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

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

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

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

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

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

(click any image to enlarge)

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

1. stunning views

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

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

2. a spacious courtyard

we have a total of six floors,

four stoic pillars, three or more friendly balconies,

and a hammock. 

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

4. physics problems that confuse us

5. people who study

6. people who are friends

7. people who are hardcore athletes

8. AMAZING HOUSEMASTERS

9. cats

10. creativity

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

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

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

a rainbow ribbon

some random hallway foliage

11. MURALS

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

So here's a lesson for you: never delete your Public. NEVER DELETE YOUR PUBLIC. If you are trying to delete an item in your Public that you do not want there anymore and you have done this a thousand times before and twelve times already that morning, you will probably accidentally delete the entire folder anyway and then you will be made of fail and then the little voice in your head that mocks you all the time will point and laugh at you for ten million years.

JUST THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW.

Anyway, half the photo posts on my blog are full of broken links. What up, guys. I got a degree from MIT and it has taken me two months to figure out how to fix my broken blog. I am working on fixing this, anonymous person who probably got assigned to Senior Haus in the housing lottery and then sent me an email asking to fix the links in my posts about the dorm.

So yeah, I'm working on it, guys. In the meantime, take this picture of a drawing of a Slowpoke as a token of my affection.

Edit: Fixed! Alex '12 is made of awesome. Also this was fixed by a one-line Athena command that I have totally used before and definitely knew. Um. Yes. Definitely.

(Learn your way around Athena, guys. It's super useful.)

32. Take a lot of pictures. One of my major regrets in life is that I didn't take more pictures in college. My excuse was the cost of film and processing. Digital cameras are cheap and you have plenty of hard drive space, so you have no excuse.

22. Take some classes that have nothing to do with your major(s), purely for the fun of it.

41. Make a complete ass of yourself at least once, preferably more. It builds character.

37. In the long run, where you go to college doesn't matter as much as what you do with the opportunities you're given there. The MIT name on your resume won't mean much if that's the only thing on your resume. As a student here, you will have access to a variety of unique opportunities that no one else will ever have - don't waste them.

23. It's important to think about the future, but it's more important to be present in the now. You won't get the most out of college if you think of it as a stepping stone.

18. Take risks.

50. This is the only time in your lives when your only real responsibility is to learn. Try to remember how lucky you are every day.

7. At least a few times in your college career, do something fun and irresponsible when you should be studying. The night before my freshman year psych final, my roommate somehow scored front row seats to the Indigo Girls at a venue 2 hours away. I didn't do so well on the final, but I haven't thought about psych since 1993. I've thought about the experience of going to that show (with the guy who is now my son's godfather) at least once a month ever since.

49. Enjoy every second of the next four years. It is impossible to describe how quickly they pass.

...I'd say it's worked out pretty well.

SUCCESS AT LAST.

(Well, I still have one grade that isn't in. Whatever. I'M DONE, Y'ALL.)

Clearly MIT is refusing to let me graduate without a few last hard kicks in the face. (Remind me to tell you about how I failed my swim test last month.) This morning was out of the ordinary, though, because my KeyboardFace™ wasn't caused by one big epic scientific fail for once.

If you're anything like I was before I left my soul behind and enrolled at MIT, you're probably really into art. You're probably a huge nerd with a love of all things scientific, too, or you probably wouldn't have applied to MIT in the first place. And now that you're in and you've sent off your reply card (send off your reply card and come here, by the way, mmmk?), you're steeling yourself to leave all your cameras and sketchbooks and paints behind and to dive headlong into four years of SCIENCE SCIENCE SCIENCE. Abandon all art, ye who enter here.

False.

There are organizations all over campus specifically so that you don't have to do this. If art's an important part of your life now, it can be an important part of your life at MIT. And if art isn't already a part of your life, but you've always wanted to change that, we're still here for you too.

That said, let's talk about the SAA for a bit.

The Student Art Association is one of my favorite things about MIT. Students and members of the MIT community can take classes in ceramics, photography, life drawing, sculpture, and about eleventy million other areas. Classes are offered at every level, so you can get in on the action even if you think that throwing a pot can be classified as violent assault. Students even get a discount on the classes, so a life drawing class that might be over $200 elsewhere in Boston will cost you $85. You can't beat that. Really. You can't.

What's particularly awesome about the SAA is that the things you so there aren't just an escape from the stress of classes and, well, life. Almost all of them teach you something that you can take and apply to your work. My experiences in the darkroom have carried over to lab classes in my major; sometimes, you won't get the result you want on your first try, but you have to have the patience to look at what you've done and figure out what it means and how to change it if necessary. Wait, am I talking about brains or pictures? I'M SO TIRED.

I took a Color Photo class through the SAA last term. Their darkroom is one of the only ones equipped for color film processing and printing, and they have one of the few color enlargers in New England that takes 8x10 negatives. It's huge. It's scary. It's awesome.

Biyeun has blogged about the SAA before, so some of this might sound familiar, but it's always nice to be reminded that there's more to MIT than science and engineering.

Don't forget about art once you come here. There's no excuse for it.

And if I haven't convinced you, maybe this video will.

Welcome to the SAA: PATD 2010 on Vimeo.

I completely disagree. I work desk when I need money. I blog whenever I find something interesting. As a relatively uninteresting person, this translates to me rarely blogging. Stay tuned, though, for an upcoming post about my favorite door on campus.

(No, that is not a joke. It's an ultra-cool door.)

I'm in the middle of a tough week where I'm racing to finish up an incomplete in a class from last term by Friday's deadline and surveying everyone and their grandmother for an experiment in 9.61. A lot of my work involves living in the New Media Center, where most of what I do is staring at a computer while it tells me how much time is left on my conversion to a movie in Final Cut Pro. (Two hours? Four? Should I just leave and get a sandwich now?) I still don't have a job. I still don't have an apartment. The cardboard boxes I've been hoarding in my room in case of housing emergency become more and more of a certainty each day.

Sometimes I want to find the living embodiment of MIT and slap it around a little bit. "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME??? WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY WARN ME?! WHY DIDN'T I LISTEN WHEN PEOPLE WARNED ME ABOUT THIS PLACE?! WAHHHHH."

Luckily, an email from some of the deans on campus about the MIT Senior Survey gave me the chance to figure out what I really thought about MIT. At the very least, it was a 20-minute break where I got to click on a bunch of buttons. On the last page, though, there were two final questions that most of my fellow seniors seem to be asking themselves nowadays (although in language notably more informal):

Please use the space below to comment on what your school could have done to improve your undergraduate experience or what you wish you had done differently, or both.

Um. Easy.

"I wish my grades had been better. But hey, who doesn't?"

Please use the space below to describe the most important outcomes of your time as an undergraduate. Where possible, be specific about how your college or university contributed to these accomplishments, changes or other developments.

(Hoooooo boy. Where to start?)

"When asked what I would have done differently if I could start MIT all over again, I wrote, "I wish my grades had been better. But hey, who doesn't?" It does partially bother me that my grades have been strikingly average here. That said, early on in my undergraduate career, I realized that in order to get the most out of my education, I was going to have to take advantage of as many opportunities as possible; that meant my grades weren't guaranteed to be stellar, but I figured it'd be worth it. Looking back, it absolutely has been.

I've had a show at the radio station for four years, been president of my dorm, organized one of the largest alumni reunion events on campus, learned a ton about photography (and had some of my work included in an exhibit in a Boston gallery), seen Sonic Youth and the Pixies in the same week, produced a musical, discovered my passion for teaching, and even learned a thing or two about brains, all while living and working with some of the most amazing people alive.

It's scary seeing the last four years of my life fit in a couple of sentences. It seems like almost nothing at all, but it's all meant so much to me. My only hope is that more people keep in mind that an MIT education is more than just the purely academic; if that's what you believe, then you're doing it wrong."

Keep this in mind. This place is so much more than the classes and the grades you get in them. If you forget this, you are doing it wrong.

That's my theory, at least.

Let me remind you that I am getting a degree in June.

It is my final term here, I finished nearly all of my course requirements over a year ago, and there is one lab class standing between me and an S.B. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT. I can see the light. I CAN SEE IT. IT IS SO SO CLOSE.

Of course, my classes are impossible this term and I haven't slept in a while.

Case in point: I am working on the following assignment due tomorrow in 21M.840:

Create a text for a 3-5 minute performance. This text must be composed of no less than five different source materials. No single source may comprise more than 20% of the whole. Try to assemble your "text" from a combination of media--prose / dialogue / recorded conversation / poetry / sounds / still images / transcript / moving images / television / etc.

Your piece must include the following:
-5 entrances and exits
-2 extended close-ups (at least one so close, we aren't sure what we're looking at)
-1 example of partial view (only part of the performer is visible, other parts available by technology: mic, camera, monitor, etc.) (partially seen, partially screened)
- at least 1 moment eating, drinking, or both
-1 example of gravity
-1 example of lack of gravity
-1 short dance number
-1 radical change in shape, silhouette, or something like that (costume, something more abstract, take your pick)

Clearly, Rocko's Modern Life is the first thing that should come to mind when I have to develop experimental performance art pieces. It's the king of all weird cartoons.

