Have no fear, though! Because here is what you should do this week in 3 easy steps (results not guaranteed, though they turned out alright for me):

1) Finish (or start…) your essays/"short written responses"/whatever they’re calling them these days- This sounds like common sense, but considering I wrote my entire main essay for UChicago the night it was due, I figure a few of you might need this reminder. You need to actually do the essays first before you can edit them. Just throwing that one out there.

2) Pretend you’re not you- This sounds counterintuitive, I know, especially because you’ve just spent hours crafting essays that perfectly depict who you are. The thing is, after all this, you really, really know yourself, to the point that if you keep reading over your own essays, you’ll just fill in the gaps of information that someone else might need to make sense of the essay. Like, you might know that your brother is only a year younger than you, but if you reference your baby brother’s first girlfriend or something you might need to clarify a bit.

So this is knowing yourself business is no longer super helpful. Ideally, you have someone else who doesn’t mind reading over multiple drafts of your essays to do this for you, but it doesn’t hurt to do it yourself, too. Take a step back, and while reading your essay, try to answer the question: If I didn’t know myself, what would I think of the person writing this essay? If that person isn’t the part of you that you were trying to get across, then you need to fix something. If you don’t like the person who came across but it was an honest essay… you have larger problems that it is not in my job description to deal with.

3) Read over your entire application as the you-who-isn’t-you-from-number-2- What does it say about you? Does each part contribute to the bigger picture of you that you’re trying to get across? Would you want to admit yourself? Do you have typos? Did you spell your name right? (true story: I almost submitted my Common App as Shanon).

The best analogy that I’ve ever heard regarding college apps is this: your college application should read like a story, with each part building upon the next. You don’t want it to get repetitive, but it should have some organic unity and a few general themes running through it. Remember that your application is your only voice to the admissions officers—make that voice count. Your teachers and interviewer will vouch for you, but your application is your only real chance to speak to the admissions officers and tell them who you are, what’s important to you, what your dreams are. Don’t blow it off and assume you’ll get in anywhere because you have a 2400. It doesn’t work like that.

… And that’s that. At this point, you can’t change the grades you’ve earned or the scores you got. All you can do is put your best foot forward and hope for the best—things have a crazy habit of working out in the end in world of college admissions.

So when you wrap up your applications and hit submit, just breathe. It’ll all be ok.

And puppies make everything better!

(The older younger brother and my actual puppy. This is what I'm missing at home).

So a few weeks ago, I was heading over to my sorority house to study one Friday night when I ran into a couple of my sisters.

Them: Where are you going?
me: Back to the house… to study….
Them: False. You’re coming with us. We haven’t seen you all week.
me: I mean… okay.

I am not a hard sell on the let’s-do-something-besides-work front.

Anyways, the problem with this is that I am literally in a pair of free Crocs I got at Notre Dame one time, powder blue men’s basketball shorts, and a navy BoSox hat with my usual black North Face. (No, I do not usually go out in public like this. It was a bad week.) Needless to say, I am not about to walk around Boston in this outfit, so I borrow one person’s jeans and get a shirt from someone else and we’re on our merry way.

… and in true MIT fashion, come home a few hours later and camp out in the basement of our house to work.

This is not the point of the story, though. The point is that a week or so later, I get the following text from my friend Sarah.

Sarah: hey, do you still have my genes? could I get them back sometime?
me: i mean, I have like 99.99% of your genes…
Sarah: crap. i definitely did not even catch that. i meant jeans.

So I give her hard time and promise to drop off the pants at Baker when I get a chance.

Fast forward to last night, when the nerdiest, most MIT text exchange I have ever had occurs. And this is why I love MIT.

Sarah: Genes?
me: crap, I keep falling asleep before I make it back to baker. Will return your genes later tonight… oo la la.
Sarah: can I have a copy of reverse transcriptase with that too? I would like to make some cdna… you can be my virus lol
me: I’ll do what I can, but remember that you’ll need some dna helicase to unzip these genes.
Sarah: as long as you bring ligase… its getting hot in here and something needs to piece me back together.
me: no worries, I’m on it. I’ll even bring some primer over to get things started.
me: and while this might be the weirdest conversation I have ever had, the good news is that you totally sound ready for 7.013. and I do have your jeans.

