It's in these aloof conversations that I really appreciate one of the more unsung parts of MIT:

People here are very clever.

You see, let's be honest here for a second. There are plenty of very respectable universities that you can go to for your education. It's not like MIT teaches some secret form of Math that no one else knows about. Heck you can even kill yourself with homework if you really want to try and emulate what it's like to be here (as a sidenote, I recently learned that going for 35 hours without sleeping makes your thoughts indistinguishable from someone with a severe mental disorder in an MRI. This makes me want to wear a tactical vest and be very nice to everyone on campus).

But what really sets MIT apart from other institutions is the incredibly stimulating thinktank nature of people around here. Thinking is a hobby for many people around here, and for the hard stuff, they're really good at it. The more trivial things, like "Does orange plaid match with a floral green print?" or "Should I wash my hair this week?" seem to stump some people, but given that they could make a supercomputer using nothing but soda cans, hairspray, 3 rubber bands, and Karmic Koala; it's definitely forgivable.

You needn't click further than the Notable Alumni page to see a good number of people who's accomplishments I'd venture to say started off as the sort of humble ideas that populate the dialogue of students around here.

But it doesn't even have to be serious stuff. People here drop pumpkins off buildings for fun, and turn grocery carts into high speed go-karts for no other reason than because they can. It's a sort of art really, engineering as expression. It's no surprise then to see this creativity transfer to problem solving, seeing people win grants and contests is a such a regular occurence that it's not until I'm away from campus that it really sinks in how cool that is.

That's nothing short of exhilarating to me, to know that the people eating lunch at Subway next to me are future Nobel Laureates (scientific ones nonetheless. You know, the ones that are hard to get), engineers of advances in space travel, and doctors who will cure cancer. The guy getting his bagel from LaVerdes could be a MacArthur fellow, whose annoyance with the local price discrepancy (read: gouging) spurs him to invent a bagel tree that solves world hunger. Who knows what paradigm shifting idea is starting right now in someone's room or the coffee table in lobby 7. This is a place of dreamers, thinkers, and creators. The impossible's dying breath is "you know what would be cool?" because with it comes the beginning of ingenuity so profound that it makes the all the hours spent reading, tooling, and being awake well worth it.

BUT I had to share a particular incident with you today as I was walking back from working on psets. I walked by the LSC announcement board (LSC is a group that screens movies on campus) and one of the movies was called: "Sin No Mbre". Puzzled, I stared at it:

"Sin No Mbre"

Now I don't speak more than a large burrito worth of spanish, but here's what I thought.

Sin No Mbre = Sin Nombre---> Sin ("number*")----->O/H---->OH--->Two components in liquid rocket fuel--->EXPLOSIVE action.

I can almost guarantee you that's not the logic the advertising commitee went with, but effective nonetheless. I want to see this movie now.

*Nombre is actually "name", numero is number, but whatever I felt like I'd solved the Da Vinci Code before it was so easy Tom Hanks could do it.

Ok so after that needlessly artistic intro and akward awkward segue, I give you Snively's 21st Birthday as seen on Conner 2! Watch and see how a birthday is meant to be celebrated! There's everything you could want: jokes that died in transit, brownies, and most importantly- Steakon!

It was surreal coming back, I think it was one of those moments that helps solidify what it really means to be here. First, there's CPW, where (if you're like me) you see MIT for the first time as a real place and not just a picture in a brochure or a website (or Google Street View if you're really obsessed).

Then there's that dizzying moment on the first day of classes where you just can't seem to take it all in, you feel like you Have Truly Found Paradise. Then that one sobering moment sometime after where you realize that you're really here, on your own, away from your family.
Before long you gain a very personal understanding of what IHTFP really means. Then there's the moment where you come back and you realize that this isn't like a summer camp, that the year before wasn't the race, it was just the first leg--and by some ways the easiest one. It's the moment you really understand that you're a student here, that for the next few years this is the largest part of your life.

Like an aimless spectre you open doors and see flashes of yesteryear; smells trip unexpected memories like gossamer landmines good and bad. You walk the halls that housed you on the hottest carefree days and the coldest tooling nights, seeing people who've left your life and those who are new additions. It all comes rushing back to you and you feel a familiar dizzying, overwhelming feeling like you did just one year ago, but this time there's something different. Something's changed. Now you know what you're in for, you know the sleepless nights and frustrations are never far away, but this knowledge can't seem to remove the exhilarating smile on your face. And it's in that masochistic moment that you realize who you are. That this is what you're made for.

