At the start of May, the end of my undergraduate career couldn’t have come fast enough. The last two weeks of term were spent in a pressure cooker, as presentation followed project, and project followed paper. But the moment did eventually come; at precisely 3:23pm on Thursday, May 12, my work at MIT was done. Like many other seniors, I had no final exams – or any obligations – in the three weeks until commencement.

Unfortunately, those were three weeks for my jubilation to dissipate. The weather was markedly poor during the third week in May as the temperature struggled to surpass 60F and the sky remained dark and sunless. But, I still managed to find time to relax in the vacuum, as I caught up on sleep, enjoyed an end-of-semester dinner with The Tech, and celebrated a friend’s birthday. Every once in awhile, I’d step off campus, but I ultimately ended up returning as I hung out with people who I distracted from their exam preparations.

Toward the end of that week, I returned home to Maryland with two friends, for whom I played tour guide of the nation’s capital. I had known each of them for a year, but I had gotten to know them better during that one week at home than during the previous thirty at school. It was truly amazing the friendships that could be fostered when aimless discussions aren’t interrupted by guilt and exhaustion brought upon by work. Neither of my two friends was graduating with me, so I quickly foresaw how this strengthening bond would result in misery.

Nevertheless, with one week remaining before commencement, I spent almost my entire time back at MIT hanging out with friends, including the aforementioned two, in MacGregor, which is where a large portion of students staying over the summer are housed. I put off clearing up my room and selling off my unwanted textbooks until the last minute, as I continued to wallow in what seemed to be my final moments with my friends. I saw how peaceful and beautiful the campus could be during the long, warm summer days. I realized just how impressive the buildings could be when I didn’t have to drag myself out of bed to them to attend lectures.

Indeed, as I saw all the friends and families of graduates lining Massachusetts Avenue and Memorial Drive while the Class of 2011 walked into Killian Court on June 3, I realized – perhaps too late – I was going to miss this place.

That isn’t, of course, to say I don’t have great things to look forward to. This September, I’ll be beginning a Masters of Science program in structural engineering at Stanford; I expect to complete the degree program, and head into the “real world”, by March 2013. Prior to that, I’ll be spending my fourth consecutive summer abroad, this time studying Arabic in Amman, Jordan, as part of the Critical Language Scholarship program. And, as if to compliment the beginning of my summer, after the program, I expect to go to Turkey to visit one of the two friends who came to my home last month.

Unfortunately, though, that was the last thing on my mind Sunday night. The previous three weeks had drowned my ambitions with the memories I was leaving behind. I couldn’t help but think I was journeying into the abyss, with cultures, people, and places unfamiliar. This was especially surprising, as I felt my travels had made me immune to this discomfort. But perhaps, as before, I could take solace in the old adage, “Ships are safe in harbor... but that’s not what ships are made for.”

So, as before, I’m on my way. Full steam ahead.

I made my way from North Station to Kenmore Square around 11:20 am; thanks to the number of spectators heading that direction on the T, it took 45 minutes to go (compared to the usual twenty minutes). Despite the extremely packed state on the trains, Kenmore Square is a nice place to watch the marathon because there’s so much space and it’s not actually packed there.

One of our fraternities, Phi Sig, hosts a Marathon Day party every year at their house, which is located along the marathon route on Commonwealth Avenue. They were doling on hot dogs, hamburgers, and chicken burgers to the mostly MIT crowd there, although it was quite clear they couldn’t make the food fast enough to keep up with the demand. Thanks to sponsorship, they were also handing out free energy drinks.

They also had a dunk tank, which was only in intermittent use – i.e. when one of the Phi Sig brothers (or friends of Phi Sig brothers) was willing to take a dunk.

Oh, yeah, but the marathon. See, it’s very exciting. I got a rather precarious shot from above the action on this segment of Commonwealth. And I’m reminded again how nice Kenmore and the Back Bay are.

The number of spectators increases one walks the final mile toward the end of the finish line. By the time I reached the final corner of the marathon, where runners turn off Exeter Street onto Boylston Street, I simply couldn’t move any further. Nevertheless, thanks to my long wingspan and an articulating screen on my camera, I still managed to get a shot of the frenzy over the final few paces.

Now, I’m not going to tell you how to spend your weekends, but do be sure to spend at least one Patriots’ Day watching the Boston Marathon.

6:19pm: I arrive at the Tech office twenty minutes late; articles are nominally due at 6pm, so it would make sense that I should be there. That often doesn't happen, as you will gradually see here.

6:30pm: Those in the office dig into the bi-weekly offering of free food; even though the food (wings!) has been in the office for quite some time, so people know when to show up in the office, no one is permitted to touch it until exactly 6:30pm.

7:06pm: The first draft of the article of the night – on McCormick transfers – is finished.

7:28pm: It's tough when writers have to balance their articles with their problem sets. In light of that, one of our writers (Rebecca '14) asks, “When's the latest I can get my article to you?", to which I respond, “When's the earliest you can get it to me?" Ultimately, we agree on 8:30pm.

7:51pm: The office gets a call from our chairman – Joe '12 – notifying us that there's free ice cream at the coffeehouse on the third floor of the Student Center! Several people, including myself dash out to claim our portions.

7:52pm: Our editor-in-chief – Ethan '12 – chastises our chairman for telling us about the ice cream when we're not permitted to have any until 8pm. I mean, it's issue night and he drew working people (the EIC and myself included) away from the issue!

8:00pm: And it's not even ice cream; it's ice cream cake.

8:22pm: Several people inquire about the ETA of Rebecca's article. I mention the 8:30pm time agreed by the two of us and the fact that I'm still looking at the McCormick article so I'm not dying to see it at this moment.

8:28pm: Rebecca sends in her article. See! Don't doubt your writers!

8:53pm: I'm finally finished working on the McCormick article. In the interest of saving myself a little bit of face, part of the reason it took so long to edit it – aside from my multi-tasking with editing Wikipedia – was the fact that in the interim at looked at another article in progress. Okay, this is still a long time.

9:35pm: Ethan comes up to not-so-subtly cough about the slow progress of the news, to which I note the decreased efficiency of the office due to the relocation of the water cooler. Trust me; it makes a serious difference.

9:38pm: The article on women faculty, coming in at 1,600 words, is much longer than your average article (which is somewhere around 600-700 words). I have been working with its writer – Margaret '13 – on reorganization, while taking pride in loudly announcing some of the piece's most inspirational quotes, including “All anyone wants to be labeled is smart!" Yes, Professor Sive, indeed.

10:00pm: John '98 asks when I'm going to get around to looking at his article. I flatly say 11pm, under the impression it won't take that long.

10:07pm: I'm finally done with looking at the women faculty piece, which Margaret plans to further revise.

10:35pm: I don't even know how this came up, but somewhere it was noted that there are people in Bexley too. Oh, I think it was about their “student" representative, which was a cat or Naked Abe Lincoln or something apparently more bizarre than Naked Abe Lincoln.

11:17pm: I call Rebecca to ask a question about her article, which is on a proposal to replace the UA Senate with a new Council. Hearing some commotion in the background, she says, “It sounds like there are a lot of people there! Maybe, I should stop by later…" Given the late hour, things only went downhill from here.

11:18pm: I'm finished with looking at Rebecca's article, which is about proposed reforms to the UA.

11:22pm: It's that time of the night when someone is asked to get Prod Munchies, which are named after the Production department – responsible for, among other things, the physical layout of the paper. Prod is generally the last department to remain in the office, although there are generally still tons of people when the Munchies – basically snacks from LaVerde's – come in.

