successful optimization requires experience to avoid pitfalls, and optimization that ignores uncertainty can select fragile designs. This course is about the tools and understanding necessary to do optimization under uncertainty.

In Probabilistic Design Optimization (PDO), students will learn to formulate and solve optimization problems and to model uncertainty with probability. Students will practice modeling engineering problems with objectives, constraints, and densities, and will see examples across many different fields. They will gain an intuitive and practical understanding of relevant challenges: necessary conditions for optimality, local minima, approximation challenges, problem rescaling, data sparsity, and modeling uncertainties.

This course will reinforce content through problem sets and a large project with significant student choice. Students will work on individual projects and will choose a system to model, analyze, and optimize under uncertainty. This class is intended as a design depth; however, students have the option to take this as an ME, ECE, or E:Computing elective. Students taking this course as such an elective must select a simple system from the relevant core topic---e.g. Thermodynamics, MechSolids, Transport, etc. for ME; Circuits, Signals and Systems, etc. for ECE; a CompArch or Machine Learning for E:Computing---and communicate this choice to the PDO instructor. High-level work on the project will begin with the first problem set, and students will iterate on their project throughout the course.

Instructors: Jesse Austin Breneman, Coby Unger

Credits: 4

Class Hours: 2-3-7

Curriculum Role: Design Depth or ME Elective

Registration Note: Co-requisite Collaborative Design

Course Description: What does design mean? In this class we will explore the practice of design within four disciplines: engineering, industrial design, and craft. We will redesign the same artifact from all 4 disciplinary perspectives. We will learn what questions practitioners are answering.  What methods are they using to generate answers to these questions? And how the results of their explorations inform the collaborative making process. By the end of this class, you will be able to: 1) articulate and compare the strategies of a variety of design practitioners; 2) synthesize your learnings into a cohesive strategy; 3) communicate your findings effectively to a diverse team of collaborators and stakeholders, and 4) prototype, test and evaluate based on physical and theoretical models.

Instructor: Beat Arnet

Credits: 4

Class Hours: 4-4-4

Curriculum Role: ECE Elective

PreRequisites: ENGR1125, ENGR2420

Course Description: In this course, the student will learn the fundamentals of power electronics with a focus on different types of DC-DC converters.  The theory is taught in a hands-on fashion through simulation-based analysis and lab work.  Topics covered include power converter topologies, selection of power semiconductors, loss modeling, gate driver design, magnetics design, cycle-cycle current control, as well as debugging and testing techniques. Each student will design and realize a power converter, which entails schematic capture, board layout and the manufacture of a custom inductor or transformer.

Instructor: Gillian Epstein

Credits: 4

Class Hours: 4-0-8

Registration Note: must have project approval and mentor assignment prior to end of Fall 2025 semester

Curriculum Role: flexible, depending on project 

Course Description: Students will develop habits of mind and skills to support their independent learning; work collectively to share and support ongoing work; develop mentor relationships in order to receive and iterate on feedback; and find creative and engaging ways to share their work with the Olin community. Once you register for CLIP, Gillian will reach out to have you complete the mentor process and fill out ISR paperwork.  CLIP mentor pairings and paperwork need to be completed prior to the start of the Spring semester.  We got this!

Instructor: Sarah Spence Adams

Credits: 4

Curriculum Role: Advanced Math, ME Math, E:Robo Math

Pre-Requisites: QEA1 and QEA2

Course Description: In this course, students will design their own learning goals, including content goals related to linear algebra, abstract algebra, or other algebraic structures, and then coordinate with a small group to design their own projects/experiences to achieve those goals. This structure will allow students to improve their self-directed learning skills, develop quantitative knowledge related to algebraic structures, and apply their new learnings to applications relevant to their major or personal interests. This course counts as an advanced math elective for ME and E:Robo (and maybe other majors). 

Short introductions to key content or applications in linear/abstract algebra will occur, particularly during the first several weeks of the course as students are deciding what to learn and how to learn it. There may be a small amount of homework on these common lessons, however, most of the work in this course will require students to take initiative to articulate their learning goals and craft projects/experiences to achieve those goals.

This class is a great match for students who have finished QEA 1 and 2 and are motivated to significantly challenge themselves to design experiences to learn advanced technical material. Based on student feedback from the first two iterations of this course, seniors going into graduate school or careers in technical fields are particularly encouraged to use this course as a way to build technical content knowledge and transition to more fully self-directed learning.  

Intructor: Jean Huang

Credits: 4

Curriculum Role: E:Sust Elective, or Foundation Biology

Course Description: This project-based course invites students to collaborate on real-world sustainability challenges with faculty and industry partners. Working in multidisciplinary teams, students will engage with external liaisons to analyze and develop solutions to current sustainability challenges with external partners.  Students will apply skills in engineering, science, teamwork, sustainability, biology, and systems thinking.  Through this hands-on experience, students will gain insights into real-world sustainability problem-solving and apply systemic thinking for analysis and design. For Spring 2026, SIRC partners are the Wellesley Department of Public Works and Town of Wellesley Sustainability.

Instructor: Alessandra Ferzoco

Credits: 4

Curriculum Role: Science - MATSCI CHEM ENV Foundation

Course Description: In this course we’ll use the principles of quantum mechanics to study how matter takes shape, transforms, stores energy, and transfers energy. The course is organized around core ideas in quantum mechanics, that build towards describing why matter behaves as it does. Quantum mechanics can help us view the dual wave-like and particle-like nature of matter. From there we can study how matter is structured in discrete bound states, how we can predict the probability a system will adopt a particular state, and the limits of certainty we have in those predictions. We will do research literature reviews to learn about chemical questions that researchers are using the tools of quantum mechanics to try to answer, which will involve building skills in formulating questions and extracting information from sources beyond our current level of expertise. We’ll frame questions and practice seeking our own answers using open-source computational tools. We’ll build rudimentary spectrometers to practice our technique in observing how light interacts with matter.