So by now you might think you have a fair idea of what to expect when you get to MIT. Floatillas, Liquid Nitrogen, and peak internet use at 3a.m. every night. But what about after you graduate and Mattress Dominoes turn into "Oh Noes!"?

Luckily the trend appears to be that MIT alumni are dedicated to having as much nerdy geeky fun as they did while they were in school, and so they tend to continue doing really cool things. I present to you as a case study the company LiveScribe.

So this past weekend, Snively and I were invited to be a part of a start-up company called LiveScribe. They flew us into California for the weekend to attend training seminars and get some hands on time with their product.

For those too lazy to google it, LiveScribe is a pen that does something that makes college students like myself (and you guys!) very happy. It records audio while you write notes. It's a simple thing, but that's the beauty of it. You take notes just like you do with a normal pen and paper and it records the audio from lectures. I personally detest note-taking because I tend to do one of two things. Either I obsessively write down everything a professor says, or I listen and understand while he's talking and thus leave my notes.....lacking. With the LiveScribe pen you just tap record and it records audio while you're writing, which means you can slow down your professors who talk at .66667c, and condense an hour's worth of lectures down to just an outline, leaving you with a really clean visual organization of the entire audios lecture. Snively wrote about it a while back, so you can check his blog out for some videos showing the pen's usefulness in action.

But what's REALLY cool about the company is that it was founded by a guy named Jim Margraff who is, you guessed it, an MIT alumnus. LiveScribe isn't the first time you've seen or heard of one of his products though. He also invented the technology for the Atlasphere (an interactive globe that may be a little before you're time....which makes me feel old), and much more recently the LeapFrog system that teaches little kids how to read.

So have no fear kids, the fun never stops when you're an MIT student!

How was the conference? It was AWESOME! Snively and I stuck out like....well like MIT students in a class full of sports management majors (and 16 other majors MIT doesn't have). But in a good way! Seriously, people thought we were (are you ready for this?): cool. That's right, we were "the MIT guys"! People were interested in hearing about the crazy things we do at school and lots of the execs came and sat with us at meals to chat. The first night at dinner the Senior Science Advisor Andy Von Schaak came and sat down with me and we started about the little bit I can talk about my job at Los Alamos, which segued into what my plans and visions for the future are etc. Snively came and joined us and Andy gave us an interesting (but probably secret) problem to work out. It was a lot of fun! By the end of it, Andy and I exchanged "deets" (his word not mine) via Bump for the iPhone. (super cool app, we followed up with a discussion about how it probably works, but you should go check it out from the app store if you have an iphone).

Snively wrote a much better blog about the details of the experience, but there's one particularly illustrative event I'd like to share with you. While we were at Berkley, one of the events we did involved people spinning a wheel with the opportunity to win a pen, with chances to win normal pens, or raffle tickets as well. What made it interesting were the two "spin again" spots. When we had gone back to the room we were talking about the inordinantly high number of pens we gave away, and that of course led to the odds.

Tip #1, don't discuss odds with MIT kids.

I estimated them to be about 1 in 10 and said so. Then an argument broke out about what effect the "spin again" spots had on the odds. But being the big nerd I am I knew that there was one way to solve this, and that was to solve this.

I was able to get it into a series like this:

The odds of winning immediately are 1 in 12.

The odds of spinning again are 2 in 12, or 1 in 6.

The odds of winning after getting a spin again therefore are 1/6(1/12), but there's also a chance you'll spin again after spinning again, after which you could win or spin again, repeating the whole thing over and over again like episodes of Seinfeld after 1998. This led to the equation for odds being:

1/12+1/6(1/12+1/6(1/12+......))

all the way to infinity. Hmm to infinity eh? that sounds like an infinite series to me! Sure enough if you distribute the 1/6 you get

1/12+1/12*6+1/12*6^2.....1/12*6^n

which means the odds are just:

lim(k->inf) Sum(n,0,inf,1/12*6^n). The ridiculous math geniuses among you took a look at that and said "yup one in ten", but since I couldn't remember all my convergence tests at the time, Snively and I were standing outside with a laptop running mathematica crunching numbers. Surprisingly enough, people asked what we were doing and were genuinely interested!

I have a theory for why people think MIT kids are still kind of cool even though we're used to being the nerds everywhere, but Snively's wrote it up in his blog, so I won't bother repeating it. In short, being at MIT makes you legit, it means even though you do something nerdy, you do it at an impressive level, regardless of what it is. By the end of the night, we had people coming over to hang out in our room as we stumbled around YouTube and ran bash scripts in Terminal to replicate XKCD jokes.

