(flickr: thenerdsangle)

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.

(flickr: Dan4th)

You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.
About some you will say, "I don't choose to go there."
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.

(www.newenglandliving.org)

And you may not find any
you'll want to go down.
In that case, of course,
you'll head straight out of town.

It's opener there
in the wide open air.

(google MIT D-lab and MIT MISTI!)

Out there things can happen
and frequently do
to people as brainy
and footsy as you.

And when things start to happen,
don't worry. Don't stew.
Just go right along.
You'll start happening too.

(flickr: D-lab, and google MIT-Cambridge Exchange)

OH!
THE PLACES YOU'LL GO!

You'll be on your way up!
You'll be seeing great sights!
You'll join the high fliers
who soar to high heights.

(flickr: nd-nʎ - read about MIT hacks)

You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed.
You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead.
Wherever you fly, you'll be the best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don't
Because, sometimes, you won't.

I'm sorry to say so
but, sadly, it's true
and Hang-ups
can happen to you.

You can get all hung up
in a prickle-ly perch.
And your gang will fly on.
You'll be left in a Lurch.

You'll come down from the Lurch
with an unpleasant bump.
And the chances are, then,
that you'll be in a Slump.

And when you're in a Slump,
you're not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.

(more doonesbury and mit comics)

You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?

And IF you go in, should you turn left or right...
or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find,
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.

You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place...

...for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.

Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.

(* waiting = sleeping)

NO!
That's not for you!

Somehow you'll escape
all that waiting and staying.
You'll find the bright places
where Boom Bands are playing.

With banner flip-flapping,
once more you'll ride high!
Ready for anything under the sky.
Ready because you're that kind of a guy!

(mit tech - a la rfong - google east campus orientation or cpw)

(flickr: hollyladd - the mit glass lab)

Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done!

There are points to be scored. there are games to be won.
And the magical things you can do with that ball
will make you the winning-est winner of all.
Fame! You'll be famous as famous can be,
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

(mit athletics - re: mit basketball)

Except when they don't.
Because, sometimes, they won't.

I'm afraid that some times
you'll play lonely games too.
Games you can't win
'cause you'll play against you.

All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you'll be quite a lot.

(learn about UROPs - what makes the MIT undergrad experience so special)

And when you're alone, there's a very good chance
you'll meet things that scare you right out of your pants.
There are some, down the road between hither and yon,
that can scare you so much you won't want to go on.

But on you will go
though the weather be foul
On you will go
though your enemies prowl
On you will go
though the Hakken-Kraks howl
Onward up many
a frightening creek,
though your arms may get sore
and your sneakers may leak.

On and on you will hike
and I know you'll hike far
and face up to your problems
whatever they are.

-Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, 2012 commencement speaker (in one week!)

---

Some of you might wonder what I'm still doing here. It's true, what am I doing here?.

I can't believe it's been one year already. In this intervening year, I evolved into a multiple choice test-taking machine, and already forgot what a pset looks like (don't panic - take it from a reliable source that there is a life without psets :P). I also interviewed ten prospective MIT '16s, and drafted ten passionate interview reports. It's fun, and keeps me connected to that crazy Institvte up north. (I still remember writing this blog! time really flies - i'm still getting over the fact that i'm already at the other end of that blog)

I wanted to write this entry last year when I graduated, but somehow never found the time to do so. Now, on the eve of the '12s graduating and after having one year to condense my thoughts, I hope to publish it (of course, with the blessing of the powers-that-be on MIT blogs).

---

This is a simple story of three guys, how they met, and the brief time they shared together.

I first met Steve at FLP (Freshman Leadership Program) during Pre-Orientation. FLP was a great experience - you get stranded on this island in Massachusetts Bay, have these counselors that play pranks on games with you, and generally spend a laughter-filled week before Orientation actually starts. Steve struck me as a quiet guy but I tried to connect with him a bit since I already knew that I was going to be living in the same dorm as him.

I lived in a triple during my freshman year (officially the largest room in New House, although my mom still balked at the size and the fact that I had to share the space with two other guys. i didn't mind quite as much). I had officially secured the single bed by the window by putting my sleeping bag on it prior to even leaving for FLP (haha) but not actually staying there until right up to school started. I left Zach and Steve to fight over the bunk bed. I met Zach in the room - he initially got the upper bunk, but moved down to the bottom after realizing that Steve and I don't usually sleep till 3 or 4 AM (and he goes to bed at 10). He proceeded to put sheets around the lower bunk, creating a tent-like coccon which he retreated into every night.

That was the year of the triple, the year when we figured out how to navigate the Institute, the year when we teamed up to make this i3 (kind of like a dorm intro video) promoting iHouse.

This was like wayyy back during Orientation, with Anna '11 - we joked that we should take another picture at the end but we didn't get the time to do so right before graduation and tell Anna about it. I just saw Anna two months ago when she visited NYC!

We had weekly brunches in our dorm, and for the freshman boys' brunch, I contributed this excellent promotional photoshoot while they supplied the breakfast :P

At the end of the first year, we all moved into singles, but we never left the same dorm.

Over the next three years, I got to know Zach as a passionate violinist who combined his love of music with his (equal) love of physics. He would always invite me to his endless string of concerts and recitals, of which I have attended probably only two or three, sadly.

The man in action, teaching the freshmen (we were sophomores) the finer points of 8.01.

Steve morphed into a math genius, taking economics and math classes alongside each other. He has a talent for solving problems, and I can't remember a time when he ever complained to me about a question being too hard (although there was plenty of it going in the other direction, lol)

I had lots of American food (courtesy of them, since Steve doesn't eat anything that's not American and Zach has a marginally broader palate), which stretched my gastronomic preference quite a bit, haha.

And so the years rolled on, and we found our own niches at MIT. One night sometime during our sophomore year, we were sitting around and talking about double degreeing at MIT, which would be a fun thing to do together before graduation.

(So at MIT, if you entered before 2007, you had the option of taking 270 units on top of your General Institute Requirements AND fulfulling the requirements of two majors to get a double degree, rather than a simple double major. This means you get two diplomas at graduation. Probably to decrease stress and unnecessary competition (or simply stupid people like ourselves, I guess), MIT removed the option beginning from the class entering 2008, effectively making our class the last class with this option possible - replacing it with a double major, where you get one diploma with two majors printed on it, but only with an extra 180 units)

Perhaps spurred on by this stupid idea of graduating each with two diplomas, we went on our own ways and really amped up the pace during our last four semesters, trying to fulfill this goal. Of course, it was fun when we were doing it and I got the crazy opportunity to write a history thesis (and thereby get my name into the MIT Library system, hehe), but I probably wouldn't have been so motivated if it wasn't for the prospect of us doing it all together. I took four history classes one semester (which meant well over 2000 pages of reading over the semester), which made me feel like this sometimes (x 2000):

As 2011 inched closer, we reminded each other to get in our petition forms, and it was exciting because it totally was coming true!

Finally, June 3, 2011 rolled around, and we took this picture after walking down the aisle:

Steve: Course 14 (Economics) and 18 (Mathematics), Zach: Course 8 (Physics) and 21M (Music), Me: Course 7 (Biology) and 21H (History). Between the three of us, we span almost 1/4 of the majors at MIT! :)

They say that there are some pictures where you'll always remember how you felt and what the day like when that photo was being taken, and this was truly one of those moments. It was a moment of relief, a moment of celebration, and a moment of reminisce for all those nights when we:

+ Mario Karted
+ played AOM together in Zach's room after working
+ drove in a Zipcar to this random place out in the 'burbs of Boston just for some burgers
+ sat in the common room and watched the Dark Knight for like the fifth time in one year
+ were happy to have someone to talk to after a long day at school or a long bout with a particularly stubborn pset
+ made those spontaneous runs to MacGregor convenience for extra large bags of Ruffles Sour Cream (and only Ruffles Sour Cream)
+ (when I) asked Zach how to solve a 8.02 problem and Steve how to solve my math questions (which I still do with Biostats, like my email yesterday -____-)
+ (when I) complained incessantly to Steve while stressed out about my med school applications, and Steve running a regression on admitted stats to tell me that I shouldn't hope for the HMS (he was right)

Since then, Steve has just completed his first year at Harvard Economics, and Zach is entering UPenn to study physics this fall after taking a gap year.

First year of med school is great and all, but there's something magical about the many people you encounter on the way at MIT, just like Khan said. It is my firm (and often vocal) opinion that you don't have to be particularly smart or even cool to become a doctor, but everyone at MIT is genuinely special. This is the reason why I enjoyed interviewing prospective students so much this year, because it gave me a chance of looking for that spark of energy driven by passion that I've come to see in so many of my peers during my MIT years. Even one year out, I'm only starting to see this even clearer than I did when I was a student.

---

Congratulations to the class of 2012, and best wishes for your Commencement coming up next Friday. It is truly a feat to have completed your MIT education, and although you maybe can't wait till your life after MIT, I'd recommend taking this upcoming week nice and slow and savoring all there is to those numbered buildings and dank Athena clusters.

Trust me, you will miss being there soon enough :)

This is, however, NOT my last blog. That is coming, and (I promise!) it will be still MIT-relevant.

Once things stop becoming MIT-relevant, then I'll stop blogging. Which will be a sad day.

----

So I'm now living in THE NYC, on THE UES (or the Upper East Side, for you unenlightened folks). Theoretically, I live in East Harlem, since we have the East Harlem zip code (10029), but we are zoned in the same Congressional district as the wealthy Upper East Side (NY 14th). This made me finally realize what "gerrymandering" means*. (okay, I also wanted to live in the most Democratic Congressional district in the nation according to the Cook PVI index, which is NY 15th (Harlem and Washington Heights) and NY 16th (Bronx) :P)

* Seriously though, check out the Manhattan Congressional zoning map - the traditional boundary between East Harlem and the Upper East Side is East 96th St., but see how the district lines shift sharply northwards by Park Ave. next to Central Park? That's where my medical school (and the medical center) is, lol.

I'm going to medical school at Mount Sinai, and I just had my seventh day of school.

In many ways, med school is like going back to high school - the days are much longer with an intense amount of lectures (5-6 hours), the class is really small (140 in my graduating class), and you have class with everyone else all the time.

A major difference, however, is that people in your class are no longer the same age as you. In MSSM Class of 2015, the age range is from 21 to 31, with the average age being 23. I'm 22, so I fit just below the average age of my class. It's a bit strange to realize that most of the people in my class had taken a year or few years off and that people didn't just recently turn legal like I did, haha.

Thanks to the rigorous MIT biology and chemistry instruction, the biochem that we have seen so far appears to be quite amateurish (what is the secondary structure of a protein? how does DNA transcription proceed? explain the function of the TATA box? which amino acids are polar and which are nonpolar?). Not trying to be cocky here, but MIT does provide a really rigorous foundation in the sciences (even through the GIRs without going into advanced courses), and this serves us really well post-graduation, which is a great thing :)

----

What I really meant to write in this blog, however, is about the MIT alums that are in my class at Mount Sinai.

I am happy to announce that Mount Sinai had an extremely strong showing of MIT alumni this year, with 4 of us from the Class of 2011 attending - Sonya '11, Grace '11, Amrita '11, and yours truly.

It's pretty funny because Grace '11 shares almost the exact same life story as me (born in the US, grew up in Taiwan, didn't come back until college....our parents even know each other!). I've delegated her as the spokesperson for the "where are you from" question when we're together :P

I went to the same summer program at the same campus (SSP Ojai 2006) my junior year of HIGH SCHOOL with Sonya '11. (woot woot SSP represent! here I am going to link Anna, because she always links me when talking about SSP - although it was a pity that she went to the New Mexico campus...when they were rained out with T-storms, us folks on the California campus even took asteroid measurements for them and sent it over to NM. True story.) We also went to the same FPOP (FLP 2007), and now we're in the same class again. It is pretty funny though that Sonya and I actually rarely talked at MIT since we never really ran into each other, but now I see her almost every day.

As for Amrita '11, she also went FLP 2007, and she was Grace's floormate at MIT. Now they're roommates!

So all of us are doing well here at Sinai, and after two weeks of meeting people, we discovered that there was a hidden MIT alum in our class, Paul from the Class of 2003*.

* To give you a sense of time, Simmons Hall opened during his senior year at MIT.

It was extremely exciting to refer to our majors using numbers again and have someone understand what "Course 7" meant (he was Course 5). Although Paul is much older than me, there are so many things that all alums share - so much more than course numbers. He knew what it felt like to stay up tooling all night, and how tasty the food trucks (especially Goosebeary's) by Building 66* were.

* To give you another sense of time, the food trucks by Kendall used to park next to Building 66 in an alleyway that led to Main Street. We would buy food from the food truck and eat at this small lawn area right next to Building 66. This was during my freshman Orientation (2007). Since then, that lawn area got demolished to make way for the new Koch Center and is sadly no more. The food trucks moved over to the alley by the ambulance entrance of MIT Medical, and Goosebeary's got renamed Momogoose**.

** I still like the original Goosebeary's better.

----

To stay in touch with MIT, I signed up to be an Educational Counselor, and I sure hope I get picked (unfortunately, there are way too many alumni in the NYC area :( ). It's so much fun to keep in touch with MIT, and it would definitely be super fun to get to help pick the incoming future classes.

There is a quote that I really like from Alice in Wonderland (did you know Lewis Carroll was an eminent mathematician? see, scientists are capable of so much more than just science XP)

"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

It is a bit tongue-in-cheek when I use it to describe MIT, but this quote seriously sums up how I feel about this place after four years. There is something very special about the school, and once you leave, you're never quite the same again. Even when meeting my new classmates from other colleges, I can't help but feel that there are just so many things that I can never properly describe to them - you'd have to have lived it to understand.

Just like Harry Potter going off to Hogwarts - you belong here if you received the fat envelope. I can't help you if you don't want to go among mad people, but if you're sitting in Cambridge right now reading this post.....

....too late. :)

ps. Our professor talked about the Ras oncogene a few days ago, and I had to resist the urge to turn to my classmate and announce that the guy who discovered Ras taught me freshman biology. :P

I.

I was chatting with this guy at one of my med school interviews -

HIM: "So where do you go to school?"

ME: "Oh, I go to school in Boston."

HIM: "Do you go to Harvard?"

ME: "No!"

HIM: "MIT?"

ME: "Yes..."

HIM: "Funny how Harvard and MIT kids always tell people that 'they go to school in Boston.'"

I never thought about it, but if you must press me for a reason, I do feel like sometimes saying "oh, yeah, I go to MIT" sounds rather pretentious, so I've unconsciously continually opted to say Boston, rather than MIT directly.

It's almost like that with being Premed at MIT.

II.

For some reason, people HATE admitting that they are premed at MIT - consider the following exchange:

HIM: "So what course are you?"

YOU: "Uh...7. (or 9, or 10B)"

HIM: "What do you want to do after you graduate?"

YOU: "Uh...go to med school...."

HIM: "Oh, you're a premed?"

YOU: "Yeahhhh....."

This happens all the time at MIT.

III.

Additionally, premeds like to say that they are different from "all the other premeds." cf. -

HIM: "You know, that 7.20 test was hard! I hope the curve isn't too harsh though, but considering how there are so many premeds in that class..."

YOU: "Uh, aren't you a premed too?"

HIM: "Yeah, but I'm not one of those premeds."

I'll admit upfront that I'm definitely guilty of both II and III. Part of the reason why I'm reluctant to say I'm premed sometimes is really because premeds get a bad rep as people with no life and study all day, or simply neurotic overachievers.

At the risk of violating III again, I just want to establish some ground rules about the kind of premed that I am, so you know the perspective that I'm writing this article from. If you are considering being premed at MIT, you will definitely meet other MIT premeds who will tell you their angle of the story, but here's my honest assessment of being a premed at MIT.

I.

I didn't come to MIT intending to be premed. My father is an urologist, and when I was growing up, he consistently told me that "if you don't enjoy medicine, it's not worth your time or energy." I came to MIT wanting to be a chemical engineer. If you ask Matt McGann, he can dig up the essay on my MIT application where I wrote about my fascination with chemistry. To make a long story really short, I became interested in medicine after working with Chinese immigrants my freshman year of college, and since then I have worked with immigrants across three Chinatowns in America (Boston, SF-Oakland, NYC-Queens). I spent my past two summers participating in internships that gave me direct exposure with immigrant patients. This, combined with my disintest in engineering (too much programming and technical aspects...I like studying the "philosophy" of science, not so much the nitty-gritty of building something), incentivized me to switch from 10 to maybe 20 to finally 7. (in reality I should have been 9, but that's another long story :p)

II.

This is how my last cycle turned out, from June 22, 2010 (when I submitted my AMCAS Primary) to right now. The MCAT scores and the GPA are all accurate. (note: we don't get 0.3 or 0.7 for plusses and minuses in GPA - grades are assigned strictly by letter grade for the external transcript)

CLICK

III.

Now that you've seen my stats compared against MIT's Premed Data stats, we can talk a bit more freely:

My MCAT is slightly above the MIT Accepted Mean (36 vs. 35), and my GPA is slightly below the MIT Accepted Mean (3.71 vs. 3.73 - adjusted from MIT's 5 point scale to 4 point...the 5 point scale is rather silly because as long as you don't fail any classes, simply -1 from your MIT GPA to find the "normal GPA"). There is no reference Science GPA (also known as the BCPM GPA, or the average of your GPA in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics classes ONLY), but I will venture to say that is the Achille's heel of my application. 3.50 is rather low, and I expect accepted MIT Premeds to have numbers around the 3.6-3.8 range.

