Snively '11
Sep 27 2012
Stealing from the Class of 2016
Posted in: Miscellaneous, Freshman Applicants, Information, Life & Culture
Good day!
One of the many unique and altogether unavoidable aspects of MIT life is the mailing list. Mailing lists are powerful tools that allow people to contact a large number of other people whom all have a common interest. Most sporting groups, clubs, class groups, dorms, floors in dorms, classes, councils, and recitations all have unique mailing lists. It's impossible to avoid getting added to many MANY mailing lists during your time at MIT. By the end of my four year stint I believe I was on ~200 different mailing lists. This isn't unusual.
There are some mailing lists that only see use for a semester, others that get used for a year or more, and still others that are used for four or more years. Many mailing lists lack clever names and all of them end with @mit.edu. Since they lack clever names it's usually pretty easy to recognize patterns (or guess what a group's mailing list name might be). Take, for example, the mailing lists that are used for contacting an ENTIRE... read the post »
Jul 31 2012
How to jump out of an airplane and live
Posted in: Miscellaneous, Life & Culture
Hello again from out in the real world! It's been a little more than a year since I've graduated and I'm happy to report that real life isn't as difficult as I thought it would be. Just pay your rent on time and don't spend more money than you make and things tend to work out.
Unfortunately, I've picked up a new hobby that makes that second rule a little more difficult.
In the summer between sophomore and junior year at MIT I did my first tandem skydive while I was back home in Oregon. I didn't tell my parents, I just went with a bunch of friends, shelled out the cash, got strapped to a skydiver, and was pushed out of a plane. It was AWESOME! I didn't even mind that there was a malfunction on our main parachute and we had to cutaway and deploy our reserve, I was too busy being on sensory overload :) My parents weren't really excited that I'd gone skydiving but they were glad that I'd had fun and were also glad that I was still alive.
I did some checking that semester and... read the post »
Jun 8 2012
Kick . . .
Posted in: Miscellaneous
Greetings and salutations! If I'm a good judge of time, and I like to think that I am, all y'all prefrosh are starting your summer internships and getting excited to finally make it to campus in just three short months. Yay!!! Either that or you're gearing up and anxiously awaiting the release of the MIT Application at the end of summer. I know during the summer leading up to MY freshman year I haunted these blogs and I expect many of you will do a fair amount of reading as well.
Before I go too much farther, I suppose I should introduce myself. It's been forever since I've blogged and many of you may not have heard of me. Hi. I'm Snively, I graduated in 2011 (MechE) and have just completed my first year out in the real world. That's right, electricity bills, rent, gas, insurance, and all that other boring stuff.
You know what's not boring though? My job. My job is very much not boring and I think you'll agree. I build interactive exhibits for museums AND design/build... read the post »
Jan 5 2012
Surviving MIT
Posted in: Best of the Blogs, Freshman Applicants, Process & Statistics, Prepare for MIT
Head over to /r/confession and you'll find this post lurking near the top. Since Reddit tends to cycle through content pretty routinely, I'll reproduce the post here:
Also, I'm kind of an asshole about how smart I am, at least to myself. I'm always telling myself that I was cheated out of an A, but deep down I know I deserved that B. Not only that, but I should have gotten B's in several other classes as well, but I somehow managed not to get them.
Jun 19 2011
This is the end
Posted in: Miscellaneous
INTRO
First things first, I have to post this, as promised in an earlier blog entry:
What could this possibly mean? It means I've graduated!!! Holy smokes, four years of MIT and now it's over. It seems like it goes so fast, how could it be over? Then you think about specific moment, all of the episodes, and you realize that it didn't go fast, that it took just as long as anything else takes because there's no way to slow or quicken the progression of time. So here we are, four years from when I started, and I get to look back at all I've done. Not gonna lie, sometimes it's hard to remember (not because the moments are painful, just because they were a long time ago and I'm getting old), and all these blog entries I've got archived here are an awesome way to reminisce.
Ups and Downs
It started on my personal blog with this, admittedly, super tooly entry. It's amazing to compare how I act and write now with some of my earlier entries, both in my personal blog and MIT blog. MIT has... read the post »