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

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

So imagine my disappointment when I'm eagerly waiting for a huge storm to blow in, skis in hand, and it never happens. After the massive amounts of snow we had around here last year, it was torture. I had resigned that  this would be the year we had no winter. And for a long time, it looked like I would be right. We in the outdoors club even called off our "Winter Circus" trip this weekend because, well, it didn't look like there was going to be any winter!

But if there's one thing to describe Boston's weather more than "terrible" (no offense New England, just not my scene), it's "weird". And weirdly enough, on the first day of March we had our first big-ish snowstorm. Of course now school is in full swing and I'm running full-tilt to try and get things done to graduate in June (eeep! real world! yikes!) so there's no way I can sneak off to the mountains for a few runs. Grumble grumble.

Of course all things in due time, and maybe next year when I have a real-ish job I can spend more time out in the mountains that I love. Heck, if I could do that for my job, that'd be a dream come true. I can't imagine an engineering position that would be more fulfilling to me right now than designing climbing and ski gear for someone like Black Diamond, who is based out of Salt Lake City a.k.a Park City UT. Fingers crossed.

But since I won't be out and enjoying the slopes this weekend and thus not transferring that experience to you vicariously, you'll have to make due with this video I made but never got around to posting from the end of IAP:

I, for better and worse, am not most people. My term is the heaviest one yet for me, both in terms of academics and non. So lets take a peek into my day:

6.002x (Circuits and Electronics)

One of MITs pilot online courses for their new high-quality online learning initiative, MITx, 6.002x is actually open to the world for registration. You could all take it with me if you wanted to (and you should! It's fantastic). The kicker is classes for the rest of the world start first week in March, and ours have been going since the beginning of February, so we'll stay 4 weeks ahead to blaze the trail, stomping bugs, talking about ways the class can be improved, and generally preparing it for mass consumption. The class itself is all about circuit design, op-amps, and all that jazz (and confession, I've actually taken most of it once before I dropped it), but the best part is that there's a roughly 1.2:1 ratio of instructors to students in the program, including some of the coolest names in education and MIT like Agant Agarwal, the director of CSAIL. Plus since we're a small group working collaboratively, our physical meetings on Tues and Thurs serve lunch. Which is a great bonus.

6.041 (Statistics and Probability)

Another class in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department, 6.041 focuses on thinking about probability. Probability is really the foundation of a lot of analysis in EECS. Artificial Intelligence? Probability. Network management? Probability. Error handling in hardware? Probability. So far it's been pretty interesting for me, except for my recitation section, but maybe it'll pick up. Not much to say really, math is math.

2.744 (Product Design)

2.744 is the grad class follow-up to 2.009. 2.009 introduces you to how products are made and gives an hands-on experience doing it from start to finish, and 2.744 elaborates on that design part. We talk about what constitutes good design, and the whole thing culminates in a term-long team project with a theme. This year's theme is "Eco friendly office of the future" and is sponsored in part by Staples. If anyone makes a particulalry great product, there's a real opportunity for it to become an actual product for Staples. 2.744 is taught by Prof. David Wallace, who is one of the coolest people I've ever met. He also teaches 2.00B "Toy Design" and 2.009, and he is constantly working for each of those classes.

21A.100 (Intro to Anthropology)

Anthropology is my HASS Concentration, which as part of the HASS requirement means I'm taking 3 classes under the Anthropology department. 21A.100 is an absolutely fascinating class, and it's in no small part because Prof. Graham Jones is a super engaging person to listen to. He's also a magician. Not kidding. His field of anthropological study is in magic, and why people keep secrets. The class itself is a great way for me to travel all over the world and through time learning about different cultures and how they change, all without leaving MIT. 

21A.340 (Technology and Culture)

Another class for my concentration, 21A.340 looks specifically at technology and how it affects culture. From surveillance to genetically modified crops to health science to the internet, the impact of technology on the way people behave is pretty interesting to think about. The class itself meets just once a week, so that fits nicely in my crazy schedule.

21A.342 (Environmental Struggles)

The final class in my concentration focuses on the effect of environmental change and culture, and how science ties into all of it. So far we've just been talking about global warming, but the format is essentially a forum. We all come to class and just talk about the issues brought up in our readings and viewings for a few hours, and of course write a few papers. I really like the discussion aspect. It's interesting to hear all the different issues people address, and seeing how different just 25 people in the class interpret and understand things makes it easy to understand how the world is so complex.

MISC.

In addition to all those classes, I'm helping students in 2.007 build robots, and wrapping up some loose ends from other classes, and finding some place for PE credit (climbing again? don't mind if I do!) It pretty much keeps me constantly busy, but I'm also really enjoying it so far. I'm more productive when I have a lot to do.

???

There's one more thing I'm working on this term, and it's the biggest and most exciting project I've ever been involved with. I'm really eager to tell you all about it, but I can't just yet. Very soon though....very soon...

If you want the technical definition of ice climbing, I don't know it. But a layman's definition might be something like trying to get up cold vertical stuff using axes and crampons and an assortment of other tools, just like climbing makes use of your hands and feet to get up not-that-cold vertical stuff. The gist of it is you swing these ice axes up over your head, sinking them into an ice sheet deep enough for you to support yourself on, and kicking spikes on your feet into that same ice sheet to stand on. Climbing is a motion somewhat like climbing a ladder: Hang on left arm, place right foot, stand on right foot, place right arm, hang on right arm, place left foot, remove left arm, remove right foot, stand on left foot, place left arm, and repeat. (If that's not how you climb a ladder....well I don't know what to tell you. But that's what it look like to me.)

The nuts part comes due to the fact that your covered in sharp objects in the freezing cold, trying to manage your temperature, and that ice is not just ice the world around. What you're looking for is "plastic" ice. The sort of stuff that's just the right mix so that your tools sink in without breaking the stuff, but it's not so soft that they pop out. But as temperatures change, and layers of ice build up, sometimes the good stuff is buried beneath a layer of "rotten" ice, which is really brittle and doesn't like to be hit with the sharp point of an axe (hey, can't blame it. I don't either).

So how do you tell the difference? You can't really. It's a lot of feel and intuition, so you take a swing and sometimes it sinks in, other times it sends ice chunks sailing into your face, or onto your belayer(more on that in a second). And to add to the confusion, it changes from day to day and even through the course of the day. And sometimes even solid swings in plastic ice have a tendency to "pop" off. Just the nature of it. 

You may wonder how on earth someone is supposed to do something productive with so many unknown variables (I call this "engineers cripple: (n) the illusion of inability to proceed or decide without more data to resolve uncertainty"). Well you just do, and it doesn't seem to bother ice climbers very much. But there's ample reason to suspect anyone who's willing and in fact seeking out the opportunity to venture out into the bitter cold to place themselves on sheer vertical surfaces for fun may in fact be insane.

Luckily, there are a surprising number of insane people at MIT, and a subset of them are of the ice climbing variety, so opportunity knocked and I answered with my pack and boots. We left Saturday evening to get to the MITOC cabin (Camelot) up in NH for the night, so that we could get an early start the next morning. When we got to the cabin, it was a balmy 0F outside, and by early morning I've been told it dropped as low as -8F. Looked like we were going to be in for quite a bit colder than the forecasted low of 18. But thankfully by the time we hiked up to the crag in Rumney, being in the sun warmed us up, and it turned out to be a nice day. I managed to put together this video of the place we were climbing, and some of my first ascents in ice. Hope you enjoy it! (take a close look at 3:47, when I knock off a sizable chunk of ice that hits my belayer square in the head. That's why you wear a helmet!)

But some fluke warm winter weather won't prevent the Outdoors Club (MITOC) from having it's annual "Winter School". Winter School is a series of lectures and trips designed to help introduce people to the fun they can have in the snow. They go through everything you need to know if you haven't been out in the snow before, including layering, eating, drinking, and the technical aspects of many different wintersports, such as: Hiking, Ice Climbing (yay!), Backcountry Skiing (yay!), Snowshoeing, Camping, and Mountaineering (yay!). Lectures are during the week and trips are over the weekend, where you can visit one of MITOCs two New Hampshire cabins. Given that 90% of the gifts I received for Christmas was outdoor gear, it should be no surprise that I'm thrilled to be back just in time to get my feet wet (err...only metaphorically) with Winter School. It's always fun to meet other people as excited to intentionally put themselves in situations that are other people's nightmares. I'm particularly excited about the Ice Climbing trip, because Ice Climbing is ridiculous.

Not all of IAP has to be crampons and ice axes though, there's still ample down time for doing things with your friends. I've been working with some friends on our startup project (another blog entry, but there's some stuff we're not done with that I really want to add), and building this monster of a machine:

This is my workstation PC I built over Black Friday (crazy deals). I know some of you are spec groomers, so here we go:

CPU: intel i5 2500K (OC'd to 3.8Ghz)

CPU COOLER: Hyper212+

MOBO: GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3

RAM: 16Gb

PSU: Corsair TX650W

GPU: Gigabyte HD 6950 (reflashed to 6970, and OC'd to 900Mhz)

HD: Seagate 3Tb 7200rpm Barracuda

CASE: CoolerMaster HAF 932 Advanced (it's worth noting that there are now 10 fans in this machine trying to keep it cool.)

I've named this computer "Galactica" because when I first started it, it had no network capabilities (Windows didn't like the drivers). That and because it's frackin' huge and I love me some BSG.

My favorite part of building commputers though, is the wiring:

It's not my finest work, and I'm sure I'll redo it again in the future, but it works for now. You might think I'm crazy for liking cable management so much, but there are dozens of us.