11:29pm: I discover that our slightly eccentric John '98 has a mysterious and apparently “endless" flow of $2 bills. So, I make change for $10; I now have five $2 bills that I try to pass off to confused cashiers in Cambridge.

11:40pm: And the Prod Munchies are here! Standard fare: popcorn, ice cream sandwiches, and popsicles. I didn't even have to request the ice cream sandwiches this time.

11:55pm: I'm finished with John's article (the last article), which is about the selection of Maya Lin as architect for Novartis' new campus.

12:30am: It's around this time I don't even want to multi-task. The office seems to quiet down and focus solely on doing the issue, as it's past midnight and the issue is supposed to be out by 1am. Yeah, that's not going to happen.

1:02am: Okay, I'm finished with articles after looking at the women faculty article again; this piece just went through so many iterations, and it was so long! But Issue Night is still far from over, even though we were supposed to be done by now.

1:34am: I just want to go home now.

1:46am: Slowly becoming overcome by the desire to sleep, I am requested to do World and Nation (where we feature articles from The New York Times about national and global issues) – relieving our copyeditor, Michelle '14, who isn't even supposed to be doing the World and Nation section.

2:29am: Apparently in honor of April Fools' Day, the cursor on all of the screens suddenly grew to ten times normal size. We blame our technology director, Quentin '10.

2:48am: It's snowing! Yes, it is officially April and it is snowing. Granted, this is no blizzard – just a light covering on grassy areas – but the snowflakes were so large, they led our production editor Connor '13 to wonder whether someone was simply dropping feathers off the top of the Student Center.

2:57am: “What's the latest time we've finished an issue?"

3:30am: After putting off World and Nation until the last possible moment (writing headlines and looking at every other piece of content), I finally get around to completing it. With everything in place in the paper (thanks Prod!), the only thing left is to review all the pages for any final errors.

3:33am: Around this time, Ethan thanks me for sticking around, saying other news editors might have been tempted to leave around 1am and ask him to finish everything. Wait, you mean I could have left?

3:45am: Everyone's gathered around the main table looking at all of the pages. Ethan's job is sign all pages he believes are ready. This generally takes several go-arounds per page.

4:02am: All the pages are signed. The issue is done. Well, okay, Prod has to stay a bit longer to make sure the issue is probably uploaded to the printer and to our website.

4:15am: For luckily only the second time this term, I didn't have the energy to go back to Baker and fell asleep in the office. Unfortunately, I had a 9am class – and this post.

The latke and the hamentaschen are both Jewish foods that have long divided the world, being the source of almost every battle, economic downturn, and cataclysmic natural event (including the extinction of the dinosaurs). After fighting two world wars over it, in 1946, the scientific community convened for the first time at the University of Chicago to debate each foods' merits. Since then, the tradition has spread to other universities around the country, including MIT, which hosts the event every March between the two holidays the latke and hamentaschen represent.

The latke, essentially a potato pancake, is traditionally eaten during Hanukah, in November or December, while the hamentash, a fruit-filled triangular delicacy, is associated with Purim, which is in February or March (this year, it begins at sundown on March 19). In the interest of keeping this entry unbiased, I won’t reveal which side I’ve chosen – or rather which three sides...

This year’s debate was moderated by Hillel Executive Director and Rabbi Michelle Fisher. Supporting the hamentaschen were Shaoul Ezekiel (Aero/Astro), Steve Wasserman (BioE), and Fatih Yanik (EECS), while the latke was backed by Sanjay Sarma (MechE), Allan Adams (Physics), and Robert Weinberg (Bio). After being introduced to our mascots, Rabbi Fisher recounted the history of the millennia-old controversy and officially opened the debate, declaring “the decisions we make tonight will determine… nothing.”

First to defend the hamentaschen was Professor Ezekiel, who recounted how he had been approached about participating in the debate and how he was unfamiliar with the foods – despite being Jewish himself – because the latke and hamentaschen are both foreign to his native country of Iraq. Nevertheless, he aimed to resolve the age-old dispute by looking at how the two foods react after being shot with laser beams. The hamentaschen remained unaltered, while the latke… well… it didn’t hold up so well.

Professor Sarma, on the other hand, pointed out that latkes will solve the energy crisis, as the latke (allegedly) is capable of generating its own heat. In the future, he says, we’ll all be driving Latcars. As proof, Professor Sarma display his results from a drive around Borough Park, a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn; and, behold, those homes where occupants ate latkes did not have their wasteful heating systems cranked up. Oh, and Professor Sarma added that hamentaschen taste like goo.

Professor Wasserman went for a more mathematical approach to defend the merits of the hamentaschen. You see, whereas you are able to take the derivative of the hamentaschen, you can’t take the derivative of the latke; whereas the hamentaschen represents changes, the latke represents constancy. The yumminess, supposedly, also diffuses throughout the hamentaschen. (I’m trying my best to explain this, but it’s quite clear there was some fuzzy math.)

Easily the best argument of the night, however, goes to Professor Adams of the latke team, who produced results from the LHC – the Latke-Hamentaschen Collider. He actually performed some collisions between the two foods (although I’m under the impression they took place in MIT’s Edgerton Center rather than the Swiss collider):

(Do forgive the shaky camera work; I was trying to pay attention (not look through the viewfinder) while recording.)

Closing arguments for the hamentaschen supporters were handed to Professor Yanik, who based his point around apparent dietary benefits. Whereas the latke makes worms fat and pimply, the hamentaschen makes worms lean and sexy. And if that isn't convincing enough, look what happens to a human being when he consumes latke.

Professor Weinberg’s closing remarks were less grandiose, simply correcting the history of latkes and hamentaschen (with an even more outlandish history).

Following ninety-second rebuttals, the hundreds of people in attendance were permitted to vote on the winner. Once again, as in the past, the votes produced a tie. So, the answer to the question from the teaser text is no, no it cannot.

But maybe next year.

I’m taking a total of 45 credits, the fewest credits I’ve ever taken at MIT. Part of the reason for that is that one of my classes (1.013) has a four-hour lab 12-4pm on Wednesday, which blocks out a lot of other classes. For that reason, 21F.702 (Spanish II) and 14.02 (Macroeconomics), two candidates for a fifth class, were not truly feasible. But, I’m a second semester senior! I’ll enjoy the extra time this term, even though it’ll still be less leisurely than last term, when I didn’t have class until 1pm any day of the week.

1.011 – Project Evaluation (9 credits)

Required by all Course IC students (although generally taken during junior year), the aim of this course is to provide the tools engineers need to evaluate projects and determine whether they are worthwhile and feasible (from environmental, social, and financial standpoints). Over the past couple weeks, the course has been heavily focused on the financial aspects, which I am, to some extent, quite grateful for, considering I couldn't fit 14.02 into my schedule.

1.013 – Senior Civil and Environmental Engineering Design (12 credits)

As you can imagine, this is that big class that is supposed to cap off your four-year experience in Civil and Environmental Engineering. This is considered a reunion of sorts, as all the Course I seniors, regardless of whether they focused in civil engineering or environmental engineering, or transportation, structures, or geotechnics, come back together for this one final class. There are a number of people in the class who I honestly haven't seen since sophomore year. The class has a few small projects throughout the term, but the main outcome of the class is a report on one of three real issues – the renovation of MIT’s Sailing Pavilion, the revitalization in South Florida’s Cowbone Marsh, and the improvement of South Florida’s coastal structures. I’m working on the last project, and the a couple people from the South Florida Water Management District came up to MIT two weeks ago to tell us about the project. They even said that if we happened to be in Miami during Spring Break, they could show us the waterways by helicopter (tempting offer, I know…).