In terms of my GPA distribution, my science GPA is 3.50, but my non-science GPA is 3.92 (my entire History major is in this category). This probably gives you a sense of my strengths vs. weaknesses ;)

I applied to 23 schools, and received 5 acceptances (which is comparable to the average 3.5 acceptances by MIT applicants). I am attending Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

IV.

In April, I submitted a "rebuttal column" in response to this column posted in the Tech around CPW, which I consider to be overly optimistic to the point of naivety. I fully stand by what I have written, and some of the arguments I made in the column will be fleshed out a bit more here. I will also point out the parts of the original article that I believe to be correct, and the extent to which they are correct.

Premed @ MIT is special because you don't feel like you're directly competing against each other, which reduces a lot of the "cutthroat" culture seen in premeds elsewhere.

Referring again to the MIT Premed Data, only around 3-5% of each graduating class is premed (or at least applies as an undergrad), which means that it eliminates a lot of the direct competition seen at undergrads like Hopkins and Berkeley (where up to 25% of the graduating class can be premed). It helps that MIT is largely comprised of engineers who do not give two hoots about premeds, so it really reduces a lot of the "gunner" culture that people have come to associate being a premed with.

Of course, if you only survey Course 7 and 9 students, then the premed percentage might jump suddenly to 30-50%, but for the most part it still doesn't feel cutthroat largely because MIT is so difficult. At the end of the day, you will feel like you are competing to gain a good understanding of the material so you can get a good grade in the course, not so that you can beat out your classmates for the A.

Yes, at the end of the day, the grades for the majority of the premed and biology classes are still assigned via an adjusted "curve" where only a certain percentage of the class gets As and the other portion of the class gets Bs and Cs, but I have never really felt (except for one class) like my classmates were "beating me out" of the A range. Coming from a student who had just as many Bs (mainly B+'s, since MIT doesn't give extra GPA for +'s and -'s) as As in science classes, that's saying a lot.

This is one of the best things about being a premed at MIT - you can really focus on getting a good grasp of the material without being caught in the web of grade-grubbing which is so common among premeds.

MIT is THE PLACE if you want to enter into academic medicine (eg. MD-PhD) or you are interested in research in biomedical engineering or biotechnology.

I have yet to hear about a school that offers such a comprehensive package of research opportunities to undergraduate students through the UROP program (if you have, please let me know). The opportunities here to do research are simply outstanding, and it is incredible that students with NO benchwork experience can get a fully-funded research job as early as their freshman year (I am a case in point). We have several Nobel Prize laureates that you can work with, and recently I just realized that EVERY ONE of the three science professors who wrote my medical school recommendation letters are National Academy of Science members (not an easy feat). These kinds of opportunities and connections open a lot of doors if you are interested in academic medicine down the road, and if you can manage to squeeze in a publication or two before you graduate, you basically wrote yourself a ticket to one of the best medical schools in the country. Extensive connections with MGH (Mass General Hospital) and the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST, or one of the best MD-PhD programs around) are available to undergrads conveniently.

MIT applicants not applying as "research" MD candidates, however, have a more difficult time in the application process due to both stereotyping...

Just everyone who you will meet for the rest of your life, you will get stereotyped when you tell them that you are a "MIT student." Medical school admission committee members ("adcoms") are no exception. If you are applying from MIT and is not extensively involved in research, you better have something else that is strong to back up your application, because the logical question to ask is "why no research from MIT?" I am not saying that it is impossible to get into a top med school without research from MIT (I know many that didn't go the "research route") but it is most often the logical path for premeds here. If you choose to not follow that path, then you will have to be more of a trailblazer of sorts, because you really have to seek out the thing that interests you. Also, be prepared for that inevitable question from adcoms during the interview trail about research, because the commonly perceived notion is that undergrads go to MIT to do research.

...and the rigors of MIT coursework.

It is no secret that MIT is hard. Often, however, I believe that although the "training" and the dozens of hours that we spend preparing for a test really stretches or academic capabilities, it is excessive for the purposes of being premed and preparing for the MCAT. As I pointed out in my opinion piece, we have to study so much at MIT just to get a B in our premed classes that we are forced to sacrifice time that could easily be spent in pursuing extracurricular and research activities. This is fine if you are really smart and can get A's at MIT without too much work, but for the rest of us, we have to sacrifice a lot of time just to maintain our GPAs at MIT so that we can be successful at jumping through the basic hoops of med school application.

The "MIT Effect" is often overrated.

Rachel Bandler points out in her piece that: "medical schools will understand that the work at MIT is harder than elsewhere, and so an occasional B is not a nightmare that will end your career."

True, but multiple B's (more Bs and As) will ruin your chances at a top medical school*. There is a "MIT Effect" in the sense that your interviewer is likely to look at your file and remark, "wow, you're from MIT! you must be really smart" - but that is probably as far as the Effect gets you. You don't get 0.2 magically appended to your GPA in the committee review.

* Studying != automatic A at MIT. You might try your hardest and still not end up with the grade that you want.

Keeping these points in mind, is it possible to succeed at being premed at MIT without too much stress? Of course -

HINDSIGHT IS 20/20: PREMED EDITION

1. Figure out where you stand in MIT academically ASAP (the GIRs will give you a good picture). Are you at the top of the class, the middle of the pack, or trailing behind? The earlier you figure this out, the earlier you can figure out the academic path that you should be taking at MIT (how many classes to take, how many activities you can be comfortably involved in...etc.)

2. Plan out your academic schedule carefully so you achieve a good balance of all classes as early as your freshman year. Aim to finish your premed science core classes (science GIRs and 5.12, plus 7.03 and 7.05 if you are course 7)  by the end of sophomore year, so you can take the MCAT sophomore summer.

3. Never take a class for granted and always aim for the A. If you can't figure out what you are doing wrong in a course, seek help ASAP from TA's, the prof, or upperclassmen. Don't be afraid to drop and retake.

4. Get into a research lab ASAP (as early as your freshman year), and figure out whether you enjoy research. If you don't, get the lab experience (that will probably be helpful for your lab classes if you're a life sciences major or summer internships) and then use that time to do something else that you are truly passionate about.

5. Seek out meaningful clinical and volunteering activities. Do the things that matter to you, not just things to tick off on your application. Yes, a good GPA and a good MCAT are checkboxes on that list, but use your years at MIT to figure out about what it is about healthcare that interests you. Just like anyone can tell you, you will be asked this question a lot on the interview trail, so the earlier you can figure it out - the better!

6. Being a doctor is not a "fallback career." I truly believe that MIT students should not be doctors if they don't have an interest in going into medicine - there is probably something else that you are better suited (and gifted) to do. It is mildly irritating when people say, "oh, I started being premed because I didn't know what else to do." Part of the journey of being a premed is figuring out what exactly it is that interests you about the field of medicine, so don't overlook this important part of being a premed.

7. Relax and don't stress out too much. MIT is a fun place, and don't spend all your time stressing about about MCAT and med school applications. Whatever comes will come. Foresight and planning is good, but obsession (especially about grades) is not.

8. Also, there is no rush to go into med school right after senior year. On the interview trail, many of the most interesting applicants are those that had taken time off to do cool things following graduation before applying for medical school. If you have something else you'd rather do, go ahead and do it! One of the applicants I met on my Harvard interview day took five years off to start a NGO in India, and I thought that was really awesome.

Good luck! As always, leave any questions you have in the comments about being premed and I will get back to you. :)

Just like every political debate, the "Constitutionality" of adjusting the debt limit was brought up by various legislators. Sen. Schumer (D-NY) suggested using the 14th Amendment to the Constitution as a legal requirement for the government to continue paying its financial obligations. In response, Sen. Cornyn (R-TX) dismissed the idea as "crazy talk."

So how does this document, well over 200 years old, continue to shape US politics?

Professor Pauline Maier, a history professor at MIT, published this book last year. I wrote about the book when it came out last year.

Since then, Prof. Maier's book had gone on to win:

• "10 Best Books of the Year" (Wall Street Journal)
• "100 Notable Books of the Year" (New York Times)
• George Washington Book Prize ($50,000)

It is also available prominently at major booksellers like the soon-to-be-history Borders:

When I visited Borders last week for their liquidation sale and saw Prof. Maier's book, I knew I had to get it. Having spent a whole semester poring over the intricacies of the debate surrounding the ratification of the Constitution, I wanted to see how Prof. Maier crafted her argument (she was putting the finishing touches on her book when I took her class Spring 2010).

To my (perhaps unmerited) surprise, the book reads exactly the way she lectures - the storytelling discussions that the six of us had come to know so well after working with her on Tuesday and Thursday mornings for a whole semester. In the opening introduction to the book, Professor Maier compared the fervent discussions and debates that occurred in taverns and private homes during late 1780's over the ratification of the Constitution as similar to the "American obsession with the final games of the World Series," and this analogy perfectly captures the sentiments of early US politics.

In class, Prof. Maier invites students to dissect tracts and treatises written by the early proponents and opponents of the Constitution to painstaking detail, while providing the enthusiasm of a sports commentator narrating a play-by-play analysis of a nail-biting game. Prof. Maier doesn't make the class too easy - she skims over providing "right answers," but instead challenges students to reach their own interpretations of the documents following careful individual study the night before. I must admit at times the reading (almost always over 100 pages of dense 18th century convoluted English rhetoric every two days) was extremely tough on an already challenging MIT workload, but the class becomes several times more valuable if one had done the readings beforehand. Prof. Maier offers insights, asks probing questions, and supplements the reading with her extensive and vast knowledge of the ratification of the Constitution in the 13 original colonies.

Prof. Maier is also very humble, and likes to repeat, "if you found something interesting that I haven't brought up, please make a note of it and tell me! I've been though these documents dozens of times but every time I go through them again with you guys, one of you - being astute MIT students - would often bring up something interesting that I failed to notice before." Taking her up on her offer, I pored over many of the pamphlets in great detail and made careful notes and observations, only to discover that Prof. Maier had already been there and reached the same conclusion that I did wayyyy before.

It was truly an honor to have had a class of six with such an eminent scholar of US History, and more surprisingly so as a student at MIT.

MIT HISTORY GRAD AND DANG PROUD!

Technically, I'm not kicked out from the blogs until the end of the summer, so I hope to continue writing a few blogs discussing various aspects that I've come to gain a better understanding of after my four years here, which I hope would be of use to incoming freshmen, especially. I don't actually have a plan for this, haha, so I will just draft things as they come to me. :P

I graduated with a 4.7 GPA from MIT, or 3.7, if you are more familiar with the 4.0 scale. This GPA was good enough to get me into medical schools, but also means that I always get a smattering of B's along with A's every semester. I completed the requirements for two degrees, took five classes for five semesters, four for two, and six for one.

I think I am somewhat different from the "standard" MIT population because:

1) I've never learned to code* at MIT (requirement for all engineering degrees).
2) I've never built anything at MIT (most engineering degrees).
* To my credit, I was fluent in Python prior to entering MIT, so give me a break before you start berating me D: rawr!

A quick look at MIT Enrollment Statistics show that I represent only about a quarter of the MIT population, so be warned.

---

To all incoming MIT freshmen,

MIT is hard. It will be harder than anything you've seen.

But you'll be fine.

To those familiar with Wii MarioKart, I once drew this analogy*:
* If you are not familiar with Wii MarioKart, either youtube what these levels look like or go get the game! :)

Your first semester is Luigi Circuit, it's basically a loop for you to get the feel of your cart/bike and to size up your competitors. As long as you steer carefully, Pass/No Record is your friend, and you will be able to cruise through the semester without too much trouble.

Your first semester in your major is Moo Moo Meadows. It's still smooth cruising like Luigi Circuit, but there are some new random obstacles along the way, like the herd of wandering cows and the gophers that pop out under you out of nowhere. The first semester will be a time when you test the water and get a feel of how your major would be like for the following years.

One of your semesters will feel like Moonview Highway, where everything will feel like chaos. You're racing around in the dark (more all-nighters and late-nights you can remember), with obstacles, cars, and bombs coming at you from all angles. It will be the semester when you're handling a tough courseload, but also balancing a challenging load of extracurriculars. It won't be your most difficult semester though courseload-wise, that would be the Rainbow Road semester.

Finally, one of your semesters will feel like Rainbow Road, when you are constantly falling off the track, banging your head against the wall trying to figure out that really hard course that you're taking. The first lap may feel grueling due to the constant re-starts that you will have to endure, but gratification comes finally during the third lap, when you finally get a feel of the land and race through the dizzying loops on a highway of rainbows.

There is no way to uniformly describe how difficult MIT is, and your mileage will vary (mainly due to your high school training, but the bumps will even out after the first year as you adjust to MIT's challenges).

Here's a few things to keep in mind as you begin your college journey, however:

1. Figure out your study/organization habits.

You are not expected to know the answer now, and this almost certainly will change in college, but the sooner you figure this out, the better. For many, MIT will be the first time in your life when you really need to study (it was for me). I also don't believe in books that "teaches" you how to study, because techniques and tricks vary by person - you'll have to figure out what works for you.

(helpful hint: you no longer can study for exams at 10 PM the night before)

Also, figure out what works for you in terms of remembering events/due dates. I've never had a Google Calendar (and I still don't use any form of electronic scheduling), and I was fine. Find out what works for you!

2. Learn from your friends.

Who are the best TAs? Which semester should you take chemistry? Where can you get cheap textbooks*? Your classmates and upperclassmen in your dorm are your friends and will be more than willing to lend you a helping hand - hey, we've all been there before!
* Generally, you are doing something wrong if you buy all of your textbooks at the MIT Coop. One or two obscure books, okay - but no more than that.

3. Use your resources wisely.

Here's something you should know - other than the GRE, LSAT, GMAT, MCAT, or another standardized test that you'll have to take to jump through the hoops of applying to graduate school, you will probably not take a real multiple choice test again (well, at MIT). MIT exams are thinking-focused, which means that you'll never be asked to regurgitate material - instead, most questions focus on designing experiments, or research- or industry-based questions (not unlike those that researchers are presented with in the lab during the course of their experiments). Although this sounds exciting and rewards students who can think analytically and critically, it also means that there is very little of a safety net. On a standard multiple choice exam, you can still expect to get ~20% by blindly guessing, but on a MIT exam, there is a very real possibility of getting 0% if you don't know anything at all. Truthfully, I've had nightmares at MIT where I dreamed that I walked into an exam not knowing ANYTHING, and getting a zero percent at the end. :'(

As such, it is almost impossible to cram for any exam. Studying usually involves doing problem sets (the equivalent to homework in college) carefully and studying old problem sets and exams. You will actually very rarely study from a textbook ever again...for most MIT classes, textbooks are almost like supplemental or background material - material that helps with understanding the professor's lectures, but is very rarely actually covered by the professor him/herself.

This means learning to acquire study material, either from the online course database (Stellar, which will become your very good friend in the next 4 years to come), upperclassmen, or your TA.

Figure out where you can get help, like where your TA's Office Hours are. Plan on working on assignments at least a few days in advance, so you can ask your TA if needed (not frantically 3 AM the night before). Same goes for studying for a test - TAs are known to host exam review office hours at least 2 days prior to the test, so they don't have to deal with the deluge of students seeking help at the final hour :P

4. It's not a race, really.

The final piece of advice is that MIT is not a race. Some of your friends will breeze through the GIRs and make you feel inadequate, but the reality is that the vast majority of us all finish at the end.

There is a culture of academic masochism at MIT, where students try to outcompete each other on the number of units they're taking and the hours of sleep that they're not getting every night. Regardless of what the people around you are doing, it is the most important to figure out what works for you.

There is no shame in dropping a class*.

There is no shame in not majoring in engineering**.

It is okay to fail a test.

You'll be fine.

(you'll learn the failing the test part ;) guaranteed.)

* We have the latest drop-date in major US colleges, at eleven weeks. This means usually you can drop a class like literally two weeks before the final exam without penalty. Use that to your advantage!

** NEWSFLASH: MIT is comprised of more than just Course 6 and Course 2 students.

---

That said, I dug up some classics of my MIT academic career that I want to share with ya'll. :D

I've gotten a perfect score on a MIT math/science exam only twice, once during 18.02 (Multivariable Calc) and once during 14.02 (Macroeconomics).

Here is my lowest numerical grade at MIT EVER. (not lowest by standard deviation, though). BEHOLD!

The class average was 37. In case you're wondering, I dropped the class promptly after this exam. Incidentally, the professor who wrote this exam was my academic adviser, hahaha.

I kept this exam since 2008 because I still can't get over how badly I did on this test. It's hilarious because I actually put down an answer to every question on the test, but I had almost all of them crossed out by the grader :'(

My first graded quiz/exam at MIT! The very first 8.01 quiz in September 2007! :*) I don't know if you can read the text, but the quiz was just this really long question about Ray Allen tossing a basketball. It was almost a prophecy, because the Boston Celtics won the immediate following NBA Final (2008) and there was much celebration in the streets when they did so :)

As I was cleaning up my room, I found my very first 18.02 pset! It was so neat and nicely written! :*) (although most of my psets look like this...I have a habit of doing my pset on scraps of paper but then rewriting it nicely before I turn it in for the benefit of the graders :P). In retrospect, HAHAHA I had such little idea of all the pain that was yet to come :P

So I'm a bio major, right? How did I do in 7.012 (my very first biology class at MIT)?

