Auditions for the Spring musical rolled around in February - the Musical Theatre Guild was putting on "Urinetown", which I had never heard of, and wasn't particularly keen on hearing more about, given that title. 

So, of course, my friend managed to persuade me to print some sheet music and go to auditions. 

"Want to be my roommate?"
"Yeah, sure."

Liz and I filled out our rooming forms together -- single sided sheets of paper with prompts like "Who do you want to live with?" and "Tell us something funny, we read a lot of these!"

It seemed to go pretty smoothly until she brought up that she would be waking up for crew practice diligently at 6am every day. Crap.

Not my ideal start to the year.

So a lot of people wonder what it's like living in a quad -- four girls in a glorious 500-something square foot room furnished with two sinks, huge windows facing the river, and just enough space to house our joint collection of shoes, sweaters, shampoo and study fuel (AKA our weight in ramen and hello panda) -- and it's not easy to describe. (For those of you worried about getting put in a quad, there are only 10 on campus, all located in Baker House. Don't sweat it!)

The year got off to a rocky start. I never quite recovered from Nicole claiming the first bed with a bag of grapes -- turns out they weren't even hers -- or realizing that at any point in time, someone in our room was rustling and some degree of awake.

You might ask how we've made it so far into the year without any issues, and all I can say is that we figured out how to be friends. Fancy that!

Our room is best described by the little signs that we leave that we've learned to read throughout the year. We know that someone's had a bad day when there's the faithful five ounce bag of honey barbeque Fritos in our trash can that someone grabbed at LaVerde's on the way back from class. We know that when we try not to turn on the lights and end up walking into rain boots, a swiffer, an iron pot, a laundry basket, two chairs and a lamp, all we really want to do is fall into bed and sleep and we're sorry that we made more noise than a street drummer. And we know that even after our good days, all we want to do is eat dinner at 5:30 on the dot because we missed lunch and we can't wait to order sweet potato fries and indulge in an occasional 0% fruit juice beverage of our choice (okay, it's HI-C, I admit it!)

Before the 8.01 final last fall -- from the left, me, Nicole, and Anji looking particularly cheery...

And we're happy when we're all in the room so we can laugh at bad YouTube videos, whatshouldtimcallme.tumblr.com, get ready to go out at night, or just stay in to karaoke at the top of our lungs and paint our nails. Our weeks start with a collective sigh Monday morning, and by the time our psets are finished by Friday we perk up and get ready for the weekend! Together we're good at solving life problems, boy problems, and differential equation problems.

Anji, Nicole, me and ... not our fourth roommate, but we love you anyways Sam! :)

All I can say is that in the past 8 months we've constructed a little home and a little family. I'll omit pictures of our room because it looks like we took four model room sets from Target, tetrised them all into a funny shaped brick room, and then transported the toiletries and school supplies section of Walmart and scattered it on our beds, tables, shelves and floors... oops.

Dressed up with Anji and Liz for winter fraternity formals (left) and with Liz for spring fraternity formals (right)!

And for all the accidental wake-ups, stuff everywhere, running around the room late for class, I'm sure as hell going to miss what we have in Baker 446.

My wall -- one of the few orderly things in our room...

... Good thing we're living in doubles in Baker next to each other next year! :)

Thanks Liz, Nicole and Anji for an amazing year. You guys are the best roommates I ever could've asked for, and then some.

Anji and Nicole being... Anji and Nicole.

Even though that's how my life has been lately, I lucked out and shook up my routine a little bit the other day. Before heading into Kendall Square, I took some time to stop by MIT's Media Lab, where I'd park myself and do some hardcore, pomodoro-style studying for 7.05. I remembered there being a fancy couch where I could sit, and looking back, I'm surprised that's all I could recall.

What you're seeing here is probably countless years worth of tagging, doodling and signing - done via pen, marker, highlighter, or anything else. A good deal of the surface area here is made of felt, which is duct-taped onto the actual frame of the couch. The seats are white leather, or some synthetic material whose feel and look can easily be mistaken for it. And the rest...

Well, the rest is the work of people like you and me.

Of course, MIT's CMS department, for whom much of the Media Lab's facilities and offices are considered their home, would naturally be among the most creative people here at MIT. But I doubt that these freeform doodles were exclusively the work of CMS people. And even if it was, it gave me a smile. Seeing people's humanity out on display does that to me; it keeps my mind off of the thoughts of MIT-as-a-bootcamp that set in during a hellish week.

So I decided to leave something behind for the new prospectives, the incoming Class of 2016, and everyone else. I hope this a reminder that, even when your nose is to the grindstone and it feels like things suck, there's something wonderful waiting around the corner here at MIT.

Sometimes, you've just got to know where to look for it.

I was in line at LaVerdes, looking for my debit card with which to pay for my peanut-butter cup cookie that I NEEDED to basically inhale at that point in time when I dropped my ink-covered pens and people who were nice unfortunately picked them up and covered themselves in ink as well. Yay!

>.<

For the sake of all that is metaphorical, it's safe to say that I've updated you on my life. 

I've wanted to post about so many things--Terrascope, my trip to Costa Rica over spring break, amazing upperclassmen that I've had the opportunity to talk to, greek life (including greek week), burrito obsessions and Anna's taqueria, more people, more terrascope radio things <3, how I'm going to China for a week over the summer, how sometimes I feel AWESOME to be here, and sometimes I'm just plain confused about what to do with life, how in less than a month I will once again be reunited with Chicago (!), my 16.00 class in which we're building a lighter-than-air vehicle, more terrascope radio stuff...

It'll happen. 

But for right now, all I feel like doing is sitting back for a bit and letting it soak in. 

I've let only a month of my life go by without writing anything about this place and I feel overwhelmed and all shivery-like when I think of things to write about. 

So to those of you who may feel nervous, anxious, super-excited about coming to MIT, it's for a reason. There's seriously an explosion of things to do here (which I will go into more detail in later posts, I promise!!). Just keep an eye out for all the opportunities. You'll make your experience what it is.

Also, I just discovered this, which I like: 

                                                                   

Every semester or so, the MIT Press (located to the Eastern edge of the campus) hosts a legendary Loading Dock Sale where several rooms are lined wall to wall with moderately new books at prices reduced up to 90% off. How could they afford to sell them for such low prices? Apparently, the books are mainly MIT Press overstock, or with minor damage, or out-of-print. But these factors are no deterrents!

Students, educators, and other segments of the MIT community crowded room after room, carrying baskets filled to the brim, and accumulating checkout sums of several hundreds. It could get crazy in there and it wasn’t hard to see why.

The content range was incredible. From computer science to political science, to architecture, to music, philosophy, linguistics...you name it. I tried very hard to tame my hoarder instincts. My friend walked away with an impressive coffee table book on the art of Duchamp. But here’s what I ended up with - I had to stop myself before it got out of hand, and so I can hurry off to the CPW Activities Midway.

Honest Signals is written by MIT Media Lab professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland on the significance of our nuanced ways of interaction. Inventing American History investigates historical events written to serve specific political interests. Designing Media is a collection of interviews with media pioneers, probing media of the future. And lastly, Ai Weiwei's Blog is a translated collection of blog entries from the Chinese artist/activist/true-multi-hyphenate.

I am still giddy about these purchases this very moment. 

So If you love books and will be at MIT, this is a quick public service announcement! There should be another one of these events this coming fall.

What are you reading these days? Any recommendations?  

Each year, we always plan on admitting students from the waitlist. However, this year, we saw an unprecedented, record-breaking percentage of students enrolling from our admitted student group (around 70+ percent). Unfortunately, this means that we will not be able to admit anyone off the waitlist this year. This is the first time in the last seven years that we have not been able to go to our waitlist.

Today at 5pm Eastern Time, we will notify all remaining students on our waitlist via email that we will not be able to offer them admission. At that point, we will consider our waitlist “closed” and do not expect to admit any additional students this year for the Class of 2016.

I know many of you have been sending in additional materials, and we have seen all the wonderful updates you have submitted. We appreciate the time and effort you have put in to letting us know how much you love MIT, and we thank you for your patience during this time. We know you will have incredibly bright futures and great college experiences, and we wish you all the very best at the college you’ve chosen.
 

Savannah climates have streams that are dry or have low flow most of the year and can be easily crossed by foot during these periods. However, during the flood stages, such streams represent impassable obstacles. A footbridge that can be quickly assembled from easily available materials will be designed, detailed, fabricated, built and tested by the student teams.

There are a few requirements, such as failure criteria, and that the bridge has to be 10 ft long, with a 2 ft wide deck and 2-3 ft clearance above the water level, but other than that, it is really up to our imaginations (and engineering skills). Oh, and it is supposed to hold 2000 lbs of distributed load (and hopefully the building team as well).

Failure Criteria

Collapse Criteria
Collapse Load > 1.5 Max Working Load

Serviceability
Maximum allowable LL deflection < L/360
Maximum allowable TL deflection < L/240

Loads
LL: 100 lbs./sq.ft.

After spending the past few semesters in classes like 1.050, 1.035 and 1.036 learning the fundamentals of structural design, this is a chance to build a structure and test it. Even though I will likely have very little to do with structural engineering in the future (I am heading into a little sub-field of civil engineering known as transportation), it has been a lot of fun to see our design come to fruition. When I was younger, I wanted to be a bridge engineer and spent much of my childhood building and testing bridges in my basement. Most of my bridges then were maybe a foot long, rather than ten, so I am enjoying doing a full-scale project.

 
Our completed trusses

Best part?

Easily carried by one person

My team decided to go a bit of a different direction that most and try and come up with an innovative material to use for our bridge. We have a pretty simple design (a truss bridge), but are using PVC and PVC connectors to construct the bridge. Although PVC isn’t necessarily the most readily available material in developing countries ( a minor part of the project), it can be quickly assembled and is very light, making it ideal for emergency situations where aid might be brought in, and has the benefit of being easily moved and stored. We are still in the process of building our bridge, but have almost finished our frame, with only the deck left to complete.

 
A team effort to get the angles in
 

                  
Our wonderful construction diagrams, courtesty of Megan O. '12

       
Building space? The porch off Lobby 10. 

Well-ventilated area? Check. 

Some teams went a different direction...

If you are in the Cambridge/MIT area next Wednesday, May 9th, come out in front of the Student Center between about 12:30pm and 4pm to watch us test our bridges. This basically involves loading them with 2000 lbs of concrete blocks and hoping that our calculations were correct. So come watch!

Professor Woodie Flowers once told me that "MIT can be either a steamroller or a candy store: it depends entirely on how you look at it." We wanted to make a video that showed the candy store side of things. 

Soon I'll post up more on the making of MIT Imagination, along with some b-roll and a montage of mascot pain. In the meantime, I'd like to thank everyone who made this video possible over the last six months, since it was, as the credits said, a labor of love by many people at MIT. 

CREDITS:

Written and directed by:

• Chris Peterson
• Elizabeth Choe '13

Starring:

• Shanasia Sylman '15
• Estefania Avila '15
• Kayla Esquivel '15
• Delian Asparouhov '15
• Chris Mills '12
• Michael Rodrigo '12 (as Tim)

Featuring: 

• Connie Huang '15
• Ana Vazquez '15
• Kenton Williams S.M. '12 
• Stephan Boyer ‘13
• Nexie, TOFU, and the Mustachioed Bear
• The Lobby 10 Ensemble
• The MIT football team

Music:

• Orchestral arrangement by Adrian Grossman '14
• Performed by the MIT Symphony Orchestra
• Conducted by Dr. Adam Boyles 
• Sung by Chris Puchi '14
• Produced by Michael Miller '09
• Advised by Mikey Yang '05

Special thanks to:

• Rachel Fong '12 and the East Campus i3 Team
• Jack Carroll, Suzanne Flynn, Paelle Powell '15, and other residents of Maseeh Hall
• Emerald Ferreira-Yang '13 and the Random Hall Cryomaniacs
• The MIT Glass Lab
• Robert Urban and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research 
• Polly Guggenheim of the MIT Media Lab Personal Robotics Group
• Craig Bryer and MIT Environmental Health and Safety
• The MITAdmissions Bloggers
• The MITAdmissions CommTeam

During one recent episode, Stephen Colbert interviewed Richard Hersh, a former university president who recently coauthored a book on how higher education is failing in America. During that interview Hersh - who I think it is fair to say is somewhat down on education in America today - had some very kind words to say about MIT. (Thanks Richard. The check from Tim Beaver is in the mail). 