And yes, this is a conversation between two sorority sisters… only at MIT.

But that’s old news to me, because it seriously feels like I was a senior a decade ago. I was burning time on facebook the other day going through high school pictures and was like, “wow, that was not a good hair d- was that just last year? THAT WAS LAST YEAR?” And I suddenly felt very old.

To add to this, I have to declare a major by April 17th. Yes, that means that while you’re all on campus not sleeping and eating more sugar than you’ve consumed ever and figuring out how you will fit your 7 free t-shirts back into your luggage post-CPW, I will be declaring what I tentatively want to do with my life.

This is terrifying. I have ~54% no idea what I want to with my life. Last week, I pretended I was a mechanical engineer, and it was pretty fun, but then I realized I didn’t actually want to engineer things forever. I was course 7 and 18 for about two weeks at the beginning of this year until MIT was like, “yo, Shannon, math is hard” and was like “whoa, you are definitely right” and promptly retreated from uber-1337 18.022 to the nice, cozy mathiness of 18.02. Currently, I’m telling people that I’m course 5, and I’m kind of liking it. It’s like dress up. Only… with… your life.

And this is where you come in. Decide my fate! Vote what major Shannon should choose next week when she meets with her advisor!

THE CONTENDERS:

Course 2 (Mechanical Engineering)- So I’m in this class called “Wheelchair Design in Developing Countries,” which is incredible. I’m currently part of a team that’s working on a tricycle attachment for wheelchairs that will allow wheelchair users in Kenya (our current market) to travel the long distances (30 km, in some cases!) to work, a task made difficult by non-handicap accessible public transportation and current wheelchair designs. ANYWAYS. I really like getting my hands dirty and designing things. It’s pretty cool to look at a design and be like, “I made that. And it will change someone’s life.”

Like Fatuma, one of our partners in Uganda who came to visit and give us feedback on our designs:

My thoughts on majoring in MechE is that I would likely use it for biology or international development.

Course 5 (Chemistry)- My major du jour. I’m really enjoying being a pretend chemistry major. I LOVE 5.12, and I really like learning about biology from a chemical standpoint. I also took 5.112 in the fall, the hardest version of freshmen chemistry- it’s recommended for students with an “exceptionally strong background in chemistry,” which did not describe me AT ALL. But I was all “hey, I want a challenge, BRING IT.” And it did bring it. I quite literally failed the first exam (the ranges were A, B, C, Cause for Concern, and In Trouble, and yours truly made the honorable last category), but I was actually doing really well by the end and ended up learning a ton from the class. Best and worst decision I have made at MIT.

ANYWAYS.

I like chemistry, which is funny, because I abhorred chem in high school. However, these shirts alone might just be enough to sway me 5. AND we get them for free when we declare.

Course 7 (Biology)- I came in as a hard-core Biology major. And when I mean hardcore, I mean there-is-no-way-I-will-ever-consider-anything-else hardcore. I had done Bio research in high school, had done the USABO, the whole works. It was my thing. As in, this was my response to the “what major do you want to be?” question:

I blame my love of biology on my feet.

Looking for something “alive, or that had been living” around my house, my 1st grade self sat down, peeled some dead skin off my foot, and brought it into school the next day to look at under a microscope. Watching my very own cells come into focus, I fell in love with a world outside my field of view.

A first grade amazement turned into a middle school obsession with enzymes, and by high school had morphed into an interest so deep that introductory college textbooks were far too broad for my interests. I began pouring through research journals and found myself happily studying transcription factors the summer after junior year, once working in lab everyday for over 4 weeks straight. I’d wake up every morning excited to leave my dorm, and would come home to argue the merits of biology versus chemistry with my dorm mates and sit in the lounge until late at night reading the latest scientific literature.

I’ve been a Course 7 major since the age of 6- who said young love never lasts?

Hardcore. I told you. Realistically, I still want to do bio research after I graduate- which path I want to take to that is an entirely different matter. (hence the having 5 options for my potential major)

Course 10B (Chemical Engineering with biology)- Like 5, only more engineering and biology- this is looking like a good way to potentially mesh the two.

Course 20 (Biological Engineering)- Now, this seems like the logical choice given all the above, but freshmen can’t actually declare course 20- you have to apply sophomore year, and acceptance to the program is based on your completion of the prereqs to that point. But we’ll include this in the voting, because if I’m going to go course 20, I should know sooner than later.