UHHHHH this was my first 7.012 exam:

Just FYI, the Bio GIR is often regarded as one of the hardest GIRs, so just letting you know that I really wasn't that n00bish. Also, this was one of my first exams at MIT, and it totally demonstrates what happens if you underestimate MIT's difficulty. Full disclosure: I started studying for this exam 10 PM the night before - four years later, I even think I got what I deserved at the time: it's sheer folly to study for a MIT exam like that.

Anyways, the 50% translated to a D+ (the C cutoff was a 52%). Since this was taken on Pass/No Record, I promptly got an email from the Dean of Undergraduate Programming about my performance in Pass/No Record classes (this email is known as a "fifth week flag" and is sent out to freshmen both semesters who are not passing their classes by the fifth week of class). In my defense, we only had one 7.012 exams in the first five weeks, so this exam was not an accurate indicator of my eventual performance (I passed, and let's say this exam taught me a lesson for the rest of the semester).

For the next four years, I kept the Fifth Week Flag email at the top of my Thunderbird Inbox (I use Thunderbird to manage my MIT mail) as a visual reminder to not slack off ever. It's there to the present day.

Dear Christopher,

I have just received notification of your 5th Week Flag in 7.012.

You still have time to turn your grade around and pass the subject, so responding to your flag is critical.

You need to advocate for yourself and access the resources that are available to you. As necessary, please consider the following:

• Tutoring: Science core tutors and other sources of tutoring are listed at
http://web.mit.edu/arc/learning/resources/tutoring.html

• Study review sessions prior to all 3.091, 5.111, 8.01, 18.01, 18.02, and 18.03 exams. For
information of dates, times, and locations of the sessions please see
http://web.mit.edu/arc/learning/news/calendar.html

• Meet with your advisor Mr. Matthew McGann. He/She can give you advice on resources,
identify the issues/problems that might be plaguing you and discuss your options with you. Your
advisor is also copied on the flag you received.

• Office of Undergraduate Advising & Academic Programming: My office, the UAAP, is your
freshman departmental office. UAAP staff can provide advice on your classes and help you
develop a recovery plan, room 7-104, 253-6771.

• Student Support Services, 5-104, 253-4861

• Medical Department, E23-189, 253-4481

• MIT Mental Health Service, E23-368, 253-2916

• Office of Minority Education, 4-113, 253-5010

I would welcome the opportunity to talk with you about your academic performance or any other issue
that may be impacting your studies or well-being. Please call (253-7411), email or stop by my office
(7-103). Should I not be available, Dean Donna Friedman (room 7-104) is also able
to assist you.

Julie

Julie B. Norman
Senior Associate Dean and Director
Office of Undergraduate Advising and Academic Programming MIT

yeahhhh, I tell this story to almost everyone when they ask me why I chose to study Biology xP

that said, welcome to MIT! :)

----

ps. This is an email that one of the most successful MIT graduates that I've known, RJ '08, wrote to me my freshman fall semester on the subject of time management. There are only five emails that I've kept at the top of my email inbox all four years - this is another one of them. His advice is words of pure gold, both at MIT and beyond - check it out!

Academics:
1) Work on psets with friends, both weaker or stronger in the subject than you are. Either way, you'll benefit from further discussion and peer teaching
2) However, spend some time trying psets on your own before working with friends, going for office hours, etc. It'll force you to think through the questions yourself first
3) Always start on all your work early. That way, you make sure you do the pset well, and don't have to pull all-nighters.
4) MIT does not require you to pull all-nighters weekly.
5) If you always fall asleep reading the text (i.e. not a Math/physics major), then work on problems to internalize the concepts
6) Make all effort to stay awake and participate in class, and if you see yourself falling behind, have the discipline to catch up over the weekend before it's too late.
7) There are a lot of resources to prepare for exams (past year quizzes, ocw, stellar, office hours, review sessions). Make sure you use them!
8) Enjoy your classes. Seriously. If you don't like them and can help it, drop the class.

Balance:
1) Have something to take your mind off work. Ideally it should be a
sport, musical activity, etc. It takes your mind off work, and you
come back refreshed and energized.
2) Get your 7 hours of sleep. You're not going to get more done in
that extra 3 hours you stay up
3) Be focused in whatever you're doing. Pset time doesn't mean 50% facebook.
4) Think about what exactly you want to get out of MIT. 5.0 GPA?
Leadership skills? Friendships? Community Service experiences? Once
you make that clear to yourself, and have a priority list, you'll know
what you should be doing and what you should say no to.
5) Keep busy. MIT has so much to offer, and if you stay busy and
focused, you get into the habit of being efficient

Scheduling:
1) Have some form of written record of what needs to be done when.
google calendar, outlook, or pure simple paper. Having the written
record means you don't have to spend brain power thinking about it.
This includes a to-do list and a calendar of activities
2) Either when you wake up or go to bed each night, thinking about the
day ahead and have a clear idea of what needs to be done.
3) Compartmentalize your time into hour block chunks, and set
mini-targets of what needs to be done by when.
4) Again, start things early.

That was right when I entered MIT.

Now, four years later, I get to post my own version - courtesy of Grace '11, since I have long since lost my own copy due to the chaos of the intervening years.

(basically, the backstory is that at freshman Orientation, each incoming MIT student gets a copy of some version of this list, which is actually different from year to year - if you compare Melis' to mine you can note the differences - I guess significant "MIT things" change from year to year :p)

I have not seen this list since my freshman year, and I just asked Grace to take a photo of her list so I can see what the heck was on it - I was quite surprised actually, considering that I never went out of my way to do anything and most of the list happened :)

Some commentary -

THINGS I DID DO (yellow)

1. Pull an all-nighter (for fun!) - for fun, or not for fun, I think I had a bit too many of them in college >____< one of my friends that I respect tremendously at MIT kept a regular 10 PM to 7 AM sleeping schedule all four years, and I'm extremely envious of the level of her self-discipline. As for my own sleeping schedule....let's just leave it at that :)

I never did drink coffee though - CAFFEINE IS BAD GUYS. QUIT WHILE YOU CAN. <-- this at least I am proud of.

2. Eat N2 ice cream - you are not allowed to graduate from MIT if you never had liquid nitrogen ice cream. I'm serious.

10. Take a weekend trip to NYC - Chinatown bus. $15. Gets you there in 4 hours. There's no excuse. I made so many of these trips these last four years <333

11. Take a class during IAP - yup, in Spain too! (this one fulfills #68 as well =p).

15. Drink bubble tea - the week before I left the US, I LEARNED how to make bubble tea, out of frustration of the $3.50 cups in Boston that don't even taste that good (I never lost my high Taiwanese standards for bubble tea =p) I hope to be making lots more in the future! :)

18. Visit four other Boston-area colleges - yup, easily! BU, BC, Tufts, Harvard!

23. Visit Cape Cod - we did this last year after finals.

30. Visit the MFA - MIT STUDENTS HAVE FREE ENTRY!!! this is one of the most awesome perks about our student ID - I've been there too many times to count :) I even did research there! =p

31. Take a nap in Killian - it's amazing there when the weather starts turning reallyyyyy nice around late April-early May. hehe.

33. Eat at Border Cafe in Harvard Square - their (endless) chips and salsa are amazing. I don't care for most of their other dishes though...very meh.

34. Check out the New England Aquarium - being a lover of aquariums and having been to half a dozen of them around the world, the New England Aquarium is actually really decent - spend some time there before you graduate! Sadly, your MIT ID does not give free entry. However, MITAC gives discounts!

35. and 36. Go to a Boston Pops concert and see Fourth of July fireworks - Boston Pops performs live at the Hatch Shell in Boston on July 4th each year, and then there's fireworks immediately following on the river - did both of these freshman summer when I spent about five weeks in Boston. :)

38. Participate in a UROP - did you know something like 80%+ of students here do a UROP? I worked with C. elegans all four years here, beginning from freshman spring. Although doing UROPs are fun and a nice way to earn credit/money here, I decided that it's not something that I'd do for a living. The undergrad research opportunities here are AMAZING though, and you're missing out on a key part of the MIT experience if you never did a UROP.

42. Register to vote before the 2008 Presidential Election - been there, done that. Voted for Obama and Kerry for MA senator.

43. Try Dim Sum in Chinatown - YES. dude, I'm Asian! Advice: skip the overrated China Pearl - go to Hei La Moon instead.

44. Introduce yourself to President Hockfield - as a matter of fact, I did this my very first week at MIT. President Hockfield visited my dorm and I got to talk with her at length :) A few months later, we invited her to a dinner at our fraternity too!

45. Eat at Mike's Pastries - I don't know how many times I've bought my Boston-touring friends to Mike's, even though I have not tasted their cannolis for two years. I don't really like dessert, much less cannolis, haha =p

51. Go to Ring Premiere - read about ours!. Back in our day, blogging about Ring Premiere used to be a BIG DEAL - hey new bloggers, what happened?!

53. Go to a career fair - yeah, but not since my freshman year - check out all the free swag that HaoQi '11 collected. I guess one of the good things about going to med school is that we don't have to worry about a "career" for another, oh, 4-6 years, haha.

57. See a LSC movie screening - again, one of those things that you do over and over again at MIT that I've kind of lost track of how many movies I've seen at LSC - so many good memories and at $4 a movie (mostly new releases too), it's a sweet deal!

60. Have a meal from a food truck - food trucks basically fed me for all of my freshman and most of my sophomore lunches...then I took a long hiatus from them till late senior year, when I started tasting them again and realizing that they're still pretty good :) then also sometime in the middle, clover came along, and their rosemary fries changed a lot of things :)

61. Go to the Spring Weekend Concert - yup, I've been to one and volunteered at one (when Sara Bareilles came my junior year). I was pretty sad that I missed Jason Derulo this year because I was at Brown, though. :(

62. Get your name and/or picture in the Tech - I wrote an opinion piece for them! :)

73. Learn the true meaning of IHTFP - It's Hard To Fondle Penguins. XD

74. Walk across the Harvard Bridge in the middle of winter - you'll freeze your ears off. do at your own risk.

75. Take on a student leadership position - dictator President of MIT MUN for two years, heck yeah!

79. Take advantage of pass/no record - I don't think I've crammed for any class at MIT as hard as I did for 7.012 =p I might have had a bit too much fun while trying to pass that class...

80. Check out a library book - are you kidding me?!?! A library book? dude, I think I've checked out >150. =p (so frequently for my history papers that I actually asked the librarian once whether there was a cap on the limit of books you can have - he answered, uhh...well, we never had a problem with someone having too many books before, so i guess there isn't a limit? haha)

81. Take the silver line to the airport - how else do you get to the airport? lol. I'm too poor to take a taxi, and blue line isn't any faster.

82. Visit all of the dorms - I actually did this during my first week on campus, at REX my freshman year :)

90. Take a class in at least 10 different departments - 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 20, 21L, 21H, 21W, 21F! (want to know what all the numbers mean?). piece of cake! hahaha - i see your 10 and raise it by 6! :D

94. Take free sailing lessons at the Sailing Pavilion - Sailing PE counts, right? take it! it was so fun (that and pistol :P)

95. Pretend to be a prefrosh during CPW and get free stuff - FACT: I have been mistaken as a prefrosh all four CPWs - yes, even this last year fraternities tried to rush me and I was like errrr WTF I'm a senior!

97. Go to a midnight movie release sponsored by the Class of 2011 - The Golden Compass!

99. Help reduce MIT's carbon footprint - I ALWAYS print double-sided at school. learn the lpr -PRINTERNAME2 command, guys!

THINGS I KINDA DID (green)

41. Eat nothing but free food for a week - I've eaten A LOT of free food on campus, but for a whole week is actually kind of hard to do. I think I've gone about 3-4 days, before getting really sick of pizza. Apparently there is an email list that you can sign up that tells you where the free food is on campus so you get some variety and don't have to keep eating pizza =p To date, I've known only one person who had successfully done this (she did it for almost a month, though, which is really impressive)

58. Take a picture with Tim the Beaver - I've actually never done this, but I've BEEN Tim so many times! (including at the CPW Closing Festival last year if you were there ;) hehe) Does that count?

65. Spend a summer in Boston - I never spent a whole summer, but 5 weeks during my freshman summer? Does that count? :)

69. Get taken out to Legal Sea Foods - as a guy, we don't really get "taken out" - but I've been "taken out" there by my parents, which I'm not sure counts or not, haha. I suppose I could have had a professor-student dinner there (where the Undergraduate Association subsidizes a dinner for a group of us students to take a professor out to dinner) and have that count, but I never had one at Legal's. It's a tourist place anyway. =p

77. Work out at the Z-Center - I only swim there...I've never been to the weight room upstairs?

83. Get the MIT Student Discount on BOSE Products - I'm about to do this...hope they still let me do it! I forgot to do this before I graduated :( haha. For those that don't know, BOSE offers discounts on all their products to current MIT students because Bose the founder was a professor at MIT :)

84. Pull an all-nighter in the Reading Room - I've came close, but not quite. Passed out at 4 AM =p

96. Earn your Pirate's License - at MIT, a "Pirate's License" means taking 1) Sailing, 2) Pistol, 3) Fencing, and 4) Archery for your PE classes (conveniently, four are required to graduate). I have half a license, having taken sailing and pistol. I took Salsa and Ballroom Dancing for the last two PEs - can I be a dancing pirate? =p

THINGS I DIDN'T DO (white)

9. Learn a programming language on your own - mm, I'm not going to count MATLAB, which I truly learned on my own. I had too many bad experiences with Python in high school, so I ran as far away from programming as possible at MIT. I didn't mind and it didn't ultimately matter :)

13. Watch a varsity game - sadly, most MIT students don't really support their sport teams by watching the home games, even though we have so many athletes among us. unfortunately, I am one of them. I've caught bits and pieces of games through my four years here but never managed to stay for a full game. :(

20. Go clubbing on Lansdowne St. - I didn't know what Lansdowne St. was until right before graduation, hahahahaha. Guess someone really likes to party! =p

27. Take a Duck or Trolley Tour - I actually have never done this.

28. Go to an event at the TD Bank North Garden - we've been meaning to watch a Celtics game for ages but it never happened (same as a Red Sox game at Fenway, actually - #56)

29. Attend Charm School - I actually was in town this year for Charm School (first ever opportunity since I spent the first three IAPs abroad), but was too tired to go to any of it =p

47. Ice Skate on Frog Pond - Again, one of those things that I meant to do but never did :(

70. Volunteer at a blood drive or donate blood - I'm scared of needles! >_____<

72. Host a prefrosh - my sophomore year I signed up but whoever was assigning prefroshes ignored me :( I was too busy to host for the other years =/ (also, my room is really cramped, haha)

93. Name your own Athena box - what is an Athena box? lolol.

98. Try out for the MIT Blackjack Team - THEY STILL EXIST?! O____O

100. Introduce yourself to the Orientation leaders - yeah, nice try, guys.

MIT "SCORE!"

yellow = +1 point, green = +0.5 point, white = 0 point

white = 23 x 0 = 0
green = 8 x 0.5 = 4
yellow = 69 x 1 = 69

69+4 = 73 :D yayyy not bad actually =p

LAST BUT NOT LEAST!

101. EARN YOUR MIT DEGREE(S)!

Biology AND History! :D

Been there, done that. BOOYAH. +100 points :D

-----

(2) I'll let Shaq speak for himself:

"You wanna go to Harvard? I wanna go to MIT. You wanna study chemistry? I wanna study biology." So yeah, basically Shaq is jealous of my life.

-----

(3) Recently, there was a College Confidential post that suggests that MIT is overrun by "socially awkward math geeks." Just watch the video - it speaks for itself.

A big thank you to all the coordinators for the work you put into organizing this!!

(by the way, today was MIT 150 Open House, where a bunch of departments and student groups put on a big show to the surrounding community, MIT alumni, and just anyone who happens to drop by! Think of it as a CPW for adults =p - check out the festivities online!)

:D

I love blogging. I applied to be a blogger on whim almost four years ago, and interestingly enough, I am the last guy that still seems to be around from the batch that got selected with me on that fateful day in September, so long ago. So, no, I have not forgotten about my duties. It's just every time I try writing something, I feel like I should be working on my thesis instead, so I stop blogging and revert to thesis mode. Now I have 60+ pages of it finished, and trying to get words out of me is starting to feel like making myself vomit when there's nothing else to throw up, so maybe I should take a mini-break?

All the blogs I promised in here will still get written, but I need to finish my thesis first ;) so I'll just provide a brief update of what I've been up to this semester -

This semester, I am taking three and three-quarters classes (45 credits), which is the smallest number of credits that I have ever taken at MIT (the second lowest comes in at 54, which is four and a half - I have never taken just four classes in one semester at MIT. I did originally sign up for four and three-quarters, putting the last class on junior/senior PDF (you can designate two classes during your junior and senior years, outside of your major and minor, as pass/D/F), but ended up dropping that class too because of senioritis. SENIORITIS IS REAL GUYS. IT HAPPENS AGAIN IN COLLEGE. BEWARE.)

Four years ago this time, I was sitting blissfully by our high school pool, basking in the afternoon sunlight, fantasizing about a place far away known as MIT, and the kind of things that I would encounter there. High school was amazing and all, but I was ready to leave - I was ready to fly far away from Asia and be part of a new great adventure.