Captain Compost Heap approves.

I'm pretty disappointed, but hey, it could be worse.

So it goes.

Two days before The Crowbar (Non)Incident, I wrote the following over on the emo, emo LiveJournal:

[MIT's] admit rate terrifies me more than just a little - I mean, 12.2%? Come on, you know the 87.8% deferred or denied can't have all been absolute idiots. What if they've already reached their (nonexistent) quota of black, female, National Merit Scholar, (possible) salutatorian, overachieving drama freaks with too many credits to her name? What if there's someone else out there just like me - except maybe they did something impossible or unthinkable (like teaching Latin to orphan children, or something of the sort) that made them just a hell of a lot more special than me?

Sound familiar?

Two of the last three summers, I've had the wonderful opportunity to live and work with gifted students as they took classes through the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University. Many of these engaging, talented students are now high school seniors applying to college, and they're understandably nervous about what the next few months will bring them.

Over here on the blogs, we aren't very far removed from the admissions process ourselves. We don't forget what it's like to be that worried about your future. Some of us are dealing with it again right now. The main difference is that four years ago I was sure I'd end up at a good college doing something I loved once the whole application ordeal was over. (The same will happen to most of you!) Things aren't nearly as certain anymore.

Pooooooop.

Meh, it'll be fine. I'll end up somewhere awesome. Am I right? I'm totally right.

(Also, I don't really want to leave MIT, but that's just IAP talking. Just wait until classes start again and ask me if that's still true.)

(From my 4.341 project last fall.)

All right, maybe "gorgeous" is a bit of a stretch.

I've been floating around this school for the last couple of months doing student-type things (going to classes, sleeping very little, forgetting to wipe the crusted drool off my face before going to classes) and doing me-type things (takin' the pictures, rockin' the radio, fallin' down surprisingly few flights of stairs) - you know, the usual. I'd say you've been missing out, but I'm really not interesting enough for anyone to miss out on my daily nonantics.

Speaking of boring, I had a four-hour shift at Senior Haus Desk yesterday afternoon. (I kid, I kid. I love Senior Haus. I couldn't imagine living anywhere else.) This stretch of time is perfect for when I need to get a solid amount of work done, even though it usually turns into a marathon Futurama-watching session. I'm using my IAP time to catch up on my nonrequired reading. Today's read was One Day, All Children..., by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. The book goes through the process of developing the program, building and expanding it, and how to work in schools across America to change how children learn.

I applied to Teach for America in October, and I received the book as a gift from MIT's TfA recruitment director after I made it to the final interview round. I find out whether or not I've been accepted on Thursday, and the rest of my life is mostly on hold until then. Hanna and Liz (both '10s) want to know if I still want to live with them next year, but apartment-hunting is contingent upon my being in the Boston area after June. I don't know where I'll be living. I don't know what I'll be doing. I hate answering questions from my friends and family about this. Let me pass on that message to all friends and relatives of current college seniors: We hate it when you ask us about these things.

This is really not the best way to go about planning for the future. I have, however, pre-registered for the spring semester, which is really as far ahead as I'm comfortable thinking about right now. (Don't be surprised. I just said I'm afraid of life way up at the top of this post.)

Anyway, a long-ish time ago in a land far-ish away, I went to high school in a low-income area of Fort Lauderdale with a magnet program, and the extreme disparity between the quality of education in the magnet and the mainstream classes was one of the more disturbing things I've experienced. My AP Physics class shared a classroom with a remedial reading class; the reading class had the room for the period before AP Physics, and the materials left in the classroom and written on the board revealed that the teacher could barely spell basic words correctly. In some of the larger, more basic math classes, students who could have done well in a more challenging course were barely noticed while the teachers tried to work with students who were even farther behind.

I've had a multitude of amazing opportunities at MIT, and I've heard from a person or two that this college ain't half bad. (Am I right?) But every time I think about the last four years, I also think about how the people I knew (and the thousands more I don't know) who had the potential to have their own college experience but weren't able to overcome the odds against them, and that's really not acceptable. I want to see students succeed even after years of being told that they can't, and I want to help make that happen. Sure, that's idealistic, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.

Here's the thing, though: I'm scared. I'm terrified that I'll fail. I've tried to do things and failed at them before - take, for example, everything related to 18.02 ever - but if I fail at something like this, I'm not the only one who has to deal with the consequences. That feeling of responsibility for someone else's future only makes everything even more terrifying. And if this doesn't work out, then what happens? This is something I care about a lot and really want to do with my life, and when I try to think of my future in a way that doesn't involve teaching, it's one scary-looking blank.

I am (understandably?) a little jealous when I think about my friends who know what they want to do with their lives and are already doing it, as opposed to sitting around in the overly neurotic state of limbo that has been my last two months.

I realize that I haven't written about any of this yet; my last post is from the day before I submitted my Teach for America application. TfA isn't the only path towards becoming a teacher, but it's a program that shares many of the same ideas and ambitions that I have. I'm worried that I won't be accepted, and I've been afraid of putting myself out there on the blogs because of the possible letdown. That's not fair to all of you for quite a few reasons, one of which is summed up in some faux-sage advice in the wrapper of a Dove chocolate I ate a few months ago:

At the time, I thought the answer was bacon. (I'm only half-joking.) But it's not. It's really not.

(That said, bacon's still absolutely delicious.)

...but I'm not the one being affected here. What are your thoughts?

(Oh man I love otters so much)

So, let's take a look at the schedule of a first-semester senior with two classes and a swim test* left between her and graduation:

9.15 - Biochemistry and Pharmacology of Synaptic Transmission. This is the last of my six Course 9 elective classes, and it's looking to be one of the best. Twice a week, Richard Wurtman stands in front of 40 students and talks about neurotransmitters and drugs for 90 minutes. He does not use any notes. I have been trying to figure out how any one man can have that much information in his head. (Please send any hypotheses you may have to keri-lee at mit dot edu. I'm dying to know.)

9.71 - Functional MRI of High-Level Vision. Remember when I was a TA for a neuroscience class this summer at nerd camp? With these guys? We spent some time in class talking about neuroimaging studies and their uses in localization of brain function. Most of those talks were in relation to the fusiform face area (FFA), which responds selectively to faces over objects presented in the visual field, and Nancy Kanwisher, who has taken part in many elegantly designed neuroimaging studies and co-authored just about every neuroimaging paper that isn't a gigantic pile of crap.

Yeah, so she's teaching this class.

My thoughts when I walked into the room were as follows:
1) HOLY CRAP YOU ARE A VERY IMPORTANT PERSON I AM INTIMIDATED BY YOU
2) HOLY CRAP THAT IS A GOLDEN RETRIEVER SITTING ON THE FLOOR OF THE CLASSROOM
3) HOLY CRAP I AM TOTALLY SITTING NEXT TO YOUR DOG

After sitting and actually listening to her for two classes, I concluded that Nancy Kanwisher is my new favorite person ever. Her discussions are really interesting, and she consistently brings up points that make or break neuroimaging studies.

7.342 - The X in Sex: A Genetic, Medical, and Evolutionary View of the X Chromosome. An advanced 6-unit seminar class in the Biology department being run by a postdoc at the Whitehead Institute, 7.342 assigns two papers a week on some aspect of the X chromosome and its role in biology - in the first few weeks, we've discussed the multiple causes of sex reversal, the discovery of X-linked traits and sex-specific areas on the X chromosome. it's a super small group that meets once a week for two hours, so we actually get to talk in depth about the papers we read for the week and what each of us got out of them. I wish the Biology department would promote these classes more and start doing so earlier, since so many people are eligible to enroll in them (juniors and seniors who have taken at least one class beyond Introductory Bio can sign up), but if they did, there'd be too many people for the discussions to work as nicely as they do now.

4.343 - Photography and Related Media. This is a grad class, which I'm taking because I took the undergrad-level class last fall and I am running out of photography classes to take for credit. We take pictures using digital and film cameras and go through workshops on printing, lighting, and other aspects of photography, all the while working towards a final term project.

If you're interested in photography classes at MIT, Biyeun from the ARTalk blog has written quite a few posts on it, which you can check out here, here, and here.

On that note, I'm also taking a color photography class through the Student Art Association. The class rocks so far, and I've managed to successfully not spill hot toxic developer all over myself yet. (Progress!) The SAA has amazing classes and studios for all sorts of different artistic endeavors - ceramics, sculpture, drawing, painting, all that - and I've always had too much on my plate to do anything with them, but not anymore because I'M ALMOST DONE WITH MIT. YEAHHHHHHH. The class meets on Monday nights, though, which means I had to drop a class I've been trying to take for two years:

21W.763/CMS.309 - Transmedia Storytelling: Modern Science Fiction. Admittedly, I was mainly interested in this class because of the instructor. I worked with Beth Coleman at WMBR for over a year as an engineer for her radio show; she's a sound artist, DJ, and a pretty swell lady. The class was nothing like what I'd expected - there's some science fiction writing at the start of the term, but the class is mainly using that as a jumping point for the creation of an augmented reality game (ARG) in a style influenced by I Love Bees. This is completely unlike anything I've ever done, and it's wayyyy out of my comfort zone, and it's exactly why I was psyched about the class after the first meeting. Anyway, now I can't take it because COME ON, COLOR DEVELOPING AND PRINTING.