So what do I do with such a behemoth of a machine? Well, this is my workstation computer, so I normally crank through SolidWorks stuff, MATLAB, programming--that sort of thing. But here lately, I've been using it to....well....

If you don't know what this is from, then I envy the amount of time you haven't sunk into it. This is Skyrim. The most life-consuming of games. And it's very pretty. One more:

(as an aside, I really like the dwarves, because I think of them as ancient engineers. Building robots and mechanical things, living underground away from the light. The similarities are uncanny.)

Yes, I'm using my powerful work computer to play games. That's what IAP is for. 

Did you know the soda can top (or "pop" can for those of you so inclined) took ~5 years to perfect and develop? And look at it. It's simply a tab on a lever that punches out a precut piece of aluminum. It's hard to imagine a simpler mechanism. And yet, to get that simple took an enormous amount of work. 

In fact, this "simplicity follows complexity" idea is one that I've learned more and more throughout my time here at MIT, and particularly through one of my favorite classes, 2.009. (As an aside, that last half of the sentence was difficult to type given that I'm averaging 12hrs a day in lab with at least another 4 spent on work for that class alone, but if I'm honest with myself it's still true).

I've learned that in engineering, it's not that difficult to design individual solutions to all your design criteria, and then your proposed solution is just the superposition of all the little solutions. It's not that hard to make a design more complex by just solving all the little sub-problems and summing them up. To express it mathematically (because there's literally nothing I can't turn into a formula):

Where S is your solution to a problem, pi is the ith particular subproblem, and s() is the solution to any particular problem.

But it turns out that the best solutions/products/designs are those that are butt-kickingly simple. The sort that make you think "that's it?". The kind that make you feel like anyone could do them. Those are the hard ones.

This I understand firsthand while exploring the mechanism for my 2.009 project (whose final presentation I will be in part presenting on Monday, so that'll be a fun blog). In a nutshell, I've been working with my team to try and figure out a way to dispense helmets reliably and one at a time. The first proposed solution we had was enormously complex, but plausible given what we'd learned. We had four bar linkages, ratchets, pulleys – the whole MechE toolkit coming out. But in designing it in Solidworks, we discovered it was incredibly difficult to make work correctly, so we abandoned it for a much simpler mechanism. This we all felt pretty good about, until we tried to start building it and learned it was essentially impossible to implement given our constraints. So I worked with a small subset of our team and tried to find alternatives. A simpler solution was found and decided to go for that.

But once again, it was too complex. This loop repeated for a while until the eureka moment occured and we managed to reduce our mechanism from around 32 parts, with 8 moving parts in perpendicular planes, to just 4 parts, one moving, all in the same plane. And the thing works beautifully and reliably (I'm hoping I'll get a patent out of it, but that's another topic).

One of my teammates was commenting on how frustrating it was to get that solution after all the design and iteration we had, but that's when I realized we HAD to go through that. Otherwise we never would've understood the problem with the depth necessary to see the simple solution. Turns out, problems require a complex understanding to yield simple solutions, and vice versa. Or, to express it mathematically:

Where Sc is the solution complexity and Pu is the problem understanding.

And that's because it's not until you really understand all the interfaces that you can see the nonlinear and coupled solutions. The ones where you say "yeah Sx wouldn't solve Px, and Sy wouldn't solve Py, but Sx + Sy solves Px, Py, and Pz which wasn't even a design criteria!". That's where the innovation is, in seeing those solutions that aren't algorithmically generated, the ones where either of two mutually exclusive extremes are non-ideal and the optimum solution is some tradeoff. THAT'S what engineering is all about. That's why you study your brains out trying to understand how everything works and in what ways you can solve problems, because it's only after that visceral understanding of the whole system that you get a unified, elegant solution.

And looking back, I think that's something MIT looks for in their admissions decisions too. It's easy to think that the best candidate is the broadest and deepest one; the stereotypical encyclopedia of extracurricular activities and good grades. But what's more compelling than a laundry list of sub-achievements are the ones that REALLY define you. The ones you're passionate about and interested in. Those are the ones to express in your application because they show a focused, concise portrait of yourself.

And even outside of applications and engineering, I think the principle applies to life in general (at least as much as my admittedly limited and naive experience in life has been). A simple, clear purpose seems preferable to a smörgåsbord of roles, but knowing what that purpose is requires a very deep understanding of what you want and why it's more important than other things you want.

So in a very literal way, engineering is my life, and with remarkable overlap the lessons I learn about being a better engineer translate to making me live a happier life (well, eventually. This sleepless streak of a week is getting old). MIT is truly an incredible place to be and learn.

Most of my entries center around things I've learned or experienced in my always interesting (if occasionally miserable) time trudging through the 4 years of masochistic glory that is MIT. 

This is not one of those entries.

Instead, I want to focus on something much more grandiose, much more important––and much MUCH geekier.

It all started, as most nerd fights do, on twitter and facebook.

(cue flashback music)

Some brief background: MIT apparently leads the pack of Ivy+ institutions in Facebook page "likes". Cornell is super jealous, and they started trash talking a bit with this message:

Notice the comment about the Doonesbury girl. What they're whining about is that in 2006, the writer of Doonesbury put up a poll on Doonesbury.com asking readers where Alex should go to college. As nerds procrastinating psets are want to do, MIT students hacked the poll and snagged 48% of the total votes in favor of MIT. Since such tactics weren't explicitly forbidden (and because who'd want to piss off such a pasty, intimidating tour-de-geek-force) the writer decided "the will, chutzpah, and bodacious craft of the voting public will be respected." And in an admissions decision to surely make any student jealous, just like that Alex was going to MIT.

In light of this complaint, MIT and Cornell have entered into a "ficticious alumni faceoff", presumably because Cornell isn't tired of losing yet. The whole thing can't even be called a contest as much as an exhibition because there's absolutely no way Cornell can compete with the impressive list of fictional MIT alumni. But why let me tell you want to think (HINT: because I'm right). Read on about them:

FICITONAL MIT ALUMNI BIOGRAPHIES:

Dilbert:

Ok, maybe not super strong cool-guy out of the gate, but he's relatable, lovable and he's got "the knack"

Gordon Freeman

Physicist who shoots headcrabs. Looks like House. Boss.

Benjamin Gates

Steals declaration of independence, cracks codes hidden in plainsight on dollar bills, and uncovers huge hidden treasure.

Will Hunting

 Janitor. Mathematician. How do you like them apples?

Invisible Woman & Mr. Fantastic

That means half of the Fantastic 4 are from MIT. Apparently getting into the the elite super hero group is a bit easier than getting in.

Bullwinkle Moose

Yes, even non-humans aspire to grace the halls of the 'tvte. No word on where Rocky went.

Lex Luthor

 Ok, maybe not a great example as far as "Doing good things" goes, but you can't deny that he's super smart. Maybe just a little malaligned.

Howard Wollowitz -

Yeah....not neccesarily the best example for a lot of arguments either, but he's an engineer for NASA. He drives the martian rover. Thatmight be worth the neon mock-necks and tight pants. Maybe.

and of course, our trump card:

Tony Stark

 If the rest of the list didn't exist, we'd still win with Tony Stark alone. The guy has it all. Wealth, women, cool cars, robot assistants, a sense of humor and charm, and genius enough to build a compact fusion reactor out of scraps in the desert, not to mention building his own mechatronic suit to be a superhero. No "baby I was born this way" origin story for him, no "Wayne Corp. makes my stuff, I just buy it", Tony Stark designs, builds, and uses all of his stuff. 

Any doubts? Of course not. How could you compete with that?

On Friday, I'd had it. I was coming off of one of those weeks that will just run you absolutely ragged, and at around noon, I snapped. I ran into Killian Court and flipped the bird. I gave everyone the finger as crowds amassed on the sidelines to see what the commotion was about.

But instead of a police presence, and maybe a trip to MIT Mental Health, I was greeted with cheers and pom poms and a strange ghostly feeling rising in my mind that I've forgotten how to put in words.

Fu....Fun? Ah yes, that's it––fun! 

As you can probably surmise from Matt's entry, there's a class called 2.009 that is one of the Mechanical Engineering Capstone courses, and it has to be the best class at MIT by a long shot. You might have also seen this picture on Matt's entry:

Wait a minute.....what's that? Can we enhance the image?

Hmm the back of that head looks familiar* Enhance it further:

Oh my gosh! That's me! And the aforementioned finger!

Yes,  The truth is, I know so much about 2.009 because I'm in it. And as the Systems Integrator for my team section (Pink A) , more often than not I am in it deep. The class runs at a breakneck pace sketching, brainstorming, analyzing, fabricating, testing, and iterating every week for at least a few hours. There are intermittent milestones to help select the most promising product ideas, and it all culminates in the product showcase at the end of term in front of hundreds of industry experts. It makes for some intensely long days in the shop and some high stress negotiations during meetings, but I really feel like I'm in my element in it. This week was one such high stress week where we were fabricating prototypes for a presentation every day for several hours. I was in the shop on Thursday from 0900 until 1700 when everything had to be finalized, and then went directly from there to the presentation room until all the presentations were over at 2100. Long day.

But the reward for such a long arduous day was the "Angry Birds" competition you saw. A chance to blow off some steam with your team and have a few laughs:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/-uOyZp_TB4o" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

There were two categories of winners: those who won the competition, and those who had the most spirit throughout. Unfortunately, the former is largely determined by your machine. In particular ours had little variance in it's shots, which made for impressive precision (5 birds were perfectly piled up on top of each other) but disappointing accuracy (the pile was about a foot in front of the tower). Eventually, we all but gave up on winning the competition part and focused on the team spirit part. We cheered, built human pyramids, and I waved the giant pink finger in the air with the chant "Think Pink".