Stephen, though, had some unkind words about MIT, and moreover didn't seem to really "get" what makes this such a special place. Now, I know such complex concepts may be difficult for him to grasp (after all, truthiness will only get you so far), but, as someone who cares deeply about education, I felt compelled to try. 

So Stephen, a few of us here at MITAdmissions put something together in a form you might understand: 

Of course, CPW brings out the best in a lot of people: facilities pays extra attention to make sure things are just so, professors and students organize tons of events to show off all the nifty things they can do, and hackers – MITs clandestine purveyors of engineering spectacle–are no exception.

This year, there were a number of particularly impressive hacks throughout the weekend. For starters, Lobby 7, the entrance to MIT from the road, was transformed into a circus ring!

The school you choose in the next few days is one of your first big decisions. Some very intelligent people have disagreed with my decision-making process, but I stand by it: follow your heart, as cheesy as it sounds. When it comes to some of your biggest, most consequential life decisions—your priorities, your career path, or, in this blog post, your home for the next four years—it seems to me that what you choose is a lot less important than that you are confident in your decision and prepared to give yourself to it fully. I think where you end up is less important than that you choose it for yourself and that you choose it for reasons you believe in. You’ll be here for the next four (or three or five) years, wherever here is. That’s not very long. It’s going to be as important, as fun, and as life-changing as you make it.

Two years ago I got into MIT and Caltech. I also spent my senior year of high school at the Penn State Schreyer Honors College as an early enrollment student, and had the option of staying.

I should have visited Caltech, but I didn't want to pay for or sit through the flight from Pennsylvania. I realized it wouldn’t be any different if I went to school there, and I decided I couldn’t live that far away from my family for four years.

At Penn State I was at least a year younger than everyone in my classes, and thanks to AP credits I could graduate in two and a half years if I wanted to (including what would have been 12th grade). I was already doing research in the field I want to dedicate the rest of my life to. My professors were extremely accessible and usually thrilled that an undergrad wanted to talk with them. Dr. Ocneanu, who is still one of my favorite professors, chatted with me about math and life for hours after lecture several days a week.

I left because if I stayed, the next few years would probably be just like the one before it.

I lived at home. I had lunch with my mom every day, and I could visit my parents (both are professors) whenever I wanted. I hitched a ride with my parents or biked to class in the morning, always surrounded by forest and mountains.

Good grades came easily, but my classes weren't much harder or more interesting than they were in high school. I was younger than everyone around me. I didn't relate to the predominant culture of the university, and I made no effort to absorb it. I didn’t make many new friends, and the friends I did have were friends from high school or my mom’s students. I don't think I changed or grew much in that year, compared to my years at MIT.

MIT shapes you. It pushes you to your limits, redefines your limits, pushes you some more, breaks you down, and rebuilds you as a better person and a better scientist. It gives you opportunities to explore and amazing friends to explore them with.

I knew this before coming to MIT, and it was my answer to the big “Why MIT?” question. But I didn’t really know what it meant.

MIT is MIT entirely because of the people here. For maybe the first time in your life, all of your peers will be as smart as or smarter than you, and just as willing to work hard. In high school, you might have been defined by your nerdiness and intelligence. When suddenly everyone around you is just as nerdy and just as intelligent, you start to discover new layers of your personality and your relationships with other people. You stop defining yourself by your grades and start to strive to be a better, more interesting person in other ways.

Another result of smart peers is that your professors will have very high expectations. An obvious effect is hard, fast-paced classes: not only will you learn the material in your classes, but you will also learn how to manage your time, how to study efficiently, and how to use your resources (including asking for help). Another effect is that the intelligent, accomplished adults you interact with will value your ideas and your dreams for humanity, and that you are likely to be trusted with important, challenging problems if you decide to work in a lab.

Maybe the most important thing you will learn at MIT is how to handle failure in a constructive way. You will learn just how big a role luck plays in success, and you will learn the importance of hard work, persistence, and good friends. You will push what you thought your limits were, reassess your priorities, and learn how to stay happy when things don’t consistently work out. MIT makes you resilient; it teaches you how to accurately assess obstacles, and it gives you the confidence to take risks.

A lot of MIT is fun and games, but MIT is not easy and it is not always fun. However, the people you will meet here and the person you will become—and every step in the transformation—are more than worth it.

I hope you choose MIT, obviously. This place is amazing. If you got in, it’s because you can handle it, and because you’re the kind of person who might love it. Life moves fast here: there are many more opportunities—for fun, for work, or both—than you have time for, even if you don’t sleep. But whether you choose MIT or not, own your decision, because when the path you choose gets difficult, it will be very helpful to rekindle the assurance and sense of purpose that drove you to follow it. Do it because you know you want to do it, not because of money or rankings or because other people say you should.

Please email me or comment if you have questions about MIT, or if a blog post about a particular topic could help you with your decision. Alternatively, check out the annual questions thread on College Confidential.

Congratulations on your acceptance(s). Best of luck choosing. :)

Why I Chose MIT 

In all honesty, there are times (*cough* hell weeks *cough*) when MIT makes me feel like this:

But mostly, it makes me feel like this:

(p.s. you should all go waste some time on this site because it's hilarious - and it's also where I got the above two gifs)

I visited MIT for the first time during CPW, and I came in expecting the stereotype, i.e. that everyone here would be incredibly nerdy and anti-social, and that I would fail all my classes because they'd be insanely hard. I was mostly deciding between the Rice-Baylor 7-year med program (where I wouldn't have to take the MCAT and would be guaranteed a spot at Baylor Med School), but my four days at MIT convinced me that MIT was the right place for me to be pre-med...despite the fact that I would have to take the I-never-want-to-ever-take-this-again exam a.k.a. the MCAT.

So what made me change my mind? I think that above all, it was the spirit of MIT. People here want to change the world - in whatever way they can. The pre-med students that I met during my CPW were all down-to-earth, big dreamers, and hard-working. But they were also realistic. They knew that a B at MIT wasn't the be-all-end-all of their med school ambitions. They collaborated with others, they shared ideas, and above all, they held on to the idea that they wanted to make a difference. They inspired me.

That, combined with the ridiculous numbers of opportunities here (UROPs, MISTI, Camp Kesem, proximity of hospitals, etc) pulled me away from Rice (disclaimer: I *do* think the Rice-Baylor program is still awesome). Just a few days after CPW, I comMITed and happily joined the MIT Class of 2013.

What It's Been Like to be Pre-Med at MIT

I like it. I feel like pre-med students here offer a unique perspective on medicine: that of a joint scientist-engineer-philanthropist. MIT has a pre-health office that has streamlined the medical school process and made everything easy to follow and understand. Last semester, all the students planning on entering medical school in Fall '12 were asked to answer a series of questions to allow them to be matched to a pre-med advisor. Over the course of this semester, I've been meeting with my pre-med advisor: the one and only McGreggor Crowley. (Best advisor ever?? Yup, I think so!) Together, we've come up with a list of schools I should be considering, a packet of information to give to those writing my rec letters, and a preliminary draft of my personal statement. Every med school advisor helps his or her advisees through the process, complementing the series of presentations/talks that the pre-health office organizes as a guide and resource to current applicants.

To give you an idea of what these presentations are like: the most recent one featured an admissions officer from Harvard Medical School, who answered questions and walked everyone through the expectations of the medical school application/interview. These sessions are both a little intimidating (so much to do!) and very helpful. I've visited the pre-health office at least 7 or 8 times this semester, as I was toying with the idea of a gap year, worrying over whether or not my recommenders spelled my (very long) last name correctly, and confused about which schools to apply to. They've got my back :)

Grades

Of course - this is what everyone is most worried about: will I be able to maintain a high GPA at MIT? Rest assured, it's not impossible. I know a number of pre-med students who have 5.0/5.0 GPAs and have gotten into top schools. I also know people who have collected a few B's and have lower GPAs - they too have ended up at great schools.

I guess my point is: don't let the idea of a B (or even a C) prevent you from coming to MIT and being pre-med. Every medical school in the world knows that MIT is a tough place, and that perfect grades aren't the only thing worth considering in an application. Come here to learn, to be challenged, to gain some engineering intuition - in conjunction with your pre-med course work. And if you get a B, consider it a lesson learned: you're more than a grade/letter.

Closing Thoughts

I'll add more of my thoughts as I get further into the medical school process. In the meantime, feel free to email in with any questions or concerns. To prospective '16s: I hope you all loved CPW - and that I get to see you here in the fall! To those of you who didn't sleep at all during CPW, this is how I'm imagining you: 

 Cuteeee ♥

Haha - peace out, guys! 

Cognitive psychologists Dale Griffin and Amos Tversky (one of the discoverers of cognitive biases along with Daniel Kahneman) asked 24 of their colleagues choosing between jobs to estimate their probability of making each choice. Their average confidence in their choices was 66%, but 96% of them ended up choosing the job to which they had assigned a higher probability. 

Isn't that terrifying? If you can guess where you're most likely going to college, you're almost certainly going there. We change our minds less often than we think.

Last semester I applied for an NSF Fellowship. Part of the application required that I give the name of my graduate institution. Of course, I didn't have a graduate institution yet; I wasn't even done applying! I knew that I was applying to MIT, Harvard, Columbia, UChicago, and UC Berkeley, and I'd looked up the professors at each school to find out which ones I might want to work with, but I hadn't visited them or anything (with the obvious exception of MIT). I did not feel prepared to predict which one I'd end up at. According to the application, I could change my mind later, but it sounded like an annoying process and I would save time by correctly predicting where I'd go right then and there. 

Last semester, months before I formally made my decision to go there, I put "UC Berkeley" on the NSF Fellowship application.

Knowing that I don't change my mind as often as I think is pretty scary, but at least it explains some advice I'd received in high school about college decisions. I'll give it to you in the form of a short poem I found recently by Piet Hein:

Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
and you’re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No—not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping.

Okay, so you've almost certainly made your decision. Possibly you made it months ago, before you knew all the things you know now. That could be bad, right? What can you do about that?

Well, to some extent, it doesn't matter. If you're good enough to get into MIT, you're probably good enough to get into other great schools too, and you'd probably be happy at any of them. Your experiences at each school will likely be very different, but in many of the most important ways you won't be able to predict those differences. Maybe if you go to one school you'll strike up a strong relationship with a professor who will encourage you to go into academia. Maybe if you go to another school you'll meet some interesting fellow students, drop out, and start a company together. And maybe if you go to a third school you'll meet the love of your life. Who knows? 

If you're content with the decision you've already made, then congratulations! If you're worried that you should be attempting to change your mind, I don't have any easy answers. Reading some of the material on lesswrong.com might be a good idea, although I don't know how much good it'll do you in a few days. Start with the Sequences if you want to try; the relevant one is How To Actually Change Your Mind but I don't remember how much it draws on the others.

If that sounds like work, try reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality instead. Actually, even if you don't listen to anything else I just said, you should try reading Methods anyway. It's good. It's really good. 

As I recently wrote in an op-ed piece for the higher ed website Inside Higher Ed, the best thing a student can do is whatever will advance his or her personal growth and genuine enthusiasm for learning.

In the piece I cite the FIRST robotics competition as one of many excellent and worthwhile activities a student might do. While many MIT students have participated in FIRST, last year I had the good fortune of experiencing FIRST through the eyes of my daughter, who was on a FIRST Lego League (FLL) team. And, as I am gearing up to head to St. Louis for the FIRST World Championships in a few days, I thought I would share a bit of my experience with the program.