When I'm not in classes or trying to have a life, I spend about a million hours each week working desk. Welcome to Senior House. I let you in. I sort your mail. I offer up your daily dose of snark.

It's a rockin' good time, y'all.

*No, I haven't taken my swim test yet. Yes, I've known how to swim since I was 3. I was scheduled to take it my freshman year at 11:30 on a Monday morning, which was too early for me then and is too early for me now. I'll take it soon, I swear.

What made this different from all the other days when I carry my camera around all day and take awkward pictures of my friends and everything around me is that hundreds of other people on campus were doing the same thing with the same purpose: to take part in A Day In The Life, a project open to the entire MIT community sponsored by Technique, MIT's yearbook and photography club. Students, faculty, and staff alike have been uploading their photos to the website, which Technique describes as a "collective photo blog" and which allows you to view timelines of multiple people's photos at once.

Over 120 people have collectively uploaded thousands of pictures of their days so far, and it's really interesting to see not just what people do over the course of a typical day, but also how they choose to frame that. The project made me notice the things around me all the time that I never really stopped to look at.

Like eating lunch in Stata, where seats fill up around noon and everyone moves quickly all the time.

Or the pattern of the splatter paint on the walls of my room, which I stopped noticing about two weeks after I did it.

It also gave me the opportunity to take a million pictures of the disastrous construction zone all the way down Amherst Street to the corner of Ames and Amherst (also known as WHERE I LIVE. RAWR.), because my parents do not believe me when I tell them how ridiculous it looks. The stairs to Senior House were cordoned off for over a month. Everyone was using the handicapped ramp. Delivery guys and taxi drivers keep trying to turn the wrong way down what was once a two-way street and not understanding why pedestrians and the drivers of oncoming cars keep giving them the finger.

Anyway, Check out ADITL. It's made of awesome.

...all right, that statement's also a lie. There are some things about that bio that are immutable; my birthplace will never not be Jamaica, and my love for pie is still only surpassed by my love for bacon and Arrested Development.

I've now seen more snow than I ever cared to see in my life; by that token, you can tell that I'm certainly not new here anymore. (In case the last three years of blogging and my recent distress over becoming a senior didn't clue you into that.) My old bio is also a testament to my former desire to earn a degree in Chemistry (HAHAHAHAHA) and spend my life playing with brains, blowing stuff up, and curing cancer. My goals have clearly shifted quite a bit. This is partially due to a year of research, during which I learned - among other worthwhile things - that ampicillin-resistant bacteria will not grow in a kanamycin-containing medium and that spending excessive amounts of time with petri dishes full of bacterial colonies makes me want to shoot myself in the face. (Speaking of my UROP, I was explaining the O'Connor Lab's work to my friend Adrian earlier today, though, and I was shocked when I realized that I could actually do so without sounding like an idiot. Who knew?)

I'll elaborate upon my new life plan in an upcoming post. Hint: it's teaching.

"So what, you went to MIT so you could teach?" you may ask. Of course not. I came here so I could learn (Hey! See what I did there?), and I think that's been working out pretty well. No one should be expected to skip off to college with a definitive plan for their lives at an age where they're barely trusted with adult privileges and responsibilities. At the very least, no one should have to be locked into whatever plans they may have; I had an awesome, well-thought-out plan, and look how that turned out.

Anyway, this all means it's about time for a new bio.

There are people at this school who are exceptional at everything they do: they get all As, cure diseases, bake amazing cookies for their friends all the time, and manage to look awesome every day when they show up (on time!) for class in the morning.

I am not one of those people.

My name is Keri Garel, class of 2010, and my life at MIT is not what you would expect. I fall up flights of stairs only just more frequently than I fall down them (which is often). I should really cut down on the amount of bacon I eat, lest I have a heart attack at age 30. I am known for making obscene faces in photographs on the rare occasion when I am in front of the camera instead of wielding it, and I will attempt to write the next paragraph without including the word "I," to compensate for its overuse in this one.

In my homeland, snow is only a myth. My fanatical, creepy-as-all-get-out love for brains means that people never fail to remember my major. The number of Sonic Youth albums in my music collection is a little ridiculous. My dorm is better than yours.

I love music, art, photography, dance, and theater. I'm still not quite sure why I go to a school for science and engineering, but I'm in good company here. ("Do you even go to this school?" "No, I just have a lot of feelings.") The future is terrifying, but if you don't ask me about it, then we won't discuss it. Deal? Deal.

My Neuroscience class had 17 students who are pretty much the best people ever. (Don't argue. I'm right.) I have fantastic evidence to back up my argument, too.

There's a video on CollegeHumor of some students playing mattress dominoes, which involves... well, you'll see it. My class made their own version of the video last week when I was away from the floor for approximately two seconds, and it's pretty great.

That's all I've got for you today. Back to the living and the learning and all that.

An Act of God, in this case, refers to one hell of a lightning storm in Fort Lauderdale, closing the runway for an extended period of time, causing my 6 AM flight to leave an hour late, and leading me to miss my connection to Chicago O'Hare by approximately two seconds. My luck in airports is notoriously crappy.

To celebrate, I went to pee - I'd been holding it during an all-out sprint across the terminal to, you know, not miss that connecting flight that I missed.

This post has nothing to do with the above.

I have been spending too much time on the 2013 Facebook group, which I knew would happen. (I'll leave you all alone soon, I promise - I've had nothing to do for the last two weeks, but that ends today when I start training for teachin' the kids IF I EVER GET TO CHICAGO RAWR RAWR RAWR.) There's a discussion topic called "Advice for Freshman," which is notable because of two things:

The latter point and everything related to it may confuse the living daylights out of you, but it's really not a problem, which I'll explain in a second. By now, you've heard that you should take 7.013 in the spring when the class is larger, unless you want to take 7.012 with the great and all-powerful Eric Lander, unless you want to take 7.014 because you're a huge fan of ecology and think that genetics can suck it, unless you want to pretend that biology doesn't exist for a semester or seven and take it in your last term at MIT. And now you're confused and don't know who's right and whether or not you'll make the right decision, because if you take the wrong biology class, you won't pass, you won't graduate, you won't get a job, no woman will ever love you, and you'll find yourself living in a cardboard box underneath the Longfellow Bridge.

And let's not even talk about 8.02, because physics is made of evil and you definitely won't pass that as a freshman.

....Oh, I'm sorry. Was that all a huge lie? I really should quit with the sarcasm over the Internets. It clogs the tubes and the point doesn't always get across.

By the way, all of the Introductory Biology classes cover genetics. You won't get out of it just by taking 7.014.

Sure, upperclassmen all over the place have been telling you that the classes are difficult. Sure, we all advise you to do different things, making it hard for you to decide which path to take. The good thing about having us around is that it informs you of the options you have, at which point you can decide what's best for you.

I know you're all getting a ton of stuff thrown at you now that you'll have to deal with in two months, but it's not as terrifying and life-altering as it seems. (Am I repeating myself? Oh hey, I totally am! I'm making an important point here!)

Or, to quote my post in the discussion yesterday:

"The only reason we all keep saying that MIT is hard is because it is. We know that many of you are coming in here after years of being told that you were the smartest, most amazing kid ever ever ever, and that a lot of what you've done so far may have come easily. We've been there, and we know it's a bit of a shock when you fail your first test and you can't answer half the questions on your first pset. All we're trying to say is that you're not alone - there are three thousand(ish) upperclassmen who have been in exactly the same position, and there are a thousand other people in your class who are experiencing the same thing that you are. As long as you realize that you don't have to (and shouldn't!) do everything alone and that you're in a collaborative rather than a competitive environment, you should be okay."

That's all. I'm getting off my soapbox and I'm going to stop yelling. My voice is getting hoarse, and everyone in the terminal around me is wondering what in blazes I'm shouting about.

I joined the MIT Class of 2013 facebook group.

Sophomores and juniors can attest to the fact that I spent ample amounts of time last summer and the summer before answering questions and debunking myths. But I'm a senior this year, and after three years of this stuff, I should be entitled to a month or two of just not caring whether or not you decide to do Terrascope or a freshman seminar. (Holy crap, I'm a senior. When did that happen?! Wasn't I posting obnoxious froshy comments on the blogs just two seconds ago?)

I have absolutely nothing better to do, though, so I'll be posting stuff like the points below:

-A four-inch memory foam mattress pad, though pretty damn comfortable, is really not necessary for your bed. In fact, I fear that it may swallow you in the middle of the night in January. You can't really trust anything that retains an imprint of your hand for that long, regardless of what those Tempur-Pedic informercials say.