When the awards ceremony came up, the green team won a giant foam trophy for finishing first. But no one stood a chance against Pink's spirited battle cries, and we proudly won for most spirited. And what did we get as a prize?

Angry Birds beanies. (That's me in the red that the finger is pointing to). Which is waaay better than a trophy.

It was a great way to head off into the weekend before we hit the ground running next week on our next milestone, which will be a technical review of our concept. What's our concept? Well, I'll just have to let you see after our technical review ;)

This is one of those times that I really love this place, and it makes all the frustrating and endless nights worth it.

*no it doesn't. How often do you see the back of your own head?

Anyway, as I was saying, I'm going to be honest with you (and redundant, apparently). When school starts back up it's like a whirlwind of activity happening all around you. There's seemingly a quintillion things to be done, and walking around campus is not unlike walking around a 3 ring circus, except instead of elephants,it's nerds; acrobats, calculus; and confusingly just as much juggling.

But one of my favorite parts of the new school year, aside from seeing all the new, wide-eyed freshmen and hearing about their struggles to choose housing, majors, and classes; is the blogger get together known in all it's syntactically misleading glory as:

"The first annual blogger meetup!"

(Even though we've had one every year for a few years, I suppose it's supposed to signify the first one of the new academic year.)

The blogger meetup came about because once upon a time, Meet the Bloggers, the CPW event, was also a Meet the Bloggers for bloggers. Until that point, a lot of bloggers never crossed paths because, let's face it, MIT is a broad and deep place to be immersed in, and many of us are busy looking at our shoes as we walk.

So to remedy the situation, bloggers would meet together at the first of the year to talk about how to make blog posts, the few guidelines we have about making posts, and to meet the new and senior bloggers. This year's festivities sounded especially exciting: trampoline dodgeball.

You can read more about the events that transpired from Elizabeth, but I'd like to share with you one interesting fact about the evening. I managed to, in all my sensibilities, split my chin open during a match. Against my own knee. Yes, I'm so manly that I beat myself up. I actually didn't notice until Snively yelled out "Um. Someone's bleeding..." only to look down and see a few small puddles of blood, and then notice a few smears of blood on my clothes. Oops, so I ran off to find just where I'd sprung a leak and was greeted by this lovely sight:

Horrifying isn't it? And the wound is kind of gross too. Needless to say, a split chin is the torn ACL of competitive blodgeball, and my blossoming career as a dodgeball player was over.

I was still kind of bleeding a lot though, even an hour later when I got back to campus, so I texted the above photo to two nurses I know and asked a poignant medical opinion:

"Stitches?"

The answer was a unanimous "yes." Followed by a eerily similar "what did you do?". I suppose a correlation could be drawn about the thought patterns of nurses, but I'll need more data.

Heeding their advice, I figured I'd stop in at the Urgent Care clinic to see what they thought. When a nurse came in to see me and asked what I was in for, I cheerily replied "oh, I cut my chin a little and it seems a little borderline for something more than a bandaid, so I thought I'd see what you think". I showed her my wound, which was unsurprisingly met with a "what did you do?", and followed with a chuckle and an exasperated "men and their sports" at the explanation.

The first attempt at patching me back together was to use medical grade superglue called Dermabond to glue the wound back together, but as it turns out, my 5 o'clock shadow was preventing it from adhering properly, so stitches it was. 3 to be exact:

And with that, I was on my way. All in a day-before-class's work I suppose.

Oh, and as an aside, my professor in 6.02 (Intro to EECS II, electric boogaloo) has adopted a method of teaching with twitter he calls "tweaching", wherein you can post question with a specific hashtag, and they show up on his twitter account during lecture, which he'll then try to answer. I find it very clever, and rather MIT like. 

While it's easy to think and talk about the incredible academic opportunities at school when you're, well, at school; it's decidedly harder to notice them when you're not. This shouldn't surprise anyone, as it's much akin to trying to appreciate the shirt your friend is wearing when you haven't seen your friend in a while.

Being away from the 'tvte does afford the opportunity to appreciate all the other ways MIT has impacted you though, and following a recent trip (we'll get to that) I'm reminded about the discovery of an entirely unacademic (and some would argue irrational, dangerous, or perhaps even stupid) passion:

Rock Climbing.

See, in my home town of Pearland TX, the highest point of elevation is probably the light bar on top of someone's jacked-up pickup truck. Driving down some stretches of road are so flat, I swear you can see your own taillights in front of you. Climbing as a sport is essentially non-existent because of the distinct and critical lack of things to climb. Out in West Texas, there are a few famous bouldering places like Hueco Tanks, but that's 800 miles from Pearland. In short, you don't climb in TX.

Well that's not entirely true, there was a rock gym in Houston that I'd been to a few times with some friends for various excursions, but it wasn't that much different than the sort of thing you'd find at your local YMCA, which is quite a bit different from what actual climbing is like.

Thankfully though, I had just enough exposure at home to find myself not skipping over the climbing PE class one semester here at MIT. It fit into my schedule well, it wasn't too expensive, and it sounded like it would be a lot of fun. (SPOILER: It was).

Fast forward to the end of the PE class, and I'm buying shoes, filling my amazon wishlist with gear, and climbing at the gym every chance I get. I was hooked. I then discovered that we also had an MIT Outdoors Club that had a bunch of climbers that took trips to do some "real" climbing, and I hopped on the first one I could out to Rumney in New Hampshire. Then the second one to Quincy Quarries here in Boston. And then the third, the fourth....etc.

Why exactly I find myself so enamored with climbing is an excellent question, but it doesn't really matter. I am. At least in part because I'm amazed at the mechanical devices and physics that make it possible. It's downright impressive to be able to orient yourself in such a way that you can stand on a dime-edge thick ledge or steady yourself with nothing more than a knuckle in a pocket. I'm so fascinated with it all that I did my undergraduate research project for a class on the effects of knot geometry on the tensile failure strength of static rope. I'm constantly passing rocks or walls thinking about the ways that you could climb them, foot there, hand here, the whole way up.

Which is why when I found myself out in Oregon for the summer, I had one major goal. Climbing out at Smith Rock.

Smith Rock is an absolute mecca for my particular favorite flavor of climbing, which is sport. In sport climbing, routes are bolted and as you climb along, you clip your rope to the bolts so that if you fall the bolt will catch you. Arguably the most famous route at Smith Rock (besides the one on the front of a Clif Bar) is anything that makes you ascend a spire known as Monkey Face.

Aptly Named.

The first time I hiked around and saw it, I knew I had a goal. So this summer, I spent a lot of time training, and gearing up for one last hurrah and I set out to do it. To scale Monkey Face. Here are the photos:

My friend Matt (blue helmet) and I at the base. As it happened, we both have the same shoes and wore white shirts. If only he had worn khaki shorts, we'd look like a team. We discussed a game plan and laid out the gear we'd need. All that was left to do was get climbing. Easy Peasy.

Here I'm nearly finished with the first pitch (I'm the tiny dot near the notch in the mountain.

The route we climbed up monkey face was divided into four pitches. A relatively easy scramble up to the notch. A pretty exhaustingly long, but not terribly difficult pitch up to a cave (visible on the top left here), a difficult overhung traverse out the side, and finally an easy scramble up to the peak.

The top of that first pitch leads to this pleasantly wide (though it doesn't look like it) ledge that makes for a great belay station. It was wide and solid enough that I thought I'd go ahead and take a picture off the top:

Those would be my feet, our rope flaked in front of me, and a long way down. The most bizarre part of climbing big walls is seeing birds flying at eye level or beneath you. I don't think I'll ever get used to it.

Interesting thing about my shoes, they're a good 2 sizes smaller than my street shoes. They're uncomfortably tight, but they're so snug and stiff that I can stand on the smallest of ledges, which understandably helps a lot in climbing.

Of course, you can't hang out here forever, we've got spires to climb! So up I went:

So here I am cleaning our clips (called quickdraws, or just draws) out of the bolts as I make my way up to the cave. It was a long pitch that was complicated by the occasional gust of wind whipping through the notch. But thankfully I made it:

The funny thing about looking at these pictures is that it doesn't seem that high while you're climbing. The whole time you're basically pressed up against the wall inching your way along, so you don't really notice the altitude you're gaining. Well, that's mostly true. At one point along this climb, you have to exit the cave at an acute angle, which means you are forced to look down and realize that you're a few thousand feet in the air. It's aptly named Panic Point.

Here I am moving through the aforementioned panic point, which is definitely the hardest part of the climb. The overhang makes it tiring on your arms, compounded by the fact that you're tired from just having done the long pitch all the way up. Nevertheless it was the high point, struggling through that moment where you know that if you can just get past here it's smooth sailing is nothing short of a rush. From there it was just a short, easy scramble to the top where Matt and I enjoyed the view and had lunch:

Not a bad place to grab a bite if I do say so myself. I highly recommend it. Of course, if the pictures don't do it for you, I also made a slideshow with some video that you can check out here:

My english teacher would be proud of that alliteration.

But I digress, after all I'm not here to wax nostalgic about how happy my former english teacher would be! And how fortunate, because I'm sure the rest of my blogs will have enough run-ons and comma splices to make the Voynich Manuscript look like Shakespeare. No what I'm actually here to talk about, albeit in my characteristically verbose but curiously charming roundabout way, is freshmen advisors.

When you arrive on campus, you don't know anything. (many scholars and religions will argue that you never will, but again, I digress). It may seem like the wealth of reading materials, videos, and of course priceless blog entries have prepared you to dive headlong into the rigors of MIT, but on the other end of it you'll realize you were never ready at all. Perhaps there's a lesson in that.