Now, I am sitting in front of the wooden desk in the room that I have lived in for the last three years, shutting the window because Boston nights still gets quite cold, even in late April. I do not yet know where I will ultimately end up for med school (that comes in a few weeks), but I am excited about the prospects. I am ready to leave, but not so much because I have seen everything there is to MIT (by far impossible - I've seen like less than 20%), but it's because I am getting old and there are so many of you young 'uns coming in. This place is a magical place, and in the four years here, I still do not feel the energy level ever diminishing - not even one bit. This place is still just like the school that I set foot on three Augusts ago, and in many ways, even better and more improved.

Looking back, I've completed the requirements for two majors, along with a slew of classes in between that I took for fun. I have written countless essays, completed numerous psets, and taken many, many exams. Just this last Thursday, I took my last regular examination at MIT, and I didn't feel a sense of relief. Just moments after the exam, I was already anxiously discussing my answers with fellow classmates, exhaling in relief when our answers matched, and feeling my heart skip a beat when we had widely differing solutions. Perhaps that part of me would never change.

It is impossible to write a blog detailing why you should come to MIT, why you should pick this school over Stanford or Harvard, or why you should not go to Caltech. The simple answer is just that it's really different for every person, and there is truly no one-size-fits-all answer. There are a few overarching principles that I believe hold true across the board, however, that I realized from my four years of being here:

Firstly, MIT will train you how to think. The Latin motto of this school is mens et manus, which is simply mind and hand. Beginning from the selection process and extended across all the courses that you will encounter here, MIT places a heavy premium on being able to create - being able to innovate. It is not sufficient to just have book knowledge; MIT wants you to be able to do something with that knowledge, to create something, to blow something up - to apply it somehow, in one way or another. I am not even an engineering major here and I've already learned so much. Like I said in a few entries ago, I went from a confused freshman pipetting water from one beaker to another to running simultaneous experiments side by side, sketching out future experiments in my lab notebook, and discussing my research with postdocs and grad students in my lab. My history thesis took me on research trips to Washington DC (at the National Archives) and Manzanar, CA (four hours outside of Los Angeles). With the very rare exception of one course, I have never taken a single multiple choice exam here. The exams here ask students to design experiments, to explain phenomenons, to defend their rationale and explanations. You will not be asked to regurgitate anything that you crammed for the test the night before. Instead, you are asked to apply that knowledge to new situations on the exam - to take it to the next step. Remember those "Critical Thinking" questions that used to be at the end of your math textbook in every section that comes after all the basic drills? MIT exams are that, times 10. Regardless of what major you are here, you will not leave this place without being a better analytical and critical thinker. You might not be able to impress your guests at cocktail parties with the precise names of all the blood-clotting factors, but you will able to take them through a 10-minute impromptu lecture on the brilliance of the biochemistry of the human blood-clotting cascade.

Secondly, MIT is hard. It is harder than anything that you have ever seen. There is no getting around it, and you might as well be prepared to hear it now, because it is not going to change. During your freshman year, some of you guys might come in better prepared than others (some General Institute Requirement classes may seem rather easy if you come from a very competitive schooling system), but the playing ground will even out by the time you enter your major - I promise you. For those lagging behind, you will quickly learn how to swim (don't worry, you just will). I am not going to pretend that there are not going to be those who drown, but there is help here, and you won't be left behind with the right blend of support, resolve, and introspection. I've heard freshman year often being compared to a boot camp, where everyone is put through the same classes with the same safety net (pass/no record) for incoming frosh to get used to MIT-level rigor before branching out into their respective majors. It is very much true, although the difficulty and pain does not end after the GIRs are finished. Depending on your major, you will be put through another grind with the more difficult advanced-level subjects in your major and the laboratory classes, but you should be already doing something that you like, so this may not be as bad as the GIRs. Just like any other boot camp in real life, some of you will come in more fit, in better condition, and better trained to take on the challenges, and I might argue that some of you will sail through MIT - and that's great, more power to you, but I still believe that you are in the minority, and most people here still tackle MIT bit by bit, one day at a time. There will be nights when you will be up till daybreak, watching the sun rise over the Charles - there will be days when you stumble through your day, exhausted and groggy from the amount of psets, exams, meetings, and events. But you will emerge from the other side - that's what long weekends, IAP, and the summers are for. It's just like recovery after working out or running a 5K. You feel like crap when you're in the midst of it, and you feel worse with each step that gets you closer to the finish line, but collapsing on the grass after the event feels like heaven - the celebratory ice cream at night even better.

Lastly, and most importantly, MIT has developed for itself a spirit and a culture that no university can emulate. This is perhaps one of the most amazing things about this Institution - MIT is so rife with culture and inside references that only alumni know and carry on with them.

You will not encounter any alum that do not know what Lobby 7 or what the brass rat is, and older alums will even regale you with tales about how 8.01 was "a lot more hardcore, back in the day." Each one of our dozen-plus dorms and living communities has an unique personality that cannot be found anywhere on campus, and you do not just live in the buildings themselves - you become part of that culture the longer you live in and contribute to the dorm. Go on a citrusy expedition during your Freshman Orientation; lead the said trip as a junior or a senior. Learn the extensive collection of MIT lingo/slang; discover your own meaning of IHTFP. Learn the esoteric Athena command codes; fail to remember the Athena cluster combinations. Find your own best view of the Boston skyline; figure out the best way to get to your dorm to Kendall during a blizzard. Go on a fraternity or a sorority formal; ask someone out to one of them. Party with Boston-area college students, get to know them, and take a break from MIT students complaining about psets all the time. Study at the Reading Room and know why that room made CNN headlines; stand in the Stata Center during a rainy day and know why Frank Gehry got sued for that building. Have snowball fights in Killian Court; build an igloo on Briggs Field. Take pictures of the Dome; take lots of them during your time here. Learn how to work Stellar; have a heart attack when you check exam grades on Stellar. Set up your laptop to print to any Athena printer; pick up your homework that you've sent ahead of you at the printer right next to your class. Find creative ways to recycle your Athena header sheets; fold them into paper lotuses. Do the Mystery Hunt during IAP; attend the Integration Bee and the Ig Nobel Prize ceremonies. Take a picture with President Susan Hockfield; eat lunch with a Nobel laureate. Find a UROP - keep that UROP - quit that UROP - find another one, or two, or three; stay in the lab past 3 AM; operate a piece of equipment that costs more than $100K. Take a glass-blowing class; take pistol, sailing, fencing, archery, and earn your Pirate's License. Apply for a grant and travel to Europe (or do the Cambridge-MIT Exchange); have a romantic rendezvous while you're there. Enter a competition and win money to change the world in Africa or India; see your wildest imaginations blossom into practical solutions to urgent problems. Take a graduate level class; figure out why the grad students think we're smarter than they are ;). Eat LN2 ice cream; steal dry ice from your lab. Pull an all-nighter to finish your lab report; then pull another one after that, just for fun. Learn a new programming language; take introductory economics (14.01 and 14.02). Register for eight classes; drop half of them three weeks before the final. Don't get addicted to coffee; don't drink Monsters. Apply for a College Card and head on over to Symphony Hall for free BSO concerts; find the hidden temple inside the Museum of Fine Arts. Ride an entire Saferide loop for fun; memorize the Saferide schedule. Get to know Tosci's; decide whether you like JP Licks or Berryline better. Shop at LaVerde's; grumble at how expensive it is, and buy that juice you're holding anyways. Get a super steak burrito at Anna's; ask for the tomato salad instead of the lettuce at Sepal's upstairs. Take a picture with Tim the Beaver; BE Tim the Beaver. Memorize the course numbers; guide confused tourists through MIT's building numbers. Take a picture for the Korean tourists; be PART OF A PICTURE with them. Sign up for the List Art Gallery's artwork lottery; attend concerts and recitals on campus. Collect free T-shirts from student groups; eat nothing but free food for a week and attend cool lectures while you're at it....

Want more? I'm just getting started :D

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Stay tuned for Tim the Beaver's adventures in Oxford, England! :)

From a bottle of Honest Tea, purchased from MIT's Student Center

It's been awhile.

As I write this, I'm in San Francisco (hiding from the bitter Boston cold...hehe), after a long semester spent Western Blotting at midnight*, sleeping till noon, and hauling my garment bag around to medical school interviews. (I actually got that bag on mega-sale, so it cost like $15 =p...by the way I'm such good friends with that bag now, having carried it with me to so many places this past semester - and also, I've mastered the art of changing out of a suit in a toilet cubicle without letting anything touch the floor ;) )

* This video is TOTALLY NOT an exaggeration after your Western Blot has already failed for 21 times (...I succeeded on the 22nd try)

I guess I don't have much to say in this entry other than to give a brief update of how my life has been...so don't expect too many MIT-related things in here. =p

This coming semester will be my FINAL semester at MIT. FINAL FINAL FINAL. LA FIN. EL FIN. THE END.

MIT seemed like a dream. It seemed like yesterday when I was still sitting in 8.01, worrying about understanding how gyroscopes work (which I still don't - actually, but shhh, no one says you can't graduate if you don't know how they work ;) ) - and now I'm sitting here, with medical school acceptances in hand, ready to begin the next chapter of my life.

It has been a time of epic failures - but also epic successes. Just last semester, I got my first ever A+ in MIT - A PLUS!!! Obviously, I was exhilarated when I discovered the grade on my webSIS (online grade system), but it was also a potent reminder of all the 2 AM nights in lab this past semester (and having to walk back to the dorm in the freezing cold) - and how scared I was at beginning this class for the last year or so (I got the A+ in 7.18 - also known as Project Lab at MIT - where bio majors do a research project for the semester right before graduation...the class is weighted at 30 credit units (a standard class is 12 units), so what grade you get in the class also makes a huge difference in your GPA).

There it is, 300 hours of hard work in the lab during the semester, converted into two simple characters in a webpage online. Funny how sometimes the things that you are most scared of turn out to be your biggest accomplishments.

In San Francisco, I've been hanging out with a bunch of MIT '10s, seeing how life for them is one year out of the Institvte. Some are in grad school, others are working in industry - but the common thread is that everyone still fondly remembers MIT and are proud of the fact that they survived the grind and got their share of the "MIT experience."

Here, I'm sitting on the cusp of graduating, with friends around me left and right applying for jobs - applying for graduate school - attending interviews - getting ready for life after MIT.

When we were freshman or sophomores, it seems like our time at MIT would never quite ever end. After all, there were just too many course to take, so many new things to try, so many new friends to make. MIT is like a giant summer camp, filled with teenagers amped on Monsters and Red Bulls (literally true), burning up their energy and their youth for the things they were passionate about.

Now, as a senior, it seems that this party is finally winding down. Not for the ones that just joined it, but for us on our way out.

Here, you'll see the acronym IHTFP thrown around a lot - depending on how many nights one hasn't slept, it can either stand for I Hate The Friggin Place, or I Have Truly Found Paradise. It's this kind of ambivalence that has always characterized our relationship with the Institvte, but is only coming into sharp focus now, when we are so close to graduating.

I can't count how many nights I've trudged back to New House in the wee hours of the morning, exiting a self-imposed exile away from my dorm room so I can properly study for a final exam - how many nights I've wolfed down free platters of food and cold pizza that I found in the Student Center, having gone to too many back-to-back student group meetings to grab a proper dinner. And I know so many people share the same story - what makes MIT so awesome is the energy and the excitement that is always buzzing around the campus - in the classrooms, in the laboratories, even in the dormitories.

In a recent medical school interview that I attended, my interviewer glanced through my file, and then remarked - "oh, so you're a student at MIT."

"Yes," I responded.

"So tell me, how is it?"

The first word that slipped out of my mouth, without even thinking about it, was "intense."

But it's so much more than the intensity here - if you're accepted, you're in for the rollercoaster ride of your life - but it's also about the people you meet along the way, the faculty that you'll have the honor of sharing coffee hour with, and the opportunities that you'll stumble into here. Just three summers ago, I stood stupidly in front of a lab bench, pipetting water from one beaker into another, learning the basics (and you really can't get more basic than this) of molecular research. Now, I'm drafting up research plans, running simultaneous trials and experiments side by side, and coming in and out of the laboratory at all hours of the day and night (my postdoc jokingly remarked that I work harder than the grad students =p)

I've quoted this quote earlier in one of my blog entries - I love the quote, because now I truly understand it.

"MIT is a very good place; I'm not trying to put it down. I was just in love with it. It has developed for itself a spirit, so that every member of the whole place thinks that it's the most wonderful place in the world--it's the center, somehow, of scientific and technological development in the United States, if not the world. It's like a New Yorker's view of New York: they forget the rest of the country. And while you don't get a good sense of proportion there, you do get an excellent sense of being with it and in it, and having motivation and desire to keep on--that you're specially chosen, and lucky to be there.

-Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Laureate in Physics, 1965.

My acceptance letter to MIT did not arrive by owl post, but little did I know (in fact, I had NO IDEA - haha so naive back then) when I put that black checkmark there, what I will be signing myself away to for the next four years.

It feels slightly surreal that sometime between May 1 and May 15 I will be doing the same again (albeit no longer by hard-copy mail, since it appears that no one does that anymore) for the next 4 years of my life.

Thanks MIT for all the memories - both the good and the bad* - let's make this final semester awesome.

* I will never ever forget the humiliation you gave me on 7.06 Exam 2, when several students walked out early with several pages of the test completely blank because it. was. that. hard. (the average was 37/100, I got a score in the teens - yes, out of 100)

I won't really forgive you for the ton of B+'s (which are counted the same as B's and B-'s, since we don't have +'s and -'s in the external transcript) on my internal transcript either ;)

(I am currently trying to study for it but it's not working very well >____< But it's ok. Judging by the amount of spam and youtube videos that are coming into my inbox, I think I'm in plenty good company :P)

Anyways, one of my favorite youtube comedians is GloZell, who honestly deserves her own talk show:

Watch her discuss MIT at Fire and Ice! haha

"You can become anything you want to be...we talking a bus driver, a secretary, two kids in MIT...can't beat that...that's the American Dream!" :)

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ps. I am going to be a doctor! yayyyy :D

MIT History Professor Pauline Maier makes the MIT homepage today with her treatise on the formation of the Constitution of United States.

Follow the story here! http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/constitution-1203.html

Professor Maier taught me The American Revolution last semester, and she is an absolutely fascinating speaker. She has done decades of research on colonial United States up to the Declaration of Independence and the formation of the Constitution, and yet she was willing to sit down with the six of us - relative novices in matters relating to the formation of the United States - for three hours every week and pore through primary documents with us and patiently explain to us various intricacies (after having let us have a crack at it first) of the same documents that she had probably read and re-read easily over several dozen times.

To Professor Maier, teaching is not a one-way street. I believe she thinks that she would have failed as an instructor if we are not able to contribute our opinions and tell her what the documents meant for ourselves, even if she gave the most eloquent and expressive lecture. We, being MIT undergrads, are often so swamped with work from our technical classes that - I will candidly admit - we may not be the most well-prepared when it comes to class discussions on the documents and pamphlets that we ought to have read the previous night. This easily causes the utterance of a multitude of platitudes when Professor Maier calls on us to explain the significance of certain passages, but she is never impatient with us - in fact, she simply probes deeper in her questions and gets us to think like a historian should, even on-the-spot if necessary.

Professor Maier is a master historian, but she is not jealous of her art. In fact, she seeks to instill in her students an appreciation of history and a deeper understanding of the echoes and repercussions of these events that happened over two centuries ago. Professor Maier teaches history in the same manner that my grandmother tells me stories of how she evacuated from China with my grandfather sixty years ago in the wake of the Chinese Civil War - Professor Maier is a storyteller, and although she is often fond of stating how she enjoys teaching MIT undergrads because we are so astute and sharp in our logical and reasoning skills, she also deserves half the credit because she allows us to see history as it happened, as if she was the proverbial fly on the wall at Independence Hall.

I find it amazing that American Revolution class is attended by a mere six undergraduate students, but I guess all the power to us, because we get Professor Maier's undivided attention for so long? ;)

I wish to offer my congratulations to Professor Maier for her work, and MIT HISTORY IS AWESOME! :D

Further Links

Amazon Page
Compilation of Critical Reviews for Professor Maier's Work
Professor Maier's Biography
MIT History!

This guy tried to guilt-trip me into writing a blog, but yeah, I haven't written a blog in too long anyways, so I owe all of you one. :p

Truth is, I have not been doing much this semester other than being in lab. You see, I am taking Project Lab, this 30-unit class (normal classes are 12 units at MIT), and I have been spending well over 30 hours every week in my lab, looking at worms, running gels and blots, and checking out the most beautiful girl in the lab (see below).

....just kidding.

My research deals with the characterization of a novel gene in the aging pathway of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans (a roundworm that is only 1 mm in length as an adult - so NO, these are not earthworms! i can no longer count how many people have asked me that). C. elegans is known as a model organism, because since its characterization by Brenner in the 70s, we have come to understand much of its genetics well and see how it applies cross-species to higher order organisms. You might not know this (kudos to you if you know what this is as a high schooler!), but RNAi, for example, was first fully characterized in C. elegans, and resulted in the 2006 Nobel Prize in Medicine. This is more commonly known - but apoptosis was also one of the biggest discoveries made using C. elegans, and Professor Horvitz of MIT won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Medicine for that discovery (every once in awhile I will see Professor Horvitz at joint lab meetings!). Two Nobel Prizes in five years for a microscopic worm - not bad eh?

