Well, I have this folder on my desktop full of pictures and half written blog entries that I completely lost the motivation to finish as soon as I graduated and went home to spend a wonderful summer outside in the sunshine. (To answer the questions from my previous entry: no, really, I graduated from MIT and immediately went back to my old summer job from high school as a lifeguard. I'm not kidding.) But then today I was struck with motivation, and I thought I should go ahead and post it, even if I should really just move on with my life already. I hope no one minds. =)

Okay, so ONE WHOLE YEAR AGO (man I am bad at this timeliness thing) I began the adventure known as 2.009. This is the famous capstone class for seniors in mechanical engineering, and the department spends 2 years grooming you to dread it. It's infamous for the inordinate amount of time that it requires of students, but the little known secret is that this class actually rocks.

The class is called The Product Development Process (or something like that, but who really cares? just call it 2.009 like a normal person) and all of the seniors in Mechanincal Engineering are split into teams, which are identified by color. (So there's Blue, Orange, Silver, Red, and of course, the best team ever, Yellow.) The teams are pretty big (something like 16-20 students each) and they are tasked with some pretty big assignments.

The class as a whole is given a theme (last year the theme was "The Home") and all of the students brainstorm potential products that fit within that theme. Early on in the process, the course staff gives each team an area to focus on within the larger theme (to assure that multiple teams don't start designing very similar products). Each team then chooses a few promising ideas and starts working frantically to get a model of the idea finished. Then there's a big, stressful, majorly important presentation day when the team's ideas thus far are presented, followed by feedback from classmates, professors, and outside observers invited by the course staff. The team then discusses their ideas, throws away the less promising ones, delves deeper into the ideas that are left, and then repeats this whole process two more times. Finally, they decide on their final product, and proceed to spend every waking hour of their lives (it seems) working on it, hoping to have the full, finished, working (!) prototype done by the end of this semester. This feverish work is interrupted several more times by big, stressful, majorly important presentations.

In case you didn't notice yet, the theme here is PRESENTATION. 2.009 is a CI-M (Communications Intensive course within your major), and it takes these presentations seriously. You know how in most classes you might have one or two big presentations per year? They're usually at the end of a unit or marking period or maybe even the end of the whole year. You do tons of work for it, you spend lots of time preparing, and it's like this super important culmination of the entire class, and it's a Big Deal. 2.009 has one of those about every 3 weeks.

The secondary theme is, oh yeah, you have to build a full working prototype of your product in the span of a couple of weeks.

My team, the Yellow Team, was assigned the topic of "constrained space." We kicked around different ideas for improved storage methods, but when we got down to our 2 final ideas they were a Lazy Susan refrigerator and a Moveable Wall. As a result, about 90% of the 2.009 junkpile came from our scraps

and ironically, the team working on "constrained space" had the biggest, bulkiest materials spilling out all over the place

In the end we developed the "ModuWall," a Do-It-Yourself portable wall that apartment dwellers can use to split a bedroom in two to save on rent.

My teammates Jeremy and Fiona are shown here, hard at work developing the "extension cap," a device which allows the structural posts of our wall to change in size.

I was my team's Information Officer, which meant I spent lots of my time taking meeting minutes (and sprinkling them with jokes when I got frustrated that no one read them), keeping our wiki up to date, and organizing the subteams:

Seriously, the irony of the "constrained space" team building a WALL was not lost on us when we had to start cutting 3' by 4' panels on this tiny bandsaw.

The course professor, affectionately referred to as "Doc Wallace," tried to inspire us in the last days before our final presentation with a countdown showing an egg developing into a beautiful chick, or to fried chicken, depending on how hard you worked.

There was one final milestone before our final presentation- the Tech Review, where professors and members of industry were invited into the lab to inspect our work and give us last-minute feedback.

In the frantic days before the Tech Review, we pulled together some awesome engineering on this store-bought bifold door. I know it doesn't look like it, but trust me, a lot of work went into that doorframe. Caitrin is justifiably proud.

We stuck labels on everything to describe some of our design features.

And when we finally got the whole thing set up in the lab, it looked pretty darn cool, if I may say so.