Alright, so here’s the ballot. Feel free to add your comments and/or lobby for your choice of major in the comments. If you offer to bring me cookies at CPW, I may or may not lend more credence to your vote*.

*Emphasis on the may not.

And in officially less than 4 days (OHMYGODDECISIONZ), over a 1000 of you will be right there with year-ago-me. Yay, you now know where you're going to college (MIT, clearly), your teachers have given up on trying to make you work, and life is good.

But in the meantime, you probably want to do anything but work, so that is why I propose the following: an MIT Admissions Blogs wide game of Funny Farm.

It is pretty much impossible to solve this by yourself, though I wouldn't put it past an MIT applicant to actually be able to do it. The game is pretty self-explanatory: you start with the phrase "On A Farm," which is connected to a bunch of boxes. Those connecting lines indicate that the general idea of the connected box is along the lines of the original, and the number of dots is the number of letters in the word. Okay, in case I'm not making sense, here's the game with a couple of solutions in it:

Following? Okay, the clincher here is you can actually save the game AND just post the link they give you anywhere. Meaning, we can all work on this together and keep posting what progress we've made on the game in the comments. Even better, you can actually merge games, too, so if someone posts a new link you can just add their answers to the game you're working on.

So have at it, MIT applicants. Here's the link to the game I just started above. :)

from: Shannon
to: Theta
date: Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 8:10 AM
subject: Snow snow snow.

So I'm from West Michigan, which gets some of the most snow in the US, right? Our standards for getting school off were really high- and even WE would have had a snow day today. Current tally:

OFF- BU, Northeastern, Berklee, Tufts
DELAYED- BC, the Harv
BUSINESS AS USH: MIT

fml.

View from my window onto a main thoroughfare this morning when I woke up at 7:30:

I am seriously going to drown in snow on my way to class. If I never post again, you now know why.

EDIT1, 8:37am: Burton Conner's fire alarm just went off. Seriously, now.

EDIT2, 9:09am: http://wbztv.com/schoolclosings#College Really?

But without further ado, let's roll out the red carpet for our first 3 respondents.

We start with Narce '13, a proud 13-er (one of the 13(37)? okay, bad joke.) who may or may not like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain, I didn't ask. He maintains that he is in fact NOT making a peace sign, but, and I quote, "as an otaku, that can only be 'V for Victory!'"

The acute observer will note the Class of 2013 poster in the background and fantastically nerdy t-shirt, an excellent choice of attire. Kudos, Narce.

Next up is Nathan '13 of Ponte Vedra, FL, who is actually one of my neighbors' cousins. We've never met. We actually just found this out. Fun fact.

Anyways, Nathan goes for inquisitive look. Nathan, keep practicing. You will be making this face a lot next year at psets.

And finally we come to Sheila '13 of Connecticut, who opts for separate pictures of the tube and card. Probably because they came at different times, but we'll pretend that artistic emphasis was the goal. Clearly.

So send me your pictures and I'll keep adding them to the post! Happy Valentine's Day from MIT!

EDIT:

Oh, but wait! There's more!

First off in round two, we have Richard '13 from Brawley, CA, and "if you don't know where that is, it's ok (99.9999% of the population doesn't)." I didn't. I had to look it up on a map. I also tend to know nothing about geography west of Wisconsin, though.

Also, please note that his beaver says Tim. That is awesome.

Next up is Paula '13 from Coconut Creek, FL, wearing yet another awesomely-nerdy-shirt-from-the-COOP-that-I-wish-I-owned.

And finally we have Maria '13 from Cleveland, OH (where I actually lived for a year or so, fun fact) sporting the classic tube-card-card pose. Solid choice.

Alright, guys, unless you get me a picture in the next 34 minutes, you have missed your chance for a moment of fame on the MITty blogs. Hope you had a great Valentine's Day!

EDIT #2:

Okay, Alex '13 brought up a good point in that it'll be Valentine's Day for three hours longer in California than Boston in the EST. So I'm not really being fair in cutting off your picture submits. So just keeping sending them. It's not like I'll be asleep.

