Taking a Leave of Absence

For many students, taking time away from college is a chance to get away and do something entirely different.  In my case, it was a chance to do all of the things I loved about Olin without spending time on the classes.  Inspired by a group of students a year older than me who spent a year on leave and started a business, I decided to spend a year living a short drive away from Olin with five other students.

Picking Up a Strong Education Bent

Since we lived near campus, we stayed involved with a number of activities.  One initiative that was just ramping up early in the fall was the creation of a new Saturday program at Olin for Boston high school students.  Three people from our house began attending the planning meetings and found ourselves signing up to be part of the first crew of teachers and curriculum designers.  We didn’t have a lot of experience, but we were excited.

Within our house, our goal was to come up with a good business idea that we could work on together for the school year.  We spent the first six weeks of living together generating new ideas, identifying problems, and trying to find the perfect business that we could all be excited about.  Simply put, it didn’t happen.  After a meeting at our student business incubator, a professor sat us down to see how things were going.  We talked about a lot of idea generation, etc, but he quickly identified that we had gone nowhere.  He asked us to go around the table and each share the things we’re passionate about.  Though different people had different levels of interest, it was clear that the common thread was an excitement about education.  Within 48 hours, we had a primitive concept for a web app and started arranging visits with local schools.

Ironically, these two projects started completely independent of each other and had minimal cross-over during our leave of absence.  However, it meant that 95% of my time that year was focused on either conceptual or implementation-level design for education.

Projects

• Olin Saturday STEM Academy
• Alight Learning 

Daily Life

We kept ourselves plenty busy from the start with dinners, side projects, and infinite ideation.

Early in the year, we were open to a huge variety of ideas, going through a few boxes of post-its and covering whiteboards with ideas.	Life wasn't all business -- from our $20-30/person/week food budget, we created a number of amazing dishes.  I was in charge of eating and leading the cleanup crew to sub 15-minute dish-washing assembly lines.