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Back to SchoolOn a bright spring day last year, IEEE Spectrum Associate Editor Erico Guizzo [photo] arrived on the campus of Olin College, in Needham, Mass. We had sent him there to get the inside story on this radically new engineering school, which is at the vanguard of a movement in engineering education that seeks to plunge students almost immediately into real design work, rather than making them go through two or three years of more-theoretical studies first.
Guizzo’s mission was to make contact with Olin’s administration and then go undercover, passing himself off as a student to get the full experience. But within hours of arriving at the school, he realized he needed a new plan. “The school has only 300 students,” he points out. “They can recognize each other across campus by their haircuts.”
So Guizzo arranged a series of visits to the school, where he sat in on classes and lab ses-sions, socialized with students, attended a schoolwide exposition of student presentations, spoke with administrators and professors, and hung out at a barbecue. And in the end, Olin even allowed him to spend a night in the school’s modern dormitory.
“It’s a very different school from all the others I’ve ever seen,” says Guizzo, who has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. For more on this remarkable little school and its big aspirations, see “The Olin Experiment,” in this issue. n
the back story
www.spectrum.ieee.org Ieee spectrum | May 2006 | na �
Editor Susan Hassler, [email protected] ExecutiveEditor Glenn Zorpette, [email protected] ManagingEditor Alfred Rosenblatt, [email protected] SeniorNewsEditor William Sweet, [email protected] SeniorEditors Harry Goldstein, [email protected] Jean Kumagai, [email protected] Tekla S. Perry, [email protected] AssistantManagingEditor Elizabeth A. Bretz, [email protected] SeniorAssociateEditors Stephen Cass (Resources), [email protected] Steven Cherry, [email protected] Samuel K. Moore (News), [email protected] AssociateEditor Erico Guizzo, [email protected] AssistantEditor Willie D. Jones, [email protected] SeniorCopyEditor Joseph N. Levine, [email protected] CopyEditor Sally Cahur, [email protected] EditorialResearcher Alan Gardner, [email protected] AdministrativeAssistants Ramona Gordon, [email protected] Nancy T. Hantman, [email protected] IEEESpectrumJournalismIntern Lauren Aaronson, [email protected] Intern Francesco Ferorelli, [email protected] ContributingEditors Ashton Applewhite, John Blau, Peter Fairley, Alexander Hellemans, Jen Lin-Liu, Robert W. Lucky, Paul McFedries, Michael Riordan, Philip E. Ross, Peter R. Savage, Carl Selinger, Seema Singh, Paul Wallich WebEditor Kieron B. Murphy, [email protected]
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ciTing ARTiclEs in IEEE SpEctrumIEEE Spectrum publishes two editions. the international edition is identified by the abbreviation Int at the foot of each page. the second edition goes only to north america; it is identified with the letters na. Both editions have the same editorial content, but, because of differences in advertising, page numbers may differ. If you cite an article, then, you should include the issue designation. for example, this note is in IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 43, no. 5 (Int), May 2006, p. 3, or in IEEE Spectrum, Vol. 43, no. 5 (na), May 2006, p. 7.