Thankfully, you do have a wonderful resource available to you in the form of your freshmen advisors. Freshmen advisors are faculty and staff who have agreed to take in a group of wide-eyed new cadets under their wing at the institute and, as their namesake implies, advise them about ways to do things.

Advisors come in many different flavors (but don't lick them. That's weird). From extremely hands-on to more-or-less agreeing to let you do whatever it is you want, there's a style for every student. They're the people you can talk to about what classes you should take, what to major in if you don't know what to major in, how to talk to professors and other intimidating academics, as well as just generally be there to ask how you're doing. 

I certainly can't speak for all of them since I didn't have all of them, but my freshman advisor (Stephen Pepper), was a particularly important figure in my freshman year. I, at the time, thought I had more or less a game plan, and didn't need to have a lot of meetings and talking about what it is I wanted to do. I wanted the controls and I wanted to hit the throttle.

In the off-chance that Stephen finds this entry, I'd like to take the opportunity and publicly say thank you for your patience and politeness in pulling in the reigns more than once. I hope you have a small smirk in remembering the occasions we disagreed and no small satisfaction in knowing that you were right.

And if there's anything I could suggest to incoming students who'll soon be in their first meetings with their advisors, it's to listen and engage them.

In fact, that's good survival skills for MIT in general. The professors and faculty are immensley welcoming and open, but the responsibility is on you to engage them. The moment you don't understand something in lecture, ask. The moment you start to get behind, ask for help. The instant the rest of your life collapses in on you and you find yourself overwhelmed with it, tell someone. More times than I'd care to count, I found myself in tough spots figuring I'd just duck down and power through, and more often than not that made things worse. I hated to say or do anything though because in my mind I'd rather put in the blood sweat and tears to do it myself. But you'll quickly learn MIT isn't meant to be done alone. Psets encourage collaboration. There's no graduating with honors or valedictorians. Professors encourage questions, and most will bend over backwards to accomodate your curiousity. Of course you might be able to do it yourself, but if you do, frankly, you're doing it wrong. 

So don't. After all, there's no "I" in MIT.

...err...wait...

Ahh summer. The fresh air. The copious amounts of free time (HA!). The Temporary Housing Assignments.

Hard to believe that it was years ago I received my temporary housing assignment (Simmons), and since being at school I've lived in many different parts of the housing system (West Campus, East Campus, Off-Campus). And from those experiences I think it's worth saying that for me at least, where you choose to live can be hugely important for your health and happiness, as well as your academic success.

Thankfully the MIT Housing system is designed to give everyone the best chance at being put where they're happiest. Of course no system is perfect and there are no guarantees, but it's flexible enough that most people can end up where they want to be.

It all starts with your temporary housing, which actually means practically nothing. It's mostly just a place to put bodies while all the freshmen go out and experience REX (Residence Exploration). REX is where each of the dorms pulls out all the stops that they can to try and showcase their culture and the people who live there so that the freshman can get the best idea of where they want to live. At the end of REX, you can enter the readjustment lottery, where you can re-rank the dorms you'd like to live in. Maybe REX changed your ideas, maybe they didn't. But the readjustment lottery tries really hard to maximize everyone's preferences through some fancy algorithms and voodoo. I seem to remember that most people get their first or second choice for where they want to live. 

The key to the whole party though, is to pick a place you feel most connected to the people in. I can't stress that enough. A lot of times, I see students getting charmed by beautiful buildings, nice facilities, bigger rooms, more singles etc (myself included). But none of those things matter if you don't like the people you're living with. Thankfully, with such a wide number of Dorms and FSILGs (more on that in a minute) you're bound to find a group of people with whom you connect.

It would be impossible to categorize each dorm concisely and completely, so I'll give you my impressions (that's my blog is for after all right?). Your mileage may vary. Without further adieu, here's my insultingly shallow and biased descriptions of the dorms, each in 144 char. or less! #twitteristakingover :

WEST CAMPUS: Many newer dorms. Same side as the student center. Generally considered more "tame" than East Campus.

–Baker: Largely athletic and "social". Lots of "normal" college kids. Extremely popular choice among freshmen.

–Simmons: New and modern. Unestablished culture and quiet. Lots of nice things, but a bit far from campus and other dorms. Has a Puerto Rican floor.

–McCormick: All women. Former hotel. Don't know much since I'm not a woman, but seems to house many international students.

–Next House: I always confuse Next and New. I don't actually know much I can in conscience say about it. Near the end of dorm row. Everyone I know from Next is Asian, but that's not statistically significant.

–MacGregor: Very tall. Has a convenience store which is, well, convenient. For a long time I thought this was a men's only dorm, but that's not true.

–New House:  Has several "international floors" including a french floor, a spanish floor, and an African-American floor known as Chocolate City.

–Burton-Conner: A curious number of bloggers have lived in Burton-Conner. In my admittedly limited experience, the most "east" of the "west" dorms. Has a jewish floor.

–Maseeh Hall: Brand-Spanking-New. Choice location next to campus. No experiences to speak of, since this will be the first year it's open!

EAST CAMPUS: Older side of campus, with lots of heritage and very unique cultures. 

–East Campus (EC): Truth be told, probably my favorite dorm. Large number of nerds. Lots of Course VI majors. They build a rollercoaster in their courtyard every year, and they're super close to most classrooms you'll frequent.

–Senior House (Haus): Non-house residents shouldn't spell it like "Haus". The oldest dorm on campus. Very accepting of alternative lifestyles. Residents of Senior House seem to have a really strong bond with the place and the other residents. They throw a big party called "Steer Roast" in the spring.

–Random House: Not near the other East Campus dorms, but more or less aligned culturally. Lots of kids who love deeply nerdy things like LARPing and RPGs. (The games, not the weapons). Their isolation relative to campus tends to make them a tight knit bunch. 

??? Campus:

–Bexley: Bexley is crazy. 'Nuff said. Primo-location for campus. 

Of course, your experiences will vary greatly from mine, but the most important thing is that you find a place you like to live. Living near people you like and get along with has, for me, made studying easier, and life better. MIT is hard, and having people you care about and who care about you goes a long way in helping you get through it.

More questions about dorms? Ask away in the comments!

(SIDE NOTE: that was the most difficult and awkward sentence I've typed in a long time. I think the problem stems from not having a good word for "friend of a friend". In the interest of furthering the human language, I propose we adopt exponential notation to denote level of friendship. I.e. A "friend", or "root-level" friend is one that you personally know and like. A "friend^2" would be a friend of a "friend", a "friend^3" would be a friend of a "friend^2", etc. That would make things so much easier, for example:

"I was going to go to that convention with my friend, but a lot of friend^2s and friend^3s were there, so I felt like I wouldn't fit in. Plus I don't have a pair of cat ears to wear."

See? Isn't that so much easier? Not to mention your most special friend, or "friend^0" is "the one". But I digress.)

Anyway, we're talking about school and I mention that I go to MIT and one of the girls asks:

"Do you participate in the annual prank?"

Relative frequency and vocabulary aside, I was a bit impressed that this girl knew about our hacks, because she was in an entirely different social sphere than MIT. The rest of the girls were a bit confused, so I explained to them what hacks were and began sharing a few of my favorite hacks throughout history, incuding the (in)famous police car on the dome, and the Caltech Cannon.

Then this morning, I saw this slideshow of some of the more well-known hacks and figured it'd be worth sharing:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/gallery/100308_mit_hacks/

(SIDE NOTE: If you're a web developer, please please please, don't make slideshows where you have to click to load the next page for a single image. Every time you do, Richard Stallman thinks about doing away with the GPL. Use a gallery.)

Some of my personal favorites that I've seen are the music notes on the dome, the solar-powered T car (STILL more reliable than the red-line, even though for the first day it was broken) and of course, the upside-down-lounge.

I can't wait to see what the hackers will come up with this year!

"MIT is full of amazing people, I don't think I'm all that amazing, how can I fit in?"

It's a question that's been on the forefront of my mind lately, and it's got me thinking about incredible people and what it is in them that makes them incredible. And the surprising conclusion I've come to is:

No one has become great by wanting to be great, greatness is a natural by-product of following your passion.

The people who are most remarkable don't do it for any reason beyond that it's what they love to do, a deep intrinsic call to follow their dreams regardless of whether or not people say it's a good idea, or whether or not it has any practicality. The important thing is to find what you love and do it to the utmost of your ability. Live and breathe it, take it in deep into your person and be the best you can be at it.

Why? Because if you do this, greatness in some sense will naturally follow. Some of you will take in math and science and become great engineers, great entrepreneurs. Or some of you will become great parents, great husbands, mothers, mechanics, etc. if you find what it is you love to do and funnel your energy into relentless pursuit.

So for those of you in high school, wide-eyed and unsure of how to get the most out of your life, theres a simple pseudo-algorithm for you:

if passion == known:
pursue it

else:
try new things

And that's it. If you know what you love, do it non-stop. If you don't, try new things until you find it. You'd be surprised at the number of people who've told me stories about starting college with an idea of what they want to do, taking a new class and being sent off on an entirely new trajectory because they loved it so much.

So that's what I think in a nutshell: try new things until you find something you love, and then do it as much as you can. If you do, you'll be great in some sense, or at the very least happy.

blogging.

As it turns out, this semester was.....well....I learned a lot of "extracurricular lessons". We'll put it like that. But an unintended side effect of the tough semester is that between having my time tied up in school and feeling a little less than confident, I haven't felt like I have any place or inspiration to have anything to say. But ah well, so it goes sometimes.

Thankfully, the semester is over and it's on to bigger and better things! So what exactly am I up to for the summer? Well a little bit of this and that.