1.041 – Transportation Systems (12 credits)

Although I have had a longtime interest in transportation, this is my first transportation course ever. So far, we’ve done a lot of MATLAB modeling of networks, car following dynamics, and, now, GIS. Easily the best moment of the class was when our TA last Wednesday asked for feedback on the problem set and someone sternly remarked that if he says an assignment is "due Wednesday" (as it was), it should not be due at 1:00am. Indeed, I hadn’t started the assignment by 10pm and had to cancel my quick nap when he “reminded” us (via e-mail) that it was due in three hours. Our TA took the comment rather well, but now whenever he mentions a due date for a problem set, everyone in the class responds, “What time?” He’s never going to live that one down.

4.440 – Building Structural Systems I (12 credits)

The only course I’m taking this semester that isn’t required for Course I, I was drawn to the class by the lab component (three hours on Fridays) and the architectural angle of the course. Aside from a seminar-style Islamic architecture course last term, I haven’t taken a single architecture course during my time at MIT (and I think it's important for civil engineers to meet their architect comrades). While some of the concepts are a bit basic for a civil engineering senior (as I was forewarned), the course has begun to teach me some nifty graphical concepts that would be useful in civil engineering, but which, for some reason, have been left out of curriculum. The professor noted that he has long thought the course should be required for civil engineering sophomores (when the engineering concepts aren’t so basic). Also, I am looking forward to our design projects, where we build structural elements and models.

On Friday, we completed our first such project. We had to building a balsa wood column 12-36 inches tall and less than five inches in diameter. Prizes were to be awarded for the column that could withstand the greatest load relative to weight and greatest load multiplied by its height squared (to encourage people to build taller).

The undergraduates, for some reason, were seriously outperformed by the graduate students. Seriously. Take a look at our creations:

And here is my pair's structure being tested...

...and destroyed...

The undergraduates’ strongest column held 2,147 lb, but it was widely believed to be outside the regulations because it was cut from sheets of balsa wood, rather than from strips of wood. Ignoring that one, the strongest column among the fourteen undergraduate teams belonged to myself and classmate Adam ’11; our column held 1,202 lb. Somehow, though, that figure was bested by six of the twelve graduate student teams, with their strongest column holding an unbelievable 5,268 lbs! Balsa wood! We held the highest pressure-per-column-mass ratio among the undergraduates (with 24.2 lbs/g; yes, I know the units are painful), but we were – again – outdone by one of the graduate teams, whose column had a pressure-per-mass ratio of 59.1 lbs/g. Their column was also the lightest of all, coming in at a shockingly light 16 grams (the heaviest were above 250 grams).

As one might be able to deduce from my previous adventures, I feel more at home overseas and traveling abroad than at home. This trip to India, which had no connection to Hamsika's, was a follow-up to a course I took last term called 4.S10 – Delhi and Jaisalmer: An Architectural Journey through Two Indian Cities. It wasn't a particularly heavy course – just six units, P/D/F grading, a semi-freshman seminar (even though most of the people in the course were upperclassmen). There was no doubt the IAP trip was a major draw for students, but I am also very much interested in Indian architecture – specifically the Mughal architecture the country is most famous for – and so registering for 4S.10 was a no-brainer.

Now, let me warn you that, although this post is a summary, it is far from brief. But there are pictures!

Week One

During the last week of December – and 2010 – I was briefly back in the UK, now my second home, where I reminisced about my prior year there (where I did the Cambridge-MIT Exchange). Having exhausted the London tourist trail over the summer, when I interned in the city, I simply revisited the street where I lived and took in some of the Christmas decorations (the Trafalgar tree was remarkably unspectacular). I stayed with a gracious friend in the East End (with whom I proved how poorly I play Call of Duty) and then went up to Cambridge for more trips down Memory Lane.

But the crowning moment of Week 1 (technically not during IAP) was the chance to celebrate New Year's Eve in London. Even though my friends and I arrived relatively late to the Thames, we still scored a riverside spot for the stroke of midnight (after three hours standing in the chilly nighttime air). Following the fireworks, we stayed up the remainder of the night playing backgammon, eating kebabs, and going to a shisha café (see a theme?). My flight was at 8am on New Year's Day, so I hardly had a choice here: I had to stay up all night.

After transiting through Doha's abominable airport, I finally arrived in India January 2 in the early – very early – morning, at 3:30am. I was back in Bangalore, where I worked during the summer of 2009. Despite the early hour, I still managed to recall how to navigate to the home of a friend whom I worked with during my internship (+ one benefit in meeting people abroad). The weather was a welcome change from the Boston cold and London fog; the temperature in Bangalore was in the neighborhood of 80F and, for the first time in days, I could see blue sky. The traffic was a lot more chaotic in India (as expected), but I guess you can't have everything. And, to be honest, I'm a big fan of chaos.

Week Two

Departing Bangalore, I slowly made my way up north to Delhi, where I was supposed to meet the remaining MIT students on January 6. On the way, I stopped in Bijapur, sometimes known as the Agra of the South. Not receiving as many foreign visitors as the real Agra, it seemed everyone wanted to talk with me and be photographed.

The next stop was Mumbai, where I spent several hours walking around its Londonesque southern tip (as I had done sixteen months earlier). For a number of reasons (did you know it takes over an hour to go 15 km in Mumbai?), I missed my train departing to Jhansi. Luckily (not sure if that's the right word to use), there was a taxi driver willing to drive me the 130 km to the next station at the meager price of Rs 2500 ($55). Because the deal was that I only paid if I made the train, he drove in a manner that may have even been unacceptably aggressive by Indian standards. Trust me; that's saying a lot.

To add to my travel troubles, the train was five hours late arriving in Jhansi; we actually sat about ten kilometers from the station for around ninety minutes. The late arrival seriously cut short my time in the city (or, rather, nearby Orchha), but it was certainly among the most memorable parts of the entire month, as I met a number of people on the train and joined passengers in building (unappealing) trash fires outside the train. (Between Mumbai and Jhansi, we went from 80F to 40F.) And this foreshadowed the extended final leg to Delhi: whereas I was supposed to have a four-hour train ride leaving around 6pm, I had a twelve-hour train ride leaving closer to 10:30pm. The culprit? Fog apparently.

Finally united with my MIT comrades in Delhi, the "official" part of the trip kicked off with visits to several business schools owned by MIT alumnus Vinay Rai, including Rai Business School. Several students from these schools, especially RBS, showed us around the city the first few days and even accompanied us throughout much of the remainder of the month. On January 8, all of us, plus several students from the University of Virginia, made the journey down to Agra to see the Taj Mahal (no trip to India is complete without it).

Week Three

Week Three was almost exclusively consumed by Project Prakash, a project spearheaded by MIT Professor Pawan Sinha. In a few words, Professor Sinha's work focuses on addressing congenital blindness in India; eventually he'd like to build a facility in India that would help reintegrate formerly blind people back into society. However, our group of fourteen MIT students broadened the scope of his project to research all childhood disabilities in India. We split into four teams (mine was looking at medical concerns) and travelled across Delhi, speaking to doctors, NGOs, shopkeepers, and everyday citizens (in between more sightseeing, of course).

Toward the end of the project, we visited a charity eye clinic set up in a slum in northern Delhi. As part of that day's program, we walked through (I hesitate to say 'toured') one of the slums in the area. Many of us, suffice it to say, were very surprised to see how happy and excited many of the people, especially the children, were to see us. Rather than making us feel like intruders (which, in a way, we were), children were following us, talking to us, jostling for the opportunity to be photographed, and finally wishing us a resounding goodbye when we eventually pulled away in our bus.

That day – January 16 – truly encapsulated one of the great parts of doing Project Prakash: it enabled us to explore aspects of India one normally wouldn't be able to explore as a typical tourist.