Not to get into the science too much here, but the basic idea of worm research is because we know that there are so many different genes conserved between mammals and C. elegans, we can use the worm as a model to see what these genes actually do by knocking them out in the worm and observing the resulting phenotype. In very broad terms, this means qualitatively assessing for traits, but also using molecular biology methods to look at resulting protein expression, gene levels, and molecular interactions caused by eliminating the gene.

As Project Lab expects a long "research paper" at the end of the semester, I have been in lab consistently over 30 hours per week running assays and getting results. I used to dislike research because I didn't like how all the trials take so long and they keep on failing, but the biggest lesson that I learned this semester is that once you really come to understand your project, like really understand the work that you do, then most of the research doesn't seem like a chore and you actually start becoming excited about designing new assays and keep pushing towards demonstrating/disproving your research hypothesis. In a sense, I guess I can say that I truly felt like a real scientist this semester, and the fruits of my labor have more than justified all the time that I have been spending in lab (I started keeping a blanket in the cabinet near my desk because I nap on the lab couch so much while waiting for gels to run or blots to transfer :P)

But yeah. I want to show you my bench! (I finally upgraded to a full bench this year - which I'm really happy about :P)

The worms live on petri-dishes and feed off E. coli - one special thing about C. elegans is that they are so easily to maintain. You basically just need to give them food, keep them at a reasonable temperature, and they feed happily off the bacteria and reproduce like mad (most of the time essentially making copies of themselves). This also enables us to run trials with thousands of worms at a time, which is something that is not possible with mice (can you imagine 1000 mice running amok? I think even the Pied Piper will have a tough time with that). Prospective bio majors - you will soon come to know the magic that is Qiagen kits, and Parafilm is honestly up there in my list of "Most Amazing Inventions" - alongside plastic soap boxes for traveling and French fries vending machines. I'm seriously considering asking the lab whether I can keep a box of Parafilm with me when I graduate because there are so many amazing uses for it, haha. I really don't understand why they aren't selling Parafilm in stationary stores alongside packing tape - it's seriously just as useful, IF NOT MORE THAN regular packing tape! :P OK, that's enough about Parafilm. (disclaimer: I am not employed by the Pechiney Plastic Packaging Company :p)

A - Microcentrifuge. Make sure you keep the lid on to reduce to the noise when you spin samples.
B - Hot plate. This thing is amazing - it goes from like 25 C to 200 C in a matter of minutes. I seriously wish I had one in my dorm to cook noodles with :P (ok MIT Facilities - I'm just kidding!)
C - Gloves. I wear them, but I quickly notice that none of the postdocs in the lab really ever wear gloves unless working with seriously, seriously toxic compounds. Do your years in the lab make you immune to normal chemicals...? o_____o haha
D - Really awesome microscope that I use to do worm work. Seriously, this microscope is like the Lamborghini of microscopes...whereas the one I used in AP Biology was probably equivalent to a Ford Model T - with the wheels falling off, at that.
E - Vortexer. Gives an adequate lower arm massage when protocol calls for vigorous vortexing.
F - Pipettes. Every time I think about it I still chuckle - when I was a wee froshie, my first lesson in the lab was learning how to use a pipette, and literally "practiced" by pipeting water from a beaker to another beaker for a good half hour. Now, I pipet easily hundreds of times every day without even registering it. As a biology researcher, not being good at pipetting is like trying to fight without knowing how to hold the sword properly - hence the pipet is also jokingly known as the biologists' "sword" (you've got to see last year's Biology Halloween party, where a pirate with a sword faced off against a lab nerd wielding a pipette :P it was a formidable match.)
G - Chemicals. Bottles and bottles of chemicals that I seem to be constantly making. Sometimes I really look up and wonder who figured out that you need to add MgCl2 when you make worm growth media, or that TBST can be used to wash nitrocellulose membranes (where did those membranes come from, anyway?). There's also a bottle of CHOLESTEROL IN SOLUTION on that shelf. Does drinking from the bottle directly give one an immediate heart attack? ;)
H - My desk!!! Yayy after so many semesters of working in lab I finally feel legit to have my own "space" now in a corner of MIT's campus. You can see Fuzzy, my laptop, which had always been faithfully with me through the trials and adversities of MIT. She's getting pretty old though, and the internal keyboard and trackpad no longer work - hence the new peripheral parts, sadly. Even computers get worn out by the labors of MIT :)
I - Eppendorf tube and conical holders. We joke that they're always brightly colored (check out the neon red, neon orange, and neon green holders on my bench) to make labwork a bit less depressing when it's 2 in the morning, and you still have more than 100 PCR reactions to run. :P

My results for the lab class are due November 9 (less than two weeks from now!) so I've been putting in a ton of extra work into lab to start wrapping up loose ends. A few days ago, I was counting worms under the microscope for an assay that I was doing, and after 3 hours I had counted the equivalent of almost three thousand worms manually by physically removing them from the plate (not estimation!)

Yup - that's my last six weeks in a nutshell. :)

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ps. All jokes aside, working in a lab is awesome at MIT. There are very few institutions that will give undergraduates such full access to wet lab work, and what I am doing is conceptually on the same footing as any work done by the graduate students and postdocs in my lab. Yes, I may run less trials and progress at a slower speed because I'm still a student and I have to go to lecture, do my problem sets, and take exams, but at the end of the day, my results are still taken seriously by the other members of my lab, and I'm not just a random "clueless undergrad" who is simply in charge of washing beakers and pouring plates. I really appreciate how MIT professors and researchers view undergraduates as an integral part of the research team, even though we are decades younger than they are in most circumstances. I have always thought that pure molecular research is not necessarily the right future career path for me, but I can't help falling in love with the excitement of obtaining a critical result at midnight after several days of running experiments. It gives me an adrenaline rush like no other. :P

(even if you don't take a lab class, most MIT students work in the lab through the UROP Program, which pays students to work in MIT laboratories (at least at the base rate of $9.25 per hour) - it's a win-win situation: laboratory work teaches students many vital skills not covered in normal biology lab class (I didn't know how to use a flourimeter or how to cultivate large populations of worms and perform assays until I joined a research lab), the labs get extra manpower, and the students get fed very comfortably through the pay (several of my friends make upwards of thousands of dollars per semester just by working in lab). I have yet to see a university that is so supportive of undergraduate research as MIT - honestly, MIT realized long ago that instead of telling you and belaboring the peculiarities of Western Blotting to you in somnolent lecture halls, you should just go and run a Western for yourself, and you will fill in the gaps along the way. It always comes down to our motto - Mens and Manus - and I can't agree with this aspect more :P)

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pps. Since I look at thousands of worms every day, the first thing I thought of for Halloween was C. elegans -______-" (I'm very nerdy, I know) - but I quickly dismissed that thought because how does one dress up as a featureless, semi-transparent, microscopic worm? :( haha. Why didn't I work with Drosophila?! HAHA - that would be a sweet costume ;)

Like I assured you in the last entry, I am still alive. Exhausted (like always), but still hanging in there. It's good to see all of you :)

So what's up. It's senior year. This is actually a pretty traumatizing experience. A few weeks ago, I realized at Activities Midway -

(by the way, check out Dancetroupe's performance at the Midway this year - MIT students can dance too!)

- that this is going to be my LAST Orientation Activities Midway (I had manned the Model UN booth for the last three years running >____>). And this feeling has been emerging a lot - this is my LAST fall first day of classes - this is my LAST fall first day of lecture - this is my LAST time pretending to be a froshie and going to REX events (you have no idea how easily this works for me - I successfully merged into a band of '14s at a party and remained undetected for the whole time, much to my amusement (yay for looking young? haha - tangent: i still get id'ed every time when i buy tylenol at cvs. you have to be 18 to do so. guess how young i look then =_____=))

But anywhoo, back to the actual subject.

In many ways, I still have a hard time rationalizing that I am a senior. After this semester, I will be one class away from my BS in Biology, and two classes away from my BS in History. In other words, three classes removed from being out of this place! AHHHHH what has happened to me?! lol 8.01 is still hard for me! (true story, as I try to help froshies with their psets) i don't think i'm done with mit yet! >_____<

Anyways, this is my class schedule this semester, in case you are curious:

5.60 - Thermodynamics and Kinetics - 12 units

One of my last remaining biology requirements. The only thing I have to say about thermo is that you don't understand it, or you.....don't understand it. :) I mean, I don't think I'm bad at it but I am still having problems attempting to visualize things like U, q, w, H, and S. Meh, I get by. Let's see what I think about the Carnot Cycle rears its ugly head (that was one topic in one of my MCAT prep books that I never understood fully).

7.18 - Topics in Experimental Biology - 30 units

Also known as Project Lab, this is the Biology Major's rite of passage at MIT. It is unofficially and colloquially known as the class at MIT with the most number of units, but it's the way it is because when you sign up for Project Lab, you are basically signing your life this semester away to the Gods of Experimental Failure, the Gods of Insomnia and Frustration, and the Gods of Controls That Don't Work The Way They Are Supposed To. (a often circulated joke in the biology labs is that the reason it takes an extra 1-2 years to get a bio phd compared to chemistry and physics phds is that you have to allow that extra time for unexplained experimental screwups, trial and error, and time for your experimental animals to grow)

I'm starting to get a taste of it, as I spent over 30 hours in lab my very first week after starting Project Lab. I'm characterizing this completely novel gene in C. elegans (which I have been doing since last year, on-and-off, actually), and this semester I'm trying to make a coordinated effort to finish off the project. If all goes well, I'll do a mini-"poster presentation" here with you guys! :)

21H.007 - EMPIRE: Intro to Ancient and Medieval Studies - 12 units

There are two introductory survey classes in the History Department that are very popular with freshmen. One is How to Stage a Revolution, which had been cited in some news articles as an example of innovative teaching at MIT. The other is Empire, which was just started last year by a trio of amazing professors, Profs. Bahr, Broadhead, and Goldberg, all specialists in Ancient or Medieval History (before 1700).

Now, I'm really a more contemporary historian (I have not taken any history class at MIT that goes back later than the American Revolution), so taking this class has been interesting, because one of the things you learn very quickly about Ancient History is the scarcity of first-hand sources, whereas in my thesis research and whatnot I'm accustomed to being inundated with accounts and sources. In fact, I am always asking myself how I can pare down my resources to make my paper more manageable, rather than to extract a 5-page essay out of a single Roman coin, like scholars of Ancient History do.

But at the end of the day though, the professors are awesome. Like I was relating to Dora '11 (the other history major in my class!) earlier, Professor Broadhead simply has to open his mouth, and the next 1.5 hours will disappear before your eyes. :)

Mere words will not suffice to describe how much I love the humanities at MIT. I hope to do a lot more of drawing you into this hidden gem of MIT in this year (and my last year to ramble to you) to come!

21H.ThT - Thesis Pre-Tutorial - 12 units

Yeah, here it is - the crown jewel of any humanities major - THE THESIS. But it's all good! I think I am researching a very interesting topic, and so I am excited to be writing this paper.

During the Second World War, multitudes of Americans with Japanese ancestry on the Pacific coast were hoarded up into cattle trains and forcibly removed to internment camps located in the barren lands of the Pacific West. Their only crime? "Looking Japanese." In the years that these camps were in operation, a unique culture developed and flourished within these camps, as the internees learned to make a living for themselves and make light of the situation that they are in. Many memoirs from this period are solemn and bleak, but tinged with heartwarming stories of perseverance and gaman (roughly translates to 'resilience') in this trying period. My subject of research is to investigate the social order that emerged in these camps, most notably the educational programs and analyzing how these programs were different (or similar) in bringing the camp residents together when compared to other organized activities like sports (primarily baseball) or religion.

The most interesting part of this project is that I am culling my sources from the camp newspapers that were published in this period (and for the most part, almost completely preserved in online archives - yay!). These newspapers were usually announcement bulletins published by the internees, but also served as a dual purpose as entertainment and a source of information as the internment period dragged on. By the end of the internment period in 1945, many of these newspapers were published several times a week, even resembling actual newspapers. It's fascinating to get a glimpse into the past through these yellowed tabloids, and the amount of information they yield about camp life is actually quite amazing (are you curious about what was served at the dining hall every night?). What's more, many of these newspapers contain a "Japanese section," written completely in Japanese for the benefit of the issei (first generation Japanese immigrants), who cannot read English. I am comfortable deciphering Japanese text, so reading through these sections had also proved to valuable in unlocking an additional level of understanding of camp life, previously unstudied by historians yet.

Basically, this is also really novel research into the social order of the internment camps from this period, so yay for new discoveries! I'm actually quite excited about both my biology and history projects this year.

And so finally, the other "class" I'm taking is probably:

PRE.MED - Introduction to the Medical School Interview - Fridays

I applied to medical schools this summer, and now I'm starting to hear back from a bunch. With the exception of just one weekend, I will actually be gone every Friday in October for interviews. Although it is definitely nice to have an excuse to travel the country and hopefully go to many places where I have never been to, it would probably be an exhausting experience as well. (and how the heck am I supposed to find time to work on my bio and history research...>_____>)

At the end of the day, though, I just hope to try my best (I'm actually kind of nervous, for the first one that's coming up in three weeks!), and have fun finding my new home for the next 4 years :)

Anyways, that is a lot of talking from me. Here are some pics from my life circa the last two weeks :)

This is my door this year at MIT! I love postcards, so I put them up when people write me :) A few of you will recognize the card that's boxed in light green, which we sign diligently for you guys every year! :P

iHouse went to Bryant Pond, Maine two weeks ago for our Fall Retreat, and the lake was gorgeous :)

Marisa '13, our master cook, directs the dorm to prepare the lasagna for the dinner the second day of the retreat :P

I took my camera out to the pond for more kayaking - I had to hide the camera underneath my waterproof jacket while rowing so it doesn't get wet :P

And then I got a picture of a few characters on the water ;)

And then the lasagna was ready! yayyy it was delicious :) thanks Marisa!

And OF COURSE there were s'mores at night - but a part of my lingering fobbiness is that I still can't really appreciate gooey marshmallows, so I prefer to roast them for other people than to consume them myself xP

And then we come to iHouse, and these silly people are in love with a game called "Don't Break The Ice"...

They treat this like it's the "Don't Break The Ice" world championships, yo :P

yay MIT! :)

some.plans.for.blogging
1. 10 best nooks and crannies to study on campus
2. why humanities at mit owns. and the new humanities requirement.
3. why i spent 40 hours in lab this week and oddly liked it
4. long overdue blog (since freshman year!) on mit libraries
5. on mit and late nights
6. campus food blog (several entries)
7. how to study at mit (aka. suggestions i give but never follow myself)
8. things i wish i knew in high school about college
9. obligatory senior ramblings...(aka. i want to take advantage of this blog as much as possible before i graduate! :P)

No, I am not dead yet. I had a lot of great food in New York. I went to Europe for a week, where I had more great food. I am now back at MIT. I took a long nap in the library today. I can feel MIT's gaping maw ready to swallow me whole again.

In other words...

BRING IT ON!!!!!!

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So guys, sorry for the hiatus in posting the photo contest results. I received over twenty entries, so thanks for your enthusiasm! :) (although tsk tsk to the person who sent me pictures that were 20 MB EACH. dang son! haha)

Here we gooooo!

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Let's begin with two group pictures and stories of groupwork:

From Louis, '14, New York City

A photo from Peru after 4 days working to clear the yard of bricks, hills, and assorted shrubbery.

The picture is a picture of our group of 12 standing on the brick pile in The Pit after we were finished working in it.

Then the next kind of work is something that's close and dear to my heart (working with Asian communities in Chinatown - which I have been doing all four years of my time at MIT).

From Ting, '13 transfer from Mount Holyoke, China

I took this picture outside Chinese-American Planning Council in Chinatown, Manhattan, New York City. I am the first one on the left in the first row, holding the banner. We are the summer interns and volunteers at the Chinese-American Planning Council for the biennial Walkathon and Family Day Fair.

On Saturday, July 31, 2010, the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC) brought together over 2,000 participants for a fundraising Walkathon and Family Day Fair with the theme "Community Walks Today, for the Youth of Tommorow." All the proceeds will go to CPC's youth programs, which are significantly affected by the city budget cuts. Starting from Columbus Park, participants crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and then returned to the park. As summer interns, we prepared this big event for nine weeks.

Let's turn now to two sets of traveling pictures...(I must say I got a good laugh out of the first one, and I just had to include the picture of CROATIA - Lake Plitvice was a place that I really wanted to visit this summer when we were in Croatia but really could not due to time constraints)

From Ioana, '14, Bucharest, Romania

I traveled during the summer with my family to Turkey and with the Romanian International Physics Olympiad team to Hungary, Belgium and Croatia. I attached some photos:
-Shop in Kusadasi, Turkey
-Ada Land delfinarium near Kusadasi, Turkey
-Plitvice Lakes National Park in Croatia

From Chelsea, '14, Pleasanton, CA

In June, my family went to Kauai, HI for a week. During our vacation, we did two awesome things: (1) helicopter ride, and (2) zip lining. Since we only took videos during zip lining (with lower quality than these pictures), I only attached pictures from the helicopter ride (though zip lining was just as if not more awesome than the helicopter ride). Also: since I couldn't get a picture of me with the scenery of the helicopter ride, there are two pictures.