(Actually, my first experience with a FIRST-like program was in Woodie Flowers’ 2.70 design class at MIT – a story for another day.)

The FLL program is the elementary and middle school version of the FIRST robotics competition. There are two elements to the program: a robotics competition and a project where the team identifies and develops a solution to a real world problem. Each year there is a theme to the robot game and the project. Last year’s theme, “Food Factor,” explored food safety and the challenge of keeping food from spoiling. But here is the key reason that I found FLL so valuable: the robot game and the project are overlaid with a third, arguably more important, element: the FLL Core Values.

These core values, such as teamwork, discovery, and the notion that your competitors are really your collaborators, are the real insight into this program. Teams get evaluated based on how well they live these core values. You get judged not only on how many points your robot scores during the tournament and how good a solution you develop for the project, but also on your process – the teamwork, intentions, and values that you bring to it. How accepting was the group to different ideas? Did all members contribute? Were your mentors appropriately involved (i.e., guiding, but not doing)?

And so the winning teams are not necessarily the ones that have the highest scoring robots or the most elegant designs (although these are good things). The process, intentions, attitudes, etc. – all the good stuff that allows teams to succeed and sets young people up for success in life – is what is judged and what is rewarded. As every engineer knows, you get what you measure, and as every parent knows, you get what you reward. The key is to measure and reward the outcomes you want. And FIRST is doing exactly that.

Imagine if sports championships were won not only based on how many points you scored, but by how well your team worked together and solved problems, and how much you respected and even assisted your opponents?

My daughter’s team learned an enormous amount about how to design and program a robot. They learned that by jumping in and trying things, you can learn to do something that just weeks before seemed impossibly hard. They learned how to build things that wouldn’t break (by building things that did), that it is actually good to change your direction once you realize it needs to change (by hanging on too long and then panicking), that getting ideas from others on the team actually didn’t mess everything up, and they learned to focus, ultimately building a robot that did a few tasks well rather then one that did many not so well.

They also learned a lot about food safety. They learned that it is not so easy to keep food from spoiling. They learned to do research before identifying a problem to solve. They learned how to brainstorm possible solutions, and then compromise to agree on one to focus. And they learned that everyone had something unique they could contribute to the solution (including a team member who contributed his ventriloquism skills to the presentation!).

What is clear is that the learning that takes place in FIRST is not abstract: it is real and accessible. Indeed, it is not only real, it is aligned with what we want student to learn. Programs like FIRST get students excited about working together, emphasizing that competition is more valuable when it is not about beating your opponent but when it is used to lift everyone up. This is exactly the type of experience our students need to be prepared to meet the challenges that the world faces.
 

Sorry for the recent lack of post! After an epic trip around Europe (which I WILL DEFINITELY blog about later!), I have to go straight to exam revision (yes, over here people say revision, not review :)). Anyway, as you can tell from my post tittle, I wanna talk a little bit about what MIT peeps do during the summer since the holiday is fast approaching (of couse, after the horrifying super intense final week for people at MIT and my crazyfrightenthelivingdaylightsoutofme 9-paper exam at Cambridge.) SIGH. I will look like a zombie for 2 months ☹ But it’s okay though, because I love what I am studying!

My life:

Anyway back to the summer experience. Usually MIT people do epic stuff so I am super excited to share with you all! This post will be split into 2 parts because apart from talking about my summer experience, I have also invited two awesome MIT people to write about theirs!

First say hello to Saba Mohsin, class of 2011. Both of us are members of Sigma Kappa sorority and that’s how I got to know her!! Since the first time I talked to her, I have always thought that she is an incredibly intelligent, motivated and inspiring individual but when I heard her describing her summer experience during her four years at MIT, my response was “WOW”. Currently, she is doing her Masters in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. Anyway, here are Sabah’s epic summer experiences!

“Some of my fondest memories of MIT life took place during the summertime. I was lucky enough to find three programs that allowed me to travel for 1-3 months and I can say with conviction that I am who I am today because of those opportunities.

I lived in Paris for about 10 weeks during the summer of 2009 through the MISTI program. I worked in an experimental fluids lab at ESPCI and lived smack dab in the middle of one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. I spent my days capturing the effect of surface tension on submerged jet deflection and my nights strolling through the Bastille, munching on macarons.

The following summer I obtained a PSC Fellowship to spend 3 months working on a portable water project in the small community of Santa Ana in the Amazon region of Ecuador. During these three months, I was challenged in more ways that I could even imagine. It was both a humbling and strengthening experience and I left there with such strong bonds with my host family and friends that I have since returned to see them again. I am so thankful that MIT gave me this part of my life.

My twin host sisters (Shirley and Samira, 6 years old) who always made me laugh with the older Sacha (11), who is someone I admire very much.

Collaborators from Santa Ana who helped us develop the community water system

Our three team members (right to left: Mauricio, Israel and the late Antonio) who helped us with our water project and taught us more than we taught them. They were colleagues, bodyguards, jokesters, and dear friends.

In 2011, two weeks after my graduation, I traveled to Costa Rica where I spent 8 weeks working alongside the Ministry of Science and Technology launching a nationwide high school science camp series as a part of "Talento Joven". MIT students collaborated with Costa Rican university students, with the Costa Rican Institute of Technology, and even with HP Costa Rica to run some of the most well-received science camps ever. I was so proud to see my students finding their love of engineering and later to see them going on to college and pursue that love. It's the MIT spirit and I'm glad it has infected others."

Me as coordinator with the students of Costa Rica's first science camp.

The most hardworking and brilliant group of counselors I could have asked for. What great people!

Coordinators and counselors at the inauguration of Talento Joven.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

The second person I would love for you all to meet is Qing Li, Class of 2012. Again, we met at Sigma Kappa and I adore her wonderful personality, always cheerful, friendly and optimistic. I have always known she is a great swimmer but when she told me “I am going to swim the English Channel”, I believe my response was “WHAT? Pause. AGAIN WHAT?” This is an extremely difficult feat even for highly athletic people, but at the same time, it’s an incredible thing to do. So yes, I can’t wait to share with you all Qing’s summer training and swimming the English Channel!

“Last summer, I set out to accomplish my dream of swimming the English Channel (EC). This had been my dream since junior year of high school, when my history teacher gave out end of year awards. Some people got "Most-likely to cure cancer" or "Most-likely to be senator" or even "Most-likely to be arrested at a peaceful protest."Mine was "Most-likely to swim the English Channel."...because I was the only swimmer in my year.

Swimming the EC is 20% mental, 40% physical, 20% luck, and another 20% mental. Though, retrospectively, I really wish I had brought MIT's weather machine with me, seeing as I had to swim through a lighting storm and 20ft waves.

I prepared physically by biking, ellipticaling, and swimming about 4-5 hrs a day as well as getting open water and night time swimming experience on the weekends. I built my swimming yardage up to about 25-30 thousand meters a week. This was the fun and easy part. (Warning: the next sentence is my public endorsement of MIT, Boston, UROPs, and LAI) Having a UROP position at MIT's Lean Advancement Initiative allowed me to pursue my research in systems and lean engineering, in collaboration with Boston Medical Center Diabetes Services. I also allowed me to have access to MIT's great athletic facilities and open water spots such as Walden Pond, Nahant beach, Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Portsmouth NH, and other fun places in the greater Boston area. I trained with a friend from the varsity team, Anna Kokensparger, as well as two girls from Smith College who were also attempting to swim the EC last summer (and who had also succeeded).

My training buddies

Even though swimming the English Channel was physically challenging, the biggest obstacle for me was the mental aspect. I worked hard by talking with my varsity swim coach, MIT masters swim coach, and other EC swimmers to find out what I should expect from the swim and how to define the swim to make it my own. The mental preparation beforehand really helped me deal with my doubts about not finishing, the nausea, the physical pain, and the cold.

My preparation with Coach Bill of MIT Masters swimming helped me greatly. He had told me about the idea of "treeing." This is the technique triathletes use to forget about small things that go wrong during their race by channeling all the negative thoughts into a tree. After passing that tree, they would forget about those thoughts and, instead, focus on what comes ahead. I counted a forest by the end of the swim.

My thoughts of giving started with the first hour of the 17 hour swim. I already had motion sickness from the boat before I got into the water causing me to vomit eight time during my swim. And as I swam into the night, brought a darkness that blinded my senses and cooled the air and water to the low 60s. I shivered uncontrollably. Despite this, the lowing sun behind the white cliffs of Dover flooded my eyes with the most beautiful sunset I had ever seen. I was swimming in a National Geography foldout!!

Beautiful sunset!

The most challenging part of the swim came when I was just 5 miles from shore, which I knew it would. As we headed towards the eleventh hour, my head spun and my spirits were bruised from battling sea-sickness, cold, and storm. Light appeared and I began to see sea-birds, but still no land. As I swam on, the swells grew and fatigue set in and I struggled to stay along side my boat to take my feed. When I finally decided to as where I was, the answer I got was "Three and a half miles away. How long do you think it will take you?" Ha! Ha! Haha!! 3.5 mile? That's 6,106 yards! Or 5,632.704 meters! Or 5.6 kilometers! That's just a two hour practice! Well, long story short, it actually took me five hours instead of the two hours I was hoping for.

However, hearing I was so close was enough to renew my energy. I thought of everyone's support and the journey I had taken that summer. I knew I could not have even thought about attempting the swim, let alone getting that close to shore, without so many supporters. My goggles filled to the brim with tears (and it wasn't because my face got thrown into the edge of the boat right after my feed). Though my shoulders hurt, my stomach churned, and the waves sloshed over me, it was the support of everyone that allowed me to find the courage and energy to continue to swim.

Looking back, it wasn't the pain or the time and resources needed that ever detracted me from my goal. Nor was it the pure feat of swimming the English Channel that drove me to finish. What I gained from this experience was the opportunity to learn about myself, meet new people, and gain great friendships. Some say that the finish is almost anticlimactic. As you reach the red shores of France, the is a daunting question of "Great, I'm finished. What now?" For me, even before I swam, I knew I had gained so much already through that summer. The opportunity to swim and the ability to finish the English Channel was the cherry, the whipped cream, and chocolate frosting of an amazing journey.

After I reached France, with my parents. 

While this challenge was tremendous, I can't say it has proven me worthy of accomplishing everything I want to in the future. I probably will not cure cancer, nor will I become senator. However, I believe this experience as well as four years at MIT has prepared me to face the future with the best tools available and probably, most-importantly, gain the capacity to learn."
 

Thanks Saba and Qing for sharing with me and MIT admissions blog readers their incredible summers. I hope you all are inspired by them and plan great things for your 2012 summer. Next post: my summer fun!

Love
Linh 

I experienced my CPW, two years ago, through a downpour. I was temped at MacGregor, which had a beautiful view of the rain pummeling the Charles River and Boston on the other bank, pictured above. It was windy. I was cold. My raincoat was useless. My umbrella was useless. I concluded from my puny sample size of four days that MIT’s legendary firehose was actually somewhere in the sky, and when I got home I invested in a big, dark green, double-canopy umbrella. It was, according to Amazon, the BMW of umbrellas.

I spent most of my CPW at East Campus, because I was convinced I would live there (I don’t). I gawked at nerdy shirts at the COOP, which I would buy a year later as post-exam consolation presents. I got a campus tour from a girl with green hair, who is now a close friend. I built things. I climbed things. I participated in a protest. I met amazing people. I rocked out to amazing music. I ate free food. I got Chris M. to autograph my arm:

Your CPW will be less rainy, but I promise you it will be just as awesome. Here’s a preview, from two years ago:

Things to bring

1. Your cell phone.
2. Your cell phone charger.
3. A digital camera.
4. A flashlight.
5. An umbrella.
6. Something warm that you can put on when it's cold and take off five minutes later when it's not cold, like an MIT hoodie.
7. A highlighter, so you can highlight all the events with free food you want to go to in your CPW booklet.
8. A sleeping bag, and a willingness to sleep in things that are not beds.
9. Not homework. I brought my homework. Don’t bring your homework. If you're doing homework over CPW, you’re doing CPW wrong.
10. Not food. You’ll get a card with about $20 on it for food. If you actually need any of it, you are again doing it wrong. Let us feed you. I spent almost all my $20.14 on orange chocolate at La Verde’s on the last day of CPW. I encourage you to do the same. Mmmm chocolate.