Week Four

After a week of work in Delhi, we headed into Rajasthan, considered one of the – if not the – most beautiful state in India. We only had eight days to travel around the state, but we managed to cover a great deal of territory. The first stop was Jaipur, Rajasthan's capital and largest city. We got the chance to see the making of a few handicrafts, and the following day, we visited Amer Fort (just outside Jaipur), riding elephants from the side of the road up to its entrance. After visiting Amer Fort, easily the most impressive site on our circuit, we stopped at Jaipur's City Palace and explored the city's markets. The next day, we made our way to Udaipur, breaking up the eight-hour journey with stops at Pushkar (known among Hindus for its Brahma temple, one of very few in existence) and Ajmer (known for hosting the tomb of one of Sufism's most revered figures).

Udaipur itself was, like the iPad, simply magical. Sometimes called the "Venice of the East", the city is built around several man-made lakes, including one claimed to be among the most picturesque in the world (and I'm inclined to agree). After one day in Udaipur, we proceeded to Jodhpur, stopping in Ranakpur to see its grand Jain temple. That meant we had visited places of worship for five or six religions (after Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, Hinduism, the Baha'i Faith, and the Hare Krishna Movement). In Jodphur, unfortunately, we only had time to see its Mehrangarh Fort before we had to continue to our final destination in Rajasthan: Jaisalmer.

Week Five

Although India has many forts, Jaisalmer's is the only one that is still a working fort. On first night there, we ate at a rather disgusting restaurant where everything on the menu was misspelled and the kitchen was a mess. However, the following night, we found something a bit more appetizing to do (okay, we didn't find it, so much as it was just scheduled): that evening, we made an excursion west of the city for a short camel journey and view of the sunset over the desert sand.

(Note that I did my level best to locate a photo of all of us, but because there was almost always someone sick at any given point during our four weeks in India, such a photo may not actually exist. Pictured are Becca '11, Emma '11, Iris '14, Shan '11, Saul '14, Me '11 [back], Ami '14, Noa '14, Emily '11, Leah '11, Eliana '12, Patrick '11, Yael '13 [front]; not pictured is Rai '11.)

Our Indian adventure didn't officially end for another four days, but the remainder of the trip was primarily consumed by working on reports for Project Prakash, getting in some last-minute shopping, and preparing to leave.

My return to America was longer than most people's (even longer than the two whose direct flight to Newark turned into a twenty-four hour layover in Shanghai). I built in a six-hour layover in Doha – plenty of time to see the city considering its limited points of interest and the close proximity of the airport to Doha's Corniche. My goal for the day was to stop by the Museum of Islamic Art, whose building is as much a work of art as the pieces in its galleries. I.M. Pei, who graduated from MIT in 1940, designed the building in the mid-2000s – at the age of 90. Ninety, folks.

After leaving Doha, I made the obligatory return to London – somewhat of a forced two-day layover to break up my sets of flights. While much sunnier in London than on my outward journey, I was much less productive this round, spending what seemed like half of it queuing in the immigration line at Heathrow. I did, however, manage to squeeze in time to go see a(nother) friend in London, watching our Boston Celtics crush the Lakers that Sunday night.

While not widely advertised, you are not compelled to be present at MIT during the day on Registration Day. So, I squeezed every little bit out of my IAP by not returning to Boston (via Zurich) until 8pm that night. I got a somewhat stern e-mail from my adviser's assistant the day after wondering why I hadn't registered on Monday, but that paled in comparison to the pointed line of questioning I received upon arriving at Logan Airport (ah, the secondary screening). I was explicitly questioned about how and why I traveled so much at a young age, what my room number was at MIT, and where my family and friends lived.

Like I said, more at home overseas.

Oh, how true.

When giving tours on campus (yes, I might give you a campus tour!), I sometimes get asked about the amount of work MIT students have. I usually respond that, while students certainly receive a hefty sum of homework, the main problem is time management. That is, no matter how much time is given for an assignment, it will inevitably be done in the twenty-four hours before it's due. Procrastination, I must say, is endemic on campus.

This semester, for the first time in my MIT career, I dropped a course. There were a variety of reasons for doing this, but, regardless, it left me with what should have been a schedule that other students would kill for. I took 48 credits, which, while considered a full course load (supposedly equivalent to 48 hours of work per week) is fewer courses than a good number of upperclassmen take (not because they need to, of course). I didn't have a single class before 1pm any day of the week. This left me more time to work on graduate applications, my UROP, being a news editor for The Tech, and, well, living. The old adage goes good grades, social life, sleep -- pick two, but I wanted all three.

Long story short, as is always the case at MIT, your academic obligations seem to expand to fit the time allotted; I had a surprising number of late nights and amount of last-minute tooling this term. On the bright side, though, those obligations can also contract to fit the time left over after the inevitable procrastination.

Case in point last week. I still had a four- to six-page research paper for 4.614 (Religious Architecture and Islamic Cultures), and I knew from the previous three essays this term that it was highly susceptible to procrastination. (Professor Rabbat, I enjoyed the class, but four essays plus a final is too much.) However, I ended up squandering all my work time during the four-day Thanksgiving weekend doing a problem set for 1.00 (Intro to Computers and Engineering Problem Solving -- essentially Intro to Java) -- and it wasn't even that long. Then on Monday and Tuesday, I will pretend I was busy doing work for 21F.701 (Spanish I), even though that really amounted to maybe two hours of work. And while I had all of Wednesday past 4:30pm, by midnight that night, I still had a dismal two paragraphs of half-coherent content and an intro paragraph beginning with Lorem ipsum to make me think I had written more than I really did.

Such is the typical progression of procrastination. I could claim I had seven hours of writer's block, but in reality, the culprits were Wikipedia, Reddit (the lion's share), that pesky thing called dinner, and probably Facebook. Surely, our forefathers and foremothers must have been more productive without the Internet to distract them at every turn.

But, I knew how this would end, of course, because I'd been down this road many times before. Drifting into a state of half-sleep around 1am, I set every alarm in my room to an arbitrary time between 2:30am and 3am. While not always effective, when I need to do something, I will wake up. So, at around 3am, after six snoozes on three different alarms, I reluctantly got up and made a cup of tea. (I bought a 100-pack of tea off Amazon in September for occasions like this; I'm not really a fan of it because it's not remotely sweet or minty enough to earn the supposed claim of "Moroccan mint tea".) Then, I resigned myself to the work ahead while cursing myself for not doing it earlier (the post-procrastination blues).

I must say, I was surprisingly alert. I don't know how much caffeine was in the tea, but I did not feel tired at all. If I wanted to go to sleep, I probably couldn't. With the shade up, I gradually saw, somewhat sadly, as the city woke up and sunlight appeared above the Boston skyline. This was a research paper, so there was -- sadly -- a significant amount of research involved. But, thank you, Google Books for not forcing me to wait until daylight to read the relevant text in most of the books I was interested in! Okay, I'm making excuses again; research notwithstanding, it was only a four-page paper (plus two "analytical drawings"). If you're curious, it was an essay about Humayun's Tomb in Delhi; unfortunately, each time I found an ostensibly good source about the place, it'd actually be a paragraph in a giant book about the Taj Mahal.

I had to take a break around 9am (after six hours of wakefulness) to finish up some work for my UROP, which involves modeling two road networks in Singapore (I had a meeting with my UROP adviser at 10am). Around this time, I also called the Information Center (who organizes campus tours) to inform them that, unless they really needed me for the 11am morning tour, I would rather not give it in such a zombie-like state. As I knew they would (few people take campus tours in December and there's a second tour guide), they relieved from the duty and I breathed a sigh of relief.

