Announcing New Bloggers for 2010! by Chris Peterson SM '13

Last week, the blogging committee – comprised, as always, of the communications team here at the admissions office, plus graduating senior bloggers, in this case Chris Su – met to choose new bloggers who will be joining the team for the coming year.

It was an incredibly tough job to do. With an acceptance rate of just under 9.7%, it’s actually more difficult to land a job as a blogger than it is to get into MIT in the first place!

However, as with our undergraduate applications, the cruel difficulty of the decisions is no excuse for not making them. Decide we must, and decide we did.

So, without further ado, let me introduce to you our new bloggers!

Class of 2014

• Anna Ho was born in Singapore but has lived in London for the past eight years. Though currently on crutches after a br√ºtal Ultimate Frisbee injury – a dangerous sport indeed – she will be living up high in French House come fall. Anna, who performed her valedictory speech with her friend and salutatorian Sameer in a “Kanye West style duet”, isn’t yet sure about what she’d like to study, but with interests ranging from FIRST Robotics to MedLinks, she’s sure to find something here at MIT.
• Kate Rudolph hails from the Chicago suburbs and is a world-class mathlete. She attended the IMO Training Camp and her research at last summer’s RSI was voted one of the top-five papers out of the program. In her long experience writing for a few different blogs Kate excels at sharing how math enters her life in new and interesting ways. As someone who personally never even completed calculus – long story – I loved how much I loved reading Kate’s blogs, whether about math or otherwise. Kate will be living in East Campus, although she is envious of how the Simmons elevators play random musical tunes when certain chords of buttons are pressed.
• Natanya Kerper comes to us from the San Diego suburbs. Born in Super Tuesday in an election year, Natanya’s been an activist and debater all of her life (JSA Best Speaker ’09) and will be a double major in Political Science and Biology here at MIT. Natanya, who plays girls lax and powderpuff football, is tough as nails – as a junior, she broke her wrist playing football, which didn’t keep her from acing the APs the following weekend. She toured Harvard, but a toilet there ate her phone, so she’ll be coming to MIT and blogging for us instead!
• last but not least of the freshman bloggers, we have Emad Taliep. Emad was born in South Africa but emigrated at an early age to the greater Boston area. He’ll be studying Brain and Cognitive Science here at MIT, and writes blog entries with titles like “Eggs and Curry: The Cross-Cultural Culinary Story.” When he gets to campus, Emad hopes to join Live Music Connection; I’ll post his answer to the “zombie apocalypse question” to illustrate why:
  

  The smell of decomposing flesh abounded. The nation was cast in eternal darkness, allowing the dead to rise. The shrewd cretins had shut down roadways and laid waste to supermarkets. The end seemed nigh. And the gigantic flamethrower I ordered was stuck in Beijing.

  “I’ve gotta beat them somehow,” I said, in an impromptu dramatic monologue. “Wait…beat! That’s it!”

  I called my friend David – a man so metal, he frequently drew suspicion from airport security – and told him to bring his guitar. My plan? To defeat the zombies with a logic bomb.

  We’d play death metal loud enough to wake the dead, yet heavy enough to cripple the living. I took a gamble by thinking death metal could be so intense, it could actually be lethal. But, in paranormal situations, risk-taking is essential.

  David plugged in his axe, amp, and mic, cranking up every dial. I put on my headphones, ready to unleash percussive chaos. As the zombies approached, David and I chugged out a window-shattering riff of sonorous death with a pounding rhythm. Our righteous metal threw the zombies into existential limbo, with the conflicting commands to die and reawaken putting their lives in flux.

  “Finish them!” I screamed.

  David growled into the microphone, rending the skies with his resonant voice. The Gods of Metal replied by raining down utter carnage. Lightning bolts fiercely incinerated the undead oppressors, leaving naught but scorch marks where they once stood.

  That’ll show my mom not to call my drumming a nuisance…

Upperclassmen

We also are hiring two upperclassmen this year to join our blogging team!

• Elizabeth Choe, ’13, is a Course 20 major from Missouri who lives in Simmons. She plays cell in MITSO, wants to be a comedian, rejected our “Team Jacob vs Team Edward” challenge to write about “Team Leibniz vs Team Newton”, and draws things during class:
  
  
• Becca Heywood, ’12, is a Course 1 major from Colorado who lives offcampus in an independent living group. She’s traveled the world while at MIT, with a MISTI internship in Mexico, an exchange trip to the Czech Republic, an an Engineers-Without-Borders trip to Uganda, blogging throughout them all. She’s on the varsity crew team and is terrified of zombies, so maybe she’ll make friends with Emad and his Drums of Doom.

These six special folks won’t start blogging right away, as we have to wrangle them here to campus, get ’em trained, and set up into the system in early September. When that time comes, they’ll be able to tell you more about their own personal stories, which I assure you are more interesting, compelling, and better written than anything I provided here.

Once again, thanks to all those who applied, and everyone say hi to the new crew!