-Where you are temped for REX is not that important. I ranked Baker first in my housing lottery three years ago (SERIOUSLY THIS CAN'T BE RIGHT I'M NOT OLD ENOUGH FOR THIS), got temped in New House, and after REX I moved to Senior Haus, which I love so much that I've been masochistic enough to run Steer Roast and be Haus president for a year. If you don't like where you're temped, you can move. Unless it's McCormick. Or Spanish House. Or Chocolate City. Or - no, that's it.

-It doesn't matter too much when you take 7.012/3/4/5(?) or which incarnation of the class you decide to take, so long as you pass it and graduate. This does not apply if your major requires it for a ton of classes or if you are really bad at bio, in which case you should take it as soon as possible, as Pass/No Record is kind of your BFF. No, I cannot tell you when I decided to take it, as I got a 5 on the AP Bio exam and got credit for the class. The class of 2010 was the last class for which this was allowed, so I like to rub it in a little bit every now and then.

I wrote a post on freshman scheduling two years ago (OH GOD I HAVE BEEN HERE TOO LONG ALREADY), which has a basic outline that doesn't need to be followed, as you can see in the comments at the end of the post.

-You do not need to bring your own fire extinguisher. Don't laugh. Someone asked this once.

-Yes, I'm this awesome all the time. Thank you. My hair just dries like this.

-That's actually a lie. I'm not very awesome at all. And my hair's a disaster when it dries.

Anyway, I suppose I'll be another one of the eleventy million current students answering questions and countering each other's advice in the Facebook group.

Moving on to more important information: a Japanese manufacturer recently unveiled its latest invention: a robot that cooks you pancakes for breakfast.

This would be the highlight of my life thus far, were it not for the fact that - good news, everyone! - Futurama just got uncanceled!

Better than pancakes: Y/N? Y. Definitely a Y.

And then I woke up this morning and my right hip was bothering me a lot - it's been a recurring issue in for the last couple of years, probably made worse by my inability to remain standing on my feet for more than a nanosecond without falling over them. Anyway, I've been limping around pathetically all day. Woo.

Oh, and I haven't showered since Saturday morning and I've been wearing the same shirt for three days.

But today I got back one of three exams I took last week, and since it is the best grade I've gotten on an exam since my first 5.12 test over two years ago, I stuck it up on my refrigerator with magnets.

I also asked around on my hall for a gold star sticker.

No, I do not think I am taking this too seriously.

Not today, kids. I had an exam yesterday, just got out of another exam, and have yet another one tomorrow morning. Since I'd actually like to write something other than "AGH MONKEYS WHY DO I FAIL AT LIFE," stories about what I've been doing with my life and which flights of stairs I've fallen down this term will just have to wait.

It's not like I'm leaving you out in the cold with nothing to read about, though. (Speaking of, why is it so friggin' cold here right now? Where I come from, we don't have things like cold and snow.) Here's a guest post from Sondy G on MIT's six independent living groups - they've been mentioned on the blogs before, but as none of the current or former bloggers have lived in ILGs, they haven't really been discussed in much detail. Sondy's post changes that, though. Read. Enjoy. I'm off to study for 7.05.

In response to not-so-recent posts by Paul, Snively, and Chris on fraternity life and lack thereof at MIT, here's a post on MIT Independent Living Groups (ILGs), another alternative to dormitory/Greek life. Independent Living Groups are cooperative houses of 20 to 40 MIT students living together, similar to fraternities or sororities. Most ILGs lack national organizations, meaning that most if not all decisions made by an ILG are made by its students and alumni members. Since none of the current bloggers live in ILGs, I'm appreciative of Keri's offer to host this entry. Thanks Keri!

I've visited a few of the other ILGs at MIT and some of their members were so kind as to include information about their houses, but the main focus of this entry will be pika since I live there. Hopefully other representatives of other ILGs will read this entry and can answer questions; if not, I can forward queries along to them. Comment early! Comment often!

Epsilon Theta

David '10 remarks that,

Epsilon Theta is a small and close-knit co-ed fraternity. We live in our beautiful house across from a pleasant public park in Brookline. Epsilon Theta is more than just a residence; it is a community of men and women who live with and depend on each other. One can always find members around the house playing a board game, working together on a pset, or eating a community homecooked meal. A recent pledge compares ET to other living groups stating "We're more awesome."

Fenway House

Fenway is home to 20 MIT students (and cats) in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood.

No. 6 House

Student House

Student house is a co-ed living space located at 111 Bay State, Boston MA--
right in the midst of MIT fraternities, BU dorms, Fenway Park, and Kenmore Square.
Shuttles (Boston Daytime, Boston West) run daily during the year and help many
of our 24 residents get to and from campus.

Though we live in one of the richer parts of Boston, we are actually the
cheapest option for MIT affiliated housing at $370 per month, which includes
dinner most nights. Students are responsible for most aspects of life at the
house, including house government, cooking, house chores, etc.

We've got a great mix of undergrads, exchange students, and a few masters
students this semester, so come check us out!

WILG

pika

the house.

The back porches/firepole/roofdeck


The treehouse (a good place to camp during the summer)

Owning Your Own House

What distinguishes pika from the dorms and Greek groups? First off, we own our house. We don't have a national organization, so our housebills go directly to house upkeep, food (I'll get to that later), paying for our two cats, and buying chocolate for study breaks. As soon as a pikan graduates or moves out of the house, they become a member of Housecorp, a body responsible for our mortgage and decisions regarding the grander physical plant of our 100-some-odd-year-old house in Cambridgeport.

Owning your own house means you can modify it as you see fit. Think that wall needs a mural? Want a rope ladder in your room? Sick of that wall between you and the closet? Bring out the Sawzall... okay, consult with your housemates first; sawing through live wires and plumbing generally is no fun.

Part of owning your own house is maintaining your house. Most other ILGs have some flavor of work periods throughout the year: pika is no different. In the fall we have a major Work Week where we build new parts of the house (roofdecks, lofts, bunkbeds) and thoroughly clean and fix anything else that's been neglected in the last year. We hold a smaller version, Work Weekend, at the beginning of spring semester. Local alumni show up, helping you bend steel with an oxyacetylene blowtorch or clean the kitchen after lunch. Work Week is a great time to get to know you housemates, whether they just moved in or if they've been living there for two years.

After completion of the roofdeck last fall, pikans celebrated with a human pyramid. From left to right: Top: Amber '10. Second row down: Susa '09, Liz '10. Third row: Fucheng G, Jason '10, Amelia '10. Bottom: Emily '10, Eric '10, Brian '08, Mark '08. Photo taken by Alex G

Ian '09.5 pledged pika last November, and while we were excited to have him be a member of the house, we suddenly faced an important question: "How the heck will he get his scooter inside?" Within a month we had a design for a ramp that would wrap around the side of the house, planned out by current residents and an architect alum. In three weeks over IAP, we built an entire ramp for Ian, some days working in subzero temperatures. Fellow pikan Spang '10 has more details on her blog here.

Food, Glorious Food!

Other ILGs have meal plans, ranging from having the kitchen stocked by a student elected to buy groceries to having a hired chef cook meals throughout the week. pika has a meal plan where everyone in the house takes turns cooking or cleaning once a week, ensuring home-cooked meals every night throughout the year. Speaking of preparing food, our kitchen is pretty awesome: a stove with six burners, two ovens, a sink big enough to bathe in, and more flour/cereal/fruit/sugar/rice/butter/milk/spices/whathaveyou than you can shake a stick at. Seriously. Come over and we'll show you how well-stocked the pantry is. (It even has an alarm that squawks at you to shut the door.) We also try to see how many people we can cram around our dining room tables: at last count we were around 20. Video here.

20-something pikans on and around our dining room table

I like pika's meal plan because it doesn't require you to know how to cook! Novice chefs can sign up to clean, buy groceries, or help more knowledgeable geniuses in the kitchen. A lot of people have walked into pika not knowing the difference between a teaspoon and a ladle and walked out being one of the most celebrated chefs in the house. The only drawback is that when you graduate and get a place of your own, it becomes difficult to cook for just one after years of cooking for 30.

Connection to MIT

Being part of MIT means we get our own SafeRide stop. If you're on campus past the last SafeRide run, Campus Police will give you a ride home. Some parents might worry about their son or daughter living so far away from campus and the infrastructure MIT provides. All ILGs are part of the FSILG Cooperative, which helps us pay bills, hire plumbers, pay our mortgages, and keep our houses running. In addition to having bureaucratic support, all ILGs are connected to the MIT network, meaning that we don't have to wrangle with Comcast or Verizon for Internet access. This year, MIT is paying for network upgrades in all of the FSILGs, improving our network connections to campus, in addition to upgrading our phone lines and alarm systems.

MIT also supports a residence advisor (RA) in each FSILG. The RA is effectively our GRT and makes sure that the various students in the ILG are doing well, whether academically or emotionally. The RA also receives money from MIT throughout the year for study breaks and house outings. Our last RA was a magician and regularly put on magic shows for the house as well as the neighborhood. The current RA runs a summer camp and teaches elementary school children during the rest of the year. He's developing a startup and is improving pika's composting system. Awesome!