The 10am meeting with my UROP adviser was rather straightforward and brief, but, unable to resist the distraction, I watched the BBC's online, live feed of the announcements of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup hosts. FIFA was not doing me a favor by taking all of an hour to take two cards out of envelopes...

I had a Spanish quiz at 1pm as well, so I had to study for that some. Meanwhile, I still had my essay. But, okay, there was no way I was going to finish this on-time; I had not used my one unofficial extension for the term (really amazing, to be honest), so my TA permitted me an additional twenty-four hours to complete the assignment. But, I knew this was really just an additional nine hours, mostly in the middle of the night.

Why, you ask? See, I had earmarked Thursday afternoon for working on the final 1.00 problem set (we got to work with a partner, and we both agreed to put the assignment off until the night before -- see, we all do it!). Despite being on Hour 12 of being awake, we managed to blaze through the problem set in record time. We were done in two hours. Still a Christmas miracle, though, I tell you.

That left me just thirty minutes before I had to report to The Tech office for another night of news editing duties. I did my very best to multi-task -- splitting time between editing articles and working on my 4.614 essay -- but it wasn't working out too well. I cannot convey this to you clear enough: the Tech office is a very distracting environment. Others have tried to work there on issue night, but with Rockband in the next room, Ripsticks all over the office, and an editor-in-chief who likes to play "Whip My Hair" over the sound system because it annoys everyone, I could have gotten more work done sleeping.

Despite the fact that that issue was fairly light, I had to stick around until 2am. Sigh. After forty-five minutes of break, I slogged back to my room in the biting cold and continued to work on my essay. At 3am, in commemoration of reaching the 24-hour mark, I had only my second cup of the not-so-Moroccan mint tea. I was fairly happy with my progress around 6am, so, unwilling to see another sunrise, I went to sleep after 27 consecutive hours awake. Believe it or not, I had to be up at 8:30am ahead of a 9am tour. I volunteered to take the tour a few weeks earlier thinking I'd be finished with this paper well before Friday morning.

And therein lies the recurring problem: foresight. Indeed, I thought I was close enough to finished with the essay to complete it in the two hours between the end of the tour and my target completion time of 12pm (when I needed to leave for the airport); in reality, I ended up leaving closer to 12:45pm. When I arrived at the airport check-in desk twenty minutes before my flight, the agent initially refused to give me the boarding pass, saying I was too late. I briefly argued with her (noting technical difficulties with their website and a previous call to the airline), and she eventually caved in: "Alright," she said, "I'll print it out for you, but there's no way you're going to make that flight." Thought myself, Challenge accepted...

I made it.

You see, MIT currently has a rather unorthodox dining system, and by that I mean we don't really have one. You, your parents, or someone else will add money to a TechCash account and whenever your ID is swiped anywhere on campus – and a few places off campus – the money is deducted from your account. It's a debit card system; nothing fancy about it. If you want, you could just as easily use cash.

But this alone apparently does not produce a profitable venture. To encourage students to eat at the dorm dining halls (currently only open for dinner), students who live in dorms with dining halls (McCormick, Baker, Next, and Simmons) have to sign up for preferred dining at a cost of $300 per semester, which simply gives those students a half-price discount on all purchases at dorm dining halls. And even with this in place, MIT still has had to subsidize dining to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars a year.

Unsurprisingly, MIT doesn't like subsidizing food. So, over the past year or two a committee called the House Dining Advisory Group (HDAG), composed of administrators and students, was set up to explore new options. At the end of this past spring term, they came up with a plan – a plan that has been met with widespread student condemnation.

Operationally, there will big some huge changes coming to dining next year – there are plans to shift the hours of some of the dining halls around so that they're not all simultaneously open; perhaps they'll have one or two that close at 10pm instead of during the 8pm hour. All the dining halls should be open seven days a week, compared to the current five days a week for some. Further, the dorm dining halls will offer continental breakfast, something which is a rare find on campus now. And, perhaps most importantly, instead of the a la carte system ubiquitous this year, the dorm dining halls will have all-you-can-eat meals. (In addition, kosher options will be available in dining halls six nights a week and halal dining options will be more widely available.)

But those changes aren't what are making students unhappy. Instead, it's the compulsion to eat at dining halls for almost every meal (if not every meal) that is effectively incumbent upon all students who live in dining dorms (McCormick, Baker, Next, Simmons, and, starting next year, Maseeh). Students in those dorms will have to sign up for a meal plan that consists of a certain number of breakfasts and dinners per week:

Freshmen will only be permitted to sign up for the 14-meal-per-week plan ($3,800/year). Sophomores can either sign up for that plan or the 12-meal-per-week ($3,400/year), while junior and seniors can sign up for the freshman or sophomore plans or a 10-meal-per-week plan ($2,900/year). With all three plans; the meals must be split between breakfasts and dinners (e.g. the ten-meal plan cannot be allocated to seven dinners and three breakfasts). Further, as is the case currently, students who live outside dining dorms would be unaffected, although they would be permitted to pay for individual meals at the dorm dining halls and sign up for any of the meal plans.

The main sticking point for students is the cost: HDAG's own report (p. 5) indicated that the average student living in a dorm with a dining hall spends just $2,250 a year on food – and that figure includes lunch, which is not included in the weekly meal plans. Because of this, students are worried prospective freshmen will choose dorms not primarily based on culture (as is, supposedly, currently the case – although I contend location is a factor as well) but on whether they will have to pay for the dining plans. To its defense, however, MIT has noted that the financial aid office, when considering how much funding to award students, already budgets a considerable $4,460 for food and that they may consider adjusting the budget to accommodate for the additional costs resulting from the plan.

Those in fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups are worried some of their members who still live on-campus (e.g. freshman pledges) will come to their houses less often for (often free) dinner because they have already been locked in to the dining hall meals. Further still, with so many events offering free dinner as an incentive to attend as well as the simple desire to go out to eat on the weekend, it is extremely rare that one eats at a dining hall for seven – or even five – consecutive dinners.

Others are a bit unhappy they'll be forced to pay for breakfasts they probably won't use; I rarely eat breakfast other than some breakfast bars purchased from the supermarket or an early-morning burrito from Anna's Tacqueria, although I'm sure I'd eat breakfast more often if it's already paid for. And, indeed, that's part of the intention of the plan: encouraging students to eat more healthily, including by eating breakfast and (presumably healthier) on-campus options.

But they had to know changing the dining system from one that stands at the zenith of choice to one that looks like the nadir of it was going to infuriate students. And infuriate it has. Over the past two months, a number of petitions have been going across campus voicing dissent to the new dining plan. Just last week, things reached a fever pitch as the petitions went digital. Signs appeared all over campus encouraging people to 'say no'.

As of Sunday, November 21, at 4pm (EST, UTC-5), there have been 1,653 signatures – from students, parents, alumni, and faculty – to the petition; with more than 1,400 of those signatures coming from undergraduates, that means a third of undergraduates have voiced their opposition to the plan (not, of course, to suggest two thirds are in favor of it).

On Thursday evening, there was even a sit-in protest in Baker Dining (where you were supposed to bring your own food to the dining hall):

To be honest, though, I was surprised at the rather – um – sparse attendance, given the apparent vehement opposition to the new plan.

As of now, there have been no indications from the people up high that the plan is going to be altered before next year. They have noted that the HDAG includes student members and that efforts were made last year, especially in the spring term, to acquire student feedback. One student HDAG member was quoted as saying the time for feedback had ended after the final plan was announced, although they're reconsidering amid all the furor. MIT has submitted a request for proposal to several caterers, so, barring a tectonic shift, this will be in place for the fall of 2011.