So there are a few lessons in there, one, don't argue about the odds. Two, MIT will open up a lot of cool opportunities for you to meet amazing people. Three, do what you love without caring what other people think of it, and you may be surprised to find that some people find your passion for it cool, even if they know nothing about the actual subject. Four, MIT alums are awesome.

Of course that also means you're adults now, and you have to make choices. Some are trivial, like what color sheets you want for your bed, others are important, like where you want to live; some are easy like "would you like to go skiing?" and others are hard like deciding if your relationship with a person you said you love is still a healthy one. Yes in the course of one year at MIT you will make exactly 7,873,456,235.834 decisions varying both in magnitude and speed at which their magnitude is clear.

And in true MIT fashion, here comes one of those decision moments before you even have time to comprehend it:

You're going to have to start paying for things.

Now everyone has a different monetary relationship with their parents that I won't even dwell on except to say that personal finance WILL become more important to you very fast, maybe to different degrees but it will. And it can seem overwhelming when you get an email saying your account was just billed for tuition and you owe MIT 5 numbers before the decimal. But fear not worrisome frosh, that's what this entry is truly about (after a wordy introduction). It's about personal finance and some tips I've got for you (get it? tips? in a finance blog? eh? ok nevermind). So here's some tips and ideas I've come up with or gathered from various sources to maximize your meager money monthly (ok, no more alliteration I promise). No particular order:

1. Make a budget:

Save for the pigs sake

It's not really a hard concept, just hard to apply : Spend less than you make. Easier said than done though (where do you think the credit crisis came from?) Nevertheless, it's a good skill to have and it will serve you both in business and life. Your first one doesn't have to be high tech with tables and charts in excel etc. In fact, to avoid being overwhelmed I'd reccomend just a simple paper and pencil one to start. Some sample categories are things like: Entertainment, Food, Clothing, Bills, and Savings. Tally up how much you make in a month, subtract out anything you HAVE to pay for, put some in savings, and budget the rest as you feel fit. It's a good feeling knowing that you're spending money you planned on spending instead of just spending willy-nilly on anything that looks shiny and cool and this way you're constantly making money that you can use later for important things, like investing, buying a car or a house etc.

2.Cook

Green fire will impress the ladies.

Dining is a hot topic for a lot of students at MIT, and that's because everyone has something that works really well for them. Some people cook all their meals, some eat on campus for all their meals, and lots of people do everything in between. Nevertheless, it is generally cheaper (and potentially healthier!) to cook for yourself. Nearly all dorms have at least a community kitchen that you can use to cook food in, and if you get a few friends together you can split grocery bills and cook for each other. Not to mention one day you'll have to cook for yourself, and you might as well learn now.
For the summer, I cook all the meals for myself and my two roommates in the apartment, and I spend about $100 a week on groceries. That's 21 meals for 3 people, averaging out to $1.58 per meal. Compared to the ~$8 it costs to eat out for an average meal, I save around $400/mo. Not bad. You'd have to eat a lot of dollar menu burgers or ramen to beat that.

3.Buy Reusable Instead Of Disposable:

Do your plates have cupholders? didn't think so

Buy rags instead of paper towels, real or plastic plates instead of paper. Being able to reuse things will make them pay for themselves uber-fast. Not to mention it's just good practice to throw less away. Not too long ago, some friends of mine over on Conner-2 went through some number crunching for how much they'd save investing in rechargeable AA batteries instead of buying them en masse to feed their Rock Band addiction. Savings add up.

4. ReUse

Hey! It's not impossible, and if this ever shows up on reuse...

This is something MIT specific, but there's a mailing list called reuse where people post things they're getting rid of for people to come and take what they want. Some AMAZING things show up on reuse, and if you get email pushed to your phone, you can get some sweet stuff. Some of the stuff I've received for free include:

A fridge
A couch
A road bike
A TV
Hangers
Awesome Office Chairs
Skis and Ski Boots

...and that's just what I've received! there are frequently old laptops, computer bits and pieces, furniture, utensils--you name it! Most notably I once saw a Cintiq Wacom Tablet, which goes for around $550 used. I also once contributed half a subway sandwich ( I bought a footlong, but only ate half). ReUse is amazing.

5. Mint.com

Alright so now you're saving tons of money, you've got a budget, you're wooing girls with your mad cooking skills and all the free stuff you've acquired from ReUse. Now to bring it all together, use some kind of financial management software. You can use Quicken or Microsoft Money if you want, but my favorite is Mint.com.

apparently you spend more on orange than you do on green...