Rush

Along with setting our own rules and policies, most ILGs have relatively relaxed rush schedules. For example, Epsilon Theta accepts pledges both in the fall and the spring. pika holds rush meetings throughout the year, so people can receive bids in September or July or January or really whenever the house decides we're excited about living with someone. Our bids are pretty unconventional: we give out physical objects to people that reflect the bidee's personality. Chenxia '10 received part of a washing machine that she helped disassemble. James '08, an AeroAstro major, received a little red biplane for his bid but couldn't figure out the best way to tell pika he wanted to move in the next term. Finally it came to him. He snuck into the house one night, hung the plane from the dining room ceiling, and spelled out "I PLEDGE" in flags behind its tail.

Rush is really a great excuse for the house to have fun! Some previous rush events have included making creme brulee with the oxy torch, beach trips, roofdeck campouts, frying pan ping pong, moonlight sailing expeditions, water fights... My personal favorite event in the last year was the Tesla coil made out of a ton of wire and two cake pans:

The Tesla coil, spewing 13,000 volt sparks into our basement (you should have seen the electric bill that month)

Community

The best thing about the ILGs, beyond the tasty food and the awesome digs, is the community that each house embodies. pika has 30 students ranging from sophomores to grad students, in a myriad of majors. I love coming home at night to a living room full of people debating control theory or finding the best way to sail on the Charles in a stockpot. Three-hour musical jam sessions spontaneously break out in the living room. If you need a shoulder to cry on or help differential equations, someone is around to lend an ear or last year's course notes.

People from pika go on to the Peace Corps, graduate school, or consulting gigs. Some start their own companies, volunteer in Africa, or just chainsaw firewood at sunset in an undisclosed location. Your roommate might be TAing the class that you're taking this term, or might be trying to change the way people think about automobiles in the world. Or learning Israeli dance. Or tie-dying t-shirts in the basement all night. Regardless of who you are and what you're doing, pika will accept you as you are, plus improve your cooking skills and handiness with a hammer by the time you graduate.

There's a great sense of pride you get once you've installed your first toilet or slept in a bed that you built. Being responsible for the upkeep of a house is a great life skill and goes along well with MIT's motto of "Menus et Manus" (Mind and Hand). Having practical experience taking care of yourself and your living arrangements is great practice for getting out into the real world after MIT.

For more information on ILGs at MIT, here's David '10's article on ILGs from the Tech and the Student Life website on ILGs.

When you come to campus, be it this spring or August, be sure to check out not only the dorms and Greek houses, but also your friendly neighborhood ILGs. We look forward to meeting you at either CPW or in the fall.

Thanks for reading!

Sondy ('07*... sorta) G

---

*Who is this graduate student and why is she writing about MIT like she knows something about the place? Though I didn't attend MIT as an undergrad, I attended a nearby college and was able to cross-register at MIT for four years. I took seven classes at MIT as an undergrad (ranging from humanities to Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier to Asteroids and Small Bodies), had a UROP to build sailboat tracking devices, lived on campus one summer, and spent a lot of time in various dorms, fraternities, and living groups. Now I'm a second-year graduate student in planetary science (go EAPS!) and I currently live at pika, thanks to the undergraduates who were gracious enough to let me dwell with them. Rock on!

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If the world operated on my sense of time, then the concept of "morning" would be applied to a time no earlier than 2 PM. Unfortunately for me, that will probably never happen. Even more unfortunately, I am a ridiculously heavy sleeper who could slumber through the initiation of a massive nuclear war. And now I somehow have to get up at 7:30 AM five days a week.

(If you are my stepdad, you are probably laughing so hard you just fell out of your chair. He spent four years waking me up at 5 AM for school, which is a truly Herculean task. Consider it retribution. Or payback. Or both.)

I've been taking the 8-9AM hour at desk every weekday morning for the last three weeks, since I'm pretty sure I won't get up in the morning unless I'm being paid to do so. When my alarm clock goes off in the morning and I'm tempted to cross the room and hit snooze, it's like a little voice in my head says, "I'll pay you $9.25 if you get out of bed right now." So far, the voice is compelling enough for me to immediately get up, shower, and dress. It's been working out nicely.

As I'm sure you can all understand, I was thoroughly looking forward to sleeping in last Saturday. I unplugged my alarm and pulled my window shade before going to bed at 3 AM, fully prepared to be knocked out until well into the day.

I woke up without any provocation at 7:15 AM.

Someone up there hates me.

I have been assigned exactly zero problem sets since December of 2007.

I realize that everyone and their grandmother thinks I am a lucky bastard. I hate psets - seriously, I really hate them - so the fact that I've been able to avoid them for so long means that even I belong to that party. I've passed on pset- and exam- heavy classes in favor of those with huge end-of-term papers and projects, hours upon hours of darkroom and Photoshop time, lab reports galore, and hundreds of pages of reading each night. Last semester, I had a total of one midterm and one final.

I find these projects and reading assignments far more conducive to my learning (and far more enjoyable to do) than psets and exams, so it all works out nicely.

This term, however, my luck has finally run out. 7.05, 9.22, 9.59, and 9.65 collectively have six problem sets, four papers, and thirteen exams. I also still have about 60-70 pages of reading per class per night.

As you can see, I got served.

If at any point in the upcoming months you find yourself wondering "Hey, where'd that Keri girl go?", I encourage you to read this post again and think about what I could be doing with my life right then. Don't spend too much time doing that, though. You could be off living your own instead.

I'm off to make myself a sandwich and read about protein folding.

Anyway, some of those comments are all like, "MIT is hard, yeah, yeah, whatever. Anyway, I want to know - how hard is MIT? Because I keep hearing it's hard, but I just don't understand, you know?" or "wait, why does everyone keep saying high school is easy? I don't think it's easy. I actually think it's kind of hard. OH, CHRIST. I HAVE NO CHANCE OF GETTING IN."

(I exaggerate only because I don't know any other way to live. Ask my friends.)

In response to all of these comments, I'd like to deliver a poorly elaborated anecdote about my 10th grade PreCalc class. The class was taught by Mr. Antunez, a new teacher who had grown up in Spain and Argentina and was known primarily for two things: 1) being an absolute hardass of a teacher, and 2) completely butchering everyone's names. I spent the year being called "Karel," which I stopped correcting after one quarter because it was a portmanteau of my first and last names and could therefore technically be considered correct. Neha '10 still uses it sometimes. It's one of those nicknames, like "Klag" and "Squeaky," that only maybe two people can use without being in danger of my setting them on fire.

Oh. Right. PreCalc.

Over the course of the year, a disturbing cycle emerged. We'd have a few lessons. We'd all feel like we were slowly being dragged deeper into a pit of despair. We'd take a test, which felt like an entirely different and far more painful pit of despair. (It's early. Metaphors and variety thereof are not my friend right now.) And at the start of the first class after a test date, Mr. Antunez would, without fail, stand at the board for ten minutes and lecture us about how HORRIBLE our test scores were and how he just didn't UNDERSTAND why we were in this CLASS when we OBVIOUSLY didn't KNOW what we were DOING.

And every time he delivered one of these lectures (which became increasingly emphatic), Neha and I, as the only sophomores in this section of PreCalc, would sit in the back row passing snarky notes to each other and thinking about what badasses we were, since he couldn't possibly be talking about us. When we got our tests back, our scores would usually be just as bad as everyone else's. Oops.

I call this Everyone But Me Syndrome, and every single one of us has some form of it.

It manifests itself in different ways, whether you think that you are supersmart and probably don't find things difficult when everyone else does, or you're the opposite and are convinced that everyone is smarter and infinitely more awesome than you are. I've slowly shifted from the former to the latter, since I become increasingly aware of how lame I am every day.

This is all a really long way of saying two things:

-Think classes here won't really be hard for you because you might be smarter or more accomplished than we are? Think again. With respect to specific classes: want to take the more advanced (and sometimes more difficult) version of a class - say, 18.022 instead of 18.02? Go ahead. Sign up and do it. Challenge yourself. You'll decide what works for you soon enough.

-Think that if you're working hard in high school, then you definitely won't be able to handle it here? That's not necessarily true either. Many, if not most, of us here put a lot of effort into our work in high school too. I remember spending the majority of my sophomore and junior years wondering why I was struggling so much and if I had any career options other than being a professional standardized test-taker. (I did really well on the SATs without much effort, but that's about it.)

Anyway, that's my two cents. Take it or leave it. And if you do decide to ignore me, please don't say as much. I get it. I'm lame. I already know.

This has been going on for about twenty-five minutes.

It seems like the right time to start an update.

My grades are all in, and for the first time since coming off of Pass/No Record, I don't see any Cs.

Well, I can't see any Cs.

9.10 might have been a C, but I'll never know - I took it on Junior-Senior P/D/F, which is exactly what it sounds like. You can take up to two classes on Junior-Senior P/D/F, and they can't satisfy any Institute or departmental requirements. (9.10 would have been one of my six Course 9 electives had I not switched it to P/D/F, but it's okay - by the time I graduate, I'll have taken about nine classes that can satisfy those requirements. Brains are awesome. Tell your children.)

So long, Fall '08. You've served me well and made me broke. Also, falling down multiple flights of stairs probably didn't help much in the long run.