But, we shall see. I am at least happy to see MIT students politically interested in, even if not always involved with, a major issue on campus – and it's unlikely, especially if the plan is implemented, the student interest will abate. Feel free to follow along through The Tech; dining articles from over the past year can be found by search.

And this is proof positive why I would rather have a cat than a child. Cats die maybe two weeks after they stop being cute. Children live – what? – maybe eighty years after they cease being cute?

Another aside: do be sure that if you have a flight at Logan at 6:45pm that you leave MIT well before 5:45pm. If you choose to ignore my advice, you will not make your flight. Even though it’s rush hour, the Silver Line to the airport will burn you, coming only once every ten minutes. Even though you don’t have any carry-ons, the guard who is supposed to simply check to see whether your ID matches the name on your boarding pass will feel it’s his duty to chat about the Yankees and the Red Sox with the person in front of you. And, of course, as you leave the security checkpoint, your laptop bag will tip over, spilling all its contents onto the ground. Then again, you might be lucky enough to be put into business class on the following flight because there are no other seats available.

Also, let me say for the record that this is the first time in my four years I’ve been home on a random weekend like this. I go home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Spring Break (hardly even over the summer), but I never go home on a weekend despite living so close (relatively speaking).

But the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear had become a phenomenon on its own right, and a number of friends from home, MIT comrades, and MIT alums were heading down to the festivities on the National Mall. So, I couldn’t pass up on the excuse to go home – especially at Halloween. I’ll spare you the details about what happened on Friday – it just involves doing work for 1.00 and having a friend’s car suddenly stop while driving down I-95 – but Saturday, well, was quite an adventure.

I departed from how at about 11am with my sister, only to happen about the – well – insanity caused by the rally. Outside the Metro station was a long line extended down the street composed of unwise out-of-towners who didn’t have SmarTrip cards or otherwise didn’t get their farecards in advance.

Meanwhile, my sister and I, with our local insight, had our SmarTrip cards ready to suavely go through the fare gates. It didn’t quite work that way, because for the umpteenth time my SmarTrip stopped working (never happens in Boston, by the way). Thankfully, the station officer said the line was too long and let me go in for free ($2.40 saved!).

Estimates for the crowd attending were at nearly a quarter million, but the D.C. Metro was sadly ill-prepared. They were still running their pathetic Saturday service, which sees, at times, only one train every fifteen minutes. Hence, this miserable sight, and the packed-worse-than-vacuum-sealed-sardines trains:

Look at the platforms, just look at them! If you didn’t get on the train at one of the suburban stops, you weren’t getting on at all; there were simply too many people.

I had intended to meet up with several current MIT students or MIT alums, but finding our way through the crowd was difficult enough. Further, it seemed as if the cellular networks were jammed with rallygoers posting realtime Facebook updates about the event and CNN reporters Twittering about the breaking news on the National Mall. So, I couldn’t even call them.

And while organizers had intended to only accommodate a crowd for four blocks, they ended up taking up ten blocks of the National Mall, plus a number of adjacent streets. The side effect is that a number of people couldn’t hear or see anything, forcing some people to scale trees or, worse, portable toilets (I was so hoping for one of those to cave in). At one point, the crowd even began to chant “Louder! Louder!” Either way, it was quite amusing to look at the signs. If you’re easily offended, hide your kids and hide your wife.

I was considering adding Halloween to my blog post, but it was a rather quiet Halloween in my neighborhood. When I was in high school – i.e. too old to be trick-or-treating (ahem…) – it was tradition for me to sit outside in a chair pretending to be a scarecrow and then jump out on unsuspecting kids. Having been at MIT all these years, I have not been able to satiate my appetite for little children screaming. But, this year, I was able to reprise my role, restoring fear in the hearts and minds of children. I didn’t even think I looked fake, but, my, children can be gullible. Some of those screams were of Wilhelm caliber, and one girl in particular was clutching to the side of the house in unabated horror with a scream that caused some boys down the street who I scared a bit earlier to break out in laughter.

Sadly, there weren’t too many people out in my neighborhood trick-or-treating, so I had to be satisfied with the ten sets of kids (and parents) who I managed to startle. But I’ll take what I can get.

After fruitlessly trying to get the thing to work, I quickly ordered a new adapter online the following day. It was scheduled to arrive Monday, and while I knew I would miss my computer the whole weekend, I was ready to take advantage of this weekend off to get some serious work done. No YouTube, no Grooveshark, and, most importantly, no Reddit. This weekend, I said to myself, was bound to be my most productive all semester -- and perhaps ever.

How naïve.

I was able to complete my Spanish homework without issue – my textbook and two workbooks were all I needed. I now feel moderately prepared for tomorrow’s exam, and I should be fully prepared once I finish this post and get back to studying. However, when it came to just about everything else, well... no, it was far from the most productive weekend of the term.

I tried to work on my UROP, which involves computing statistics about traffic in a section of Singapore. I had been really guilty about not devoting enough time to the project as I would like, and this weekend – I had vowed earlier – I’d really knuckle down and work on it. But it required MATLAB. And previous data I had already spent time computing. And that was on my computer. So, sorry, Swapnil, it’ll have to wait a bit longer.

At the same time, I came to the alarming realization that my first set of graduate applications is due in mid-December. Mid-December! I have plenty of time to work on them, of course, but the three people whom I would like to ask for recommendations? Well, unlike me, they may not be so willing to pull all-nighters to get something in before an application deadline (did that last week for externships). They, as Matt put it, have lives too, and I needed to give them ample time. (Note, for the record, that I absolutely will not be pulling all-nighters to get my college applications in, and neither should you. I'm just saying that if I had to, due to unforeseen circumstances, I would.) Two of the three people who I decided to ask recommendations from are overseas and so I needed to ask them via e-mail. There were e-mail addresses, background information, resumes, etc, that I wanted to have access to as I prepared said e-mails. And, guess where those were? Yes, so, I didn’t get around to that until today.

I needed to also pay some credit card bills. But, I'm not doing that from a public computer, nor am I searching through thousands upon thousands of e-mails in Webmail (can you tell I don't use Gmail?) looking for that esoteric username they assigned me. No, still haven't done that yet.

Now, now, I know what you’re thinking: (1) Use an Athena computer. Yes, I did, but I had more pressing things than work, silly. (2) This is why you should back things up. Don’t worry; I have learned that lesson by now. My computer crashed suddenly in September of my sophomore year, and I was practically crying all the way to the post office as I mailed off my fallen hard drive – and a $250 check – to recover the hundreds of photos taken during the second half of my summer that I had foolishly neglected to back up. (Ah, I’ll just get around to it tomorrow, I kept saying.) A year and a half later, earlier this year, when my computer was stolen on an overnight train in Eastern Europe (another long, sad, but easily predictable story), I had at least some solace in the fact that I had backed up everything, especially my precious pictures, just two weeks earlier (and not emptied my camera’s memory card like I had planned).

But, there’s something exhausting about trolling through and unzipping all those backup files. Instead, I sought to go the easier route – borrowing a power adapter from a fellow Baker resident. I e-mailed out to the dorm mailing list, but, unfortunately, there wasn't a single person that could help out. Perhaps this is just a testament to how many people have Macs (yes, I'm willing to admit it now; I sometimes have Mac envy). Or maybe it was a testament to how many plugs HP makes (so many that when they offered to replace one for free a couple years ago, they sent me the wrong one: "oh, your computer has an Intel processor, so you needed the 90-watt one; sorry about that!"). But, no, it's neither; it's just a testament to the fact that nobody likes me.

So, yes, with no help from fellow Bakerites, I had to suffer the whole weekend without my computer, but with a wonderful – albeit not airtight – excuse for putting off so much work. But to think my parents had to go decades living like that... wow... makes me shudder.

