What Is Olin College, According to Maia Bittner?

Maia Bittner tells Stewart Alsop on Crazy Wisdom that Olin College is a new engineering school in Needham, Massachusetts, built because the field needed entrepreneurial engineers who could get out of the usual rut. The first class graduated in 2006. About 75 students enter a year, and she says a little over 1,000 people had graduated. Most schools, she says, teach theory for two years and applications after that. Olin calls its version do, then learn. In the first semester every freshman builds a robot that has to walk up a vertical glass surface, before anyone has been shown how.