And in case you were wondering, I'm the one in the white (but not the helicopter driver, though that would be a pretty amazing job).

And I think this qualifies as very "MIT"...

From Sean, '15 prospective, Concord, NH

The Boat_Race pictures were taken during a sailboat race yesterday. The black Jolly Roger sails belong to my boat, which is a 1969 sunfish (yep, it’s 41 years old. Great find on Craig’s list.), and I was so intent on the race, I forgot to take a picture of myself sailing.

P.S. – Pirates Trump Ninjas, Yo Ho!

Finally, in the "Honorable Mentions" category, a special place must go to this guy with Animal Planet pictures...

From Anthony, '15 prospective, Johannesburg, South Africa

Hey Chris,

Little note on the lion cubs, the photo with me in shows the cubs just before breakfast time (porridge) and they paid very minimal attention to my existence. After they were fed photo number two was taken :]. There were two rules when going in with the cubs, no picking them up, and no letting them bite you (bad habit for them to start apparently >_>), which ruined my plan of bragging to my European friends that I was bitten by a lion, even if it was only a month or two old.

THIRD PLACE:

Not entirely unbiased because I am Taiwanese, but I think cheering on foreign athletes in the US is awesome :)

From Eric, '13, Taiwan

This picture is taken at New Hampshire Fisher Cats Baseball Field. Cheer for all the Taiwanese athlete players in the US!

SECOND PLACE:

There's not much to see except a lot of blue, but I must admit that the "cool factor" just dominated this picture. Is this kind of project amazing or what?!?!

From Max, '15 prospective, Western Massachusetts

View from a balloon i launched, about 80000 feet above the ground. It was taken by an automated camera attached to a weather balloon which i launched. Pretty cool right?

ANDDDD the grand finale:

FIRST PLACE:

So I am a big Miyazaki fan, and Studio Ghibli was such a big part of my childhood (and even now!).

I must take my metaphorical hat off to this fantastic culinary creation by Greg, however. One, because it's TOTORO! Totoro, Totoro, Totoro! (he's even in Toy Story 3!) Two, because it looks wonderfully meticulous and I know I would never be able to pull something like this off in the kitchen.

My only suggestion is to add some makkurokurosukes next time on the side. :) Shouldn't be hard if you managed Toroto! :p

From Greg, '15 prospective

I'm going to be an applicant this year, and as such have spent a good deal of my free time trolling around the admission site blogs waiting for the application to be released. I saw your competition and couldn't resist sending in this photo of the birthday cake I made for my brother earlier this summer. He's a big fan of everything Miyazaki, but Totoro is by far his favorite character (he painted the portrait of Totoro in his art class). The cake took me about 18 hours of work, most of which was spent wrestling with the fondant skin (a material I've never worked with before), and was worth every minute. He was so happy, and it tasted magnificent too. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did!

THE PRIZE!

I first came across this game in the game cabinet of a New York cafe, and then very soon I thought the idea was very cool and I thought it was something that I would want on my bookshelf :)

Basically, the premise of this is that you have a tube filled with plastic thingies, and there are about four dozen-ish little things hidden in the tube, and you can find them by turning the tube around. Apparently the hardest thing to find in the tube is the penny that's hidden inside, and I am still unable to find it in this one, haha. :) (ps. once you find the penny, you can go online to the game website and enter the serial number of the tube and the year on the penny to see whether you got it right!)

Have fun! :)

Thanks for all your entries! ^_____^

I'm bumping this to the top of the page (shameless, I know - it's ok, I have no shame :P).

Just letting you know that I have received a lot of entries from y'all (during the time when I visited 7 countries in Europe :p) but I know there might still be awesome pics out there! Don't let go of your chance to fame and glory on the MIT Admissions page! :)

Contest closes this weekend, and the winners will be posted by next weekend! :) Stay tuned.

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best mussels i've ever had! washington dc last weekend. :)

2009 EDITION:

RULES

RESULTS!

Redux from last year, with more excitement, a better prize, and more fame and glory!! ^_______^V

(^ my attempt at building up enthusiasm :P)

What: Send me an exciting picture of what you're doing this summer! You don't have to be in it, although it would definitely be preferred. :) (ie. don't be like me and send a food picture)

Please include:

where you took the picture. (aka. captions)
affiliation with MIT (year, or year of application for potentials)
where you're from!
anything interesting you would like to say about yourself/what's in the picture/your favorite haiku that doesn't end in 'refrigerator'/blahblah

I will post selected entries in a complete blog to come! You'll have at least 2 weeks to send them in. :) Will post when I get enough pictures! (you can also send multiple pictures, but i only ask that you don't make my inbox explode. :p)

Prize: Something awesome. Will not be a Giant Microbe. I ship domestically and internationally. There is no refund policy. I do not accept returns. I reserve the right to cancel the prize if there is less than 10 entries. Void where prohibited.

My email is up there in the banner - I'm curious to see what all of your summers are like! :)

ps. GO SEE INCEPTION NOW IF YOU HAVEN'T YET. You'll like it.

lesson one: LEARN TO PEE, lesson two: LEARN TO POOP, extra credit!! LEARN TO POOP ASIAN STYLE - shanghai expo 2010

Anyhow, this is certainly one of the most creative stories I've heard. Just gotta share this. :)

"MIT, for me, was always a dream, a place where I could imagine myself at, but never realistically go. In fact, if I had not visited the University in August and completely fell in love with it, I wouldn't have even applied.

I was out of the house when my father received a phone call from Stuart Schmill's office, informing him that I had been accepted into MIT. When I found out, I literally screamed while jumping up and down for a good minute. It was probably the best feeling I've ever experienced. At MIT, I plan to major in EECS, Course 6, although I haven't decided which path I will take. In addition, I want to get a concentration in Music."

I totally DID NOT do anything this cool to get into MIT. Just FYI, ya'll. I'm so impressed. :)

Just a month ago, I had just completed my final exams, which can only be termed as EPIC, but was also a sweet finish to a hectic junior year where I took eleven classes in one year, finished my MCATs, and embarked on the terrifying journey also known as medical school admissions.

Through my time at MIT, aside from Boston, I've lived (stayed for >= four weeks) in Madrid, Tokyo, and San Francisco. Through the madness of MIT, savoring churros con chocolate in the quaint cafes of Madrid, wolfing down one of those 500 yen gyudon specials during rush hour in Tokyo, and biting the heads off one of those cute sourdough turtles from Boudin Bakery in San Fran have definitely been some of my fondest memories in the last few years.

And this summer is no exception!

I have relocated to New York City, where I live in an apartment in the Lower East Side. Every night, I dodge drunks in urine-filled street corners and go to sleep when the apartments across from me draw their curtains and turn off their lights (with the guy who lives in the apartment across the street from me in plain view when he takes a shower circa 1 AM). I had never felt such a strong feeling of "solidarity" with any city that I have lived in, if you get my gist. ;)

During the day, I intern at Bellevue Hospital, a fifteen-minute bus ride from my apartment, where I work on developing a novel medical interpreter training system for Mandarin speakers, and help more critical-need Chinese cancer patients apply to treatment subsidies or apply for insurance. When I'm not working, I put my 30-day unlimited MetroCard to good use by discovering amazing restaurants in the Upper West Side, and wondering why the heck the F train never comes. I also take Japanese and Cantonese classes at night, because one of my secret dreams is to work as a multilingual interpreter in the United Nations, and you gotta start somewhere, right? ;)

This is the obligatory "oh-wow-I-can't-believe-how-fast-time-is-passing-and-I-am-getting-so-jaded" section, but in so many ways, I find it shocking that in a little bit more than two months, I will be a senior at the Institute. Sure, I guess all these memories I have proved that a lot of time has passed since I was that confused froshie wondering which corridor the "Infinite" really referred to (yes, this actually happened, once upon a time), but I also remember my high school graduation trip as if it had been last summer, not three years ago.

College will really transform the way you think and rationalize, and MIT especially so. There will be sleepless nights, there will be agonizing psets, and there will be heartrending exams. At the same time, however, there are also midnight parties, weekend adventures, and 7 AM triumphs. You will have a lot of new friendships, connections, and relationships - but don't be afraid of change, because that's how we grow. Above all, however, take the time to sniff the flowers along the way, and savor the journey - in more ways than one, traveling has actually kept me sane among the challenges of MIT, and I think that's the biggest reason why I travel and go to so many places during the summers and IAPs.

I guess this time next year my life will have changed completely once again, which is slightly scary, but also kind of odd, since with med school applications and such, you start looking beyond MIT - but I still have two semesters to get through! :)

Anyways, just a quick update about what I'm doing this summer! Congrats to the '14s (I got to meet a few dozen of you through our iHouse housing applications :P) and be excited about the fall! :)

(and like what I have been saying for like that last ~5 entries, MIT-relevant entries to come soon! haha)

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(unrelated) - I also came back from the extremely-hyped Shanghai Expo two weeks ago, and this is what it's like there =p

Although Shanghai is really pretty...

And my favorite pavilion in the entire Expo - UK - this is what it actually looks like! (read about it! :P)

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PS. And I also have been avidly following the World Cup! (all the games I can catch if I'm not at work or sleep). I watched the BRA v. CIV game in Little Brazil in NYC and it was crazy - when Brazil scored a goal, the cheers were so loud that the cars actually stopped in the middle of the street to see what's going on. I still have my bets on ARGENTINA!!! to take the whole tournament but I'm rooting for Japan to beat Paraguay on Tuesday. Fingers crossed!

Jenn '11 has played at venues such as the Boston Symphony Hall (with the Boston Pops, no less!). Her other accomplishments at MIT include being an Emerson Piano Scholar and winner of the MIT Concerto Competition. In her most recent recital on campus, she performed the Goldberg Variations, of which you can listen to here (LARGE file! - recommended: right-click+save as on the link to download the file and listen on your computer in its entirety.)

So I actually did this "interview" back on April 23, but you know how MIT is... :)

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Chris: Since when has music been a passion for you? Tell us about your musical journey prior to MIT.

Jenn: I began playing piano at the age of four. Of course, at that point, it wasn't really my decision, and there were a lot of times when I felt pressure from my parents to practice piano. In the middle of high school, however, there was a point at which I kind of stopped to think, and realized, "Hey, wait, I actually like this stuff!" That's when I realized the power of what you can communicate expressively with music, and it just amazed me. Another big milestone for me was after I came to MIT. I didn't expect to be playing as much music here as I am. It kind of just happened. I realized that, with the limited time we students at MIT have, I chose for myself to continue playing piano. I think that knowing with certainty that playing music was truly my own decision has solidified my passion for it.

Chris: What is the most unforgettable experience during your music career at MIT? Can you describe it for us?

Jenn: I don't think I can single out one specific experience. I would say, though, that I am truly grateful for all of the opportunities that I've had at MIT for performance. Because of this, I've been able to realize my love for performing. My most memorable performances include: two solo recitals, performing with MITSO, and performing with the Boston Pops for Tech Night at Pops.

Chris: What do you think are the most unique aspects (if any) of fellow MIT musicians? How would you describe the music community here?

Jenn: I think the spectacular thing about MIT students (in general) is the amount of dedication they put to everything that they do, and that includes music.

Here are the numbers: ~1500 undergraduates take music classes while at MIT, and ~500 are active in performance. Given that, it is impossible to know everyone who does music at MIT. But I can say that playing music at MIT has allowed me to forge some of my strongest relationships here, both in the practice rooms and out!

Chris: What do you think about the music department (faculty, music teachers, conductors...etc.) at MIT?

Jenn: I think the music department is comprised of some of the most genuinely nice people I know. The great thing is that they truly like each other, and care tremendously about the students.

Chris: Why did you decide to major in music?

Jenn: I decided to double major because I realized that your undergrad years are the only four years in your life that you can basically do whatever you want, and I wanted to make the most of it.

Chris: Can you tell us about the Emerson program?

Jenn: The Emerson program is a scholarship program that can provide financial support for music lessons. There are two types of support: Emerson Scholarship, and Emerson Fellowship. As an Emerson Scholar, half of your lessons are paid for (you pay for the fall semester, the program pays for the spring). Requirements include: participating in either chamber music/ensemble/piano accompanying, performing in a master class at the end of the fall semester, and performing in a group recital in the spring. As an Emerson Fellow, your lessons are paid for in full. The requirements are: taking Advanced Music Performance (21M.480), participating in either chamber music/ensemble/piano accompanying, and giving a solo recital in the spring. In order to audition for the program, there is an online application form, and a 10 minute audition is required at the beginning of the fall semester. More information can be found here.

Chris: What are your future goals, and how do you see music playing a role in it?

Jenn: As of now, my plans for after MIT include going for an MD/Ph.D. I'm not quite sure how the balance of practicing medicine and research will work itself out, but my research interests right now lie in immunology, and particularly the intersection of immunology and biological engineering. While music isn't directly a part of these goals, I know that I am as much a musician as I am a scientist. As long as I have a piano to practice on, and people willing to listen to me, I will continue playing and performing music.

Chris: Real quick - what will you miss (or NOT miss!) about MIT? :p

Jenn: I can't believe that I only have one more year left here!

Things I will miss:
* studying piano with my fabulous teacher, David Deveau
* the people here, and playing music with the people here
* the music department and its stellar faculty
* the biological engineering department and its amazing faculty

Things I will not miss:
* psets
* winter/bad weather

Chris: Any last words of advice for incoming freshmen thinking of doing something in music/humanities?

Jenn: With music or any other activity you find yourself doing at MIT, do it because you want to. And, have fun while you're doing it!

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CURRENT STUDENTS! Are you a student who is double majoring or minoring in the humanities here at MIT? Do you want to be profiled here? Does your neighbor want to be profiled here? Just email me at ask-oasis [at] mit [dot] edu! You will have my unending gratitude as a reward :) Show prefrosh how awesome the humanities community is at MIT!

Two days ago, Sophia '10 drove Kathy '10 and I to Cape Cod, where we spent a blissful afternoon walking around Provincetown. After a refreshing nap on the beach and on the drive back, I remarked, "It's so nice not having any work - normally if this was any other weekend during term, we would be worrying about how much stuff there is still to do tonight."

I think it's true.

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Five days ago, I was tucked away in a lounge on the third floor somewhere on MIT campus, frantically studying for my impending final on Thursday. I had not done anything fun since Saturday afternoon, when I hunkered down and started studying for my four finals this semester. Over the next five days, I put in 50+ hours of solid, sweat-n-tears work for my finals, left my dorm at 8:30 AM and returned at 3 AM daily, and generally had close to zero human interaction (with the exception of a really nice custodian that would always come by around 2 AM that I got to know pretty well for the next few days - seriously!).

I also had not blogged much this semester, and this term also broke the record for me in terms of not traveling to NYC at all. That's saying a lot - considering I probably spent upwards of several weeks over the last three years (I feel old :( ) being in NYC during term on weekends, longer weekends, and Thanksgiving/spring breaks.

So what did I spend my time doing? Here's a snapshot :) Consider this my obligatory picture post, long overdue :P

Every once in awhile, you come to MIT and you hear of kids here who take 8 or 9 classes in one term...

(one such friend I have hilariously showed me his registration schedule once and lamented that he had to be in four classrooms at once Monday and Wednesdays from 1-3. he requested a conflict exam in a class where the professor didn't offer conflict exams for any reason - he explained to the bemused professor that he *really* had to take a conflict exam because he already had three exams at the same time from three classes that didn't offer conflict exams!)

...but I discovered from trial of fire that six classes is A LOT - I took two science classes and four history classes. Now before you all engineering majors berate me...

[obligatory Kanye entrance]

Yo engineering majors I'm really happy for you and imma let you finish, but if you go through MIT pooh-poohing the humanities classes, you will have missed out on some of the best professors of all time. OF ALL TIME.

But no, seriously - all of my history classes were taught by crazily-awesome professors (including this character), which will be detailed in the entry where I explain why I declared a history major at MIT, so you'll have to wait to hear that story. Suffice it to say that declaring a history major on top of biology is a tremendously good idea and one of best decisions I made here (despite writing six papers totaling 88 pages this semester! i feel like i need to go adopt a tree now). I did have also have four finals this semester, which was perhaps a little bit more intense than I anticipated (I rarely even had four in high school). But it's all good - the race had been run, and the good fight had been fought.

Isn't that domo-rolly thing one of the most awesome things you've seen? HAHA. Made by the same Kathy as above in the extremely hyped toy design class at MIT - 2.00b. See when Snively took it! (2008). By the way, the rolly-thing is not the final toy. It's the first project in the course designed for students to get to know the tools that they'll be working with later on, but I think it's always pretty awesome to see what people come up with :)

We (MIT Model UN) invited Prof. Noam Chomsky to come and speak for us in March! If you don't know who he is, google him right now. start here.

Taiwanese represent. US CENSUS 2010.

Went to Senior Ball! SO FUN. Senior Ball is basically the last big social event for seniors before they graduate, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend! :) It's a great night filled with pretty good food, and A LOT of dancing afterwards. The level of partying that happened this year has definitely jumped up a notch, especially this semester, haha.

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CAN I SHOW YOU SOME FOOD PICTURES? PLEASEEEE.

(I'm going to show them to you anyway, cuz this is my blog. haha)

Boston's North End is famous for its Italian food - this is a sample from a restaurant that we waited in the March cold for 1.5 hours before getting in. It was well worth the wait.

