June 7, 2008
The Death of Planet Olin
Oliners past and present are good at many a thing: we’ve built K’Nex Computers, travelled to Antarctica, and started companies. But if there’s one thing we’re terrible at, it’s blogging, at least from the point of view of Planet Olin. In its heyday, PO was damn near close to required reading; during one of Olin’s famous e-mail explosions, I decided to post my thoughts to my blog instead of send out another reply-all, and still got e-mail replies to it. (By the way, an e-mail explosion happened to great comedic effect at work the other week. Proof again that Olin is just a shadowy corporation that confers degrees and not an actual college. If you’re keeping track at home, that’s Corporation 40, College 38. But like 15 of those corporation points is using Exchange as a mail server for students. Current students, rejoice in the fact that once you do get a real job with a company larger than 100 people, you’ll get to heckle from the back during e-mail orientation.) Now it’s a down to a post every other day. The bottom’s fallen off.
So what happened? Now, I admit that not everyone is a blogger, and even those that are aren’t on PO. But now with at least half of PO’s contributing authors alumni instead of students, the drop-off is explainable: those alumni are out doing real world things that take real world time, instead of procrastinating on the latest problem set to write about 2005’s horrible Aeon Flux. I think those first students expected the future classes to take over the blogging for us, but that hasn’t happened. (Some notable exceptions exist) Maybe it will someday, who knows?
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been tied into some alumni events surrounding the close of the fiscal year and graduation. These events have made me realize two things. First, that the people from Olin are (to paraphrase, of all people, Dave Barrett) the best you’ll meet in your life. They’re certainly the smartest, but they’re also good conversationalists, willing to go the extra mile, and collectively, a great sense of humor. (Current students, mourn the fact that it’s all downhill from here.) And two, despite Facebook and LinkedIn and e-mail lists and blogs and all the other tools that make Austin virtually next door to Boston, there’s not enough conversation going on en masse, not enough many-to-many threads.
Some absurd percentage of Oliners will say something along the lines of “Some of the best conversations of my life happened at <N> a.m.” where <N> is some small natural number, certainly less than or equal to 4. I think we all shared in them, those random musings that come tandem with insomnia and certainly only under extreme academic tension. But those conversations stimulated us in an incredible fashion, inspired us, gave us that last extra push. (Caffeine also did that, albeit chemically.) And despite our collective thinking that those conversations die off as a function of distance, I don’t think that’s the case. I think we just need to make more of a conscious effort in having them in formats we’re not used to, in ways we never expected.
Filed by Adam College at 10:45 am under 
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