It was a crazy, stressful class, required tons of work, and sometimes made me HTFP, but in the end, I absolutely loved it. I built this crazy thing from nothing, learned a ton, and had an awesome time with my teammates. See, Yellow Team...well, we might have been a little less restrained than the other teams. We had a great group dyanmic and were not afraid to start cheering in lab when we got something to work. Obviously it wasn't always smooth sailing: there was one particularly tense lab meeting where a simple disagreement between the best way to proceed snowballed into a lot of repressed anger and frustration being released at each other. Inspired by my new favorite TV show, 30 rock, I suggested a "one minute dance party" to break up the tension. (During this one scene in 30 Rock, Tina Fey's character congratulates her staff on finishing half of their work, and suggests a one minute dance party as a reward. Of course they're so engrossed in their awkward dancing to rap music that they don't immediately notice when their big corporate boss walks into the room. Unfortunately I can't find a clip of it, but if you search YouTube you'll find a whole slew of people hilariously spoofing the scene.) After that, dance parties became a regular part of our team meetings, and we reguarly cranked the volume and had a dance party in the middle of lab if the situation warranted it. For example, when we finally got that door frame built.

This fun attitude is perhaps best exemplified by our dance party team photo, taken at the Technical Review. This is why I love the Yellow Team, and am glad that if I had to spend 40 hours a week in lab, at least I got to spend it with cool people.

So. I graduated. And took lots and lots of pictures for your enjoyment.

I woke up super early so I could stand around the track in the athletic center for several hours for no apparent reason. Hopefully my blurry photo does something to capture the huge number of people milling around in caps and gowns.

I originally thought that we needed to report extra early so that we could have the details of the day explained to us. No such luck. We checked in at a pre-determined station and then just stood around, chatting with friends for a few hours before starting the procession. Throughout the procession were people with clipboards who checked and re-checked that we had all stayed in the right order. Not a single thing was ever explained to us- people just directed us around and we went along with it. It all went perfectly smoothly, but it was pretty frustrating being left totally in the dark. It also seemed unnecessarily complicated- everyone was confused when station 17 left the gym first. I mean, why not just re-number station 17 as station 1, if they're going to be first? As I was wondering about this, and discussing the stupidity of it with my classmates, I realized why no one explained anything to us. It was exactly because we'd start having this conversation- organizing MIT students is nearly impossible, because no matter what you do, someone else thinks they can do it a more efficient way and tries to change it in the middle. (Trust me, I lived through a few painful examples.) As annoying as it was, I have to give props to whoever organizes the whole thing for the wise insight to not explain any more than was absolutely necessary to the graduates.

We walked out onto the astroturf, down Dorm Row, and towards Killian Court. I took a photo of my Brass Rat- it was the last time I'd be wearing it "beaver down."

Kelly '09 is giving an excited thumbs up. She's quite the character. I had to look at my photos carefully to make sure I didn't include any where she was making a rude gesture. =)

Then came an unbelievably cool moment that I think will stay with me for a really long time. We walked through the tent and out onto Killian Court and an awesome view of the Great Dome to the soundtrack of Pomp and Circumstance. It's not something to be described so much as experienced, but it was sort of the exact moment when you realize "Oh my God, I'm about to graduate from MIT. That's AWESOME." It's like the complementary bookmark to the equally memorable moment of opening your acceptance letter and realizing, "Oh my God, I'm about to go to MIT. That's AWESOME." (Believe it or not, back in the day, we used to get our decision letters in the mail. I'm a dinosaur, I know.)

We took our seats and waited for all 1500 of us to file into Killian.

Then Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, made a speech. No offense, but it was pretty boring. (It was also almost exactly the same as every other graduation speech he's made in the past 2 years. It was leaked to us in a joke flyer that was handed out before the ceremony, advising us to look out for certain keywords and stories that were sure to make an appearance.) It's only been a couple of months, but I don't remember a single thing he said except, "I know none of you are going to remember anything I say today." Boring speaker or not, I guess that makes him pretty smart.

Then Susan Hockfield got up and made another speech. I don't even remember if it was boring or not. I hope none of this sounds too disrespectful, but really, most of us were too excited to really pay attention to anything. We were too busy talking to our friends and throwing beach balls around and waiting for the moment when...