During the year, I keep a box full of scraps of paper, hastily labeled "Ideas for Later". And in this box I keep, surprise, ideas for later. The way it typically works is I'll have a random thought or idea pop into my head at the strangest of moments, and quickly jot it down. Then I'll throw it in the box, and whenever I get antsy about working on a new project, I'll "think inside the box" so to speak, and review my ideas.

Well here lately, I've had more and more ideas than I've had time, and when evaluating my options for summer employment, I decided to strike out on my own and dedicate the time to working on some of these projects.

So that's exactly what I'm doing! My friends in Oregon have been generous enough to let me stay with them, and I'm spending my days coding, reading, and sketching out designs for my projects. In the meantime, I'm out enjoying all that Oregon has to offer in the way of climbing, running, biking, and maybe here soon kiteboarding and rafting.

You might be wondering what exactly it is that I'm holed up in my room working on at 4 in the morning, but I'd rather talk about it when it's done so it'll have to remain a mystery for now. But I will say there's nothing that will motivate you to learn something like having an idea about how you can use it.

It's actually one thing I wish there was more of at MIT. I think we could use a little more "manus" in "Mens et Manus". I talk to people all the time who get burned out in classes because it just becomes information, an exercise, a task, and a grade instead of tools for you to use in creating cool things and solving tough problems. It's a bit of a shame really. But that's another post.

So yes, I'm out enjoying the West Coast and all it's splendors trying to turn one or two scraps of paper into something more. Who knows, maybe I'll have something I can keep working on after I graduate, or maybe I'll come across some major challenge I'll need to mull over for a while. At the very least I'm doing what I love, and getting in some of the beautiful outdoors while I'm at it.

As an expert in what he is and is not currently in, I'd be happy to tell you and as I was reflecting late one night about how fast time flies by, and the impression I had of MIT vs now, I remembered with a telling laugh my first introduction to psets, and realized that I don't think anyone's ever talked about them. So! Here we are, and here we go!

Psets are an abbreviation for"Problem Sets", which is the academic way of saying "homework", and the answer to what you'll be doing on a Thursday night. Generally speaking, there aren't many questions on a pset, but you shouldn't think that a lack of questions implies it won't take long to finish. That's what happened my freshman year.

It was my first pset for 18.01 (Calculus 1), a class that I wasn't having trouble with since I'd done really well in BC calc, but decided to take anyway. I picked up my pset and glanced through it quickly, counting problems to estimate how much time it would take.

1.......2...3........4...5?......really? Just 5?......wait wait let me count again, backwards this time.....5....4.........3...2....1. Huh, that seems wrong. Nearly all prime, but the only ones that end in "2" and "5"

This went on for a while.

Eventually I came to grips with the apparent knowledge that my homework, which I had a WEEK to do, only had 5 problems. This was going to be a piece of cake.

So I did what any reasonably intelligent person who feels they have way more time to finish a task then they need does, and I procrastinated. I procrastinated a lot. In fact, it wasn't until the night before it was due, around 6p that I decided "hey maybe I should really knock out that pset". So I emailed some of the new friends I was making and asked if they were working on the pset. They said yup, they were working over in Burton Conner, so I went over to join them.

When I got there, they said they were on problem 4. Silently, I reassured myself and part of me even scoffed at the transient notion that this would take any significant time at all. "They're already on number 4 out of 5" I said to myself. "I'll be out of here in an hour."

As my mental image of myself was busy receiving the Nobel Prize in Mathematics for being so right about how long the weeklong pset was going to take, my friends casually mentioned that they'd been working on the pset every night since it came out.

And they'd only finished 3 problems.

Mild alarm.

To disperse the settling and unpleasant realization that it may have in fact been my professor who knew how long the homework was going to take, and not I the freshman student, I decided to jump in and get started on problem 4, just to prove that it wasn't that hard.

I don't have the original pset anymore, but it was something not unlike this:

Moderate alarm.

"Calm down", I thought. "Maybe that's just a curveball, just a tough one to get you thinking. Lets take a look at another one"

Panic.

All. Of. The. Problems. Were. Hard.

Resigned that I was going to be here a while, I settled in and got cracking. Hours flew by. Page after page of paper fell to the relentless motion of my pencil and the steady drumming of fingertips on a calculator. Most of my friends finished and went to bed around 11 or so, and one other kid, Daniel, and I trudged on through the night.

See, Daniel also needed to complete the entirety of the pset in one night, so we worked together through the night until we finished. And finish we did! At 8:30am. We were exhausted, humbled, but most intriguingly, I was fascinated. I couldn't stop thinking about one of the problems on the pset, mulling over in my mind the moment where the gibberish on the page clicked and I understood the answer. Nothing like that had ever happened before.

To understand, we need to take a step back and look at my homework in high school. Calc consisted of homework every night, to be collected altogether at the end of the week. I'd usually ignore the "every night" part of it and fly through the problems in the 1st period before class, no problem. There were a lot of them, but they were essentially the exact same things we'd seen in class, with different numbers, or trivial extensions thereof.

And that's really where psets here differ from homework you may be used to. They'll really force you to have a deeper understanding of what it is you're talking about, and if you're the curious type, you'll really enjoy the questions that spring up as you work through some difficult stuff. I never quite get over that initial shock of reading a problem and seeing something that seems way beyond anything I've ever seen before. I've gotten better about breaking it down and figuring out the pieces though, and that's a really useful skill. For all the whining and complaining and caffeine sales on a Thursday night, psets do a pretty good job of teaching you the material.

Aside from learning (which, believe it or not, is not your entire existence at MIT), psets tend to be prevalent social events, especially among freshman. That guy I worked with all night on our first pset? He's now my roommate, and he's been so for my entire undergraduate career. In fact, now that I think about it, nearly all my closest friends I've met through psetting. Huh.

So to wrap it up, don't wait until the last night to do your pset (though you probably will, nearly everyone does), and be prepared to do less but much much harder (and interesting problems).

(seriously, there's so much food for you guys. It's ridiculous.)

All the dorms will be pulling out the stops to show off their unique cultures, get to know you, and help you get a preliminary idea of where you might be happy. (There's a very important event for students who accept admission called REX that's dedicated to figuring out where to live, so don't worry TOO much about it. CPW is about whether or not you like MIT.)

You'd be amazed by the number of student groups we have too. Everything from rock climbing to Shakespearean theatre has a group, and many will be there to talk to you about what they do, and convince you to join up should you join us here at the 'tvte. There are some really interesting groups too, including the MIT Science Fiction Society which has the worlds largest open shelf collection of science fiction! They have over 90% of ALL SCI-FI PUBLISHED IN ENGLISH! Which is a pretty remarkable nerd collection that you can peruse whenever they're open.

There's also MITERS , which stands for "The MIT Electronics Research Society", though to be honest that name is a bit of a legacy title. In reality, we're a student run hackerspace that draws a diverse and talented group of individuals who use the space to work on any number of projects. Ever wanted to build a robotic panini press that only works when you play a Bb on a keyboard? Come to MITERS. Want to browse an extensive gallery of various electronic detritus we've acquired over the years? Come to MITERS. Want to see the other insane projects members have built, including a musical Tesla coil, homemade analog segways, 3D printers, electric go carts, Wiis-stuffed-into-laptops, and more? You guessed it, come to MITERS. It's a really incredible atmosphere to immerse yourself in, where engineering is the art by which people express themselves; building cool things for the sake of them being cool and not necessarily for any practical or academic reason. It's one of the few shops where you can be a little more relaxed and listen to music, snack on a sandwich, or just hangout with your friends.

Besides checking out the cool organizations, there are a number of great events to go to. I think everyone should go to one of the many dance parties hosted around campus, if only because it's a unique environment to go to for a lot of people. There's also Senior House's infmaous bouncy ball drop, the EC liquid nitrogen ice cream party, Meet the Bloggers (come revel in my depthless wit in real life!), and who knows what else. It's seriously like someone just dumped a bag-of-holding worth of awesome on campus just for you guys.

But with so much stuff, there are two primary concerns I get from students:

0) How can I do all of this? There's literally nonstop events 24 hours a day for the entirety of CPW?!
1) Is this really what life is like?

My non-institute-sanctioned opinion on 0) is to go out and do as much of the fun social things as you can (even if you have to do the MIT thing and sleep a little less). You're probably already convinced that MIT has a stellar academic program. (If you're not, ***SPOILER**** we do.) Now if something like computational methods for abstracting biological nanospheres (which I'm almost sure I just made up) is critical to your undergraduate experience, by all means poke around at the academic lectures. But in my opinion, one of the greatest assets at MIT is the people, and CPW is a great chance to already start to forge some friendships with people who truly, deeply, GET you and your love of math puns or your compulsive need for proper punctuation (you guys are probably, twitching: while read this]. There's this common thread that resonantes in everyone that you just don't find anywhere else, and I think it's a fantastic time to exploit that. Talk to students and prefrosh, ask them what they think about MIT. Or Lady Gaga. Whatever, just enjoy being here with such a high concentration of intelligent and interesting people like yourself.

Now about 1). Here's the thing. CPW is not MIT everyday. But everything you see at CPW is representative of things that happen throughout the year. There really parties like the ones you can go to, and people really do wild things like liquid nitrogen ice cream. But we also do muggle things too, like study for exams and work on psets. But those aren't necessarily the things that make MIT special, so CPW focuses on the things that do. And with so many fun, unique things to try and cover in 4 days, you wind up with the concentrated and caffeinated variety show that is CPW. (Besides, I'd like to see the matriculation rate after a CPW modeled on 4 days during finals week......yeeeeesh....)