PooF To GO TO (Points for the Good of the Order)

When it comes to dorm events, pay more attention to the people than the event. Your goal over CPW is to meet everybody. EVERYBODY. You will not reach this goal, but I want to see you try. Visit every dorm at least once. If you stop by Random Hall (and I happen to be home, and you recognize me) I’ll give you a glitter fairy sticker and a sheet of bubble wrap.

Please don't be shy. You’re an excited prefrosh. The other prefrosh are also excited prefrosh. The upperclassmen are drained since last CPW, and need your excitement to revitalize them. Don’t you dare contain your excitement.

Here are two events you should definitely go to, because I'll be there and I say they'll be awesome:

The other events I think you should definitely go to are Random Hall events. Random Hall traditionally has more events than any other living group, despite being the smallest dorm. You might notice that most events start 17 minutes after the hour (or half hour). That's because 17 is the most random number, according to random people polled by Randommites outside of Random Hall. Coincidentally, 17 also happens to be the number of prefrosh living at Random for CPW. You might also notice that events continue until 30:00. That's because Random Hall runs on the more realistic Random Standard Time, where the day rolls over not at midnight, but at 6 am.

Finally, you might notice that the events below are not the same as the events in your official CPW schedule. That's because this list is more right than your list. You can get the better, updated list with event descriptions by stopping by Random Hall or, later today, by clicking here.

The weather sobered up just in time for CPW, and we celebrated the sunny warmth with a spring picnic. It was a day made for frivolity. I procrastinated long enough to contribute mint-lime-honey-rolled strawberries and sweet potato fries, which I've been wanting to make since I read this MIT alum's article about how he backward engineered McDonald's fry-making process (the part where he explains his thoughts leading up to using vinegar to slow the breakdown of pectin in the potatoes is pretty cool).

As the afternoon waned, we sauntered off into the grass with our guitars. Meanwhile, I caught the perfect lighting and discovered that everyone I know is absurdly photogenic.

SEE YOU ON CAMPUS TOMORROW!!!

about the ridiculous number of awesome events, but don't worry! We're here to help.

And you may be wondering who WE are, so we drew something for you!

Without further ado:

N = Nat, K = Kirsten

1. Don't buy ANY food!

N: One of the best parts of CPW is the massive amounts of delicious free food, but eating at events is so much more than that. Food events are a great place to meet new people and make event hopping friends.

K: Also, if you're interested in the dining halls, now's a good time to check them out :) Especially since you guys will have a meal card!

2. Don't be afraid to randomly talk to other prefrosh. Everyone wants to meet new people just as much as you.

K: MEET PEOPLE. It's awesome when people tell introduce me to friends that they met over CPW!! I wish I met more people over cpw :( 

N: Whenever I went to events it felt like EVERYONE already knew each other, but that's not the case. You tend to only notice the large groups, but the majority of attendees will be looking for friends, just like you!

3. Visit EVERY dorm. Don't let stereotypes you've heard stop you from checking out an event.

N: Go to the events and form your own opinions. There's a community for everyone!

K: If you're thinking about going to MIT (which I know you all are going to go here), then you should really get to know the culture and community of the different dorms.

4. The best events are late at night. You have the rest of high school to sleep.

K: Truth. Don't sleep!

N: My favorite events were the firehose sessions which last well into the morning. Don't let a little drowsiness stop you from having fun.

5. If you are coming with your parents, make sure you do the events that YOU want to do. You're the one who'll be spending four years here.

N: I can't tell you how many parents were on dorm tours and at various events with clearly bored children.

K: Do your own thing :D The best thing you can do is find out if you feel comfortable in the MIT community.

6. GO TO THE FRESHMAN LEARNING COMMUNITY EVENTS.

N: This year's a little different in that all of ESG's/Concourse's/Terrascope's/Media Arts and Sciences' recruitment has to occur during CPW. So drop by and let us convince you why FLCs are cool!

K: Nat says I should say that FLCs are cool. 

7. Go to the CPW Prefrosh Welcome!

K: Because it might be the only time before graduation when a significant portion of the 2016s are in one place!

8. Don't be afraid to check out the Greek events. They may be really far away but their definitely worth it.

N: Around 50% of men and 30% of women at MIT are affiliated. Throw out everything you've ever thought about Greek Life, nearly every pledge I've met this year has said, "I never thought I'd be in a fraternity/sorority."

K: You might think: "Oh those Greek houses are too far to go visit over CPW." But lemme clarify some things. Saferide is EXTREMELY easy to use and will take you to the houses safely (in case you weren't sure by the name). Also, if you're curious about Greek life, it's the best time to check out the different fraternities and sororities. 

9. Talk to current MIT students! We love talking to prefrosh.

K: Don't be afraid to talk to us!! We love talking about MIT and answering all of your questions. It makes us feel legit.

N: We can give you whatever information you need! Directions, why you should choose MIT, and life guidance to name a few.

10. Don't plan out your whole CPW, go where the flow takes you.

N: I made a detailed list of every event I was going to go to on the plane ride to CPW, then threw it out after my second or third event.

K: Definitely find events that you want to go to, but don't feel like you need to be on a strict schedule :)

11. For those of you curious about Interphase, attend the info session!

N: This is one of the choices you'll have to make pretty soon, and it'll be filled with pertinent information!

K: Nat's going to be a TA for this. More of a reason to learn about Interphase!

12. Go to the activity and athletics fair. Explore the different activities, try something new, obtain free things, meet more prefrosh, obtain free things, eat liquid nitrogen ice cream, oh and did we say free things everywhere?

K: FREEEEEEE

N: You should've stopped after free things, that's really all you need to know.

13.Try new things by going to an event you scanned over whilst looking at the schedule.

K: YOPO. You're only a prefrosh once.

• 13.A Get liquid nitrogen ice cream at some point.

• K: Frozen deliciousness.

• N: And it's right after the activities/athletics fair, MORE FREE STUFF.

• 13.B.Dye your hair!

• N: Okay, this might not be for everyone but if you're in the business of dying your hair a neon color, CPW's the place to do it.

• K: DO IT. (Although it may be pertinent to remember that graduation/prom may be coming soon....)

14. Go to a Firehose session! Or 2, or 5.

K: A taste of life at MIT :P

N: And they cover some really cool topics.

15. LOOK AT THE POSTERS ON THE WALLS OF EVERY CORRIDOR.

N: I didn't realize until the last day that most of the posters were for the prefrosh. Don't miss a cool sounding event just because you didn't take a moment to check the posters!

K: Apparently, there were lots of posters for events down infinite for the events. I wasn't even aware of this!!!! D:

16. Go to the Meet the Bloggers event!

K: Because you're awesome. We're awesome. & Awesome people should meet each other... for the sake of awesomeness.
If that's not enough... ROOT BEER FLOATS!

N: Two words. Chris Peterson. 

If you follow these 16 simple guidelines, this'll be you,

BUT NO LONGER! Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to witness the Blogs' Goofiest Video Ever:

We did something similar in GEL last year: At the end of the fall semester, each of the GEL students evaluated one another based on leadership and performance within a group.

Now I understand how professors feel. I couldn’t believe how such a diverse group of students had one, clear piece of advice for me: speak up! At least half of the comments said something like “your ideas are valuable, but you tend to keep quiet during meetings.”

So before the spring semester started, I heard there was an opening for a section leader position in a weekly Engineering Leadership Lab (ELL). Section leaders are the three students in their second year of GEL ("GEL 2's") in charge of one of the three ELL sections. I kind of think of myself as the Teaching Assistant (“TA,” in MIT-ese) for the 1:00-3:00 section. I meet with the staff and fellow GEL 2 student officers, and make sure my section is ready for the upcoming ELL.

One other little detail about becoming a section leader was that I was responsible for helping to plan the Student-Run ELL.

I’ve mentioned these lessons before. Once a semester, the GEL staff let the GEL 2 students take the reins and design a brand-new ELL. It’s fun because we get to think outside of the box and try things we haven’t done in ELLs before.

This semester was no exception. About three weeks out, the GEL 2 students started brainstorming the kinds of things we’d like to see happen in “our” ELL: bigger groups, greater time pressure, new leadership; this time, we were breaking all the rules.

Here’s what we came up with (keep in mind that I’m condensing about 2-3 weeks of work, meetings, and emails into a tight abstract).

At the beginning of the ELL, we asked for a volunteer. We didn’t give any background information or any hints about what the volunteer would do. We just asked for a volunteer. We then took the brave soul outside the classroom for a “debrief” while the usual class announcements were made inside.

The volunteer learned that he or she was to role-play as the Director of FEMA in an earthquake emergency simulation. In less than 10 minutes, the Director was told to organize his or her classmates into a shelter team, an evacuation team, and a Public Relations team. The Director was to achieve certain tasks while minimizing the number of lives lost in the catastrophe. Every five minutes, there would be 1.2 million deaths in the simulation.

The volunteer then returned to the classroom, and the clock started ticking.

The shelter team was in charge of designing a rescue shelter under budget. They could choose the sturdiest structures possible, but those cost more money and thus fewer people would be saved. Meanwhile, the evacuation team had to come up with the safest means of transporting the simulated earthquake “survivors”. The FEMA Director had a budget of $250 million, which had to be split between the shelter and evacuation team, so there would need to be some negotiation to ensure both teams got enough money to do what they needed to do.

Meanwhile, the Public Relations team had to prepare short presentations for the President of the United States and the Director of UNICEF to keep them informed of the situation and the plan. If they did a good job, they could earn more funding from the government. If not, well, nothing happened.

It sounds pretty simple, right?

Well, designing this lab was a marathon. We wanted to make it as complex as possible for the GEL’s without making it too difficult for us to monitor what was going on during the simulation. We wanted to test a number of leadership capabilities in this simulation, and if the activity got in the way of the underlying lesson, then our planning efforts (sometimes lasting past 2am in the week leading up to the lab) would have been fruitless. To be honest, there were several times where we wondered if we had bitten off more than we could chew.

So, just like last semester, we did a “dress rehearsal” at our weekly GEL 2 staff meeting to identify any kinks in the design. With 48 hours before the lab, it was all coming together.

At 1:00 on Friday, it was my turn to lead the simulation. Under the direction of FEMA Director Marisa '13, the ELL seemed to be going as planned, but it took a little longer than expected for the budget to be divided between the shelter and evacuation teams.

Halfway through the exercise, I stopped the clock and gave the section time to reflect on the activity so far. This is something we’ve never done before in an ELL, but it seemed to be a valuable pause in the action. I know I’m sometimes less likely to point out flaws in a system while there’s work to be done; this way, the break forced the teams to think about how they were doing things as opposed to what they were actually doing.

We identified a few miscommunications between teams and revisited how each team was using the leadership capabilities of the day just to drive the point home. The next 30 minutes went pretty smoothly, and from talking with teams afterwards, they identified strengths and weaknesses in their section as a whole and in Marisa’s leadership style.

For me, though, the best part was all the feedback I got after the ELL. All the little curveballs made this ELL stressful, but interesting, according to a couple of my GEL friends. Plus, I was finally getting more comfortable with speaking up and sharing ideas!

There are few things at MIT that make me happier than a week of sleep deprivation with great results. There may even be a chance that this ELL is incorporated into the regular curriculum of future ELLs; if any of the future GEL 2’s leading that ELL happen to see this, I can only hope they have as much fun with it as I did!

FYI, more pictures are available on the GEL facebook!
 

...okay, so I work here, and I'm actually on campus about as often as when I was still a student. Whatever. It ain't the same.

