Starting with a clean slate

Visiting the building site of the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, the first US engineering school in four decades to be created from the ground up, is like witnessing a collective academic bungee jump.

Leighton Ige, a high school valedictorian from Hawaii, could have gone to Harvard last fall. Instead, he came to a muddy construction site as one of 30 new "Olin partners." Along with faculty and a cadre of other math and science wunderkinder, these adventurous students are spending this year creating a new model for undergraduate engineering education.

Through innovative design projects like the recent attempt to build the world's largest Rube Goldberg machine, faculty say they will develop a curriculum that both inspires students and causes lessons to stick like super glue, rather than being quickly forgotten.

Inspiration does not seem to be a problem. Like most of the young partners here, Mr. Ige happily works around the clock for no class credit. His 16- to 20-hour days are typical for many students. In essence, they are voluntary curriculum guinea pigs for the school's first 22 faculty members.

The partners were selected from a pool of more than 660 Olin applicants. Several are valedictorians. All are math and science whizzes whose SAT scores are among the top 3 percent nationwide. They will be joined by 45 other students when the school's first freshman class arrives this fall on the new campus in Needham, Mass., a suburb of Boston. All the students receive a four-year scholarship for tuition and housing worth an estimated $130,000. (This will likely extend to future classes, as well, but officials haven't said how long the policy will last.)

Olin officials say the school is trying to select and cultivate well-rounded students - not to replicate the excessively bookish and introverted "nerd" culture found at some technology institutions. After four years, Olin students should be top engineers, but also adept at dissecting a Shakespearian sonnet or creating a startup company, they say.

What tickled Ige's fancy and lured him away from the prestigious schools that pepper the Boston area was the irreverent notion of melding engineering with liberal arts and entrepreneurship - a sort of "renaissance engineering," he says. It appealed to the cello-playing graphic-design expert, who also owns a Web consulting business and sees himself as much more than "just an engineer."

"I just kept thinking how fun it would be to help start a college and break away from the norms and blaze a new trail," he says.

Olin is indeed a radical experiment, a sort of utopian bid to remake undergraduate engineering education. Engineering schools today are often considered within academia as math and science "boot camps" that churn out many bright young hopefuls with masses of math theory but little actual engineering experience. Students who survive the first few semesters of these programs get to do projects later - sometimes as late as their junior year.

Olin's idea, in contrast, is to learn mainly by doing projects from the start, and to put top faculty directly in charge of nurturing student success instead of having research assistants do most of the teaching. Another goal is to engineer a culture more conducive to continuous improvement. So there will be an honor code at Olin, but there won't be tenure. No departments, either. The focus will be students.

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