Maine seems to have a lot of small towns with misleading names: Paris, Norway, Oxford, Poland, Mexico, Naples, Vienna, Belfast, and Lisbon are all names of towns in the state. Our retreat was in Peru, located in western Maine; The Tech rented a large vacation home located near a lake in the town. The owners of the home left us a handbook that had a lot of rules by which we were compelled to follow, including one that implored us to refrain from using unauthorized boats in the lake. "TOGETHER WE CAN WIN THE WAR AGAINST AQUATIC INVADERS!" they exclaimed.

The place was a bit too remote for me – its nearest major cities, Boston and Montreal, are each 260 kilometers away – but I suppose it’s passable for a just a few days. Thank God there was still Internet though.

We trickled in to Peru over the course of several hours late Friday night, but that didn’t stop Keith ’08 and Rob ’12 from busting out the chessboard; apparently Keith is very good at chess, having played against someone in the back seat holding on the car ride over in his head while the other person had a cellphone board -- and Keith won.

Some of the two dozen folks who went to Peru for the weekend went hiking on Saturday, but I had to rest on account of (a) the fact I was feeling a bit sick and (b) having to drive to Portland and back, an hour and a half each way, at 7am, after only three hours of sleep. (The latter was due to an attendee, Austin '08, who had to endure an eleven-hour bus ride from New York to Boston thanks to this). But, that afternoon, several of us who avoided going on the hike decided to simply walk around in the vicinity of the house. We stumbled upon some strange sights, including a semi-abandoned car (or maybe it was for sale?) and a series of what appeared to be snowmobile trails. (The first picture was taken by Sam Range '13, a Tech staff photographer, as you can tell by the superior photo skills.)

We partially relied on Ethan’s (’12) phone GPS to get back to the house, but it didn’t help that Google’s location of the house is farther down the road than it’s actually located. So, we had to actually rely on memory, like it was the 1990s or something.

It may not be abundantly clear, but the fall foliage in Maine was quite stunning – they don’t call it Vacationland for nothing. I recall our jaunts around the creeks in nearby Mexico during retreat two years ago, which got us up close and personal with nature. There were no jaunts around creeks this year and the eerie backwoods we walked around by the house weren’t particularly endearing, but we still had the lake:

Still, MIT students will be MIT students, and some people couldn’t help but sit around doing p-sets or studying for exams the following week.

Some were worried that the presence of wi-fi for the first time meant people would spend too much time on their computers and not enough time getting to know their fellow Tech staffers. Some threatened to unplug the router if things got out of hand, but that never came about. Still, at one point more than half of the attendees were on their computer or doing some internet-related thing on their phones.

Keith, meanwhile, continued his chess campaign. This time, he took things to another level by using a deck stool to play chess in the hot tub outside. Sorry, no info on whether he still won.

(Also taken by Sam)

That evening, several of the guys (not me; I take no credit) cooked up a large pot of pasta and some chicken. Round two came around 11pm in the form of steak tips.

I can’t tell you everything else that happened – what happens in Peru is supposed to stay in Peru – but Darthur G, apparently an avid fire breather, showed off his fire-breathing skills.

Greg ’12 tried his hand as well and he did just fine, even though he had never done it before:

(Taken by Sam, of course)

Jeff ’11, The Tech Editor-in-Chief, also played the ukulele…

And, I’ll, uh, pretend that was all that happened Saturday night.

People began returning to Boston in waves on Sunday. I was in the first wave, and per the agreement with Ethan, we stopped at the same rest area we stopped at on the way up. Mimicking what we did on the way up to Peru, Rob bought a scratch ticket from a vending machine and one by one we scratched a number in vain hope we would win something. We also wasted a great deal of time at one of those Japanese game machines where you’re supposed to use a tiny pair of scissors to cut off a prize. After spending at least five dollars, we concluded the game was rigged.

Trust me, it was rigged.

This year, Desk workers across campus have reported that they have been receiving more packages than usual; I recall having to check maybe 10-15 packages on an average morning in the past, but on that one day last month, I had to check in nearly 50 packages of various sizes. The culprit? Well, most pinned the blame on Amazon for its recent Amazon Student promotion, which gives college students free Amazon Prime membership (with free two-day shipping) for a year. And, supposedly, students have been taking advantage of this, now being so lazy they can’t even go to the store to pick something up.

I’ll admit I’m no less guilty than anyone else on this matter. I purchased tea, a scrapbook, and several textbooks from Amazon, and I was considering buying a notebook (the paper kind, not the computer kind), just because of the Prime membership. And last month, The Tech published an article about the package fiasco.

Well, today, Amazon, in probably one of the smartest PR moves, took out a full-page ad in The Tech “apologizing” for the additional burden caused by their program. You can take a look at the online and below.

But the first week was still of note due, in part to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Okay, I”m not Jewish, but Hillel and the Muslim Students” Association joined forces for a dinner celebrating the Jewish New Year and Eid ul-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan. Pictures were not permitted at the dinner, but just imagine an endless feast in a dining hall fit for Hogwarts. It was nothing like that.

That was Thursday night. The following day, as you no doubt inferred, was Eid ul-Fitr. As in previous years, several folks from the MSA met at a pre-determined location on campus at the ungodly early hour of 6:30am, then headed off to the Roxbury area of Boston, home to the largest mosque in New England. But, with an estimated 8,000 people expected to attend, the mosque could not accommodate everyone, and so the main event (the holiday prayer) was held on a football field behind a Roxbury high school. Toward an American flag. With the Boston skyline as a backdrop. Somewhere, there”s a calendar with this precise image.

And afterwards, crepes near campus...

I”d normally take the rest of the day off, even though it”s not particularly necessary, but it was the third day of term; I had to go to class, and, to be honest, it's not like I would have been doing much else back in my dorm. And, no, I was not changing out of my salwar kameez. That same evening, I secured my UROP for the semester – I”ll be working with the Intelligent Transport Systems Lab (as I did in the spring of 2009, before going away for the year) on a traffic simulation project in Singapore.

I wasn”t certain I”d pursue a UROP this term with my already very busy schedule, but my new year's resolution for this year is to manage my lifestyle better. This means managing time well (okay, I”m already failing as I was writing this post the night before my GREs). This is especially important because I”m taking 60 credits this term –

• 1.00: Introduction to Engineering and Problem Solving (12 credits)
• 1.571: Structural Analysis and Control (12 credits)
• 1.572: Structural Systems (6 credits)
• 4.614: Religious Architecture and Islamic Cultures (12 credits)
• 4S.10: Delhi and Jaisalmer: An Architectural Journey through Two Indian Cities (6 credits)
• 21F.701: Spanish I (12 credits)

While less than some students take during an average semester, this is more than I”ve ever taken at MIT. On top of that, I”m a news editor for The Tech, which requires me to be holed up in The Tech office for eight hours one night every two weeks. Then, there”s working at the front desk at Baker, serving as a tour guide, blogging, eating, sleeping... So far, things have been going well, but it is, of course, just the first week.

But this also means keeping my room clean, or at least in navigable condition. To this end, I have a much larger room this year (168 sq. ft.) compared to during sophomore year (120 sq. ft.). But I also have about a third as much stuff. When I was packing up my stuff at the end of sophomore year, before heading abroad, I came to the sad realization that I had far too much stuff. There were strange doohickeys my parents bought me that I never used, clothes I wouldn”t get caught dead wearing – not sure what they were doing in my closet. I took maybe three large boxes home with me (two of which I planned to never bring back to MIT), and stored at least six crates at a relative”s house in Boston.