If you've never heard of it, it's an online financial management solution that does all the same things that quicken or MM do, BUT it's totally free! It's a cinch to set up with your banks if you do online banking (and who doesn't? this is 2009), and you can access it from any computer (they even have an iPhone app). You can set up your budget, view your spending habits based on card transactions, and even set up alerts to remind you of things like when you're over budget, when your accounts are low, and when bills are due. Mint.com can also suggest bank accounts, investments, and credit cards that can save you money by matching your spending habits. Which brings us to....

6. Credit Cards

That's a scary word for a lot of people, and with good reason. Uncontrolled credit card use has made lots of peoples lives really difficult. BUT they are a financial tool that, if used correctly, can give you some great benefits. For one thing, if you're like most people you're going to have to eventually take out a loan to buy a house or a car or something like that. When you do, they look at something called your credit score to determine what kind of interest rate you can get, (or if you can get the loan at all!). Well the only way to get a credit score is to have had credit history, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to use a credit card. A credit card is a HUGE responsibility though, and all the sort of rules and responsibilities you should be aware of before making the decision is kind of outside the scope of this entry. Nevertheless, some benefits to having a credit card include: building a good credit score, rewards for your spending, flexibility with how much money you have.
If at this point you're sold and rushing off to sign up for the first credit card you get an offer for, slow down. You should find a card that matches your spending, and our good friend Mint.com can help! After doing a bit of research, Mint.com helped me find a card that offered 9% interest, 5% rewards on purchases for restaurants, gas, movies, and books, and 1% on all other purchases. I also get a bonus for maintaining a high GPA throughout the school year. It was the perfect card for me and I use it all the time in place of my debit card, then just pay it off every month. So all in all, I'm not spending more money than I normally do, I'm establishing credit, I'm still not in debt, and I get 5% of everything I spend back. Works for me!
I have to reiterate though that credit cards are a massive financial responsibility and an advanced financial tool, and you really shouldn't pick one up until you're absolutely positive you can manage it's use well. It's like Uncle Ben said "With great power comes great responsibility." (yes that is a Spiderman quote.)

Peter I want to talk to you about your credit card.

7. Investment

Despite what it may look like, a tree made out of money is a poor investment.

So the whole point of all this money saving and budgeting is to start making yourself financially secure. As a reward for not spending it, money you save can earn you interest in your savings account (you make money....for having money? What's not to like?) and once you collect a fair amount you can invest it in stocks, bonds, IRAs and the like. Investment is a complicated topic, but the gist of it is that you get compounded interest on what you invest. As a simple example let's say you invested $5000 up front, and then $1000/year after that (not as much as it seems). At 10% return (a fairly reasonable estimate), in 50 years your investment would be worth $1,659,754.00. That means completely separate from the income you make from your career, minus a measly $1000 you invest every year, you could retire in 50 years on over a million dollars. Subtract out the $55,000 you invested in total (and ignoring taxes) and you made $1.6 million doing nothing. That's because the most important factor with investing isn't the amount, it's the time. That's good for you and me because time is something that you have on your side whereas abundant money isn't so much. To make about the same amount in 40 years (like if you waited 10 years to invest), you'd have to invest $33,000, plus the $1000 annual investment. Clearly there is a huge benefit to investing early. Our friend Mint.com can help you find good investments, as well as any investment firm like Charles Schwab etc.

So there you go, there's more information than you probably care to know about what it's like managing your income in college. It's intimidating, liberating, exciting, and a host of other -ing words.

]]> http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/workplay_balance_at_mit/money_money_money.shtml http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/workplay_balance_at_mit/money_money_money.shtml Work/Play Balance At MIT Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:52:17 -0500 Chris M. '12 So it's mid July, Summer is well underway, all the major Holidays have passed (read: the 4th) so what's your favorite blogger up to? I don't know, I'll go ask Yan. But if you're interested in what your 4th or maybe 5th favorite blogger is up to, I can tell you!

Besides traveling (and consequently starting several blogs I haven't finished) I've been working on some personal projects like learning objective-C, planning some super cool surprise projects for when I get back to school, and watching lots of How I Met Your Mother, Arrested Development, and Big Bang Theory. I've also been hiking and exercising a lot, and trying my best not to get burned by the wildfire burning 13 miles south of me.

I'm also looking forward to being more involved in non-class things this year, like clubs, sports, and teaching classes over IAP. I've also acquired a pair of skis so I can now freely go and do my favorite outdoor activity!