So speaking of Alex, he's from Colton, California (I know where that is! yay Google maps.) and will likely be in for a surprise this time next year. Surprise! Boston is cold. Sorry to spoil it for you.

And Happy Valentine's Day, again. Let's see who can be the last person to get their picture in before Valentine's Day officially ends. A contest to be last. That should be a new one for you guys.

First, and most importantly: BEN FOLDS IS COMING TO MIT.

So every year we have this thing called Spring Weekend (the link is to last year's site), which this year falls around Drop Date, the last day to drop classes and have them disappear from your transcript (April 23); AXO Lip Sync, which Snively has blogged about (April 24, and formally Alpha Chi Omega, by the dubs, shortened to A Chi O); and Greek Week, which is this week long celebration of Greek life on campus, which is kind of a big deal- last I checked, 50% of men are in frats, and a little less than 25% of women are in sororities (April 26 through May 2, in case you were curious). Paul, Chris, and I are all Greek, but that is an entirely different topic.

What's most important, is that right there in the middle of all that awesomeness is the awesomeness that is Ben Folds on April 25. Christmas come 8 months early. Literally. I am so exited beyond belief right now.

But okay, so that was exciting news today on campus, but, you know, Ben Folds only got the thumbs up from 70% of the student population, no big deal. Today being the day before Valentine's Day meant that the different a cappella groups on campus (plus the fabulous, never imitated, very charismatic and definitely shameless marching band) were all selling serenades- for a mere 10 to 20 dollars, you could chose from a list of songs and have them sung to your sweet heart/friend/sorority sister you really wanted to embarrass (uh...) in the middle of class.

By far the most adorable of the groups doing this, though, was the Logs (short for Logarhythms), who are our all-male a cappella group and kind of the heart throb of more than one female I know.

To get a taste of this, here's them at our CPW closing ceremonies last year, though the quality is kind of eh. If you really need to procrastinate, just youtube "MIT Logarhythms" and you can lose a few hours of your life.

So in the middle of our 18.03 (Differential equations) lecture, a bunch of guys in shirts and ties ran into 10-250, yelled out a girl's name, and went running up to serenade her. To give you some sense of how middle of everything this was, here's the end of the song and them literally just running past our very bewildered professor.

And the song they sang to her, as sung at their concert back in December.

They're pretty awesome.

What's ALSO awesome (oh, slick transition WHAT) are the Valentine's Day cards we sent you kids earlier this week. So. Following last year's tradition, send me an email with a picture of you and your card (and tubes and Holiday cards, if you're feeling particularly awesome) and I'll put all of them up tomorrow in an awesome collage. It'll be awesome.

And before I use the word awesome again, I should probably end this entry. Alright. GO EMAIL GO.

FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS IS GOING TO BE IN BOSTON ON APRIL 17. OH MY GOD.

Also, to continue the in-cases, (I don't think I'm Englishly allowed to say that, but whatever), in case you haven't been on Facebook in like, the last month, there's this thing going on where you write 25 things about yourself, and then inflict this upon others, and... okay, I'm just going to let this chain letter ridiculousness explain itself.

"Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you."

Basically, let's have fun with this. I'm doing this now, and now you have to post 25 things about yourself in the comments. HA. I'm enabling your high school procrastination. Yes, I am a terrible person.

1. I am not the person today that I thought I would be. I thought I'd never be an engineer, never seriously be premed, never join a sorority (much less one that would quite honestly be the reason I got through first semester), and would never actually find a pair of skinny jeans that fit. Oh, how things change.
2. I am becoming my mother, down to the hazelnut flavored coffee. I'm okay with this.
3. I only just started wearing socks again.
4. I went to three finals in a row in the exact same set of clothing. Make your own assumptions regarding personal hygiene during that period.
5. I'd really love to run a marathon. Personal goal.
6. I have oatmeal for breakfast almost every day.
7. I like being sore after workouts.
8. I had never had guacamole before this year.
9. My childhood goal was to be quarterback for the Detroit Lions. This didn't work out.
10. I want to be fluent in at least 3 languages some day. An Asian language would be cool.
11. Things that I really like I am not necessarily good at, and things that I am really good at I don't necessarily like. This tends to disappoint a lot of people.
12. If I could eat only one food for the rest of my life, it would probably be Nature Valley bars. But preferably in a variety pack.
13. I hate going out in sweatpants.
14. My nose currently itches.
15. I have only fallen out of bed once, and I got an ambulance ride out of it. (This was recent.)
16. My mom once dropped me down the stairs and broke my femur. This sounds awful when taken out of context.
17. It takes a lot to make me cry. Like, even the falling-out-of-bed-extravaganza was dry eyed. I also was asleep, but whatever, details.
18. I am never not in the mood for chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream.
19. I have called 4 dead people at work so far with the Alumni Association... and counting. It's a little awkward.
20. I would really like some milk right now.
21. I just realized that I have had 5 facts about food already. This was completely unintentional.
22. Fall is my favorite season. That 50 to 60 degree range is pretty ace.
23. I recently purchased my first pair of rainboots. They're bright yellow. I was excited.
24. I am about to be late to signing your guys' Valentine Day cards.
25. And fun fact- Samantha '12 in that entry is currently my roommate. :)