For those of you who don't remember me: hi! Nice to meet you! I'm Keri Garel, class of 2010, and in the blogger world, I am old and retired. I was Course 9, and now I'm a research assistant in a cognitive science lab (the very lab Lydia blogged about in her post on dyslexia!). As a student, I lived in Senior Haus. Matt once said that I was Senior Haus; I was president in 2008, ran Steer Roast in 2009, took all of the pictures of all of the things, and own so many variations of the Sport Death shirt that at this point it's probably cheaper to just turn myself into a giant skull.

Long story short, I loved living there. It was my home. And before moving into my temp dorm as a freshman (spoiler: I didn't stay) and checking out Senior Haus during REX, I'd never imagined that that it would be the place for me. If you're a prefrosh and practically wetting yourself with excitement over CPW, you should totally check out the SH Bouncy Ball Drop! It's really pretty. And don't sleep while you're here! There's way too much stuff to do, and it's not a true MIT experience if you aren't sleep-deprived.

But you don't have to take my word for it! Here's a stellar guest post from current resident Dan Parker '15, who, unlike me, is not totally out of touch with what the kids are doing nowadays. (Seriously – I don't know what goes on outside of my office. Is Reading Rainbow still a thing?) Check it out, 'k? 'k.

Hi! my name is Dan, I’m a freshman from Binghamton in upstate New York, interested in courses 24 (philosophy and linguistics), 17 (political science), and 8 (physics). I live in a dorm called Senior House, where I’m co-organizing CPW, and I would love to meet you, so please come visit while you’re here! I’m a glassblower; a classical singer and pianist - I’m an Emerson Scholar in voice; a volunteer for MIT’s Violence Prevention and Response as a peer educator about sexual assault; a UROP researcher with Professor Elizabeth Wood on Vladimir Putin’s presidency and premiership; and an arts writer for MIT’s student newspaper, The Tech. I took a gap year in Cairo, Egypt, before starting at MIT. This summer, I’m interning at RIA Novosti, a Russian state-owned news agency, through MISTI, an incredible program that funds all-expenses-paid internships abroad!

The Senior House: the oldest dormitory at MIT (1918) and one of the smallest (~150 residents), home of Steer Roast, home of “the artist community at MIT,” a hop and a skip from the Kendall T (subway) stop, a cook-for-yourself dorm with kitchens, mostly single rooms, and so much more… why don’t you walk through the gate...

(click any image to enlarge)

Why should you visit us while you’re here for CPW, class of 2016?! We have:

1. stunning views

we’re three seconds from MIT’s Sailing Pavilion. constant sight of the colorful fleet out on the Charles River.

the mansion there that we overlook is The Gray House, where MIT’s president lives. what other dorm gets to see Susan Hockfield eating dinner at night?

2. a spacious courtyard

we have a total of six floors,

four stoic pillars, three or more friendly balconies,

and a hammock. 

3. A RADIAL TIRESWING (come by during CPW and we’ll teach you how!)

4. physics problems that confuse us

5. people who study

6. people who are friends

7. people who are hardcore athletes

8. AMAZING HOUSEMASTERS

9. cats

10. creativity

Katy is making a dodecahedral constellation projector from scratch. It’s a modular design, with a total of 11 pentagonal faces, and an open top through which a light bulb will fit. material: black ink printed on transparency

three hand-made hollow glass ornaments that I made this spring

a charcoal portrait by Laura (the girl climbing high on the tireswing rope above)

a rainbow ribbon

some random hallway foliage

11. MURALS

The MORAL OF THE STORY is, check out our CPW events! Stop by if for no reason other than this five-pound bar of chocolate.

The MIT Society of Women Engineers would like to invite local high school students to participate in the exciting annual engineering competition, BeaverDash. BeaverDash is an event specifically designed for high school students and is held each year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). No previous engineering experience is required, and male and female students of all science and math levels are encouraged to participate.

This year the date is set for Saturday, May 5, 2012 from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm. The topic of the competition will remain a mystery until the morning of the competition. When students arrive on the day of the competition, they will be assigned to small groups and matched with an MIT undergraduate student mentor. During the competition, students will learn about practical engineering techniques and will be encouraged to practice their creative thinking skills. The students will engineer and design their contraption within the constraints of the competition to compete later in the day for great prizes. Free t-shirts and lunch will be provided!

For students interested in science and engineering, Beaverdash is a unique opportunity to gain hands-on experience and interact with MIT student mentors. Students can fill out the registration form at http://swe.mit.edu/highschool/beaverdash.php

Please sign up by Saturday, 4/28. If you have any questions or concerns please email Jennifer Li at mitbeaverdash2012@mit.edu. Thanks and we look forward to seeing you at the competition!  

-----

Get on it if you're close enough to MIT! :)

The first question I often hear from parents is, "what events should I attend with my child?" In truth, there won't be very many of them if you are each doing what interests you the most. With hundreds of options over the few days, there are lots of things to choose from and parents will probably not want answers to the same questions that students will. That said, it's important to check in occasionally so I'd suggest you pick an event where you can meet up with your student each day (perhaps the President's Welcome on Friday and the Closing Variety Show on Saturday) but mostly I hope you will encourage them “do their own thing” and know that it's good for you to do the same. It’s the best way for them to figure out if they are comfortable and at home on our campus and the best way for you to be comfortable with them being here.

I hope you’ll ask lots of questions. It’s the way our students learn and will work well for you too. Current students are great resources so don’t be afraid to ask them about their experiences. In addition we've enlisted the help of a great group of current students' parents called Parent Connectors. They'll be available throughout the weekend to address those issues that are most important to you, the parent, so don't be afraid to ask for their opinions...they know exactly how you feel since they were asking those same questions just a year or so ago. They are also easy to locate in their red Parent Connector” polo shirts so keep a lookout for them. A great place to find a parent to talk to would be in the Parent’s Hospitality Lounge. Grab a cup of coffee or tea and chat with current MIT parents as well as other parents of MIT prefrosh. Also, learn about the MIT Parents Association and the Parent Connector Network from current volunteers and staff.

I hope you’ll be open-minded during your visit with us. I live with current students and their life at MIT is somewhat different than mine was when I was here. I'm sure you'll feel the same way too, it's inevitable, but it's just not the way we remember it. I remember fondly my mother’s first comments in viewing my dorm when I was a student at MIT but for me it was the perfect choice for my four years at MIT.

Bring comfortable shoes and a jacket or sweater. Weather can change quickly in Boston so you should be prepared for anything. Boston is a great walking city and I hope you'll take some time to see the environs around MIT as well the campus itself and the best way to do that is on foot. Even just a short walk along the river can be a nice break from all the events of the day.

Have questions regarding your student's financial aid package or the financial aid process in general? This year there will be an open house Thursday, Friday and Saturday at Student Financial Services so you can stop in and get your questions answered. On Thursday and Friday there will be comprehensive presentations by Executive Director of Student Financial Services, Elizabeth Hicks. Parents and students are welcome to attend either of these programs on the hows, whys and whens of financial aid at MIT -- how your financial aid award was determined, when your supplemental forms are due, how to pay your balance, how to find on-campus student employment, and how your online student account will work and much more.

But that is just the beginning...

Events

Parent Welcome on Thursday night at 7:30 pm. Stu Schmill, Dean of Admissions, Chancellor Eric Grimson and Professor Alex Slocum will welcome the Class of 2016 parents to Campus Preview Weekend.

Parent Reception with Parent Connectors and Alumni on Friday night at 5:00 pm. Sponsored by the MIT Parents Association and the MIT Club of Boston, this reception is your chance to meet and mingle with Parent Connectors, Educational Counselors and other MIT Alumni. The presenter will be Columbus Leonard '12 who will talk about some of the programs he's been a part of while at MIT.

Insight for Parents by Parents is Saturday morning at 9:00 am. A panel of current MIT parents will be on hand to share their insights and answer your questions. Sponsored by the MIT Parents Association. There will be coffee provided, so please come and join us.

Parent Connector Saturday Night Drop-In After the closing variety show join us “Under the Great Dome" for an informal gathering hosted by the Chair of the MIT Parent Connectors at the Barker Engineering Library. It's one of my favorite rooms on the campus.

Panels & Sessions

Residential Life and Dining at MIT Our on-campus residential community boasts residence halls, fraternities, sororities and independent living groups as well as a wide variety of dining services. There will be a discussion covering life in residences, residential support offerings, activities, dining options, roommate matching and more.

Come learn about all aspects of Undergraduate Research Opportunities (UROP) at MIT, including how to participate, what type of research is appropriate, what to expect from the program, and more. Discussion will center on the experiences of the UROP student panel as moderated by UROP staff.

There are other panels on Campus Safety and various aspects of Student Life and Learning ...certainly all great options for getting those important questions answered.
Open Houses

Multiple open houses will be held over the weekend. These include areas relating to Medical Services, Careers Development, Hillel, Global Education (study abroad and more), Pre-Professional Advising (Pre-Med and more), departments, and housing.

I’ve named just a handful of the events created with you in mind for CPW and it really is just the tip of the iceberg...to get a head start on your plans check out the schedule on our newly improved CPW site: http://mitcpw.org/schedule

See you soon!

Caine loves arcades. So last summer, while home on break, he began making arcade games out of cardboard. He made claw games and soccer games and all sorts of different games, rummaging for raw materials in the junk yard and the trash and in school recycling bins. But he never got any customers. 

One day, independent filmmaker Nirvan Mullick of Interconnected.is chanced to stop by the store to buy a handle for his old Corolla.  He started playing Caine's games. Then he made a movie about him. 

Fair warning: wherever you happen to be, it will get real dusty real quick once you hit play. 

I thought about writing something kitschy and sappy here about doing whatever you want with your imagination, following your dreams, being creative, etc. But something that cute and pat I think does a disservice to the small miracle of beauty that is this movie and its star. 

I will, however, say that the Caine's Arcade website is collecting donations for a college scholarship fund, should you, like me, be interested in seeing what Caine can do with an engineering degree. 

Homies. Have. You. Seen. My. Arms. 

This was my response to the conversation: 

(Minus the fact that I DO NOT HAVE STEVE AUSTIN'S ARMS/UPPER BODY STRENGTH!) I also don't have the greatest track record with climbing things. Over the summer, I climbed a tree in a banana suit (long story) and got stuck.

(I call this one, "You thought I was kidding but I actually totally wasn't.")

Thus, I immediately dismissed the entire notion of rock climbing. So while the blip was more like a bloop, it was still a bloop nonetheless, and I went about the rest of my week unaffected by this new nugget of knowledge. 

Turns out the rest of the week was kind of hard for me and for a lot of other people, as I discovered during dinner on Friday night when Luke attempted to eat one of the centerpieces. 

Yup. It was just one of those weeks. And I was just glad the week was over. I was ready to unwind and veg for a couple hours. I was going to watch a rerun of Modern Family. And then Luke, unaware of my brief encounter with the wall earlier that week, HAD to bring up that by some FREAK COINCIDENCE he was going to climbing at the wall that night, and the rest of the table - who apparently all frequent the wall because I have been completely unaware of the fact that they are avid climbers - were going too. Why was this wall haunting me?? Here is the reader's digest version of what followed:

1. Luke tries to convince me to go climbing. See conversation with Chris.

2. Chris D., a staff member of the wall and fellow Simmons resident, says he's bringing strobe lights for a disco-themed climb night at the wall. My position still stands.

3. Other people decide to go as well. GrumblegrumblepeerpressureI'mstillnotgoing.

4. Luke: "If you go, you could blog about it..." OKAY I'M IN SUCKERS! 

Thus, Luke, Sasha, and I made our trek to Walker Memorial. It used to be a gym but now it's a multipurpose building and houses the offices of many of the student groups. I don't have fond memories associated with the building, but then again, I've only been there to take exams. 