I've always been ridiculously independent, which made for a frequent point of contention between me and my once ultraprotective mother. She and I have always been extremely close, but a huge part of me just could not wait for the day when I would be on my own in some to-be-determined overpriced glorified daycare center.

Oh, college.

Anyway, I was hanging out with some of my friends from high school.

(I have a point, I swear. I will make it.)

No one, least of all me, wants these reunions to be weird - and for the most part, they aren't; every time we all see each other, it's like picking up right back where we started, as if the last time we all went out someplace was just two seconds ago. It's only when I'm driving home or falling asleep that I start feeling strange. Despite the inside jokes we rekindle almost immediately and the camaraderie that still exists throughout many years spent mostly apart, it is very apparent that my friends and I have all changed - a lot - and we share less and less in common every time we meet. Soon our eggs will drop and all will be well.

Independence be damned. I am still not okay with growing up.

I don't feel like that's happening, but that's where they get you. (Tricked me again, life!) According to my mom, you never really feel like you're growing up, but suddenly people start expecting you to have the answers to difficult questions, to quit making faces in all your pictures, and to know what a Roth IRA is and how to contribute to it. (Note: If you know, don't tell me. I'm nineteen. I don't care right now.)

I don't want to do any of these things, especially with 255 awkward Facebook photos and counting. I always hoped the mythical Future Me would appear overnight, know how not to constantly be too snarky for my own good, and look awesome in a Dashing Hat. I just assumed these were skills everyone learned in some supersecret Charm School-esque class, or that there was some switch that turned on sometime in my mid-twenties. (Aside from my biological clock, which I plan to fully ignore. No eggs dropping for me.)

But everyone knows my mom is always, always right.

So long, Dashing Hat.

That blasted alarm has stopped. I'm going to bed.

(I may or may not have forgotten my point.)

"Oh, I hate those books," I say, before I could stop myself.

"Really? Why?" he asks.

"I mean, it's not that they're badly written or anything. Considering the quality of teen lit out there, this is probably one of the more well-written books you could give to a teenage girl." (I do not think the series is well-written at all. I was not lying when I told this man what I thought. Take this as an insight into the overall quality of teen-girl-oriented novels currently in print.) "I just think it's not very empowering, you know? It's got a main character who absolutely fawns over this guy and sets everything else aside in favor of him, which is about as antifeminist as you can get."

He looks at me as if he is all about the antifeminism, so long as it stops his little girl from having sex.

I am digging a hole for myself.

"Not that I'd rather have teen girls reading so-called "feminist" books with sex all over the place, I mean! But these books, I'm, um, saying... well, they're also not a very good example, just in a totally opposite way."

A woman on the other side of the display chimes in with, "They're not all that realistic."

"Unrealistic! That's the word!"

He glares at me, probably convinced I'm an ultra-promiscuous feminazi out to convert innocent thirteen-year-olds to fellow godless heathens.

"I have to go," I say, and shuffle into the Self-Help Section before I can do further damage.

My wordfilter - along with my eloquence - has significantly deteriorated since coming to college. I used to chide my friends for being completely tactless at the worst possible moments. I've been doing the same thing to my mom for even longer, as she is one of maybe three people in the world more outspoken than I am.

It looks like I am turning into my mother.

The prospect thereof may or may not terrify me.

I think I meant to wax nostalgic about my semester when I sat down to write this post, but clearly that's not going to happen now - one of my grades still hasn't been posted, so it doesn't feel like this term is really over yet. Also, I don't feel like it anymore.

Instead, here are some blurry pictures - insights into our lives, or some other fluffy phrase - of the illustrious residents of Senior Haus being upside down.

(Is that obscene? I don't think so. Really, though. Is it?)

being right side up.

being fierce.

being inchworms.

being out of Popsicles.

(okay, I don't actually know what's going on here.)

See you on the other side of the semester, when I'll probably go ahead with the waxing nostalgic thing.

Or, you know, not.

(This is a long post, but you won't complain, right?)

Item the first: The Journal of Negative Results.

My advisor and 9.12 professor Carlos Lois unwittingly helped me discover my ultimate goal in life during class two weeks ago, when we were discussing the isolation of the Clock gene in mice. Clock is the result of a point mutation in chromosome 5, leading to an extension of the circadian period from ~24 hours to a little over 25 hours. To express this mutation, scientists injected isogenic male mice with ENU, a nasty little mutagen that initially causes sterility while creating point mutations all over the place. After the period of sterility, the mice were bred with normal female mice to produce a generation of offspring with random point mutations. Scientists then observed the circadian periods of all of the offspring, looking for any mice expressing an extended circadian period but otherwise normal.

Although it was really the only effective way to perform this study, there are a ton of things inherently flawed with this quick-and-dirty method of looking for a mutation, the most obvious one being the sheer improbability of randomly changing the correct base pair and hitting upon the correct point mutation. Sure enough, of the 304 offspring, only one showed any change in circadian period. It was pure luck that it didn't have other major mutations.

To this, Carlos said, "This is typical of many scientific studies. About 95% of the work people do in research never gets published. What do you expect? There's no Journal of Negative Results." He was joking. I am not.

I immediately decided that my life's goal (previously just "not to live in a cardboard box after graduation") would be to establish the Journal of Negative Results, dedicated to the epic failures in science, engineering, and life. The inaugural issue would include the existence of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thomas Edison's hundreds of failed attempts at inventing a commercially useful incandescent lightbulb, and the Fox Network's repeated cancellation of critically acclaimed television shows.

Currently, no one I have spoken to about this idea has approved.

I'm just trying to make everyone feel better about themselves, okay?

Item the second: Stairs, and falling down them.

As you can probably deduce from the above subheading, I fell down a bunch of steps the other day. This occurred outside the end of the Infinite across from Building 18. There was no snow or rain to justify my fall. As far as I can tell, I tripped over myself before sliding down six steps on my right thigh, all the while doing some strange rotation straight out of The Matrix. Frantic paddling through the air was involved.

Chris '12 described it as both an "epic fall" and an "epic fail." He also laughed at me for about five minutes (after making sure I was still alive, of course).

Item the third: The importance of revolving doors.

Remember that one time I was stuck in an airport overnight? The next day, I and 1,203 other people were sworn in as US citizens. 103 of the other 1,203 were Jamaican. 170 were Haitian. 441 were Cuban. I love living in Miami.

(I mailed my absentee ballot today. It was exciting.)

That should be enough to get you to understand the first half of the first sentence of this email, because the rest of Laurie '11's message is one of the strangest things I've ever seen.

"Hi Keri,

In honor of your new US citizenship, I think you should write a blog about revolving doors at MIT. I don't know how these things are related, but I think it would be cool.

Apparently they're kind of a big deal, environmentally speaking:

http://www.slate.com/id/2196201/
http://web.mit.edu/wesolows/www/11.366_REVOLVING_DOOR_FINAL_REPORT.pdf
(The report is actually kind of funny, especially in the part where it addresses student complaints with revolving doors, bottom of page 5.)

If you do, I will totally buy you a pint of ice cream, and that's a fact."

...um. Okay.

I love the people I live with. (Laurie: Ben and Jerry's Peach Cobbler. Yes, you may have some.)

(Note: For the record, I have never fallen into or through a revolving door. Just thought you all should know.)

Item the fourth: My 9.10 exam, and how it is representative of everything in my life.

Due to a combination of awesome scheduling skillz and sheer luck on my part, this semester I have no classes on Fridays and a total of one midterm and one final. That midterm was this morning, in 9.10 (Cognitive Neuroscience). I am determined not to fail at life this semester, so I studied the crap out of that exam.

After waking up at 5:30PM on Sunday night having only previously looked at the study questions for about half a second, that is.

Don't judge me. I've been suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome for a few years, and it's been particularly severe this semester. I'm sleeping upwards of twelve hours every day, and I'm still exhausted all the time. I've been to Medical. All of my tests are normal. This is a serious issue. Inform your children.

Wait, where was I?

Oh, right. Failing at life. More specifically, not doing it.

I worked until 4 AM with a 9.10 study group on the most epic Google Doc ever to grace the face of the earth, containing eighteen pages of answers to all of the review questions. We spent over two hours on a particularly dense, detailed lecture on motor systems - I now know motor systems better than essential items permanently etched in my brain, like lyrics to the entirety of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and the script of every episode of Futurama. (You know, important things.)

Go ahead. Ask me about experiments on the trade-off between speed and accuracy, open-loop control, sensorimotor adaptation, whatever. DO IT.

Most of you probably know where this is going, so I'll spare you the details and skip to the depressing numbers.

Number of review questions on motor systems (out of ~60): 15.
Number of exam questions on motor systems (out of 18): 0.

...

Hate at everything.

HATE AT EVERYTHING.

(In case you didn't catch that, here's what I said: HATE. AT. EVERYTHING.)

Item the fifth: How girls in indie bands are the cutest beings alive.