My ex-roommates (Steve and Zach '11) love Applebee's, so this is the obligatory Applebee's picture. We really should take a picture of Bartley's Burgers too, I think we've been there 4 times just this one semester. haha.

Have you ever seen a tofu bibimbap? I chanced upon this really cool discovery courtesy of my vegan friend. I thought a tofu bibimbap would essentially be a contradiction in terms, but I think it's still amazing. :)

There's also this really amazing Cuban restaurant in Jamaica Plains, a suburb of Boston. I haven't been there since frosh year, and I got to go again this semester. It was as good as I remembered it to be. CURRENT STUDENTS - don't graduate without trying it! :)

Finally, this (froyo! NOT ice cream!) makes me complete. You don't know how happy this makes me all the time. Other than the old favorites of Berryline in Harvard Square and the new arrival of Red Mango by Symphony Hall in Boston, the real secret is that the best froyo comes from this Korean dessert store in Allston. Poke me if you want to go. :P

(by the way, strawberry+kiwi is the best froyo combo of all time. OF ALL TIME. strawberry+kiwi+mango tastes as good as it looks, but 3 toppings is usually not too economical :( le sigh)

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Staying on MIT campus after finals week has been interesting - it's so quiet now that all the students have left. Will be heading to NYC via Chinatown bus on Wednesday, and then flying out of JFK (that's one major airport in the US that I have yet to go to - that and Atlanta) on Thursday morning. Home till mid-June, with a trip to Shanghai thrown in. Then back to NYC - so excited for summer in the City! :) Perhaps this was my way for making up for not spending any time there at all this semester, haha.

Many entries yet to come about this semester!

You're in for one heck of a ride. ^______^V but don't worry, you'll be in with some of the best company you will ever know. :)

Honestly, after I heard this a few months ago on the radio, I realized the Kelly Clarkson perfectly described my relationship with MIT. So here it is, and don't hate. :D

Being with you
Is so dysfunctional
I really shouldn't miss you
But I can't let you go
Oh yeah

by Dora '11, course 8 and Ancient and Medieval Studies double major at MIT - AMS is like 21H (a regular history major) with a special twist.

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It is 1120 A.D., and the fates of four empires hang in the balance as the world poises on the brink of possible war.

Since the very early beginnings of their histories , the bordering peoples under Alexander the Great of Greece, Napoleon of France, and Frederick the Great of Germany, had made a pact to share the fruits of their research and resources in a peaceful coexistence that had propelled their various nations to glory. But recently, contact has been made with Catherine the Great of Russia, discovered to have fully populated an entire continent by herself, with cities peacefully reaching unknown heights of culture and wonder.

First contact went something like this:

Catherine: well hello there
Napoleon: hi!
Napoleon: doing pretty well I see
Catherine: you’re not doing so bad yourself
Catherine: we shall see who will roflstomp whom!

Or, so scholars believe. In fact, the only thing modern historians are entirely certain of is Catherine’s employment of the word “roflstomp” to describe the act of severely pummeling an enemy to the point at which rolling on the floor laughing may become appropriate, and her impeccably correct usage of pronouns.

All right, so, you got me. There was no ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny between Alexander, Napoleon, Frederick, and Catherine. Alexander the Great didn’t even live in the same era as the other three leaders, and certainly none of them were alive in 1120 A.D. The above situation was actually the incredibly tense moment at which I stopped playing a particularly harrowing game of Sid Meier’s Civilization IV with two friends and – here’s the really good part – my professor of medieval literature.

How, exactly, did this all happen?

To really answer the question, I would have to go back to my high school days. Back then, there were two subjects I loved equally: physics and history. I toyed briefly with the idea of going to a liberal arts college to study history, politics, and international relations, but couldn’t really pass up going to a school like MIT and still sleep easy at night. With my first step into the Infinite Corridor as a real MIT student, I came to peace with the fact that I would have to forsake one of my passions for the full pursuit of the other.

But fortunately (or, as some might argue, unfortunately), MIT has the HASS system, which for most, mandates us to take eight humanities classes before we graduate. As I was setting out for a daunting yet exciting semester of waves and vibrations and special relativity the fall of my sophomore year, I decided to reacquaint myself with an old friend and poke around the history department’s subject listing. Immediately, I was stricken by the sheer number of really interesting classes that were being offered. I finally chose to take 21H.406: Julius Caesar and the Fall of the Roman Republic, if only for the fact that it met at an open block in my schedule, and that it was a small, seminar-style class that hopefully could accommodate one more student.

I enjoyed every single one of the history classes I took in high school, but they had always had a distinctly class-ish feel to them. The teacher would lecture on a particular theme or event – for example, the American Revolution – touching on the relevant points: causes, battles, effects, and I would take bullet-point notes to stash away in my notebook. My first 21H.406 lecture, however, was entirely different. I was hardly aware of the ninety minutes flying by as I listened to the professor tell the story of the civil war between the generals Marius and Sulla as they battled for power in Rome– and that was exactly what he was doing: telling a story. I was experiencing history as I never had before, not as a set of events and facts that had occurred in the past, but as a narrative, comprising of dynamic players that were as human as we are today.

21H.406 quickly became my favorite class that term, and I found it to be a much needed break from all the math and science. Now don’t get me wrong: it certainly was no easy ride, and I still have vivid memories of reading Cicero deep into the wee hours of the night. I made flashcards for each of the fifty terms per test, of which there were two, and spent countless hours stressing over how to distinguish the various ancient sources for identifications. I probably annoyed more than just a couple of friends trying to recount the exact timeline of late Republican history over cookies and cake. History at MIT, I quickly learned, is no joke (chris here: that's so true), but also an immensely satisfying and educational experience.

So, going back to the original question: how did I end up mass-producing swordsmen to use against my professor of medieval literature? Well, I couldn’t bring myself to stop taking history after 21H.406, and ended up taking 21H.346: France 1660-1815: Enlightenment, Revolution, Napoleon, and 21H.433: The Age of Reason: Europe from the 17th to the Early 19th Centuries the following spring. I returned to ancient history last fall, taking 21H.007J: Empire: Introduction to Ancient and Medieval Studies. This class stood out to me in particular, since it was also the same class as 21L.014J (the “J” at the end means that it’s a joint class) in the literature department. It was in this class that I met that venerable professor of medieval literature, who boldly declared one afternoon that he had attained the highest level of achievement in Civilization IV. As an MIT student, I couldn’t pass up the challenge.

It was also when I was taking 21H.007 that I realized how much I enjoyed taking history, how I knew I wanted to take at least one history class every semester for the rest of my time here. I soon reached the conclusion that I wanted to double major in ancient and medieval studies with minimal further reasoning: I was already finishing up my physics requirements, and seeing as I knew I would spend a lot of my remaining credits on history classes, why not make them count for something? I’m not going to lie; what might have been a pretty easygoing last year at MIT has turned into a frantic race to complete all my requirements for a double major, and I’ve considered, on more than one occasion, sacrificing a to to ensure that my required classes have no conflicts next year. It’s an entirely hair-pulling, sleep-depriving (both in general fretting and workload) ordeal, but let me tell you: it’s entirely worth it, and I absolutely don’t regret my decision. If anything, I would wish that I had made it sooner, so I could better plan my classes and take some other history courses that weren’t directly ancient and medieval.

For one thing, some of the closest bonds I have been able to make at MIT have been in my history classes. Contrary to what the public perception of MIT is, there are lots of people here who love the humanities, and who approach subjects in humanities with the same excitement and fervor that they approach their technical fields. It creates exchanges, conversations and debates slightly different to, and in my opinion, more enjoyable than some of the conversations I’ve had with my friends who were history majors at liberal arts institutions (though, when push comes to shove, I can always match those liberal arts majors fact for fact in terms of historical understanding. An education in history at MIT is definitely comparable to an education at another institution!) (chris here again: kids, this is also very much true). Since MIT is undeniably a tech school, I’ve become really close friends with the small group of people who share my passion of history, since we all take the same classes together repeatedly and have had bonded over the material. We often discuss the history that we’ve learned together for hours on end (the various debaucheries of ancient Roman emperors never get old as inappropriate table talk), and looking back, I can definitely say that I have met some of my best and most compatible friends here at MIT through my history classes.

Through history, I’ve also created valuable relationships with many members of the history faculty. Perhaps this is partly a by-product of the fact that I now spend all of my free waking hours in building E51, where the history department is housed, but in the small, personable humanities classes here, it’s pretty much also impossible to not know your professor. Instead of the large, oftentimes intimidating science lectures that we all invariably experience at least once during our time here at MIT, it is definitely a refreshing change of pace to walk into a normal classroom and have the professor smile at me and ask, “Hey, Dora, how’s it going?” You come to learn that your professors are really awesome and fun people who also happen to assign whole books on the study of death in the Civil War for next week’s reading (True story. Utterly depressing, but was one of the most intriguing books I’ve read while at MIT). And I’ve definitely spent longer than I have intended to in my thesis advisor’s office when the conversation somehow leaves the significance of Augustan propaganda to enter the realm of what happened last week on House (I consider it a symbiotic relationship: I forsake watching to write my thesis, but then he catches me up).

So, what is humanities, especially history, at MIT to me? It’s tremendously valuable experience to have, and one that has allowed me to grow in so many ways as a student. Because of it, I have become a much better writer and I now know how to build a solid case supported by evidence and how to express that clearly and logically in a paper. This not only manifests in the history papers that I write, but also in my technical writing as well. I have also been able to forge some of the best and closest relationships with professors, something that is much harder to do in the larger science lectures. I have engaged in heated discussions with a small group of students, ones that I’ve kept in touch with even after the class ended and who I am now good friends with. To sum things up, even if it’s not technical, humanities at MIT carries a distinctly MIT feel: challenging, stimulating, and entirely fulfilling. In many ways, I am sure that I would not appreciate the same classes to the extent I did had I taken them anywhere else.*

And as for that Civilization IV match? Plans for the final showdown are in order, and regardless of whether or not I end up being roflstomped, I will never forget that time I played against my professor of medieval literature in a game of pixilated world domination. And I can say with a good amount of certainty that that’s one experience many students at your typical liberal arts school will never have.

*For instance: It was my medieval literature professor who expanded my vocabulary with the term ‘roflstomp.’ Perhaps it isn’t a traditionally GRE-recognized vocab word (yet), but I guess literature professors will always be literature professors, no matter where you are!

(talking about her daughter when she lived in McCormick as a Housemaster)

"As you know, young children play these imaginative formative games when they are growing up, like playing house and things like that. When my daughter was living in McCormick, I asked her one day what she was planning on doing today.

She told me, 'My Physics pset.'"

-Professor Margery Resnick, Professor in Foreign Language and Literature, Burchard Scholars Program Coordinator.

I've been meaning to write about Burchards for awhile, but I always thought, "well, I'll just write about it when it finishes." So this last Wednesday (note: back in November 2009, hahaha) we had our final session for our tenure as Burchard Scholars, and I think it's about time.

I've alluded to the Burchards program on and off in many of my old blogs, but I never wrote about it in a single place. So here goes:

The Burchard Scholars Program is a dinner-seminar program initiated by the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Science at MIT. Every month, Professor Resnick invites a member of the department to provide a 40-minute seminar in their field of research to the group of 30-40 Burchard Scholars over dinner.

The best part of the program is that the lectures are so eclectic and wide-ranging that you're bound to learn something new at every seminar. The list of the seminars that was in this cycle is attached:

Fall 2009

Noel Jackson – Associate Professor, Literature
"The Humanities as Half-Knowledge: Two Romantic-Period Examples."

Haimanti Roy – Assistant Professor, History
"Borderline Citizens: Becoming ‘Indians’ and ‘Pakistanis’ in Post-Partition Bengal, 1947-56"

David Jones - Assistant Professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society
"Do Doctors Make Good Decisions? History and the Complications of Cardiac Surgery"

Ben Olken - Associate Professor, Economics
"The Economics of Corruption"

Spring 2009

Taylor Fravel – Associate Professor, Political Science
"Three Perspectives on China's Rise: Threat, Opportunity, or Menace?"

Yo Yo Ma РMultiple Grammy®-winning cellist, Special Burchard Event
Performance with the Silk Road Ensemble at Symphony Hall

Dr. Thomas Byrne – Clinical Professor of Neurology
"Mirror Neurons: Impact on Learning, Empathy and Theory of Mind"

George Ruckert – Senior Lecturer, Music and Theater Arts
"The Sarod and the Raga in North Indian Tradition"

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So the seminars were phenomenal. Last semester, Professor Fravel gave an interesting perspective on China-Taiwan relations, having spent many years in Taiwan (he actually attended my high school's rival school: Taipei American School).

In March, we had an extremely rare opportunity arranged by Professor Lindgren of the Music Faculty for us to all attend a Yo-Yo Ma concert at Symphony Hall in Boston. Yo-Yo Ma was playing with the Silk Road Ensemble, and we were treated to a luxuriously exotic medley of unique instruments from the East (just check out the kinds of instrument the members of the Ensemble play on the webpage!).

After the event, Professor Lindgren arranged a "back-stage visit" for us to see Yo-Yo Ma, and there was a massive photo flurry. I didn't get to be in the pictures since I was taking the pictures, but Yo-Yo Ma did sign my program! :)

Each of these dinner-seminars begins with a feature lecture by the professor invited, and then dinner where the subject matter is discussed in greater detail, followed by questions and answers over coffee and dessert. In the words of Professor Resnick (the coordinator of the program), Burchards is designed to be an "intellectual feast of the greatest minds in humanities at MIT."

But the physical food has not been too shabby either. :)

What I really loved about Burchards is that it gathers a group of students passionate in the humanities in a small-knit gathering of students, and exposes us to the breath of humanities research that exist at MIT.

Many MIT students and even administrators dismiss the humanities as secondary to the Institute's long-ranging goals, but I find that nothing can be further from the truth. Although many students dismiss the humanities and the arts as frivolous forays into realms that yield no concrete "truth," what the humanities offer is an alternate lens to life and the world around us, and a new venue of thought and rationale of our place in the world.

In the first Burchard lecture of the 2009 Burchard Scholars program, Professor Jackson argued in his expose that the field of humanities can be viably described as "half truths" -

Whereas Plato regards this kind of poetic thinking as useless and worse, however, we find in these poems a qualified defense of not-knowing, and a concomitant claim on behalf of what the poet John Keats called “half-knowledge.” Both poems make a brief for the importance of attending to thoughts principally characterized by their incompletion and open-endedness; they embrace a kind of thinking that pointedly does not resolve into determinate knowledge. And both paradoxically ask us to accept, if only provisionally and for a time, this half-knowledge as a kind of fulfilled and complete knowledge in its own right.

Although the purpose of the humanities was never structured to "problem-solve" in the same sense that it is taught in science classes, it does nonetheless provide a new channel of thought - to allow ourselves to ask profound questions, to challenge us to look beyond horizons that have defined and measurable answers -

I want to suggest that the very ground on which Plato and many since have dismissed the humanities is in another view the basis for the enduring and vital importance of the humanities today. It is worth remembering that problem solving – the activity prized above all others at an institution such as MIT – is made possible only through the prior activity of problem making. Problem making begins with the recognition that there are questions that have yet to be asked, latent possibilities that remain unexplored. And this, ultimately, is where the humanities may have most to offer us. What may seem like the mere multiplication of “uncertainties” and “doubts” might equally serve as a conduit to new thoughts, fresh insights, and creative solutions.

(the full text of Professor Jackson's lecture at the Burchard Scholars Seminar may be found here.)

During my tenure as a Burchard Scholar, I came to realize the breath and scope of the humanities department at MIT, and claims that "MIT is a one-dimensional science and technology school" are simply not true. Over the next two weeks, before prefrosh commit on May 1, I will be writing a series of blogs of students of humanities at MIT, featuring guest blogs from 21H (history) and 21M (music) majors here. I have also declared a double history major at MIT this semester, and so I will also write a little bit more about my reasons in doing so.

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For current students, I strongly encourage you to apply to Burchards if you have a strong interest in the humanities -

http://shass.mit.edu/undergraduate/scholarships/burchard

The Burchard Scholars Program runs on the calendar year, rather than the academic year. Therefore, participants are selected from an application process beginning in the fall (normally October/November-ish). Scholars are announced in December, and the lecture series begin during the spring semester and continuing through the next fall semester. There is one lecture per month, generally.

The program is only open to sophomores and juniors at the time of application. The application consists of an essay, and a recommendation by a HASS faculty.

When I first found out about “Campus Preview Weekend,” it sounded pretty vague to me. Despite the massive listings of events that had been available for my browsing pleasure since December, I didn’t quite know what to expect when I arrived in Cambridge on Thursday. In fact, although I was tempted to plan out exactly how I would spend every moment of the weekend, I was pretty sure that it would be fun to just improvise. All I was really certain of was that I wanted to take advantage of every moment on campus… and I’m pretty sure that it’s safe to say: Mission accomplished.

You know all those events I was talking about? Well, there were two themes that I noticed: free food and discouragement of sleeping. Really that could sum up my experience – in fact, all of that food was amazing, and CPW was the first time that I pulled a non-academic, non-Harry-Potter-related all-nighter (whoa that was a lot of hyphens!) Free sodas and coffees from the student center’s grocery store (LaVerde’s) also helped to keep me and my new friends caffeinated. It seemed like West Campus smelled like barbecue all weekend (except Friday, the day that the weather machine got temperamental) and everyone was baking cookies to distribute to prefrosh that passed by dorm common rooms. Not to mention that CPW was the first time that I have ever tried liquid nitrogen ice cream – and the first time that I’ve gotten sick of eating too much ice cream! If there’s one thing that can be said about MIT, it’s that no one starves.

