NEEDHAM, Massachusetts (AP) -- When Joelle Arnold decided to go to college, she had offers from some topflight schools. MIT. Stanford. Cornell. Instead, she chose a school that wasn't accredited and didn't even have a campus or a faculty yet: Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering.
Arnold is now among 65 students who are the college's first graduates. They were guinea pigs of sorts for a different style of teaching engineering that included exposure to entrepreneurship and humanities. At the same time, they got a chance to help build a college from scratch.
The bonus for going to the fledgling institution? A full-tuition scholarship.
At her parents' urging, she set up an interview to explore going to Olin. After meeting with some faculty and students, Arnold "realized not only how rigorous the work would be, but what type of neat people we'd have around."
"I fell in love with the place."
The college was built with a $460 million charter from the Olin Foundation, known for awarding grants to schools for land development. The school's founding mission is to broaden the scope of engineering programs to include substantial training in business and humanities.
Olin was chartered in 1998 and began accepting students for the 2001-02 academic year. Last year, there were 286 students enrolled, most of whom lived on the small, six-building campus in Needham, about 10 miles west of Boston.
Olin President Richard Miller said his 17 years as an engineering professor and associate dean at the University of Southern California persuaded him something needed to be done differently in engineering education -- especially for undergraduates. He said the curriculums were too narrow and, as a result, students suffer once they reach the work force.
"These kids, just about to get a bachelor's degree, came up to me and asked 'What's a patent? How can I make money with it?"' he said.
Ask the students if they were worried about going to a school that no one had heard of and they reply as if things like accreditation or reputation are old fashioned. After its first class graduates, Olin will be eligible for accreditation, and officials said it will also apply to the degrees earned by its first students.
"Accreditation is not a concern at all," said junior Lauren Hassord. "The relationship we have with our professors is so personal, so close. We hang out with them. We eat lunch with them. We baby-sit their kids ... completely unlike a lot of schools."
Designing their own curriculum
The 15 women and 15 men who were accepted into the first class spent their first year living in trailers and developing curriculum, working with the administration and the faculty -- essentially building the school from the ground up. They had been told they could start as freshmen in 2001, but a construction delay put regular classes behind schedule.
The problem led to one of the school's most innovative programs, the "Olin Partners." The group of students had an opportunity to design an introductory class that would rely as heavily on theory as it did on engineering.
They came up with the golf ball cannon.
Students built a cannon -- from concept to launch -- and were graded on the distance and accuracy of firing its golf ball ammunition, some as far away as 600 yards. It is now displayed in a glass case in the school's main building.
"The way the course was taught became kind of the standard," blending mechanical physics, math and engineering into one project-based class, said student Polina Segalova, who was in the group.
Olin ended up with students from 44 states and three countries, an average SAT score of about 1500, and a gender-balanced student body and faculty. Forty-five percent of the students and 40 percent of the faculty are women; the national average for engineering programs is about 20 and 10 percent, respectively.
Many engineers get their first job because of their technical ability, Miller said. After five years, though, "progress doesn't depend on your ability to solve equations, it deals with working on a team, to meet a budget, to make decisions based on what's important to the client."
A few students will be running their own businesses, which is a real joy for Miller. One, for example, will be making meditation chairs in Hong Kong.
"We have, I think, infected them with entrepreneurial disease," Miller said.