Education, RSS Reflection, and Random Businesses

Hey everyone! I’ve been writing a lot recently about Solidworks and the IDEO book titled Thoughtless Acts,but I haven’t done much besides that. So, here’s an update on what I’m doing!

EDUCATION-RELATED

–I’m working on the Olin Saturday STEM Academy program which is starting in January. Right now we’ve been meeting as small focus groups of two Olin students, one Olin professor and one local high school teacher to develop the curriculum for the first and second semesters of this program. I always did like teaching, and even told myself I would grow up to be an engineer and then retire to be a teacher, but it turns out you can do both? sort of….

SOLIDWORKS!

—I’m still chugging along at Solidworks, working two days a week right now on a number of different projects. I’ve been assigned to actual development projects, and who knows, maybe I’ll have a bigger role in shaping some of these new features. At least, a bigger role than many of my actually implemented, extremely minor bug fixes while I’ve worked there? I’m a huge fan of the new Speepak feature out for SW2009, though I’m not exactly the kind of user who would actually need to use it often.

READING AND REFLECTING

–I’ve been spending a lot of time reading rss feeds and news, writing and reflecting, as well as reading books! Once I finish some more books I’ll write a bit more on this topic, but for now a list will suffice I’m currently reading ” 50 Facts That Should Change the USA” is an interesting read, though I’m only a fraction of the way through the book.  There is a stack of about 20 books waiting for me once I finish typing this post… Though it will take me a long time to get through them, since my reading speed has severely deteriorated since middle school. I think.

RANDOM BUSINESSES

–Olin Tutoring Squad is still moving along, and surprisingly, so is Go Green, which has been a source of a handful of emails this week. The best part about these two “businesses” is that marketing efforts in the last couple months has been completely lacking, but we are still getting customers…Who knows what will happen with this at the end of this year, when school and classes decrease the feedom to schedule meetings and worktime for these businesses…Oh, we’ve also got potentially 4 new clients to make websites for, not only good practice at web development (which I never thought I would ever be doing, even as late as a year ago), but also a great source of income

-Marco