...we got to turn our rings around. There's a tradition surrounding the Brass Rat (MIT's class ring). Students get their rings at the end of sophomore year, and wear them with the beaver facing towards them. Once they graduate and become alumni, they wear the ring the opposite way, with the beaver facing outwards. (There are also traditional colorful explanations about why the beaver "sits" on the student until graduation, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.) Turning your brass rat around at commencement is a milestone everyone looks forward to, almost from the moment they first slip the ring on their finger.

And while it was pretty exciting, it was immediately followed by hundreds of exclamations of "it looks so weird that way!" After that it wasn't long before...

I shook hands with President Hockfield and claimed my diploma. This is really the moment I looked forward to. It was like a final, triumphant gesture saying, "Aha! MIT, you were a worthy adversary! But despite your sleepless nights and insanely hard problem sets, I have conquered you!" And then I put my fists on my hips in a superhero pose. But not really.

I was near the beginning of the ceremony (Degrees are awarded alphabetically by school, numerically by course, alphabetically by last name, and alternating graduate and undergraduate. Don't worry, it's nearly impossible to understand, even when you're standing there counting down the names until they call you.) so after getting my diploma I got to spend a lot of time sitting around while everyone else got their diplomas. I started reading the book I had snuck in with me.

Finally, the ceremony was over and we got to start the fun of taking a million pictures. I normally hate getting my picture taken (ask me about prom sometime, ugh) but this was actually kind of fun.

By the way, I know it may look as if I'm dressed nicely underneath my gown, but looks can be deceiving. I knew that to survive the hours-long ceremony I would need my cell phone, my camera, a book, and some snacks. I also knew they wouldn't allow us to carry bags into the ceremony, which left only one attire choice: cargo pants. So I found an appropriate black t-shirt that would blend in with the collar of my gown and my cargo pants with the biggest pockets. Then I rolled the pants up so they wouldn't show beneath the hem of my gown, and put on some nice but comfortable shoes (which I bought in Madrid for 6 euros- believe or not, those shoes are a huge fashion trend in Spain) and figured no one would know the difference.

Well, my mom made fun of me, but I think it just represents the MIT ingenuity that will serve me for years to come.

After the Conner 2 reunion, I ventured over to the first aid tent to say hi to the EMTs. This might have been the most fun part of my day. I haven't been involved in the organization for the past year, but I really love all the people in the group and missed them a lot, so it was great to see them on commencement day.

Like I said, there were a lot of pictures. My sister just wouldn't stop snapping her camera. There are actually quite a few photos of the back of my head walking in front of her, on the phone coordinating the Conner 2 reunion, and waving sarcastically to my sister as she took a picture of me talking with my friends.

But mostly, there are lots of pictures showing just how excited I was.

After all of that we headed back to the dorm for a few hours. Then Sarah, Adelaide and I went out to dinner with all our families. (It was a pretty enormous group for only 3 graduates.) The next day we packed my dad's pickup truck to the brim with all my stuff and headed back to New Jersey.

And now? Well, now I'm hanging out at home, searching for a job, and working at the awesome summer job I had before I ever left home for MIT. That's right, I graduated from MIT and promptly got a job as a lifeguard at a waterpark.

The sky's the limit when you're an MIT engineer. =)

If you're interested in watching Lulu, Kim and I graduate, you can watch the webcast online:

http://amps-web.mit.edu/public/comm2009/webcast.html

I was going to write some big reflective entry before today but seriously, it's all so overwhelming that I don't even know what to say. (Me, speechless. Let that sink in for a minute.)

All I know is that this morning, for the last time, I put my Brass Rat on facing up. In a couple of hours, I get to turn it around, and that's going to be awesome.

Maybe in a few days I'll have had enough time to process all of this, and write something deep and meaningful about it. Maybe.

This time, I haven't written for a week an a half, because I've been doing nothing at all and it's been utterly fantastic.

But like any good MIT student, 10 days of that has driven me absolutely insane, so it's back to productivitiy! Time to churn out the dozens of blog entries I planned but never wrote. Looking back in the archives, it seems that Mollie, the famously prolific, friendly, and helpful blogger, wrote entries right through the whole summer after her graduation, so according to her precedent I have some time yet.

Let's see if I can get you up to speed on what's been going on in my life lately.