Have fun with this, kids.

But seriously, I’m from Michigan, so Boston cold is still no big deal. To be honest, if it starts getting cold you will probably see a noticeable change in my personal enthusiasm levels inversely proportional to the temperature, though this kind of breaks down once it gets below 0, because I kind of like to pretend that temperatures like that don’t exist.

Anyways.

The point of all this is that when it’s cold, it snows, which is pretty much the best. So while heading to Chinatown last weekend with my friends Sumi and Steph,

we were walking by the moat of the MIT chapel, which is just an empty concrete pit filled with snow during the winter. Like this.

So we’re just joking around and whatnot, and I’m all “hey, wouldn’t it be awesome to make a drowning snowman in the moat?” And we laugh, agree that it would probably one of the more epic things we’d done in a while, and proceed to gorge ourselves in Chinatown and forget about it.

This isn’t over, though. I was legitimately serious about the snowman thing, because, you know, I like snow. And my friend Steph is from California and clearly needed to be taught how to make a snowman, which I feel is some essential life skill.

So first we tried packing the snow, which failed because it was too cold.

But clearly, this was way too good of an idea to abandon, so we went ice chunk hunting and let Steph use her newly-found PE Taekwondo mad kicking skillz to cut them down into manageable sizes.

… though we still had trouble actually lifting them.

After some creative lifting though (mainly, me just lifting it and making the two of them feel bad), we managed to get the chunks into the moat, grabbed a few branches from the surrounding bushes, stole a few buttons from the McCormick sewing room and voila, we had a snowman doing backstroke.

This was clearly not enough, though. So we run back to McCormick, print off a NO SWIMMING sign, run around mine and Sumi's sorority looking for clear packing tape for lamination purposes, and run back to the moat to put it up.

Throw in a chunk of ice for a shark fin, snow angels, and you have yourself one of the most impressive things I’ve done in a while. :)

Coolest moment of IAP: sitting in the student center and hearing someone remark as they walked by, “hey, did you see that snowman in the moat? Isn’t that hilarious?”

Why yes, it is my 19th birthday. How’d you know?

While true, that’s not really a national holiday or anything, though, I mean, it probably should be. For those of you living under a rock the last year, or just living with a faulty internet connection, today is the inauguration of 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. This is kind of a big deal.

So big, in fact, that the following email was sent out to the MIT community from Chancellor Clay last week:

Dear MIT Community,

In response to employee requests, and due to the historic nature of this presidential inauguration, on Tuesday, January 20, cable viewingof the inaugural swearing-in and speech will be available in rooms 10-250, 3-270, 4-270, 32-123 and E51-151.

We request that supervisors and managers be flexible in allowing employees to use their lunch breaks to watch the inaugural swearing-in and speech. In addition, for those who wish to watch more of the inauguration than their lunch breaks allow, or whose lunch breaks do not coincide with the time of the inauguration, the Institute will allow employees to supplement their lunch breaks with release time of no more than 1 1/2 hours, between 11:30 a.m. and 1:00 p.m..

(For those of you just living somewhere not-at-MIT, those hyphenated numbers are actually lecture halls. First number is building, second is room. Not really important, but just fun fact.)

Even the hacking community chimed in.

Closer.

Even closer.

Yeah, this is cool. Go watch. This is history in the making. Any thoughts on the next 4 years?