Ahmed told me he might be blogging this, so I won't steal his thunder. Just know that the WMBRlive concerts have shown me something important about life:

If I could take the St. Mannequins and the girl from Drug Rug, stick them in a tiny box, and just carry the box of adorable girls playing music about dinosaurs and elephants around with me all the time, I would be eternally happy.

This is the most important revelation I have had this semester.

Second only to the Journal of Negative Results, of course.

I woke up on Wednesday morning at 11 AM with the (vaguely) shocking realization that I had to read and answer review questions for a paper before my 1 PM 9.12 lecture. Because I clearly have no idea how to properly manage my time anymore, I decided to ignore the paper for another 42 minutes and watch this week's episode of Gossip Girl (SHUT. UP.).

Supernatural forces larger than anything I could possibly imagine must be at work here (or at least concerned with whether or not I'm at work); that, or the world just hates me. Anyway, I was getting back into bed to watch actors in their mid-twenties pretend to be sixteen when I discovered a very large, very live spider challenging me to a turf war over my pillow.

Yeah, my PILLOW. That I SLEEP ON.

NOT COOL.

The spider lost. I left my room, afraid I'd find another. I read my paper, answered my questions, and spent the lecture hoping Dr. Lois wouldn't ask me any super-detailed questions about rapid gene transcription in neurons.

So that's my boring story of the week. If you want, you can pretend that's how I've spent the last six weeks. We now return to our super-ultra-delayed blog post about the best part of MIT: WMBR 88.1 FM, the campus radio station.

The station began broadcasting in November 1946 as WMIT from the basement of an entry in Senior House, eventually moving to a studio in the basement of Walker Memorial in 1960. The call letters were changed to WTBS, for "Technology Broadcasting System," when it was discovered that a North Carolina radio station was already using WMIT.

If WTBS sounds familiar, it's because the call letters are those of TBS, the TV station founded by media mogul and all-around rich guy Ted Turner. When Turner wanted to take his TV station national in 1979, he offered to donate $50,000 to WTBS in exchange for the call letters. The deal worked out, WTBS became WMBR ("Walker Memorial Basement Radio) and got a shiny new transmitter (among other things), and all was right with the world.

Of the student groups on campus, WMBR has one of the largest direct community and alum involvement. Students, faculty, and other members of the MIT/Harvard/Boston community have regular weekly shows, some of which have been on the air for well over twenty years. The station's listener base is pretty large - during fundraising week last year, donations from listeners brought in well over $80,000.

Local and touring bands play in the studio weekly; in fact, one of the shows (Pipeline) plays only local music and brings in a band every week.

As you can see from the weekly schedule, there's a lot of variation in what goes on the air, and most of the shows have many devoted listeners.People join the station for its vibrant atmosphere and the relative freedom (save for some FCC regulations) to do whatever you please with your show.

Of course, the massive record library - including about 120,000 LPs and 170,000 CDs - ain't all that bad either.

I'm going into a third year hosting DJ Awesome and the Wonderfriends with Hanna '10.

We used to come up with playlists, but dropped that after a few months in favor of playing whatever had the coolest album cover. I'm surprised people still listen to us, since our show mostly consists of us whining to each other, making funny faces people can't see over the airwaves, and then playing something by Pavement. Hanna throws in ten-minute-long songs by Opeth to annoy me sometimes, which I usually counter with sugary-sweet girly rock. (...I don't even like the stuff, but Hanna's visceral reactions are completely worth it.)

This year, the students of WMBR have started WMBR Live, a series of twice-monthly free concerts in the Student Center's Coffeehouse. Last week was the first show, which went really well! The concerts will build up to a huge show near the end of the Spring semester, possibly in conjunction with another department. If you're in the Boston area, check out the shows! Everyone loves a free concert.

In conclusion, WMBR is awesome.

If nothing else, it gives me somewhere to go when I want to hide from papers and spiders.

DID YOU KNOW? Charlotte/Douglas International Airport has a scale model of the Wright Brothers plane hanging from the ceiling of its main terminal. At least, I think that's what it is.

I know this because I have been sitting beneath said scale model for the last six hours, and have another eight to go.

But this isn't about my disastrous experience with America's worst airline carrier. (I considered liveblogging it - pictures of a near-empty terminal and all - but that just seemed like gross misuse of the Internet.) This is about how I'm entertaining myself - rather, how you're helping entertain me - during my night in an airport in a totally unfamiliar city.

Ask me questions. If you don't have questions, then just tell me about your day ("Well, first I woke up, then I had a piece of toast..."). I have a camera and am willing to take pictures of baggage claim, if you're into that kind of thing.

I am armed with a large black coffee and Beck's Modern Guilt. (THIS ALBUM IS SO GOOD. DO NOT CHALLENGE MY WORD.) I just ate a sandwich and a salad, and I'm rarin' to go. (Have you ever noticed how sometimes the baristas at Starbucks look at you like you're a blithering idiot when you ask for a small instead of a tall? SMALL IS A RELATIVE TERM, mmmk?)

Let this possibly-doomed-from-the-start experiment begin.

Edit: For '11:

Any time I am bewildered by the "OMG PLANES" mentality of most everyone in Course 16, I remember that I am hardcore Course 9 and scare people when I go "OMG BRAINS." This gives me perspective o' plenty, similar to watching Speed 2: Cruise Control any time I think movies today have gotten really bad.

I did this during my desk shift last Sunday. Oh, perspective.

1) The Shift and A keys on my computer's keyboard have been acting up since January, making it nearly impossible for me to type anything at all ever. Getting around the Shift key is easy enough, as there's another one on the right side of the keyboard; the A key, however, is another story entirely.

It just took me two minutes to type those sentences. WHY WHY WHY did it have to be those two keys? Couldn't it have been something trivial, like F12 or that one key up top with the incomprehensible symbol on it? Oh, wait. Incomprehensible Symbol key pulls up the right-click menu. That's actually pretty cool BUT UNNECESSARY WHY COULDN'T THAT HAVE BROKEN?!

2) My life has been taken over by fill-in-the-blank item of extreme hosage: this summer, it's being in lab all the time for my UROP and working at the Senior Haus front desk. When I'm not busy dropping and shattering flasks full of buffers I just spent an hour making, I'm sitting in a chair listening to Pandora and pushing the button that opens the front door.

Working desk is a highly eventful job, as the following pictures (taken last Thursday on my 8AM-11AM shift) can attest to:

8 AM - I open desk.

8:30 AM - No one has walked through the lobby at all, probably because they are far more intelligent than I am and are still asleep. There is food at desk, as per usual; more specifically, there's a bag of giant marshmallows left over from José '10 and Nick '10's Very Special Episode™ of their show on MIT Cable, The Hip Show for Hip Kids. It was on the obesity epidemic in America. It was hilarious. (My A key is sticking again. Maybe I should find a way to finish this post without using it again?)

9:00 (See? It's working) - Still no signs of life.

9:30 - Someone took one of the jet-puffed sucrose/corn syrup delicious thingies (KEY JUST STOPPED WORKING MUST COPY/PSTE LETTER WHEN NEEDED GRRRR.) and moved the bag two inches over.

In short, I've spent this summer being boring. This week, however, was anything but.

On Monday, I got an email from Becca '08, who is spending the next year working as a Program Coordinator for the Office of the Arts:

do you want to come to an event with me and a couple other people from the office? we're going to the mfa for a film (sleepwalking through the mekong) and concert (dengue fever, which is a cambodian pop/psychedelic rock group, with pistolera ) starting at six on wednesday night. we'd leave from the office of the arts (E15-205) around 5:15 or so. it sounds like a lot of fun(http://www.mfa.org/calendar/index.asp?keywords=sleepwalking&category=&collection=&cal_language=&week=&_submit.x=1)

let me know asap if you can come! to recap: cool event at 6PM (depart mit around 5:15) on Wednesday July 9. -Becca (:

Who would turn that down?

Not me. Never me.

So on Wednesday, Becca, Tarick '11, Michele Oshima (Director of the Artist-in-Residence Program), and I went to the MFA for the film ( a travelogue of sorts from Dengue Fever's visit to Cambodia, where they played many covers of Cambodian rock music from the 60s and 70s) and the show, part of their Concerts in the Courtyard series.

(Blurry pictures make me sad, but no flash photography was allowed and getting thrown out of the show would have made me sadder.)

The show was moved to an auditorium indoors because of a thunderstorm, but that didn't put a damper on anyone's excitement.

Get it? Thunderstorm? Damper?... Fine, joke not landed. (MY A KEY IS WORKING AGAIN. FINALLY.)

Anyway, Pistolera was awesome, and Dengue Fever was AMAZING. If you ever get the opportunity to do anything through the Office of the Arts, by all means take it - whether it's making a movie for Michel Gondry or going to see an amazing band you've never heard of before.

And if nothing else, it'll be a great addition to your week of breaking stuff in lab and eating marshmallows for breakfast.

Steer Roast was this weekend.