So get excited for CPW, take pictures, go out and meet people, enjoy the party, and say hi to me if you see me. Actually, maybe that's too generic. Maybe you should say something that lets me you read the blogs, something creative and otherwise puzzling.....how about "Vulcans never bluff!"? I'm almost positive I won't hear that unless it's coming from one of you guys.

Remember, this weekend is for you. You've done some working hard, now get ready to play hard. So say we all!

This is no ordinary changing of the guard though, as Eric Grimson is no ordinary faculty member. He loves MIT, which is no small thing to say considering he knows what it's like to be a student here (he got his PhD in Mathematics here in 1980, and presumably hasn't left his lab and doesn't know what year it is.)

More than just being around here though, he has served on numerous committees and won countless awards for his excellence in teaching. I'd be tempted to say I'm a bit biased, as he was my 6.01 professor, but the nearly unanimous excitement around campus leads me to dismiss such temptation.

The thing is, as you might infer from the awards and excitement, Prof. Grimson is a wonderful guy. He's incredibly fair and reasonable, and he genuinely cares about his students and the culture at MIT. When I was taking 6.01, there was one day where I was hosed beyond belief and slept through my lab section. This was a fairly substantial crisis as a project was due to be turned in that day, as well as the lab work itself which was a non-trivial part of my grade. I sent Prof. Grimson an email explaining how my body wasn't listening when I told it we had to wake up for class, and asked if there was a way I could make up the lab section. I didn't have much hope for my cause, as it was explicitly stated in class that attendance in your lab section was mandatory with no excuses, but I had to try.

To my nigh-infinite gratitude, Prof. Grimson sent me back an email saying he understood and would allow me to attend the Friday lab. This meant he personally had to open the class archives, remove me from my original lab section, and add me to the Friday section just for the day. After that, he had to move me back to my original section.

That's a lot of hassle for one student, and it would've been much easier for him to say "Sorry Charlie", but hassle he suffered for my sleep deprived butt that week.

Those of you who choose to come here in the future are truly lucky to have Grimson as your chancellor, and I, like everyone else, am excited that he'll be mine while I'm here. With all the praise, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that there have even been some Grimson-related fan art submissions, like this gem:

or this, more MIT-ish form of art:

yeah, I'd say any man who can get hackers to pull a hack for him is a man worthy of MIT's respect.

"Moon milk!"

You see, it was my first time caving (what? What did YOU think was going on?) and I was completely enamored with the thrill of it all. When I strapped on my helmet and pads, in my mind I had the entrance pictured as something you'd just waltz into, and the rest of the cave would be a bit like any other moderately difficult hike –– just underground.

Instead, I was met with this as the entrance:

As you can see, there's not to fit through there, and it's a bit.....steep.

The nice part though was that though it was about 10F degrees outside, it warmed up to a comparatively balmy 40F inside the cave. (Turns out caves maintain a near constant temperature throughout the year. It's one of those things that makes perfect sense once you think about it, but I'd just never thought about it before.)

I immediately gained a new appreciation for why we all wore helmets and knee pads.

After a few tight squeezes, it opened up into a large room that you could stand upright in, appropriately called "The Big Room" (though given the size of other passages in the cave, that's not exactly a difficult title to win....).

I actually don't have too many photos from the trip, because the majority of our time was spent crawling on my face through cracks, or over the top of chasms that you could look into and see the glint of lost headlamps, pads, and water bottles.

One tight passage in particular put me squeezing through a crack that ran along the floor on my left side, not unlike trying to swim the sidestroke on land. My friends asked me how I was doing:

The passage was so narrow that I had to take off my helmet and push it in front of me. It felt like a good thing to take a picture of, so I did my best:

And if you're curious how much of this squeeze I had left in front of me:

Needless to say, caving gets you sore in weird places.

As we were wrapping things up though, one of the last rooms we went through had a bit of water in it. And when I mean a bit, I really mean we were wading through it, and ducking under arches trying to keep as much as dry as possible.

Almost immediately after emerging from the water, we saw signs that we were nearing the end of the line:

Which meant that once we emerged, soaking wet, we would emerge into back into the icy cold outside. The trip leader advised us to untie any knots, undo any zippers, and try to run back to the car as quickly as possible. Once there, we'd shed our wet clothes as quickly as possible, throw on some dry ones, jump into the car and crank the heat.

Easier said then done.

I was mentally prepared for it, and I unfastened anything that was in danger of freezing shut, but it's the most bizarre feeling to be running in clothes that are freezing solid while you're wearing them. They just get stiffer and stiffer. By the time we got to the car, I was pretty cold, and I could definitely feel it in my hands (or not, as the case was). I managed to get my boots and socks off, but I forgot to take my watch off, so when I tried to take my wet thermal top off, my arm got stuck in the sleeve. And then the combination of my rapidly declining dexterity and the equally rapidly increasing stiffness of what I used to know as my sleeve meant it wasn't coming off. So I just took it as a sunk cost and figured I'd work something out.

Once inside the car feeling the burning ache of feeling return to my hands and feet, we were ready to bag up our clothes and head out. I jumped out to put my clothes in a bag, and to my surprise they were completely frozen solid. Rock hard. My boot laces looked like uncooked spaghetti. Being from the good ol' state of Texas I was in complete awe that something could freeze that fast. Incredible.

What's even more incredible though is that there are a group of people at MIT who do this sort of thing all the time (maybe it's that caves are dark and MIT students are largely nocturnal?). The MIT Caving Club will gladly take anyone with an interest in shucking off all evolutionary progress back into the caves. It's just one of the rich multitude of student groups and activities you can participate in while you're here at the 'tvte.

As I walked her around the myriad of different labs that serve host to mechanical wonders in various states of disarray, blabbing incessantly about how cool and entertaining everything was I remember her looking me dead in the eye and saying "What do you do for fun around here?"

It caught me off guard. To me, this was fun. I get to spend every waking hour (which I've traded a few sleeping hours for at market price) surrounded by gadgets and gizmos soldered and smoking around me. I love that. I love that I can spend 16 hours straight in the shop soldering my PCB boards* and carrying on a conversation with my friends who are desperately trying not to kill themselves while trying to build something that is both impressive and a valid psychological analysis.

One of these friends recently completed an analog controlled segway knockoff called "Segfault" and made a video of it. I think it's a pretty good peak into the sorts of things a few of us think are fun, and you'll probably find no better video clip to summarize life at MIT than the segway jousting at the end.

*This is belongs to a class of acronymically redudant phrases (or ARP phrases as I like to call them) that bug me. Other such examples include PIN number, and ATM machine. But if you want to be a functioning member of society you have to speak like them. *grumble grumble*

"Beards?" you say. Yes, beards. See, November is also home to a hallowed tradition known as the Novembeard ("No Shave November" in some regions, or "Beardvember"). The rule are simple. Don't shave, and try and grow the heartiest, manliest beard you can in the span of one month.

Leonidas is the patron saint of Beardvember

This is easier said than done, even though you have no control over it. See, some guys just can't grow a beard. The best you can squeeze out is a patchy tuft of fuzz on your lips and cheeks. Or worse – the dreaded neckbeard.

And for something entirely automatic, growing a beard is actually quite tough. To illustrate the self-discipline and emotional turmoil involved, I've (unsurprisingly) prepared a graph.

WEEK ONE:
As you can see, going into week one, you immediately question your decision as every day you look in the mirror and look like a slob. Your beard growth very well could be accidental; the result of a few long nights on campus spent tooling. By the end of the week though, it's clear that this is an intentional decision, and you enter the "Statham Stubble" region. Life is good, and you feel like doing all sorts of manly things like fixing motorcycles and blowing things up. "No problem, I've got this" you think. Words which you will regret in week two.

WEEK TWO
Around week two is when your beard decides it hates your face, and in an attempt to break free from your jaw it itches unbelievably bad. Nothing helps. It's a battle of determination to see whose will is strongest. You've got to break it like a wild stallion made of hair.

WEEK THREE
After about a week, it stops itching so much but you're faced with another problem. You're in the in-between zone of beard length and the beard has a bad tendency to stick out, making it look prickly and gross. a few days longer though and you've reached beard-vana. You've got a handsome patch of manliness that you can be proud of. It's a trophy and a sign of your commitment and masculinity.

WEEK FOUR
And that's when beard-induced delusion sets in. Your beard has grown on you (hurr hurr hurr), and the two of you are inseparable (ok I'll stop). You begin to think "Maybe I'll keep it, maybe I'll be one of those beard guys." This is the last half week or so of November, and you justify it to yourself any way you can. "It'll keep my face warm" you say. "You know not everyone can grow one" you say. "What if I have a beard tan line?". At the end of the week though, the strong persevere in the knowledge of what the Novembeard was: a fleeting experience, a journey cut too short, it's tragedy is it's beauty; and in the hum of the razor approaching your face, you see all of the things that the beard could've let you be:

A contestant on Survivor

A professor

A thug

A lumberjack.

But it just wasn't meant to be, and as you shear your face, watching the hair drift down like ash in the fallout, you catch a glimpse of something long forgotten: your cheeks. Your skin rises from the ashes of your beard's death like a glorious phoenix, and races up to greet your eager fingers. Smooth as a freshly shaved face, your mind races at the implications: "No more food stuck on my face! No more tickling my lips as I talk!"

"No more beard!"

Then, so brief as to be almost imperceptible, a moment of sadness. Resolute you nod in acceptance and pay your respects to all that the beard has given you. A moment of reflection shows just how much you've grown in your brief time together.

That is, until next year....