We made our way up to the third floor and found the room that houses the climbing wall. Chris D. was pretty excited for the evening when we got there. This is actually him in the middle of saying, "I'm so excited!" When we arrived, I met an alum who told me that the climbing wall was built by students around 2006. People in the MIT community use it for bouldering, which doesn't involve climbing super high. Upon discovering this, my blood pressure significantly lowered. With a $1 fee, I picked up some climbing shoes and I was ready to go! Well, almost...

I think this is Luke in the middle of saying, "Stop asking me if you're going to fall and break your neck, you're going to be fine, Elizabeth."

And actually, things went pretty well! I made it up my first route and was feeling on top of the world (or this room, rather). And then Chris D. turned off the lights and turned on the strobe lights. I must say, if you ever try bouldering, doing it with blacklights and dubstep your first time is... an experience. My phone went a little nuts trying to capture photos.

It's super fun, but a little difficult when all the tapes that mark the routes are changing colors...

Nathan, another Simmons resident, it a pretty super climber. Look at that lil' monkey go! (Just kidding. Nathan, I don't know you that well, so if you read this I hope you don't take offense at me calling you a monkey.) People stopped by throughout the night and were super friendly and helpful to n00bs like me who had never touched a climbing wall before. Thank you to Nathan, Chris D., and Luke for humoring me while I obnoxiously shouted, "Wait, where does my foot go next? Wait how am I supposed to put my arm over there? Wait, how does this work?!?!" while hanging paralyzed on the wall.

Ootz ootz ootz ootz

"O hai"

So, moral of the story is - Mom, I tried something new! Something that I didn't want to do at first but then ended up having a lot of fun doing! Also, MIT has a bouldering wall! And now I know what I'm going this Friday night! But for now I'm going to stop typing because my arms are still sooo sore... oof.

Y is a third-year undergraduate student at MIT, a math major and one of only five current MIT undergraduate students from the United Kingdom. To have gotten to MIT she had to face not only the 3.7% international admit rate, but also dyslexia, a learning disorder that prevents her from reading and writing as quickly and effectively as most of her peers.

A short paragraph can take Y half an hour to type. She says that the words that come out on paper or on the screen do not match up with what she envisions in her mind. It takes her more time to read and write than other students, and she has to spend extra time on problem sets and essays.

Like many successful people with dyslexia, Y sees her difficulty reading and writing as something to conquer. She has taken on a concentration in writing, which requires her to take extra writing classes in her time at MIT, and she volunteers for leadership positions in her dorm that involve regularly emailing the entire building. After graduating she hopes to return to the United Kingdom for graduate school.

The ability to read has long been linked in society’s mind to intelligence, but dyslexia is surprisingly common at MIT, to such an extent that the founder of the MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop per Child Association, Nicholas Negroponte (a dyslexic himself), called it the MIT disease in his autobiography. Recent research has found that dyslexia is not related to IQ. It is, however, the most common learning disability, at MIT and elsewhere, affecting between 5% and 20% of the population.

The latest research is finding dyslexia’s roots in unexpected places, with unexpected consequences, disproving common misconceptions about dyslexia and learning disorders in general. We are beginning to find that dyslexia is not a disorder but a different way of experiencing and understanding the world around us, created by a different wiring and development of the brain with benefits as significant as its downsides.

Dyslexia Research

A popular misconception is that people with dyslexia rotate, switch, and mirror letters as they read and write, but while many people with dyslexia do indeed confuse the direction and sequence of letters, dyslexia stems from difficulty processing the auditory, not visual, information of language. It is currently believed that dyslexia is caused by difficulty connecting letters to their associated sounds, and that these phonological difficulties stem from structural differences in the brain.

Y, for example, connects sounds to colors, rather than symbols. Imagining a sound brings to mind not the letter, but a color. Each sound has its own color: the calming light blue she painted her dorm room is the long e.

Tyler Perrachione, a dyslexia researcher at MIT, explains that all children flip and switch letters as they first learn to read, and that the difficulty is not specific to people with dyslexia. “In life, you want to be insensitive to the orientation of objects,” he says. “Orthography is set apart from other visual stimuli. They [children] have to learn that letters are special.” In languages where symbols represent concepts rather than sounds, such as Chinese, a larger number of dyslexics do suffer from a visual deficit. But even in China, says Perrachione, visual deficits are always present in combination with a phonological deficit, never in isolation.

Tyler Perrachione became interested in speech-sound learning as an undergraduate student, and is now studying dyslexia as a Ph.D. candidate at the Gabrieli lab at MIT. He describes studying language as “learning about what makes us human, and what makes our brains unique: moving ideas from my head to your head. I was hooked. Language was cool.”

Perrachione’s most recent publication focuses on how people with dyslexia process auditory language. He explains that while speakers of a language may use the same words, pronunciation of those words is unique to the individual. We use these nuances in pronunciation to distinguish between voices. Perrachione found that people with dyslexia have trouble with voice recognition in their native language. Previous studies have found that people with dyslexia have difficulty following a single voice in a crowd, such as the voice of a professor in a noisy lecture hall.

As babies we are sensitive to all variability in speech sounds, explains Perrachione. As we grow up we lose sensitivity to those nuances that are not in our native language. “The brain is so good at handling all the variability that there is in speech,” he says, “but it comes with a cost. Being very good at mapping sounds to the representations that you do have comes with the cost of not being able to perceive sounds in other languages.”

We don’t consciously notice the variability in language, but the brain does not ignore it, says Perrachione. “The brain can keep track of who is saying what, and how they sound is the cue to who they are.” Knowing a language gives us a standard against which to compare what we hear, he says: “Being able to say people sound different requires having some sort of comparison.” People with dyslexia do not have this comparison: “The variability is not informative, because you don’t have a standard to compare it to.”

In Perrachione’s experiment, normal readers had improved voice recognition abilities in their native languages. People with dyslexia, on the other hand, had no more accuracy than in foreign languages, where the nuances in sound were unfamiliar. “When you take language out of the equation they’re just as good. When you put language back in, they’re no better.”

The differences between how people with dyslexia and normal readers process language are evident in the anatomy of the brain. In both cases, the left hemisphere of the brain contains centers for speech, reading, and language processing. The connective fiber attaching the hearing centers in the temporal lobe with the parietal lobe becomes denser as a person’s ability to hear and identify small units of sound—as well as the ability to read—improves. This area of the brain, located toward the back of the head, is responsible for decoding letters and written words into their corresponding sounds; anatomical studies have found that dyslexics have decreased nerve cell matter and often decreased connective fiber in this area compared to normal readers.

The right hemisphere of the brain—specifically, the right prefrontal cortex, which is located at the front of the head—produces visual images. Individuals without dyslexia suppress the visual areas of the right hemisphere while reading, as originally hypothesized in 1925 and confirmed in 2003 by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center. Normal readers use the right prefrontal cortex less and less as they learn to read fluently and shift from reading by memorizing words to reading by translating letters into sounds. Perrachione’s advisor John Gabrieli at MIT and Fumiko Hoeft of the Stanford University School of Medicine have found that the quarter to half of dyslexic children who learn to compensate for their dyslexia read by memorizing words through visual memory, increasing the activity and development of the right prefrontal cortex. In normal readers, the left side of the brain is often larger than the right. In dyslexic readers the two hemispheres are usually of equal size, or the right hemisphere is larger.

Manuel Casanova at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, has found that dyslexics also tend to have less tightly packed neurons that make more far-reaching connections. Casanova found that neurons vary from tightly packed, encouraging connections with nearby neurons, to more spread out, providing space for more distant connections. At the former extreme, neurons make more of their connections with nearby neurons and can process information very quickly. The resulting person is often highly specialized and detail-oriented, and can be autistic. At the other extreme, neurons make more of their connections with distant parts of the brain, supporting complex comparisons and mental simulations. This end of the spectrum has high incidence of dyslexia.

Perrachione warns, however, that studies linking differences in the anatomy of the brain to differences in behavior are rarely replicated and often don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny, and should therefore be viewed with some amount of skepticism. “Excluding injury in adult life,” he says, “very big changes in behavior are almost never explained by big changes in brain architecture.”

Living with Dyslexia

There is hope for treating dyslexia at an early age. In 2008, Nadine Gaab at the Children’s Hospital Boston found that rapid sound shifts in spoken language generated activity in areas of the brain associated with sound recognition in normal 10-year-olds, but elicited no activity from children with dyslexia. After two months of exercising these areas of the brain, however, the dyslexic children were able to match the normal children in listening comprehension, and also had improved reading comprehension.

Dyslexia often goes undiagnosed until college or graduate school, when the length and difficulty of assigned readings make it difficult to compensate with sheer intelligence. If diagnosed as an undergraduate, an MIT student would be referred to student support services, to disability services, and then to a neuropsychologist for testing. MIT has services in place to help students with dyslexia, including exams and textbooks on tape, readers, scribes, a computer lab with voice recognition and scan-and-read software, and the option to take exams in a reduced distraction setting or with extended time.

Dr. Xiaolu His, a psychologist at MIT Mental Health and Counseling, says that many people with dyslexia find life much easier after entering the workforce, where tasks become less time-sensitive and being able to read and write quickly becomes less important. Instead, creativity and flexible thinking become vital, and people with dyslexia who are able to get so far often excel. She encourages students with dyslexia to get the help they need. “Once the problem is identified, you will find your solution,” says His. “It does not have to cripple you for life.”

Benefits of Dyslexia

“Everything that happens has a silver lining,” says Perrachione. Dyslexia’s is often a predisposition for creativity and big-picture thinking. “Their ways of thinking can be extremely useful,” says His of her dyslexic patients. “Some of them are just among the most creative, exciting innovating people I've ever met.”

Many people with dyslexia go into comedy, says Perrachione, citing Jay Leno and writers for the Saturday Night Live comedy show. A recent study also found that astronomers with dyslexia are better at identifying black holes: people with dyslexia have enhanced peripheral vision, improved pattern recognition abilities, and, says Perrachione, more creativity and flexibility in their thinking.

According to Brook and Fernette Eide, authors of The Dyslexic Advantage, the cognitive flexibility associated with dyslexia can manifest itself in noteworthy talents. “Dyslexic brains are organized in a way that maximizes strength in making big picture connections at the expense of weaknesses in processing fine details,” says Fernette Eide. These talents include improved spatial reasoning, enhanced ability to view events from multiple perspectives and draw analogies, and a tendency to remember facts as experiences and stories rather than as abstractions. Individuals with dyslexia often excel in careers that involve telling and understanding stories, making predictions or decisions using incomplete or rapidly changing information, and crossing boundaries between disciplines and ways of thinking. “High-performing dyslexics are very intelligent, often out-of-the box thinkers and problem-solvers,” says Bennet A. Shaywitz, co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity.

It is important for us to stop seeing dyslexia as a learning disability and start seeing it as an alternative way of perceiving and processing the world, with benefits as well as drawbacks, and with the potential to contribute creative approaches to our world’s problems. We have only just begun unraveling the secrets of the dyslexic mind. We know now that phonological impairment leads to dyslexia. The next step, says Perrachione, is to figure out how. Current research in the Gabrielli lab is focusing on measuring brain plasticity and responsiveness to changes in sound. The data will be out soon, says Perrachione, after it goes through peer review. “I think they [the data] have a lot of promise for really revolutionizing how we talk about the phonological deficit in dyslexia,” he says. “They’re very exciting. You can expect to see new discoveries soon.”

In support of his subversive educational enterprise Nelson has mustered both heavy artillery and covering fire. The former comes from Benchmark Capital, the VC behemoth which has invested $25 million dollars to found Minerva. The latter comes from the long list of luminaries Nelson has recruited to form his advisory board, including such superstars as Larry Summers (former President of Harvard), Senator Bob Kerrey (former head of the New School), and Pat Harker (president of the University of Delaware and former dean of Wharton, Nelson's alma mater).

I am a big believer in educational access. Education is awesome. Extending education to those who cannot presently achieve it is extra awesome.