If your initial reaction to that was "...um, what?", then I'll fill you in: Steer Roast is Senior House's claim to fame - it's our annual weekend-long party centered around the overnight roasting of a steer in our courtyard and the subsequent feast. The following description is courtesy of a presentation on Senior House and Steer Roast created by Charisse '03:

"I present Steer Roast as an extreme barbeque: instead of grilling hamburgers and hot dogs, we roast over 300 pounds of meat over a giant spit for 17 hours; instead of getting a band or two to perform, we hire a dozen bands to play over two nights; instead of general barbeque activities including horseshoes and lawn darts, we provide a 10 by 10 foot mud pit, strippers, and a casino. The festival celebrates Senior House culture by sporting death, because only life can kill you."

Steer Roast has been held in the spring every year since 1964. Legend says it started as a small barbeque in the courtyard, but alums - who return en masse for Roast every year - state otherwise. From Michael Potash '69:

"No, this did not start out as a little barbeque and grow. No. It started out as a big bang, it was a huge thing... it was 1964 in the spring... it was big from the very first day."

That said, I present you with pictures from the pit lighting and mud wrestling from this year's Roast. Captions will appear if I feel like it - that is, not often.

The courtyard Friday afternoon during setup

People filled the courtyard and crowded on balconies for the pit lighting:

A considerable number of alums bring their families to pit lighting and the feast.

Former GRT Foley got Laurie '11 to record this year's lighting:

The pit is traditionally lit by a flaming roll of toilet paper sent from five stories up, hence everyone looking skyward.

I didn't get a shot of the roll on its way down, but I do have these pictures of the flaming pit (which is what you were all waiting for anyway):

SO MUCH MEAT. MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT

The meat is taken off the spit the next morning and served as part of a full meal in the courtyard that afternoon. Upwards of 300 people attend each year - I was one of the people cooking for the Feast, and at one point on Saturday morning I managed to fill all of the ovens in the Haus with massive amounts of baking pie.

Our housemasters kicked off the mud wrestling, as they do every year. (Hey. Prefrosh. You know that Guide to Residences in the NBM? Check out our i3 video in the DVD. Yeah, that's them. Cynthia Jenkins always wins. If you can't take the time to get out the DVD, here's a YouTube video of them wrestling at last year's Roast.)

So yeah, you're looking at Paul in the picture below. Paul does not yet know that this picture exists. Hi, Paul. You can kill me later.

I spent some of Friday night hanging out with Dorota '10 while she was on Meatwatch (what, you think six sides of steer just roast themselves?) and listening to some of the bands.

Of the bands performing, I got to see five; Professor Murder and Oxford Collapse were probably my favorite two.

Roast is also a time for halls and suites to do something art-related, or just something awesome. The residents of 433 ordered thousands of googly eyes and glued them to everything in the suite.

Yes. Everything.

My hall, the 4th HNC, went with an overarching theme, "Things that pop." This involved bubble guns that made their way throughout the Haus during the whole of Friday night, but the highlight was the three hundred balloons stuffed with little packets of Pop Rocks, inflated, and used to fill the entirety of our hall lounge. We started doing this the Sunday before Roast, so the balloons had to be stored someplace during the week.

This place ended up being my room.

Somewhere under those balloons is a couch.

I'm still exhausted from not having slept this weekend. My voice is completely shot, and it doesn't show signs of returning any time soon. It was absolutely, absolutely worth it.

More pictures later. Or you can look for them yourself if you want. I'm not the only one who had a camera, and some people were smart and used digital instead of film.

Moving on to the point of this post - a few weeks ago, MITblogs got a question from Claire: "I have multiple food allergies (eggs, wheat, dairy, gluten), none of which cause anaphylaxis, but I'm wondering how food-allergies are accommodated at MIT. Can people opt out of the meal plan in order to make their own food in dorm kitchens?"

If you have multiple food allergies that require specific methods of food selection and preparation, you might want to consider living in a dorm with kitchens instead of a dining hall. (Burton-Conner, East Campus, Senior House, Random, Bexley, New House, and Macgregor fall into this category.) I go grocery shopping at either Whole Foods or Trader Joe's every one to two weeks, both of which have tons of options for people with food allergies. You can go shopping for food even if your dorm does have a dining hall (Baker, Simmons, McCormick, and Next, for those of you following at home), since they're only open for dinner anyway and buying all of your other meals gets really expensive really quickly. These dorms also all have one kitchen open to all residents (for example, Next House's Country Kitchen is in the basement).

Unfortunately, living in a dorm with a dining hall requires that you buy into the House Dining Plan each semester, and you are not permitted to opt out of it regardless of your situation. There's hope for you yet, though - Gillian '10 (yes, that Gillian), who moved to Baker last semester, sent me the following email about being gluten-free while living in a dorm with a dining hall:

"I live in Baker now and I have to pay for preferred dining, so I figured I would make the best out of it. i introduced myself to the head chef and he introduced me and my gluten-free situation to the other chefs and told me about all my possibilities. They include almost any kind of stir fry or salad--both of which are offered nightly, so I'm always guaranteed choices for dinner. They use mostly gluten-free sauces in their stir fry and offer it with rices or rice noodles! I can occasionally have soup, but I can never remember which. And I generally steer clear of the specials, but if I felt like it I could ask whether things are gluten-free or not. Also, I keep a mini fridge in my room with other gluten free staples and snacks. Having LaVerde's central in our campus is great because as anyone with serious food limits knows, the supermarket is always a guarantee!

"Lastly, Au Bon Pain is going to be your best friend, as they are wayyyy ahead of the curve with accomodating the foodly challenged. At the Kendall Square location, they have this computer with their menu that tells the complete nutrition info of ever item they serve along with the ingredients and possible allergens--it's amazing! And they have soooo many choices--their soups are a winterly staple of mine."

Jessie (yes, that Jessie. No, I could not resist the possibility of using parallelism. My AP English Language teacher would be proud of me) also compiled a list of local stores and restaurants with gluten-free options:

"Most local grocery stores (though not LaVerde's as far as I know) have a gluten-free section. Whole Foods even has gluten-free bagels sometimes."

Verified to have a gluten-free menu available:

PF Chang's (Chinese, locations at the Prudential Center and near Boylston)
Legal Sea Foods (Kendall Sq and other locations)
Outback Steakhouse (Medford and other locations)
The Elephant Walk (Cambodian, Davis Sq area)
Wagamama (Noodle dishes, Harvard Sq)

Claim to have gluten-free menus:

Pizzeria Uno
Carrabba's Italian Grill
Jake & Earl's Dixie Roadhouse
Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse
Not Your Average Joe's

Claim to accommodate GF diners (I have not been to these):

On the Border
Burton's Grill

I realize that most of this response was specifically about having a gluten allergy, but everyone should feel free to ask me questions about food allergies that this entry didn't answer. I'll get to them. Really. I will. Even though I'm perpetually hosed.

-Sleep. As second-semester seniors, you should have become well-acquainted with this sometime around January. (Um, I mean, I SAID NOTHING YOU ARE ALL BEING DILIGENT STUDENTS FROM NOW UNTIL GRADUATION)

-If you have a ton of free time on your hands, learn ozonolysis. Oh man, was that a meta-metapost? It's gonna be a good day. Speaking of, why do people shorten "organic chemistry" to "orgo"? Does Inorganic Chemistry (all the cool kids are calling it 5.03 these days) ever get shortened to "Inorgo"? I hope not, because that sounds really, really silly.

What was I saying? Oh. Right. More things you can do between now and Saturday afternoon:

-Buy really cool brain-related t-shirts on the Internet. Now you too can declare your nerdiness on your chest for the viewing pleasure of small children and passersby.

-Sleep.
--Also, DON'T PANIC. You're scaring your family. (Thank them for the last couple of months, by the way. College application time causes tons of stress for everyone.)
---On that "DON'T PANIC" note, read (or reread, if you've already made your way through it) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Similar to gateway drugs, this book is the first step before reaching a level of sci-fi hardcore known only to a select few. Next comes Neuromancer and Battlestar Galactica, and then you're on to the very depths of obscurity. If you find yourself living every waking moment in fear that you're really a cylon, all hope is lost.

-If reading science fiction isn't for you, you can always read a newspaper. Any newspaper. Something that isn't centered on the United States, even. Anything at all. Ignore any of those "RECORD NUMBER OF HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS APPLYING TO COLLEGE" articles, as they will only lead to panic, and we just discussed how you aren't allowed to do that.

-Leave a comment on the blogs that displays more than just your knowledge of ordinal numbers. (This one is really just in here to see how many of you will even read the post before commenting. Substance! Give it to us! Tell us stories!)

-Discover new music. Once you've done so, get all statistics-happy about it.

-Learn to knit! Don't be as bad at it as I am.

-If you do get in, don't get all self-righteous about it. You're fantastic and all, but you too were sitting in your desk chair full of self-doubt and convincing yourself that you weren't good enough to get in before you checked online, and your friends and family all know it because you probably went ahead and panicked a lot anyway. Worse than the "none of the fifteen colleges I applied to will take me because I suck at life!" guy is when he turns into the "I knew I'd get into fill-in-the-blank University all along!" guy. Don't do it.

For more things to do, check out a post Jess made a while back. She's better at this kind of thing than I am. Can't say I didn't try.

The best of luck to applicants on Saturday!