The last you really heard from me, I had just turned in my thesis and was going to a meeting for a group project. I was none too happy about it, I might add.

I have barely slept, my brain is completely liquid, I haven't had a real meal in days (I pretty much made a dinner out of Sun Chips and pineapple soda the other night...), I feel like absolute crap, and this is absolutely the last thing I'd like to be doing right now. I'm actually pretty miserable at the moment.

Even down to the bitter end, MIT enjoys beating you down and destroying your soul. Right now, IHTFP is feeling pretty one-sided...

Well, the meeting was relatively painless- we finished most of the work, and all that was left to me was to rewrite the introductory paragraph to our paper to reflect our professors comments on our first draft, but even that was beyond my abilities at that point.

I came home, ordered in Thai food, watched a stupid, mindless movie:

and slept for 12 hours.

When I got up, I rewrote the paragraph I needed, and proceeded to have the most miserable two and a half days of my life.

IHTFP is a timeless motto of the Institute. People who don't understand the concept claim that it means different things to different people. This is false. The true nature of IHTFP is that it holds a dual meaning for all of us. Sometimes it means "I have truly found paradise. Other times it means I hate this f?$%!@# place." Sometimes it means both of these things at the same exact time.

Well, last week it meant the second one, and the second one only, and quite vehemently. I honestly don't think I've ever hating this effing place quite so much before in 4 full years. Tuesday morning and early afternoon I finished all of my work for 1.851 (Water and Sanitation in Developing Countries), which was pretty painless- just a few paragraphs on the readings, and a reflection on the semester. Two classes down, two to go.

Now, keep in mind that I was pretty worn out at this point. 12 hours of sleep was not enough to make up for the previous....well, 4 years in general, but more specifically the few weeks of frantic thesis-writing stress. I had barely slept in the previous week, hadn't eaten a real full meal in far longer than that, and was just absolutely miserable in general. So when my D-Lab team decided that our prototype needed a major overhaul on Tuesday night, I almost lost it. At about 6 in the morning, after staying up with one other group member putting together the final paper and finally deciding to go to sleep so we could be in lab within 3 hours to finish the prototype our teammates had left behind for us to complete, I did lose it. We won't go into details, but I basically screamed obscenities into my pillow for a few minutes before collapsing for a few short, miserable hours of sleep.

You see, after Sunday night's lack of sleep, the prospect of another all-nighter was absolutely sickening to me. So when I saw one looming on Tuesday night, it put me in a pretty foul mood. I honestly just thought I couldn't handle any more of it. You know that feeling, when you're like, "no really, I actually can't take anymore of this?" It was sort of like that. I lived through Tuesday night, spiraling into further misery knowing that despite how little tolerance I had left, I'd be doing it again on Wednesday night. And it's not like any of those miserable all-nighters actually taught me anything, or were at all instrumental in my education. I suppose they were made extra miserable because somewhere deep down I knew that I could just blow off the rest of my work and still at the very least pass everything, and as we learned a few weeks ago, D is for Diploma.

Wednesday morning was spent working on the D-Lab prototype, and then the rest of the day and long into the night was spent on my set design project. The good news was that I was actually really excited about my set design project, and even looking forward to finishing it. (I was eventually really proud of my final product.) I honestly don't even remember how little I slept that night- it's all just one sleepless blur. I got up early to make some print-outs and got to class with just enough time to pin up my images for our presentation. Our instructor had invited artists and designers and theater people from around the area to look at and comment on our designs, which was actually pretty cool. I'd shown off my work in engineering classes like that several times (most notably in 2.009), but this was different, and a little scary at the same time. Because I mean really, I'm not artistic.

I showed my Photoshop model (which will be discussed in a later post), and got some good feedback. From there I went off to my last shift at work, then to my tutoring job, then back home. The end was truly in sight- classes were over but I still owed my set design instructor all of my "supporting materials-" inspirational images, preliminary sketches, a discussion of my thought process, etc. This was a somewhat tedious but easy task- it took me several hours to finish all of the updates to my set design blog (don't read it too closely- the last half of the entries were never proofread at all!). That night a bunch of friends were going out to celebrate the 21st birthdays of Andrew '10 and Justine '10. Sarah '09 came by my room at 11, but I was still frantically writing. I really, really just wanted to finish. I told her I'd only be another half hour at the most, and that they should go ahead without me. I finally finished all my updates (at 11:13 PM, according to the timestamp- I can never figure out how to make those things be in the eastern time zone) and emailed my instructor to let her know I was done.