And yet I'm troubled by the Minerva Project; specifically, by the lack of credible answers to a few questions that the painfully shallow news coverage have yet to actually address. So I'm posting them here and trying to think through what some of the answers might be. 

Question 1: Who will the students be?

According to Minerva's website, their admissions process will rely "strictly on the world's most demanding intellectual standards, while giving no weight to lineage, athletic ability, state or country of origin, or capacity to donate." For the sake of argument I'll accept this as a reasonably meritocratic mission, at least for an online university that doesn't have to worry about cultivating diverse perspectives in a brick-and-mortar classroom.

But let's compare two quotes from adjacent paragraphs in this Economist interview:

“I don’t want or need to disrupt Harvard. I care about the kid who should have got into Harvard but didn’t,” says Mr Nelson.

...

The plan is for admission standards to be higher than current Ivy League levels,

Wait, what? Who wrote this? Forget that: who edited it? Who allowed these two sentences to appear so closely together and make my brain feel like it'd been filled with coarse sand?

If Minerva has higher standards then Harvard, than how is a student who can't get into Harvard supposed to get into Minerva? Even the most cynical critics of elite admissions processes tend to make their cases at the perceived academic margins (legacies, athletes, disadvantaged students, etc) as opposed to the intellectual core of your class. Put another way: any student who is capable of meeting some undefined "higher standard" of admission than that held by an elite institution would by definition be one of the most attractive applicants in their pool. In other words the kid who "should" have gotten in already will have. 

An article in the Atlantic described Minerva's mission slightly differently:

[Minerva is for] those students who are being shut out, whether it's a smart American kid who has to opt for a solid state school when they had their heart set on Brown, or the child of a well-to-do family in Beijing, by offering them a great education and a worldwide network of contacts...Worldwide, [Nelson] believes there are anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 students who fit his target demographic.

This is a different argument, one which does not suffer from the incongruity above. Here, Minerva is cast not so much as a university for Schrödinger's student, who simultaneously is and is not one of the top students in the world. This goal is much more modest: Minerva is intended for very good students who wanted to attend elite schools which could not find the space for them.

The problem with this goal is that it is driven, not by the merit or match of the educational environment, but for the desire for prestige, affirming, shining, oily; the sweet and sensual nectar of life-giving prestige.

Take the reference above of a "smart American kid who has to opt for a solid state school when they had their heart set on Brown." This is a poignant example: it sounds tones of rejection and loss which resonate with everyone.

But hopefully the reason that student had their heart set on Brown was because they felt it was the right match for them: because they loved its open curriculum and brick buildings and Providence location and fantastically creative culture and all of the other things that make Brown Brown. But just like that state school isn't Brown, neither is Minerva. In fact, the only thing Minerva has - or could have - over that solid state school is the glorious glow of prestige descending like an angel from the advisory board on high.

I did not attend (or apply to) MIT as an undergrad. But I did have a prestigious private school I was in love with. I didn't get in. I went to a solid state school. I wasn't as happy as I thought I would have been at the private school, but that was not because of the (lack of) prestige: it was because my state school didn't have all of the things that made me fall in love with the private school in the first place. Neither would Minerva. 

When viewed from this angle, Minerva only solves one of two problems: 1) a problem which doesn't credibly exist, or 2) a problem of providing prestige to those who value it above all else. Either seems like questionable ground on which to found an institution. 

Question 2: How will they pay?

But let's assume, for a moment, that there are hidden masses of  brilliant spurned students who feel matched to Minerva. How will they pay for it?

Nelson makes a big deal of the fact that Minerva's thus-unspecified tuiton will be "half that of the Ivy League or less." The Atlantic ballparks this at $20,000 annually or less, which is indeed less expensive than MIT without financial aid, which will run a wealthy family north of $50,000 a year.

However, MIT, like most of our prestigious peers, gives an awful lot of money away to students who need it: last year, our financial aid budget exceeded $100 million. And we do this because we try to make the best education in the world affordable to the best students in the world.

This is particularly relevant to Minerva's target demographic: smart students in the developing world. We give a lot of money to these students. And I mean A LOT. OF MONEY.

Why? Because otherwise, they couldn't afford it. MIT is extremely expensive in America, where median household income is about $50,000 a year. It's unfathomably expensive in the rest of the world, with a median global income of $1,700 per annum. And of the difference is provided out of our own pockets because international students aren't eligible for federal aid. But we still must - and gladly - give every student we admit enough money to attend.

These financial realities are part of the reason why international spots are capped at a certain percentage of our class. It gives us the freedom to take the best students in the world, without having to compromise our process by taking only those international students who can pay, or rejecting top international students because they can't.

So how is Minerva going to make itself accessible to all of these students in foreign countries? Nelson says he wants to make Minerva the elite university of choice for "the child of a Foxconn line operator in China." But according to Forbes, average income in China is only $10,200 annually. It's hard to imagine even a relatively well-paid worker being able to balance a tuition check with rent and food and everything else. In short: if you don't have financial aid available to your best international applicants, you will not be able to enroll and educate your best international applicants. You will instead be left with a very, very small number of good students who can pay, and a larger number of not-so-good-students who can pay. This creates obvious problems for Minerva's stated goal of high educational standards.

But while discussions of financial aid appear nowhere on Minerva's website, a recent tweet by them assured me that aid would be offered.

So what kind of aid will it be?

I apologize if this sounds cynical but I am extremely skeptical that a for-profit university is going to be profligate with grants. All colleges are businesses, but some are more businesses than others: in 2009 the President of Harvard made a very respectable $700,000, while the CEO of Strayer (a chain of for-profit universities) banked over $40 million. Believe it or not when you don't give any of your money away you can make an awful lot of it!

This is not to say that for-profit schools can't give financial aid. To the contrary, as this article reports, the average for-profit college receives 75% of its revenue from federal grants and loans. This is accomplished in part by aggressively recruiting educationally risky students as a vehicle for securing federal aid, a set of practices which led to the recent Congressional investigation of for-profit colleges for educational fraud. Consider that though for-profit colleges only enroll about 12% of the nation's students, those students are responsible for over 50% of student loan defaults.

If I may draw a very deliberate analogy to the most recent debt-fueled financial crisis: counterparties (the student and the federal government) take on all of the risk of an asset of a questionable value, while the university, playing the role of financial intermediary, cleans up on the fees (the federal financial aid).

But even this is beside the point, as Nelson envisions "only 5-10% of Minerva's students will be U.S. citizens", which is to say that only a very small portion of Minerva's students will even be eligible for federal aid.

So what happens with the other 90% of international students who need 90% of their tuition covered?

There is, as Forbes reported one huge and relevant difference between Chinese and American households: debt, and the lack thereof. "The average US household debt is 136% of household income, compared to 17% for the Chinese." This is especially true in education. Student loan debt in America now exceeds $1 trillion; the domestic loan market is already near the saturation point. But the emerging markets of the developing world are not nearly so highly leveraged in higher education.

Suppose Minerva provides not grants, and not federal aid, but instead extensive private loans to the students of the developing world. Then, the relevant questions of the university change from "what education can we provide at what standard" to "are we achieving a sufficient return on investment for our student loans."

If this is the case, then the old insight about ad-supported media maps nicely to Minerva. Remember: when you watch a show, or read a newspaper for free, you're not consuming the product of content; you are the product, and your attention is being sold to advertisers. If Minerva's financial aid is primarily private loans at high rates of interest to underleveraged students in the developing world, then I'd be willing to bet the real product is the debt being sold to investors. 

If that's true, then Minerva isn't a university: it's an emerging markets fund hiding behind the mask of higher education.

Question 3: What's really going on?

As far as I see it there are two explanations here.

Explanation 1 is that Ben Nelson, altruistic visionary, earnestly believes, against the odds and experience of literally every other educational institution, that there are hundreds of thousands of students in the world who are:

• of equivalent or higher academic caliber than current students of elite, prestigious universities, but who are not admitted to elite, prestigious universities, and
• have the resources to pay Minerva's tuition, which will likely many times global median income, without compromising the first two characteristics or being plunged into hopeless, crippling debt, because
• they have been given generous, reasonable aid by the benevolent benefactors who inhabit the halls of high tech venture capital.

Explanation 2 is that Ben Nelson, Wharton grad and former M&A consultant, has realized that:

• there is more international demand for prestigious, name-brand American education than there is supply, and
• if he can conjure prestige ex nihilo then he can tap that demand by distinguishing Minerva from the unsavory, disreputable actors already choking the for-profit university market, and
• in the process, and of financial necessity, load his comparatively underleveraged international students with loans that will return an appreciable rate to his investors

Now, I don't know which one of these explanations is true, but I do know which one I personally think is a hell of a lot more likely, and hint: it's not the one that involves relying on the altruism of venture capitalists. In fact, in the Minerva spirit of treating colleges as investment properties, I came to conclusion that I didn't even care which explanation was true, because either way it's awful junk that I'd short in a second if given the chance. 

The truth is that if you're a student (especially an international student) who can't go to a place like MIT but still wants to learn something, the situation isn't great, but it's better than it ever has been before. Here at MIT we give away OCW and MITx for free; I also highly recommend Khan Academy and Stanford's Engineering Everywhere.

Granted, it might not be the same as actually attending an elite school with a terrific education and meritocratic admissions and financial aid.

But then again, neither is the Minerva Project.

This Monday and Tuesday, undergrad volunteers banded together in a roomful of Institvte phones to individually congratulate and chat with each of the freshly admitted candidates for the class of 2016. We all stayed longer than we'd planned; my hallmate and I swore we would only stop in for a few calls, but ended up making hundreds of calls for over four hours despite our bleeding GPAs and unfinished psets. It was a little like gambling; only one in seven or eight of you guys picked up (shame!), so we'd have losing streaks for a while, give up hope, suddenly get a real, live, excited prefrosh and have a great 45 minute conversation, and ride on a high of vicarious prefrosh cheer through the next few voicemails in a vicious cycle.

The telethon is a fun tradition that I think brings a really nice personal touch / warm fuzzy feeling to the seemingly heartless process of admissions. When I invited Stephan'13 to come volunteer at the EA telethon last year, his face fell and he plaintively said, "Anyone can go? I thought the people who called us were, like, special or something." Ironic, then, that he is insanely clever and hardworking, like, oh, I don't know, most people who make it through this place.

My calls only made it through to a handful of people, but you seemed really cool! Thanks for your time, bros and girl-bros. With Campus Preview Weekend and enrollment decisions approaching, I'd like to share some relevant FAQ's I was asked while telethoning, in hopes that they'll be useful for some of the prefrosh we didn't manage to reach.

I am trying to decide between MIT and ____. Their campus preview weekends coincide. What should I do?

I know a lot of people who had this problem as prefrosh, and while I'm not going to say "omg we are totally the best thing ever so you should just forget about those other hussies", because you are the best judge of which school is best for you, I'm pretty sure that MIT's campus preview weekend is (a) the most fun (b) the most revealing about its culture (c) the most differentiated from a normal campus tour. Most campus preview weekends don't differ drastically from a tour besides the scale; you will likely see several more organized student events, talks, and dorms than you would by visiting on any other weekend.

CPW is an intense compression of an entire undergrad experience at MIT, minus all the hard work, into three days. Events literally go around the clock; there are never less than five or six events going on at a time, and usually many more, with the exception of five or six hour breaks for sleep in the wee hours of the morning. The entire campus bands together in a concentrated burst of effort to do everything that lies at the intersection of fun and possible, everything they normally do during the year for fun but smushed together at an impossible density. A cappella groups run around serenading you all over campus; East Campus and Random Hall bust out the dewars and make you liquid nitrogen ice cream; every living group has a barbecue at least once a day; every student organization and club shows off demos / breakdances / unicycles / juggles / flies hovercrafts / blows things up at a giant activities fair. You'll glowstick, play underground capture the flag, maybe even play glow-in-the-dark capture the flag. You may walk through kiddie pools filled with non-Newtonian fluid. You'll meet people you will stay friends with throughout college, even if you decide not go to MIT. You'll talk to tens of metric tons of us. You may even meet a professor you want to do research with. (When I was a prefrosh, I pulled a super lame hack with some other prefrosh I met on the internet.)