Of course, the most valuable part of the experience was meeting future classmates. That’s what really showed me that I can see myself at MIT for the next four years and what made me disappointed to leave. CPW was a unique opportunity to meet new people everywhere and to spend 24 hours a day learning about such a rich campus culture together. The book of events also included endless opportunities to explore dorms, walk the Infinite, meet professors, and pick the brains of really friendly students about my random little questions.

But all of this glosses over the spur-of-the-moment activities that were even more exciting. So here’s a rapid-fire list of my weekend’s highlights:

· A group of ten of us was bored waiting for a tour guide and decided to (try to) build a human pyramid in the middle of Lobby 7 at 11 PM on Friday.

¬∑ When I visited the headquarters of the campus newspaper, The Tech, I met a Rhodes Scholar, learned about their layout process, ate pizza, and then mentioned that I hadn’t had a chance to visit East Campus yet…

¬∑ … So a couple of residents took me there to see what they were building in the courtyard before we took a detour on the way back to photograph the hack (a full lounge room, complete with pool table and potted plant, suspended upside down at the Media Lab entrance).

· Then there was that all-nighter that I mentioned: a group of us played mafia at Next House, with another Rhodes Scholar (who played God/narrator), between 10 PM and 7 AM.

· Several of us spent another hour playing ping pong using our hands as paddles before leaving Next and crossing the bridge into Boston.

· But as awesome as all of this was, the grand finale was the game of Underground Capture the Flag between 12 and 4 AM. We got free t-shirts (GRAY TEAM!!!!), explored the basement tunnels, and channeled our inner ninja.

By this point, some of us had been awake for 45 hours straight, but it was certainly worth it. All that time I could have been peacefully resting in the comfort of my sleeping bag back at Ashdown House, but would that have been nearly as much fun? Of course not.

I hope that my description has provided some valuable insight into those few days living at MIT, taking advantage of everything I could without having to worry about work. This was by far the most exciting experience I’ve ever had, all packed into four incredible days. If orientation (a.k.a. REX) is anything like this weekend, bring it on!

You might think that CPW stands for Campus Preview Weekend, but you're wrong.

CPW really means "4 days of Pure aWesomeness." (The C didn't want to join the little acronym party, because its still hanging around campus. It'll probably never detach itself from the Pure aWesomeness that is MIT...As I would do right now if I had the chance to - high school seems rather, um, boring in comparison [understatement alert])

Before I write about my experience at CPW, I have a disclaimer to make: There is only one picture on this post. I usually only read blogs if they have pictures on them. _{This tendency results from my inability to focus on large chunks of text unless said chunks of text are arranged into some sort of visually appealing shape, like a circle or better yet, a hexagon (do you know what I mean? Appealing text chunks should be called textagons!!).}

So anyways, I kind-of sort-of dropped my camera down the stairwell at New House 3 on Saturday. The good news is that this mishap didn't affect the camera at all - it still works perfectly, and no pictures were erased. So what could possibly be the bad news? Well, the bad news is that throughout the entire weekend at CPW, I took all of, like, fifteen pictures. Yup, kind of pathetic; cue the well-founded exclamations of "WHAT?!??!!?" and "wow, just wow..."

I guess I was more focused on being there "in the present" than viewing MIT from behind a lens (that's my excuse). Basically I wanted to get the most fun out of my stay per unit time. Hey, from what I've heard, there's always orientation, right?

Because of my inability to take pictures, this post will only have one picture, selected from the 14 possible ones I could have picked (one was blurry):

As a substitute for all of the other million pictures I could have taken, I'll use this one picture to describe the majority of my CPW experience. Yes, one picture to describe the awesomeness that was CPW.

I can soooo do this - read on.

Each one of those balls represents a new person I met, or a single colorful facet of the prism that is the CPW experience. Well, that explains my smiling face. The slightly frazzled hair and right hand reluctant to make contact with the balls represents how much I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff going on - Because CPW was full of wonderful things, from liquid nitrogen ice cream (thanks Random Hall!) to UROP tours (GAMBIT RAWKS) to free bubble tea (thanks ATS!) to tie-dyeing (thanks McCormick!) to delicious brunch (thanks Next House!) to a spiffy hack at the Media Lab (way too cool!) to the "Meet the Bloggers" event (Hello Yan!!! I ended up not dyeing my hair...) to many more events that I wish I had attended.

There was simply not enough time, just as there was simply not enough time to say hello to each of the colored balls in Simmon's (ex-)meditation room (I found this pretty silver one, and kind of wanted to keep it as a pet).

Sure, I don't think CPW was an accurate representation of life at MIT, just the same way that the one picture of me marinating in colored balls wasn't an accurate representation of my CPW (I only went in there once, I swear). It's just one picture, just one snapshot. CPW gave me a snapshot (and taste! read: FREE FOOD) of the culture at MIT, in all its unfettered glory (after all, I didn't see any of those infamous psets the entire time).

During CPW, I met amazing, accomplished, and talented people from all around the country and the world. I made new friends. I tried new things. I had more fun than I thought was possible in four days. And throughout it all I came to realize that, "hey, I really like MIT, I feel like I belong. The people here are not intimidating. They are easy to approach and know how to have a good time. It's worth it." I finally realized that getting into MIT was for real, and not an accident. I didn't want to leave.

Also during CPW I realized that when I come to MIT this fall I need to bring a pair of heavy duty galoshes. Having rain-soaked sponges for shoes is not very comfortable.

CPW was incredible, exhilarating, and exhausting. I can't wait until fall.

Ramya out.

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Like what you've read? - read more!

"Coming from Stanford [before MIT's CPW], I actually bought a Stanford pen because I really liked the campus but staying here over CPW I now regret that I even bothered to spend money on that, haha. I really like it here despite the weather. MIT rules!!"

-actual '14 testimonial, quoted verbatim from a letter left to her host before she departed MIT today. :)

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I just woke up, oddly feeling nostalgic about CPW (this happens every year).

Starting from meeting a couple dozen of you at the iHouse International Feast on Thursday, it had been a rollercoaster ride of a weekend since then. Holla to the MA, NY, CT, NH, MD, RI, NJ, CA, MI, IL, IN, MO, TX, FL, SC, NC, VA, PA, OR, WA, Korea, and Switzerland prefrosh that I met this weekend!! :) (this is why I like to ask you where ya'll are from :P one of the best things about CPW is meeting you all who come from diverse corners of the world and seeing how much energy and talent you bring to the campus!).

Just like what President Hockfield said at the Closing Festival, you are were selected from less than 10% of the applicant pool, and all have your own very special accomplishments to be proud of!

There is an old tradition where current bloggers open up our blogs to you all post-CPW, to share what you've experienced this CPW from YOUR point of view.

Therefore, I would be open to blogs from all of you! Send me your best CPW blog - text, pictures, video...whatever you want! at my email address on the banner (ask-oasis [at] mit [dot] edu) - and I'll post them as guest blogs! Don't worry too much about format - I can help you HTMLize the text and the links, and resize your pictures so they're web compatible. :)

This was your weekend, and we're curious how it went for you! :D

As for us, today is officially CPW Recovery Day, otherwise known as *cough*gettingallthepiledupworkdoneafteranentireweekendofhavingtoomuchfun*cough* :P

As usual, let any of us know if we can help you in any way to make the decision process smoother between now and May 1! ^_____^

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Congrats Next Act 2010! This song is perpetually stuck in my mind. :)

Hopefully the weather would be nice this coming weekend - these last two days have been nothing short of gorgeous (it's SEVENTY-SEVEN DEGREES out right now. hear that? SEVENTY-SEVEN). (it's currently predicted to be cold and rainy during the first two days of CPW :( )

Yes, you have the huge, official guide to CPW events, but don't you want some highlighting done for you? ;)

THURSDAY night, 7-9pm+, iHouse International Dinner!

I live in this really small living group on campus (smaller than frats, sororities, and ILGs) called iHouse - in fact, there's only 20 of us scattered in 17 rooms on the first two floors of New House, one of the West Campus dorms.

Suffice it to say, we do pretty awesome stuff:

Come for a great night of international dinner, featuring cuisine from around the world (Marisa '13 makes the best creme brulee for your life, Tiantian '13 can make a Beijing Roast Duck from scratch (SERIOUSLY! can you do that?!), Alvin '13 can make Ugandan goat dishes, and this is what just the froshies are capable of!). Since we will be cooking then eating, you'll be able to help us out, learn a recipe or two, and enjoy a scrumptious dinner afterwards! :D

Dinner will be topped off by poker (of the American variety) and an international movie in the lounge immediately following.

NOTE: Contrary to common misconception, we're not an international students' house! (although international students are very welcome!). Actually, about 2/3 of our house are domestic students, and we try to maintain a balance between the two groups.

The best way to get to know us is really to come and talk to us in person, as iHouse is just too diverse and multi-faceted to be explained through videos and text. :) We will be looking for 5-6 frosh to join our diverse community next year, and once you sign on, you won't regret the journey :D

THURSDAY, 9.30-midnight, Johnson Athletic Center, CPW Welcome Festival!

Don't miss out on the CPW Festival! Although this is only one small entry in the extensive CPW listing, you'll get to interact with a sampling of the most active groups on campus through fun activities! Intended to be the "welcome festival" that contrasts with the real "Activities Fair" on Saturday where we have promotional material that actually shows what we do, the Welcome Festival is designed purely for you guys to have a great time, and there's a slew of cool activities lined up for you, including:

Chocolate River (don't know what it is? come and find out!) presented by Leadership Training Institute - look for the ORANGE SHIRTS!

"Chocolate Milk + Ping Pong Ball Activity" presented by MIT Model United Nations, the proud host of the annual MIT Model United Nations Conference to high school students! - look for the GREEN SHIRTS!

FRIDAY, 2-4p, Johnson, Academic Fair

Don't miss the Academics Fair, where faculty, staff, and students from pretty much every major offered at MIT will be there to address your questions. There's always been some talk of what MIT Humanities is like, so especially take this time to ask about those humanities classes that you are curious about, or even how to pick up a humanities double major at a tech university!

FRIDAY, 5-6p, W20 (Student Center)-407, LTI Ice Cream Social!

Come learn more about Leadership Training Institute, led by a great group of people whose energy is probably unparalleled on MIT campus. In recent years, LTI has been making a big impact on the lives of Boston-area students, but we have also successfully brought our program to Brazil this IAP, and China this coming summer.

Enjoy some ice cream, meet some of the cool mentors, and also try out our interactive group icebreaker / games that make LTI so special.

FRIDAY, 6.30-8p, W20 (Student Center)-Lobdell Dining Hall (second floor), MEET THE BLOGGERS

We don't bite, really! :)

(okay, we won't bite hard)

(did we tell you that you should bring your computer to the blogger meet up?) - Non Sequitur, February 18, 2009

FRIDAY, 7-10p, New House, New House Battles!

See the nine cultural houses of New House (New House is really one dorm building subdivided into nine smaller living groups - iHouse is one of them) battle it out with a variety of activities, and join in!

iHouse will be hosting a hot sauce eating battle, and suffice it to say...

You have not tried hot sauce until you've tried the iHouse special blend of hot sauce. Where else during CPW can you find a hot sauce eating competition?! Try the famed iHouse blend of hot sauce that all of our residents have experienced through trial by fire, and see if you can live up to the challenge. ;)

SATURDAY, 1-3p, Johnson, Activities Midway

This is the more "formal" presentation of MIT's student groups, as compared to the Welcome Festival on Thursday.

COME! Get a crapload of free goods, visit MIT's 400+ student groups, and see what you can be involved in at campus after you matriculate in the fall. One of the biggest assets of MIT is its student groups, and I'm sure you'll agree after coming to the Midway. :)

SATURDAY, 3-4p, McCormick (a short walk from Johnson), MIT MUN International Desserts!

Come chat with us about MIT MUN while enjoying cannolis from Mike's Pastry (a Boston favorite), egg tarts from Chinatown (my favorite), cheesecakes from Finale (a popular favorite), and cupcakes from Sweet Bakery in Boston! (a recent favorite)

A traditional MIT MUN event since we-don't-know-how-many CPWs ago, you'll have a great time!

SATURDAY, 3-6p, New House, Taste of New House

MEATBALLS!

Approved by Steve '11, our resident American cuisine connoisseur, and Marisa '13, our Culinary Director and Dictator of the Kitchen.

And explore the rest of New House while you're at it!

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Other Must-Go CPW Events

THURSDAY, FRIDAY, SATURDAY nights, Next House, Next Act!

A fully student-directed musical with full music accompaniment (also provided by students) put on by Next House for 25+ years!

Be sure to check it out - I saw my first Act as a freshman, and it was a blast.

FRIDAY, 8pm, Senior House, Bouncy Ball Drop

If you ever wanted bouncy balls to throw at your friends for the whole duration of CPW, here is your chance to stock up. :P

Late during CPW, Somewhere, Sometime

A certain citrusy-tour. Ask your friends (or follow them). Someone will know. :)

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I will most certainly be at all of the events listed above (the actual purpose of this blog may have been to help organize my CPW :P), and don't be afraid to come up and say hi! Who knows, I might have something for you :)

Get pumped for this weekend! ^______^

On the night admissions came out (two nights ago), my good friend Steve '11 (freshman ex-roommate) was reminded of the story of Tim Tebow after the decisions were released. I knew about Tebow from talking with Steve many nights (or rather, him talking to me) about football, and I thought it was really a good story, and maybe some of you would enjoy it.

But yeah, that's it. Think of this as some light diversionary reading if you will. Remember Tim's promise.

Best of luck in the weeks ahead! :)

-Chris

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You're probably feeling down right now. You know you'll get over it but you feel like you never will.[1] So if I can offer any advice it's just to emote. Let your psychological immune system kick in. Get off the blogs and let out a few tears. Then watch some awesome YouTube videos Or eat a Vermonster with your friends.

("editor's note:" so for the people that don't know, a vermonster is essentially a gigantic tub of ice cream that you can get at Ben and Jerry's, an ice cream chain that's pretty prevalent in the US - fun fact: it contains 14,000 calories :D but makes for a good bonding ritual followed by heartburn :P)

I'll give you two sentences to stop reading. The rest of this post will be here waiting for you tonight. Kthxbai.

There are two things I want to say. But first, listen to this important message from Dan Gilbert, a professor of Psychology at the other Cambridge school.

A lot of events in life-both good and bad-are the products of factors that you cannot control. As Dan's story shows, some things that seem bad turn out to be a blessing in disguise. More importantly, you don't have to go to MIT to be a success. You can go to a community college and still end up at the top of your field.

Now, I hope you don't obsessively dwell on this blog in the future. It's time to move on, so I will bid you adieu with an inspirational true story.

Tim Tebow was the best college football player to ever played the game. That is a fact, not an opinion. He was the first sophomore to win the Heisman Trophy, a two-time national champion, and the most statistically dominant player in history.

Yet last December he was sitting on the sidelines watching Alabama crush his dream of winning a third national title in four years. He started sobbing because he just couldn't choke back the tears (see video). He invested so much in his team, his last season, in the championship run the media said destiny, that he couldn't hold it together.

They say you shouldn't cry over spilt milk. I guess you shouldn't cry over college admissions either, it's not that important in the long run. But even Tebow admits that many things, including academics, are more important than football. That didn't stop "Tebow crying" from becoming the number one Google trend of the day.

Of course, this wasn't the first time Tebow let his team down. A little more than a year earlier he failed to gain crucial first down and it cost his team the game. But that's not the important thing. What happened next is part of college football lore: the promise he made (see video) is etched in stone at the University of Florida.

Tim Tebow could easily be known as the wunderkind who choked when it was 4th and 1 or the baby who drowned the Georgia Dome in tears.

But he's not. He's remembered for picking himself up and making a promise to do better.

As you probably can guess, Florida won 22 consecutive games and the BCS title after Tebow made "The Promise." A few weeks after losing to Alabama, Tebow played the best game of his life in the Sugar Bowl.

Today he is remembered as the greatest not just of our time, but of all time.

Don't let setbacks set you back. Thanks for reading.

[1] - Most people say something stupid like "I'll never eat again" after eating too much on Thanksgiving. They know they'll be hungry the next day-they are every year-but to a remarkable extent people are simply stuck in the present.

"If I have kids, I'm going to name the first one "Control" and the second one "Experiment.""

-an embarrassed '12

"Can anyone help me eject my device?"

-an embarrassed '11 guy

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Good luck with decisions, everyone! :D

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WHY ART HISTORY IS AWESOME

LIST OF ALL ALLUDED WORKS

TAKE 4.601 HERE AND BE AWESOME (AND CULTURALLY LITERATE!)

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While we are on the subject of speeches - for all to-be valedictorians, this is a great commencement speech. So is this one.

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So it's a week before spring break. I'm super stressed. I don't know what is going on in one class, or make that three. I just took a test and I'm not sure whether I failed or passed. But I just know that I tried my hardest to fill in the blanks. And my history classes cheered me up. :)

BUT LIFE IS GOOD. LIFE IS ALWAYS GOOD. :D

GOOD LUCK WITH PI DAY! ^_______^V