Maybe that's why I've been feeling run so ragged lately. And if not, well that's what I'm going to blame it on. At any rate, the past few weeks I've felt pretty beat up. My brain feels like goo. I'm hungry either constantly or frighteningly never. I've been up in long enough streaks to feel my immune system start throwing it's hands up and shut down. My biological clock is underdamped with a stupidly high Q.

Looks like it will converge to midnight in approximately June 2012.....hey! That's when I graduate!

I've been, in a word, miserable. This sort of misery is prevalent enough on campus to have it's own name though. It's called being "hosed", I assume because it makes you feel like someone has shredded you into fibers, woven you into a long tube and rolled you up around a cylinder, not unlike a garden hose. It really is a mental stress test. It feels insurmountable, it feels devastating; it's a panic-inducing, sickening, almost surreal disbelief at the quantity of quality you have to produce in a given time. In fact, I've summarized the quality of being hosed into a concise mathematical formula:

"The quality of being Hosed, "H" is the summation of "k" assignments, where each assignment has associated with it a quantity of problems "q", quality of work "b", divided by unit time and multiplied over the care-tensor, where how much you care (gamma) is given principally as academically(aa), career-wise(cc), and personally(pp). Being hosed has units of Mills."

Needless to say, with lots of assignments in important classes with lots of hard questions (seriously, who puts "m" parts in a problem? I'm looking at you 2.005....) and not much time to do it I'm pretty hosed (I leave exactly how hosed as an exercise to the reader). I'm struggling to keep my brain from blowing a fuse and my roommates waking up to find me on the roof trying to eat cheerios out of a spoon using a bowl. It's an unpleasant way to feel right now, but I know in the end it's worth it.

We're entering the time of year where you really have resolve pull your laces tight, power through, and remember that your tuition is already paid and nonrefundable.

Here at MIT, you'll find that both entries are equally applicable. In fact in studying here, no matter what major you choose I can almost guarantee one thing:

Now before you start letting sweat bead upon your brow and frantically asking yourself what you've gotten yourself into, let me assure you of another truth:

You see, in the many conversations I've had with people from the MIT community, nearly everyone has the same first set of thoughts about coming here. Following CPW, you're positively electric with the thought of classes and schoolwork. You think you'll come here and quadruple-major, put your nose to grindstone, and crank out a few A's. You're on top of the world! You've proven yourself worthy of attending one of the most challenging and respected universities in the world. You're an elite. You can't help but pat yourself on the back a little–-and you absolutely should! Getting into MIT is indeed an accomplishment worth being proud of, but that's where step one comes in.

Before moving on I think it's important to identify roughly two types of people here. There are those who are brilliantly self-discipllined, and there are those who are billiantly talented. Of course that's a generalization but let's only pay attention to the dominant traits.

For students who are brilliantly talented, the very asset that got you in will be the biggest and most important change while you're here. You're used to being right, being able to just switch your brain on for a few minutes and crank out the answer before returning it to idle, listlessly day dream about the future or work through some crazy hypothetical situation and shunt your work until the next time you have to kick your brain on for some project (usually just before it's due) and literally sprint through the work to finish with flying colors.

Sound familiar? It does to me, because that's how I was in high school. I procrastinated like you wouldn't believe, I'd do a weeks worth of BC calc homework less than an hour before turning it in and make better marks than my classmates who diligently plugged away at it every night. I'd write essays in marathon non-stop sessions starting with my thesis and not pausing until I'd filled 8 pages with my thoughts. I wouldn't even reread or edit my papers, just turn them in and make A's. I'd stand before a class and wing a 20 minute presentation with no problems. I wasn't lazy, and it's not that I didn't care, but I just never had to work that hard. I was getting results I was happy with, and working harder for the sake of it seemed stupid (and I still agree it is).

But for those of you rolling your eyes and thinking right now I'm some self-absorbed egotist, here comes the crushing and perhaps a sweet sweet feeling of schadenfreude.

Two years here have all but ripped my weak academic workflow to pieces. It's a tough blow to absorb to not be able to pull off the kinds of academic feats you're used to. Working full-tilt in brief but insanely focused spurts becomes so common that it becomes taxing. And that's when you start falling apart. You end up exhausted and defeated in a lot of ways. My grades in a lot of classes weren't what I wanted, and by the end of it I didn't feel very fulfilled.

But the good news is, like I said before, all this destruction is a good thing. Or more accurately, it can be a good thing. It gives you a chance to build something that's better than what used to be there before (which in my case wasn't hard). It gives you a chance to finally get those time-management skills you haven't needed up until now. And while keeping your ego in check, you become a lot better at planning and working in teams. You gradually start edging closer to the performance you're accustomed to and expect from yourself. That feeling, that feeling of growth is a new one. And it's a thrilling one. I'm still putting on the polish, but I'm very excited to have a system that's working for me now and impressing myself with the things I can do as a result. It may be a work in progress, but my academic career is leagues better now than it used to be.

So when you get here in the fall, don't freak out about freaking out. It's supposed to happen, and that's why there are so many abundant resources at your disposal. Advisors, Office Hours, tutors, upperclassmen, and TONS more tools are waiting to help you remove the weak elements in your life (CAUTION: There may be a lot of them). You should strive to be a completely different person once you get out of MIT, because otherwise what's the point? Make huge mistakes, be bold, be honest, let your ego shatter, get crushed and rebuild yourself into something better than before. Don't be afraid to make huge and sweeping changes to try and find better ways to do things. Smash everything and start over.

You'll do it again and again, at times where you think "ok, this it the last time FOR SURE", but after a while you'll find that all that smashing has left you rather smashing as well. : )

To start things off, I'm working in the new Media Lab building this summer, building an all-electric car designed to completely pwn all existing and soon-to-be existing electric cars as far as interurban transportation is concerned. The group is called the SmartCities group, and our car, the CityCar has received a lot of press over the years from the LabCAST podcast, a few museum exhibitions, news coverage etc. The project has been around since 2003 and the overall design has more or less been totally refined. Now it's a matter of actually building and tweaking components to get everything to work like it does in the drawings. And you know, try not to make it cost a bajillion dollars.

My stake in the whole thing is general mechanical design, specifically as it pertains to our adorable half-scale prototype. Right now I'm working on redesigning the wrist joints that allow it to turn in place, and then we'll be doing a complete design overhaul to pull out together all the hacked-solutions into one more refined package. It's a great job for me, as it's goal-oriented and less "how many hours are you in the office" based, so I can work from 0200-1600 one day, or 0900-1700 the next.

So if work is so much fun, what can I possibly do when I'm not working? The answer is all the stuff I wish I had time to do during the school year! (I'm getting much much better at time management, but that's deserves it's own entry). As of July 1st, I'm currently competing in a high-stakes race through classics of literature available through the Gutenberg press with my friend Michelle. Ok maybe "high-stakes" is a bit of an exaggeration, but it's a ton of fun, and I get to read all the books I've always heard good things about. Our current list is:

-Treasure Island
-War of the Worlds
-The Time Machine
-Jane Eyre
-The Last of the Mohicans
-The Count of Monte Cristo
-Phantom of the Opera
-Flatland
-A Tale of Two Cities
-The Game
-The Call of the Wild

I also went on a rock climbing trip with the MIT Outdoors Club to Rumney in New Hampshire. The MIT Outdoors Club (or MITOC for short) has a ton of outdoors equipment for doing practically anything you could want to do outside. Ice-climbing, kayaking, hiking, backpacking, skiing––basically, if modern civilization has tried hard to eliminate your need to do it, we can fuel your regression. The club even has two surprisingly nice cabins in New Hampshire available for rental. And the prices are incredibly cheap. All the gear you could want for a weekend trip could be rented for much less than $30.

The other club I'm involved with is MITERS, or the MIT Electronic Research Society. The name is a bit of a misnomer since we do far more than just research electronics. When I came to MIT, I had fanciful dreams of building crazy hair-brained contraptions that were as much for entertainment as they were for practicality. MITERS is the birthplace of those inventions. My friend Charles transformed a shopping kart into a go-cart that was featured in Popular Science. Lots of MITERS alumni have gone on to do some cool things related to the advancing the DIY-hacker-culture. MAKE magazine? MITERS alums. Instructables? MITERS alums. Squid Labs? MITERS alums. Our mailing list is filled with a ton of people with a collective library of valuable experience and expertise in building anything you could imagine. There's been microwave-transformer welders, electric rollerblades, pocket-sized braille making machines, cotton-candy guns, just to name a few. The space has tons of resources for tinkering, including oscilloscopes, lathes, drill presses, soldering irons, etc. And once you attain the illustrious rank of keyholder, you too can spend your whole weekend there!

So as it turns out, MIT is not just a great place to be during the school year (gotta remind myself of that during finals week), but also a pretty great place to be during the summer. Even if it is a bit like a circus around here.

If there's one passion I'm glad I've been afforded the opportunity to develop at MIT, it's Munchkin traveling. Something about clearing security (no small feat, especially for an MIT student), settling onto the plan and watching the ground fall off beneath the plane is exhilarating to me. It makes me feel free and independent and refreshed, even though I always get (un)lucky enough to have an infant within a 3 foot radius who's extremely unhappy to be sitting so close to me. I even love it when things go terribly wrong and I wind up staying overnight in a terminal, or sleeping in the trunk of my car trapped on the road in 8 degree weather because there's 4 inches of solid ice covering the road and everything around it. It's the lack of humdrum "know-what's-gonna-happen" that keeps it interesting. Traveling always feels like an adventure to me, and if there's one thing I love more than science and engineering, it's Munchkin adventure. And this year has been crammed full like my carry-on.