To be honest, I'm feeling really "MITsick" if you can believe it. (I'm sure the upperclassmen just vomited in their mouths a little). I miss waking up and looking out and feeling like I could go out and do anything there, I could go make new friends because we'd have something in common to talk about or do. Of course when I get back to campus it'll be back to IHTFP, but in some weird masochistic way, I miss the tooling until early morning learning all of Multivariable Calculus before I took the final (true story, don't ask, don't do it).

But before I know it, sophomore year will be right on top of me--starting next weekend I'll be doing nothing but traveling until I end up back at MIT.

So that's pretty much it, doing stuff I can't say, and a lot of programming/designing for cool things for school. Other than that, enjoying the sun, the outdoors, and traveling.

]]> http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/what_have_you_been_doing_latel.shtml http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/what_have_you_been_doing_latel.shtml Miscellaneous Wed, 15 Jul 2009 23:30:16 -0500 Chris M. '12 Much like the luminiferous aether theory, the Photo Scavenger Hunt seemed like a good idea at the time, but the results were sparse. The two photos I did get were cool though. Oh well, you win some, you lose some--though if Schrodinger is to be believed, before posting the entry, I was simultaneously winning and losing, like tripping down stairs and being helped up by Summer Glau. Speaking of winning, here are the winners:

So congratulations Elizabeth and Mohammed (respectively) you're the winners of the scavenger hunt! Enjoy the fame and glory that comes with it.

P.S. I'm trying to write an entry about my experience here at Los Alamos, but anything I write has to be reviewed by security, and needless to say, it's a bit of a slow process. BUT I will persevere!

]]> http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/results_from_the_photo_scaveng_1.shtml http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/results_from_the_photo_scaveng_1.shtml Miscellaneous Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:31:42 -0500 Chris M. '12 Hello Interwebs, it's me Chris. As you can probably guess from the title, this has something to do with twitter. It is in fact a historic day for me, much like the day I bought my Mac, after being vehemently opposed to all things apple, I've shared my dislike and disinterest in the internet phenomena known as twitter. But if you were to go here, you'd see that's no longer true.

It does provide some nice advantages to traditional blogging. For one thing, it's easy to post cool things that happen that aren't worthy of a full blog post (like, for instance, announcing that I now have a twitter account), plus there's a lot of corporate and news companies adopting the structure, which is pretty cool as well. And the twitter phenomena seems to be gaining some clout. It just might be weird and obscure enough to be something really big(ger). Plus it's almost zen-like to compose your thoughts in 140 characters.

]]> http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/student_life_culture/mitwitter.shtml http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/student_life_culture/mitwitter.shtml Student Life & Culture Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:57:14 -0500 Chris M. '12 By this time I'm sure most of you are finally enjoying summer. (Let's have a contest, who got out the latest for summer vacation? post your final day of school in the comments, graduation day doesn't count unless it was also the last day of school) My summer last year was laid-back, carefree, and a whole lot of fun. This year my summer is shaping up to be quite the opposite (except still a whole lot of fun). I've got at least three entries started about my adventures so far, but really there's just too much to try and blog about. So while I'm working on resizing my 3 TB worth of photos to put in my blog and writing my entries, I thought it might be interesting to play a little game:

THE WORLD'S LARGEST PHOTO SCAVENGER HUNT!*

So, grab your cameras everyone because here's your (MIT themed) list. Points are of course awarded for both awesomeness of photo, and originality. Open to everyone, do it by yourself, do it with others, but most importantly have fun:

-The most creative use of objects to spell MIT
-A beaver.
-The nerdiest/coolest thing you can find
-The largest variety of energy drinks
-A magnetic monopole
-A large amount of caffeine
-A company or organization founded by an MIT alum
-A picture of a big accomplishment in a video game.
-An awesome lab
-A picture you feel best embodies the phrase "FAIL"
-A brass rat in the wild!
-A new (still shrink wrapped) copy of: Iron Man, 21, Goodwill Hunting, and the Back to the Future trilogy (just because it's my favorite)
-One photo that upon looking at it demonstrates the clear superiority of MIT amongst other institutions of higher learning.

Don't hurt yourself, and send pictures to me with the subject line "Photo Scavenger Hunt", this is important for my filter and my sanity. I'll give you a week from today to mail them in, and I'll post the results next Friday. Get snapping!

*I have no way of validating this claim

]]> http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/photo_scavenger_hunt.shtml http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/photo_scavenger_hunt.shtml Miscellaneous Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:35:34 -0500 Chris M. '12