You'll almost certainly overeat. Remember that there will be food at almost every event, and save room for a few flavors of liquid nitrogen ice cream.

More laid-back events involve teaching increasingly obscure math late into the A.M. until all attendees leave or fall asleep, the inevitable "MORE FOOD THAN YOUR BODY HAS ROOM FOR", talks by faculty members, open houses with every department, program, and organization on campus, hair dyeing (good luck explaining that to your parents), and several thousand bouncy balls being thrown from a Senior Haus balcony into the courtyard.

via flickr

It's a little more stressful for us, because we have a lot of logistics to take care of to produce this giant, mostly student-driven welcome to you, on top of normal schoolwork, which we don't get a break on. But we don't really need sleep any more, so whatever.

tl;dr CPW is not just a glorified campus tour; skipping it and stopping through the next weekend will still be informative, but you will find out much more about your future undergraduate community at MIT CPW than you would at any other preview weekend.

still tl;dr come to CPW you will not regret it

None of my following FAQ answers will be as exciting as this one. Ever. Sorry.

Can I do research freshman year? Like, real research, I don't want to sit around cleaning test tubes all day. I want to run my own project, and also have a pony.

You can have all of that except the pony. For reasons unfathomable to me, MIT is stellar at undergrad research. Many, many freshmen do real research as early as their first semester. My next-door neighbor, Martin'15, started working in the Drennan Lab fall semester -- he uses X-ray crystallography to analyze enzyme structures. You can work here in exchange for U.S. dollars or class credits, or you can work abroad. Several of my close friends have done research in Spain via the MISTI program, which extends to twelve other countries. There's also a program called D-Lab that's geared toward developing countries. Someone could write a hefty treatise on this, but the short answer is: yes, you can do research here without prior experience. The tough part will be finding time.

Can I continue pursuing the arts at MIT to <insert your own> degree of seriousness?

In my personal opinion, the MIT admissions process, brutal though it may be, does a great job picking people that are not just good at science but proficient in many areas. People who are good at doing things are not characterized by their ability to nerdily rattle off Science Facts, after all, but by their creativity, love of learning, and work ethic. I'm sure you already know this. What I'm getting at is that you will likely be able to find a variety of student groups with different commitment levels that suit your needs while you are simultaneously doing Science Things, because more MIT folks than you would expect are really artsy. The usual deluge of examples courtesy of the availability heuristic: my hallmate started doing professional graphic design at age 15 and is currently CTO at a startup even though he's only a sophomore now, my boyfriend is both a full-time web developer and a short film composer, and once I went to a Boston Pops concert and this girl who was in one of my compsci classes at the time unexpectedly hopped up on the stage and performed a Mendelssohn concerto with them.

MIT has a lot of interesting humanities professors: examples include Junot Diaz (see jkim's take on his writing class), Martin Marks, who teaches film music history and composition and serves as the curator for the National Film Preservation Foundation, and Mark Harvey, who is a mild-mannered lecturer by day and a crazy trumpet-playing jazz orchestra leader by night, crazy in only the best of ways, although I still hope he doesn't read this.

MIT's humanities programs are good, but obviously can't compete with real art colleges. Fortunately, you can cross-register at Harvard, Wellesley, MassArt, or SMFA without paying extra tuition. The surrounding area is also home to Berklee College of Music, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. So, if you venture off campus, you can find lots of non-MIT organizations too.

What will dorm life be like? I don't know where I'll fit in! Ahh!

Your dorm-placement schedule looks like this:

• some time this summer: You receive the i3 (Interactive Introduction to the Institvte) videos, which are produced by students in each dorm. Alternatively, you realize immediately after you finish reading this blog post that all of the previous ones are on Youtube, and you marvel at East Campus's roller coaster for a while before being completely confused by Bexley's video.
• before matriculation: First dorm lottery.
• orientation: Set up shop in your temp dorm. Every living group throws a billion events so you can get a better sense of dorm / living group cultures. You enter the readjustment lottery, or you decide you made the right initial decision and squat.
• after orientation: If you were in the readjustment lottery, you move.
• after readjustment: You move around within your dorm; each floor/section has a distinct culture as well.

So don't worry about that just yet -- you'll have a few months after enrolling to figure it all out.

MIT sounds great and all, but what if it's too difficult? I'm just a plain 'ol high school senior.

So were most of us, once. Don't worry, you didn't get admitted on accident. MIT is undeniably very difficult, but freshmen are given the boon of Pass/No Record for a semester, in order to help ease the pressure as they acclimate to the disturbingly rigorous coursework. It'll help to remember that the work is made difficult in order to help you learn more, not because the professors are evil extradimensional creatures who feed upon human suffering.

There are also many resources such as office hours, tutors (MIT pays students to tutor other students), structured study groups, and structured freshman programs such as Concourse and ESG. You will also end up organically forming study groups with all of the freshmen in your living group. Basically, if you try to do everything on your own one hour before it's due like you did in high school because high school classes were trivial for you, you will fail miserably, and if you reach out for help, life will be much easier. You will probably still get 20% on your first chem exam and finish the semester with your first C or two, boo hoo, but no one will ever see it and you'll do just fine in the grand scheme of things.

I elaborate upon freshman academics in graphic detail in this post; you will have plenty of time to figure that out if you do choose MIT.

I want to go to MIT for grad school; will going there for undergrad hurt my chances?

Even if you end up with the same major that you originally planned, your experiences over the next four or so years will make you a radically different person with different priorities. Grad programs' desirability and strengths vary wildly depending on the specific research interests and emotional baggage you leave undergrad with. So it's a terrible idea to have your 17-year-old self make decisions for your 21-year-old self. Not to mention that if you're good enough to get into MIT grad school, well...that's pretty damn good.

The overall feeling I'm painting here, especially with CPW and all, may seem excessively optimistic and idealistic. Nothing is perfect, obviously; tuition is horrendously expensive, the winters are cold, and there will be conflicts and bad classes and quarter-life crises. I think I made the optimal decision in coming here, though, and hopefully all our ramblings can help you figure out if this place is right for you.

That is all for now, folks. Feel free to ask more questions in the comments! (Trolls: I know where you live, please refrain.)

Emily Sheldon, who coordinates transfer admissions for our office, will be emailing all applicants with their decisions this afternoon, so you should expect to hear from her directly.

During this transfer admissions cycle we had 517 applicants. After several rounds of an extremely rigorous transfer committee process, we eventually were able to offer admission to 25 of them.

Transfer students are some of the very best MIT has to offer. I highly recommend reading the profile of transfer student Ian McKay featured on the MIT homepage last fall. It's pretty wild stuff.

As always, thank you to all of our transfer applicants, and congratulations to those we were able to admit!
 

Getting Home

Instead of flying, my boyfriend Cory and I took a bus from Boston to New York City and another bus from New York to Pennsylvania to visit my family. After we got off the first bus we wandered around a few blocks of New York City for twenty minutes and then arrived at the next bus stop.

“There’s our bus.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope.”

It was a large white van with A One Bus Inc written on the side, along with its capacity, 18. The driver sat us in the back, and fit more people into the van as they showed up. Eventually the van was full. A girl came up to the driver, asking to pay in cash for a seat. The driver reached under a seat in the second-to-last row and, like magic, out came a ninteenth seat, without a back or a seatbelt, filling up the aisle. The girl grasped two other seats and sat down on the new low seat.

Then a boy came over, also with cash. The driver put his guitar in the trunk. We heard metal clanking and we laughed, wondering if he’d conjure up another seat in the trunk and the boy would ride with our luggage. But no! Out came a preschool-sized folding chair (“Does that have a seatbelt?”) which he fit in the aisle in front of the first fold-out seat.

Here’s the view from my seat in the last row, and then some of us in front of the bus outside a gas station. The folding chair appears outside the bus on the right and under the man in the orange hoodie on the left.

In the end there were two of us in the first row, including the driver, three in each of the next two rows, four in the fourth row, including the folding chair, four in the fifth row, including the fold-out seat, and four in the back row, including me and Cory. It was stuffy, hot, and too cramped for elbow space. It was extra sweet when we started passing rivers and forests, the mountains began to part for towns ending in ville and burg, and I could count down the miles to home.

I live in State College, PA, which makes up the bulk of Happy Valley, part of which is called Pleasant Gap. The town revolves around Penn State, is surrounded by farms, and is said to be growing into a small city. Purple mountains shelter us on all sides (from cell phone signal, sometimes), much like the university shields us from the recession and a sea of red shelters our tiny blue dot come November. There is almost no crime, everything is 15 minutes away, and the grass seems to stay green year round. The place radiates energy and optimism.

Coming home, for me, is hiking, canoeing, and then a warm, soft bed, a quiet night, and waking up to birds singing and the rain bubbling on the sidewalk. My family is like my battery: seeing them leaves me enthusiastic about my classes and the people around me and optimistic about the future. I spent spring break recharging with my parents, hiking some favorite paths, getting a lot of sleep and amazing food, and playing monopoly and stuffed animals with my brother and my boyfriend. Here are two highlights: a momentous bubble bath and some amazing people on the Colbert Report.

The Bubble Bath

The day after I got home my bother achieved every child’s greatest fantasy. After our second day hiking in the rain he immediately ran upstairs to take a hot bath. Half an hour later there were bubbles filling the bathtub, bubbles climbing up the walls, and bubbles knee-high on the floor. You know you’re jealous. Here’s what it looked like after the first round of clean-up:

Cleaning up was incredibly fun, like living a childish yet intellectually stimulating dream. We quickly discovered that trying to squash the bubbles only created more bubbles. Cory drained and refilled the bathtub to slowly lower the concentration of soap until there were no more bubbles. Meanwhile I took care of the floor and the walls. The culprit, in case anyone wants to replicate our experiment, was “just a few drops” of Tone Tahitian Vanilla and Orchid Body Wash.

The Colbert Report

I’ve been interested in sex determination and sex chromosome evolution since my senior year of high school, when I was lucky to be introduced to genomics by Dr. Kateryna Makova. After a year in the Makova lab at Penn State I returned to the same field at MIT, where I’ve been working as a UROP at the Page lab. On March 26th, our PI, Dr. David Page, appeared on the Colbert Report to defend the honor of the Y chromosome.

The story starts hundreds of millions of years ago. The X and Y chromosomes originated as identical autosomes, non-sex chromosomes. After they split, the X chromosome continued evolving at about the same rate as other autosomes; the Y chromosome, on the other hand, began shrinking and losing genes. Some people speculated that the trend would continue, and that within 10 million years the Y chromosome would disappear completely. Would a new set of sex chromosomes replace the X and the Y? Would we split into new humanoid species? Would men disappear?

To settle the debate, the Page lab sequenced the Y chromosome of the rhesus monkey and compared it with ours, discovering that while the Y chromosome degenerated rapidly after its split with the X, it has been relatively stable since the human-rhesus split, 25 million years ago. Here is Dr. David Page explaining the conclusions on the Colbert Report:

For a more detailed account, read the full paper here.

On a related but less serious note, I found out this morning that the Tacocopter, invented by the super amazing MIT alum Star Simpson, along with Dustin Boyer and MIT alum Scott Torborg, also recently found its way to the Colbert Report. Check it out.

Other diversions this spring break included putting my phone through our washing machine’s 57-minute cold cycle (extra rinse, extra spin; it lives!); buying and planting a five-and-a-half-foot-tall heartthrob dogwood tree, which will bloom in June, for my mom’s birthday, which will happen in April; and running every evening with my dad, who runs five to ten kilometers every day, barefoot, rain or shine, in temperatures above 27 degrees Fahrenheit. I learned how to spell cumulonimbus, in preparation for my brother’s spelling test, and I learned how to cook things that are not cereal, in preparation for surviving the rest of this semester.

As always, it was good to be home.