Opening those six crates on Saturday was like Christmas morning, a very sad, sad Christmas morning where you wish Santa had just gotten you coal instead. By the end of the day, those six boxes were one garbage bag for goodwill, two bags of things I wasn”t cruel enough to pass on, and one single crate to come back to MIT.

I”m even confident enough to even take a picture of my room now.

What's that, you ask? The top is a snapshot of a week in February 2009, when I was at MIT, while the bottom is a snapshot of the same week in February 2010, when I was at the University of Cambridge. Typical weeks, honestly.

Now clearly, some of this disparity is my own doing – I didn't have a job during the year (although few Cambridge undergraduates do) and I didn't note when I watched 24 this year. But the fact remains that no matter how you slice it, I was busy around the clock at MIT and getting several full nights of sleep a week at Cambridge.

At Cambridge, there are three eight-week terms, separated by two six-week breaks and a summer vacation lasting from mid June to early October. The average third-year engineering student has ten hours of lecture per week, but only during the first two terms (uh-huh, no lectures after mid-March); the final term is projects (not lecture, as far as I'm concerned) and exams (also not lecture). So, that's about 160 hours of lecture over 16 weeks.

On the other hand, MIT has two 14-week terms, separated by a single six-week break in January and a summer vacation lasting from late May to early September. I'd estimate about twelve hours of lecture per week during thirteen of those weeks. So, that's 312 hours of lecture over 26 weeks.

But, of course, that's only the beginning of the story. Third-year Cambridge engineers rarely shoot for more than ten hours of lecture per week, but we all have that friend at MIT who's taking so many classes we wonder when they get a chance to eat (if you don't have such a friend, it's you). Basically, it's not unheard of for MIT students to take on 15+ hours of lecture a week (although probably not attending all of them), plus recitations. Oh, and MIT is four years, while most British universities are generally three.

But while I found the system at Cambridge a welcome change (and, let's be honest, preferable), I found myself missing my busy schedule. Note that most of the events in my February 2009 calendar are not required coursework, but the result of choice. At MIT, no matter what day of the week or what time of the day, there is always some interesting or obscure talk – formal or informal – or free food event or meeting for one of the seemingly infinite student groups on campus. At Cambridge, the lesser time devoted to coursework (and problem sets; they have fewer of those too) and the less exhaustive selection of student groups meant that there was more room for a casual social life. Again, that was wonderful, but there were times there where I just felt... well... unproductive. Ironically, that was especially true during Cambridge's last term, which, being devoted to make-or-break exams, means students there don't do anything other than study.

But no such period exists at MIT. Yes, we have important exams and problem sets, but for some reason, instead of completely drawing our attention away from those distractions, we simply go into overtime. I like that, and, while I know I'll eat my words come late September, I'm looking forward to three weeks from now. I'm already beginning to fill in my calendar.

By the way, as promised, I have the answers to the places pictured in my last post. I admit some of the pictures were nearly impossible to guess...

First Row
1: Ortaköy Mosque and the Bosphorus Bridge, Istanbul (Turkey)
2: Along Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai (UAE)
3: Blue streets of Chefchaouen (Morocco)
4: The Taj Mahal, Agra (India)
5: The beach and hotels in Tel Aviv (Israel)

Second Row:
1: Train Station, Belgrade (Serbia)
2: The Acropolis, Athens (Greece)
3: The Coliseum, Rome (Italy)
4: St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City
5: The Dome of the Rock and Western Wall, Jerusalem

Third Row:
1: The Wagah Border Crossing (Pakistan, from India)
2: Outside Petra (Jordan)
3: Island as viewing from the Aegean Sea (Greece)
4: Big Ben / St. Stephens Tower, London (UK)
5: Oslo Opera House, with my friend I met in Israel (Norway)

Fourth Row:
1: With a shopkeeper in the old souqs, Marrakesh (Morocco)
2: Chain Bridge, Budapest (Hungary)
3: Bradenburg Gate, Berlin (Germany)
4: Eiffel Tower, Paris (France)
5: The Pyramids of Giza (Egypt)

Fifth Row:
1: Canals in Amsterdam (the Netherlands)
2: Sixth Avenue, New York (USA)
3: Three Kings' Day Parade, Barcelona (Spain)
4: Travelling by train (Bulgaria)
5: Streets of Cordoba (Spain)

That was two years ago.

In retrospect, that was just how I felt on my first night in Baker; if I recall correctly, neither of my roommates had even arrived yet. But whatever slight concerns I had toward embarking on that new chapter quickly passed sometime early the following day. Now, I shudder to think of life before MIT, condemned to four years of state-mandated labour.

And the apprehension I had in Tel Aviv – that too has passed. Before, travelling abroad was breaching my comfort zone; now, being abroad is my comfort zone. Since then, I have travelled to around twenty countries on my own (I suppose if you're bored you can guess a few):

Now, I'm spending my third consecutive summer interning aboard and approaching the end of an eleven-month stint in the UK, this time working at an engineering firm in London designing airports. Over the past six weeks, I have been researching, simulating, and writing about airports all over the world – so far I have worked on projects in Ireland, Oman, Fiji, Ghana, Bulgaria, and the Maldives. Unfortunately, I won't be joining my co-workers on their exotic business trips, but I did get five paid vacation days (ahem, American companies, what's going on?). I used three of those days to go to Norway, depicted in one of the photos above; in the photo, I'm with my friend from Norway who I met two years ago in Israel!

As several of my friends know, I love airports – I have half a mind to spend thirty days in Heathrow and write a book about it (or shoot a documentary, a l√° 30 Days) – so this is essentially a dream come true. This experience also completes a span of organizations – in my three summers at MIT, I have worked at a university, a non-profit, and, now, a for-profit company. I still haven't interned in a government job (a viable career option in my field), but the breadth of internship opportunities so far has been invaluable.

And, of course, it doesn't hurt being in one of most cosmopolitan cities in the world. My five-kilometre commute to work takes a mere twenty minutes by bike, faster than the Underground and way faster than the bus. And along the route, when I'm not doing my best to avoid double-decker buses and inattentive taxi drivers, I'm treated to a tranquil route through Hyde Park and past Royal Albert Hall.

Another great part about being abroad is the milieu of people you meet and get to know. Most of my new friends from the past year are – brace yourself – British, but this summer, I'm sharing a flat with two Canadians, two Frenchmen (is that gender-neutral?), and a Spaniard. As a friend of mine said, it's like the G4 (except Spain's not in the G20, so it's not, but let's not nitpick).

New York is a great city, and there has long been a Battle of the Titans between the Big Apple and the Big Smoke (New York clearly wins in the nickname department), but it's just so far from everywhere else. By the time you get to Mexico from New York, you could have flown from London over fifty countries and just as many languages. It doesn't help either that getting into New York is so much harder; my Spanish flatmate is trying to get a long-term visa to the U.S. and the first question they asked him on the phone was "Have you ever planned to kill the president?" Seriously; who's going to answer 'yes' to that question?

I personally am close to Edgware Road, a street that has been nicknamed Little Cairo, Little Beirut, Arab Street... you get the point; perhaps akin to Chinatown in New York, the vast majority of people you see on Edgware Road are Arab. Nearly all the restaurants on the street are Arab, and many shops and banks – even British banks – translate their signs and notices into Arabic. Christian and Muslim evangelicals jostle for the same space outside the movie theatre, handing out promotional material in Arabic (but only, of course, if they think you can read it). And, the sidewalks are lined with tourists and locals alike smoking sheesha (although at London, not Cairo and Beirut rates).

I don't know what it is, but there's an authenticity in Edgware Road that doesn't exist in New York's Chinatown (oh, and let's not even talk about Boston's Chinatown).

Advantage: London.