Yestermonth’s IAP by Rachel F. '12

I’ve mentally partitioned my time here into “eras” with defining characteristics rather than temporal durations, although each of those eras happens to span precisely one academic year, rendering this system completely obsolete. Freshman year was intensely characterized by social adjustment and academic slacking. During sophomore year, I buckled down to work and finished most of my major. It wasn’t that exciting. As I passed the halfway point and realized that potential social experiences would bottleneck dramatically after college, junior year became the “just do it” era. This motto has led to some vaguely unfortunate situations, such as taking the hardcore software performance engineering death lab class that temporarily shifted my bedtime to 7am, but it’s never led to an absence of fun. (This applies to the lab, too.)

“Just do it” was difficult to implement during the semester, when I had 30-hour labs cropping up the instant I finished a round of 10-hour psets, but turned out to be wildly effective during IAP, which is popularly described as “MIT without the work”, i.e. the mystical utopia described by the admissions blogs. IAP is a truly magical time during which absolutely nothing is expected of you; ironically, you tend to get much more done for yourself. Some people spend IAP home, or go abroad, or work, and there are a few unfortunate frosh who devote it to GIRs, but you’d be hard-pressed to find an MIT student who doesn’t insist that you should spend at least one IAP at MIT, just doing things for fun. For the overachievers, there are tons of semi-structured activities to do — Battlecode, entrepreneurial bootcamps, poetry discussions, blacksmithing, pistol, etc.

That said, I’m finally getting back to the alleged topic of this post: a delayed overview of my IAP.

Through the convenience of MIT’s externship program, I spent IAP working at Monster (the job search engine, not the energy drink), located just 1.5 furlongs east of campus, where I developed a module for automatic query expansion based on job correlations, which were determined by scraping a resume database for sequences of jobs held by real people. As cool as this was, my spirits were a little soured by the first day, which I spent half of filling out and faxing a massive pile of paperwork so I could get paid, although I did get to spend the other half pondering my project and customizing my bash shell*.

*For the non-6-3s among you, shell customization is the art of increasing your productivity by writing macros for command line usage, and is incredibly addictive, but only to coders.

That was my 9-5 job. By night, I stalked the roofs of Gotham, a caped crusader of justice…

…um wrong story.

Actually, I made my first visit to NYC one weekend via bus. We spent a lot of time singing off-key in Korean karaoke bars, eating, watching Iron Chef, eating, taking pictures, riding the subway so we could find some place to eat, and eating food. Leptin abounded all round.

Back at MIT, I randomly decided to paint two murals on my hall in the middle of the night…

…and frolicked in the snow, a phenomenon unheard of in the Bay Area during my lifetime excepting that one time in 1993 when a meek scattering of flakes fell for all of two minutes…

…and, after three trials by oven, gained the ability to bake a perfect soft-on-the-inside, crusty-on-the-outside loaf of peasant bread…

…and suddenly decided to rearrange my room in conjunction with frequent room-rearranging buddies Ale’12 and Sam’12…

…and stayed up stupidly late…

…because I also filmed, directed, and helped produce a slightly creepy music video satirizing music videography. There’s still one scene left to shoot, so I don’t want to give anything away, but I promise it will revolutionize your Youtube-watching experience as much as I have revolutionized your hyphenated(-and-parentheticalized)-word-reading experience. Stay tuned.

So yeah, having fun is hard work — but it’s fun after all, so who cares. How was your yestermonth?