Then, I went out drinking. But responsibly! I mean, we were celebrating a couple of 21st birthdays, after all. We only stayed out for an hour or two, came back to the dorm, ate some nachos, and played some Halo.

Then, I got to do something that I honestly don't think I've really, truly done in 4 years: I went to sleep, and didn't get up until I felt like it.

It was absolute bliss.

Since then, I've spent the past week and a half doing pretty much nothing at all. On Friday and Saturday Sarah '09 and I played a lot of Zelda.

On Sunday I trekked over to the student center and bought a membership to the MIT Science Fiction Society, home of "the world's largest open-shelf collection of science fiction." I've know it was there for years, but knew that I'd never have time to read any of the books- until now, of course. I'm a little rusty, actually- I used to be able to plow through novels much faster than this, but I guess that's to be expected, considering how little leisure reading I've done lately. But I've made my way through a fair few books over the past week, and am looking forward to continuing that trend over the summer.

On last Tuesday night I went out to dinner with some friends who were visting Boston. Wednesday morning I made breakfast for all of Conner 2 (even though I don't even live there anymore), and then hopped right on a bus for NJ. I spent a couple of days visiting my grandparents and volunteering at my church's annual carnival. I came back here on Saturday afternoon, went to a party on Conner 3, did nothing but read on Sunday, and convinced Sarah and Adelaide to watch Dogma with me on Monday night. This inspired Sarah and I to watch more Matt Damon, because, seriously, who wouldn't want that? So yesterday I did pretty much nothing at all except watch the Bourne Identity and the Bourne Supremacy. (We finally got tired of sitting around watching movies after that, and decided to save the Bourne Ultimatum for today.)

By the way, somewhere in there MIT finally caught up with what I already knew, and figured out that I finished everything. It's pretty exciting to log into my student account and see this:

So, it's been fun, this week of doing mostly nothing. But it is getting a little boring. So, today I decided to get back to this blogging thing. In a few minutes I'll be heading to a meeting with the director of MISTI-Spain to see if I can figure out what to do with myself next year. (Yeah, while there is still no actual plan, the plan for finding a plan has changed a bit, mostly because I'm really indecisive.)

Then it's going to be a lot of blogging, packing, job searching, reading, and exercising (hopefully, I'm seriously out of shape). Friday kicks off Senior Week. My parents, sister, and grandma get here on Thursday, just in time for the Pops concert. And then I graduate!

Speaking of which, this is really exciting:

The graduation stage has been under construction in Killian Court for awhile now, and everytime I pass it I get more excited. It looks pretty complete by now.

And then, well, who the hell knows. Not me.

As of 11:27 PM, I have completed every requirement for graduation from MIT.

Excuse me while I go celebrate. =)

See, I'm hosed beyond all imagining, but as it's basically my LAST WEEK AT MIT (?#@^&*!!!), all kinds of awesome and interesting things are going on which will not be nearly as cool when blogged about after the fact. (By the way, I probably have a dozen blog entries that I've planned and never written, and about 3 weeks between the time I'm done with work and officially graduate and should probably stop blogging so...be prepared for that.)

So, I'll sell my soul a little and turn this entry into a what is basically a Twitter feed. I hope you appreciate the enormity of this sacrifice of dignity. I do it all for you, dear readers.

So, entry number 1!
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Friday May 1, 2009. 11:37 PM

I just created the following page according to these strict guidelines:

Yikes! This is crazy!

(See any typos? Please, tell me! =P)

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Saturday, May 2. 12:02 PM
I'm in D-Lab right now (it occurs to me that I should post some pictures of this place later...) and just ran into Jodie '09. Jodie and I go way back- we were almost temporary roommates. We found each other online and chatted a little before getting to MIT. By the time we actually got to campus, my rooming assignment had been switched (I was in a single, which actually really sucked for Orientation), so we never even ended up rooming together. When I got to campus I stopped by her room to say hi so we could finally meet in real life. We haven't even really hung out after that, but we sort of smile and wave when we see each other.

