LifeHacks

Why
Olin's Founding Precepts describe an Olin engineer with an assortment of important skills and experiences. The Precepts also aspire to change engineering education to reach these objectives. “[C]hanges ... include interdisciplinary and integrated teaching, hands-on learning and research opportunities for students, improved communication skills, [and] students working as members of teams ...” At the heart of each of these goals is a fundamental capability to work with information and turn it into knowledge - identifying, searching for, collecting, triaging, analyzing, presenting, and sharing the vast amount of information available to today's problem-solvers. While Olin aspires to teach many of these skills through disciplinary exercises in the classroom, developing and reflecting upon “information literacy” can benefit from a focused co-curricular experience. By focusing on some of these ideas, Olin students can become more effective and efficient at managing information in today's world.

How
We have provided a number of mix-and-match sample modules that can be used in any order as-is or as inspiration to develop future modules (or to present to students with the suggestion that they develop and teach modules of their own). It is important that the first session make it clear that this is a student-driven co-curricular, and that students should sign up to organize and run modules on the topic they feel most passionate about.

Target Audience
Although the co-curricular would be open and available to all students, this curriculum is designed with the needs of first-year students in their second semester at Olin in mind.

Contact
The current (as of Spring 2009) mailing list for LifeHacks is lifehacks@lists.olin.edu

Modules
This section will be completed with all of the modules as they are completed, since not all modules originally planned will necessarily run.