In fact, I just returned from a trip that hopscotched the US, including Oregon, California, and Texas along the way. It's pretty easy to convince me to go somewhere, and in fact it all started when my friend Michelle said "you should come to Oregon". After practically no deliberation, I booked my tickets and flew out of Boston hot on the heels of a long, terrible night of pseudopacking. Packing is in fact the exact opposite of traveling. When you travel, you move around and enjoy the simple things you have. When you pack, you stay where you are and hate all the excess stuff you've got.

Anyway, not long after finishing my last final, I was landing in Portland and being greeted by my good friends/family (framily?) who let me live in their house while I'm there and put up with my intense but baffling love of complicated technology and the rugged outdoors. My friend Michelle put together an entire comprehensive schedule of activities. She loves scheduling. I seriously think the schedules when to schedule, a recursive paradox that somehow she escapes. It wasn't long before we loaded up her station wagon with camp gear and two more friends and set out for the great outdoors! Upon arrival, we threw our campsite together and got to work on our first camp dinner: pizza.

You heard me right, we cooked a pizza on a campfire. And guess what? It was delicious. We wrapped it in foil and put it on the grill and waited for what looked like a giant space-burger to cook long enough for us to feel reasonably safe eating it. Sure it took way way longer than the packaging said, but you know what? I didn't see anyone else out there eating pizza. Though to be fair, I didn't see anyone else out there, but that's not the point.

The next morning I woke up, went running, and struggled to build a fire for breakfast with very wet wood and little tinder. Since we didn't have an axe, I wound up using some rocks to bang on the bigger logs like a chimp in a lab until I made a crack large enough for me to squeeze my hands into and split a log with my bare hands. I instantly grew a beard afterward. Unfortunately, Michelle was less impressed with me than I was (always the case) because the result of breakfast taking so long meant that we were running behind schedule for the days activities. Now considering we were booked to visit a big cat wildlife park and the redwood forest, you can see why you wouldn't want to be late, but we managed to rearrange our itinerary and do everything we planned.

Now I have to confess, when we stopped at "Great Cats World Park" and saw a few habitats with some large cats, I thought it was one of those highway robbery places you see on billboards like 'Idaho's Largest Potato" or "The Creature That DEFIES Explanation!" But our guide came out and explained to us that the company ran a business for photographers and filmmakers taking the cats out to their natural locations and taking pictures or videos without them being quite as dangerous. That made it make so much more sense, and I really enjoyed seeing all the different and rare cats the park was able to show us.

After a non-trivial amount of time in the gift shop, we headed further south for the Redwood forest just over the California border. As far as the outdoors go, I'm hands down a "mountains-and-forest" kind of guy, but the giant sequoias make a compelling case for themselves. You can look at pictures, but you simply cannot truly appreciate the sheer mass of these trees unless you see them for yourself. It's an absolutely unreal experience walking around trees older than the country and thicker than cars. Feels a bit like the set of Avatar, if it had a set, that is.

Once we returned to camp and bought some cheap, dry firewood, we ran into a small situation. Or a few thousand. Falling from the sky.

Actually, I should take a moment to clarify that camping means different things to different people. To me, the rougher, the better and the rain only made the experience that much greater. Others in our party were less fond of it, and I'm pretty sure thought I was irritatingly crazy for not wanting to pack up and leave. We roughed it out though. Unfortunately a few sleeping bags didn't weather the weather in the driest of ways, and an unfortunate soul in one of those bags had plenty of time to rethink whether or not they really meant "the rougher the better" when they said it, because there wasn't much sleeping going on. I'm still baffled by how a fairly small puddle can suck all the heat out of your body, but maybe that's a question Thermal Fluids (2.005) can answer in the fall.

Dawn showed up eventually and no one was dead, which in my mind constitutes a good day, so we packed up our things and left for the beach.

Wow, that's quite an entry I've got going on, so I think I'll stop here for now and continue in another entry. Now if you'll excuse me I've got a plane to catch headed for DC this weekend! Tune in next week!

These last few weeks have been so incredibly awesome that it's been impossible to try and capture it all in a blog. Never fear though, I'll figure out the best way to talk about icelandic volcanoes, Switzerland, Germany, the future of cars, and Bill Gates at once, even if it means I just have to draw some pictures to factor out a few thousand words.

But of all the people I polled about CPW, the one event they said meant more than anything to them was Battle of the Bands.* For an hour and a half one night you'll see MIT kids like you never knew them before! Some of the most talented musicians on campus lay down their calculators, their voltmeters, and their soldering irons to strum their guitars; beat on their drums, and whatever the heck you do with a theremin to raise the potential difference from the stage to you to just nigh the electric breakdown of air! (for concerned parents, I can pretty much guarantee you there will be no lightning sparks involved in the playing of music, though it's totally possible)

We'll be cranking the amps to 11 (plus or minus some /epsilon) and throwing together 7 all-MIT bands to answer the question that's been plaguing the ages: Will it Blend? Who is the greatest?

Technicolor, The Guitar Knives, The Shallow Romantics, Supa Dupa, Circle of Lewis, Castle Bravo, and Crossroads meet in the proverbial octagon on the second floor of the student center to battle it out for a shot at glory!

So how much would you be willing pay for such an event? A quick check on ticketmaster shows Lady Gaga tickets at TD Banknorth cost at least $200, but for you dear prefrosh it's only $3! That's 23 pico-percent of our GDP! And we've got kids just as weird as Lady Gaga, but much better at math. However, just in case you're the super self-aware type concerned about how your enjoyment of Battle of the Bands isn't doing much for charity–it is! Half of the proceeds from the event will go to Camp Kesem, a student-run camp for children whose parents have or have had cancer. So enjoy it, for the children. Plus your admission to the event lets you grab the LMC's CD for only $5!

"But Chris" you say, "who's going to determine the winner? Who has an ear fine-tuned enough? Who is awesome enough? Who is brave enough? Who is free-on-a-saturday-night-from-7:30-9:00 enough?"

Well dear prefrosh, it is I! Yes I will be sitting on the panel of three judges along with Chris Peterson from the Admissions Office and a super secret MyStErY judge! (you can tell it's mysterious because every other letter is capitalized).

Plus, I heard a certain Tim Beaver is planning on being there to get his rock on. He's been known to get a little crazy.

See you there!

-----------
For more information you can check out the website at http://lmc.mit.edu/battle.

Battle of the Bands is put on by the MIT Live Music Connection ( http://lmc.mit.edu) in conjunction with Beta Theta Pi (really cool guys), Burton-Conner, and Camp Kesem.

*I didn't poll anyone about CPW and I made up what they said. But they would've said it if I'd asked. Totally.

Anyway, we noticed that it was difficult to indicate the intensity without relying on "really"**n, a problem only exacerbated by sleep deprivation. So we decided to take the ambiguity out of it. How?

S.I. prefixes.

So if you're kinda excited about something, you can go ahead and say you're kilo-excited. Exam tomorrow that you haven't studied for? Femto-cool. You could even apply it to those tricky end-of-relationship conversations: "It's not that I don't care, it's just that we care on different orders of magnitude. You're like an exa, and I'm at a centi."

What's more, you can apply it to the magnitude of abstraction you take in a subject to indicate your level of understanding. For example, I'd say I have a pretty nano-understanding of mechanical engineering, meaning there's little abstraction. Meanwhile, biology hovers around the Tera-level, because I'm totally satisfied to believe the human body runs on magic.

Try it out, it's great fun with your geek friends! Speaking of geek friends, you're bound to make many many more come CPW next week! Up your excitement a few powers of 10. : )

"Don't Panic"

(and remember your towel)

You see, MIT is a great many wonderful things, and it's the place I love being at the most (a good thing since I spend most of my waking hours here – most of my sleeping is done when I'm on vacation =] ). It is not however the end-all deciding factor of whether or not you'll be happy for the rest of your life though. Somehow I missed that when I was applying so I hope you guys don't. D-day is a day of extremes, lots of people will be ecstatic to get their decision; many more will be disappointed.

If you don't get it, don't sweat it. Really. The admissions office is a well-greased machine that is incredibly efficient at figuring out who's gonna be happy to be here or not. Their job is in some ways to look out for you. There's a certain relationship the two of you have: Admissions knows MIT very well, but you not so much. You know yourself pretty well (at least I hope you do -- you live with you!), but you don't really know how MIT is. You might think to yourself "oh but I know so much about MIT!" and that might be true, but you don't know about being at MIT. And that's what Admissions knows about.

MIT is hard. Almost anyone knows that, but the way it's hard is a bit more transient. It's tough now even to explain, but I distinctly remember my first week real week here I thought, "I get it, I know why people wouldn't want to come here." It's not for everyone.

So in short, if you don't get in, don't worry. It doesn't mean you're not destined to do great things, nor that you're forced to be unhappy at some other college because you're not good enough. On the contrary, if you don't get in it's a good indication that this probably wasn't the best choice for you.

From here on out, changes in your life are dramatic and fast. It doesn't seem like two years ago that I was driving home from the bank thinking about what the computer screen would tell me I'd do for the next four years of my life. Before you know it, it will be you guys who'll be amazed by how far away just two years ago seems (and I'll be graduating--EEP!). But no matter where you end up going to school, take it by the horns. Carve out a niche for yourself, join clubs, talk to professors, explore and think. Those are the qualities that will make your life as an intellectual enjoyable no matter where you go, and those are the qualities you already have– just don't forget about them. MIT is a tool you can use for your education, but there many others that can do the job as well. You're in charge though; it's your life. Make something of it.

(also feel free to read what I wrote before decisions last year: http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/misc/miscellaneous/about_tomorrow.shtml)

Good luck, so say we all!