Anyway, Jodie is running around D-Lab stressing about her thesis, which is basically exactly what I'm doing, so we shared our misery for a few minutes. I can't help but think back to the first and only other real conversation we had- our first day on campus, trying to figure out where the laundry room in the dorm was.

Crazy how things come full circle, isn't it?

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Thursday, May 7. 7:52 PM
Hey look, it's me, on Youtube!!!

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Sunday, May 7. 5:38 PM

I can't believe the end is so close...I'm sitting in LMP (Lab for Manufacturing and Productivity) right now, trying to finish this thesis. Basically it's a MechE computer lab that has been functioning as Thesis HQ for the last few days. Adelaide and I have been here for hours and hours, maybe days, maybe weeks, I don't even know anymore. There have been quite a few other people hanging out too, and we all immediately knew that we were all there for the same reason.

I mean, if you didn't have a thesis to do in order to graduate, would you be in LMP at 3 AM on Sunday morning?

Adelaide is really cute when she's sleep-deprived and thesising (now a verb).

(The thing she's holding is the second prototype of the Braille Label Maker, her 2.009-turned-thesis project which has been owning at life lately and winning tons of awards...more about that when I can give it the attention it deserves...)

We've been bonding with the other Course 2 seniors, sharing junk food and caffeine, and repeating our new mottos:

"D is for diploma."

"Mystery Hunt - Fun = Thesis"

"I didn't pay for it, it's not my explosion." (Yeah, I don't know where that one came from either, we're all a little sleep-deprived over here...)

But I'm making good progress here! I just made the following prettyful diagram:

On to the editing...

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Monday, May 11. 5:33 PM

My thesis is done. It's printed on fancy special paper and turned into the undergraduate office.

I had about 3 seconds to enjoy the relief from that moment before I headed over to the Rotch library to meet with a partner to finish writing a final report that's due tomorrow.

I have barely slept, my brain is completely liquid, I haven't had a real meal in days (I pretty much made a dinner out of Sun Chips and pineapple soda the other night...), I feel like absolute crap, and this is absolutely the last thing I'd like to be doing right now. I'm actually pretty miserable at the moment.

Even down to the bitter end, MIT enjoys beating you down and destroying your soul. Right now, IHTFP is feeling pretty one-sided...

Rather than write a real blog entry, I instead urge you to consider the following:

An MIT surveyor came upon the gates of Hell,
He looked the devil in the eye and said, "You're looking well."
The devil looked right back at him and said, "Why visit me?
You've been through Hell already 'cuz you went to MIT."

That is all.

So, what's it like when 4 MIT students visit 2 MIT alums (including a former blogger) for a week on the west coast? Pretty much the same kind of nerdy conversations, only this time I have photographic documentation to jog my memory. So without further ado, I bring you the nerdy adventures of Laura, Rick, Adelaide and Mason....West Coast edition.

Thankfully, a lot of the more famous things about San Francisco lend themselves really nicely to outbursts of nerdiness. Exhibit A: the cable cars.

Do you know how cable cars work? One of the very first things we did on our trip was find out all about them at the Cable Car Museum. (Free admission! If you're ever looking for something to do in San Fran, look no further!)

Basically there are heavy steel cables which run underground all along the entire route of the cable car. To move forward, the cars actually latch on to the cables and get pulled along for the ride (kind of like the lift you use when you go snowtubing). To stop, they just let go of the cable, and stop moving. Well the cable car museum is actually located at the central location through which all of the cables are routed. Translation: lots of heavy machinery. Adelaide and I (who are both mechanical engineering majors) were practically drooling.

Another one of the very first things we did in San Fran was visit In-N-Out Burger.

This isn't exactly nerdy, but was nonetheless an important part of our west coast experience. The food was okay, but in all of our opinions a little overrated and not nearly as good as UBurger, the In-N-Out spinoff located near MIT's campus.

The In-N-Out place is on Fisherman's Wharf, which is basically the super-touristy area. There are some neat things though, like this cool museum of old-timey mechanical scenes. You know, the sort of thing where you put in a quarter (well, or a nickel at the time) and there are some figures that move around or something. By far the best thing about this museum was the following sign tacked to the back door of the place.

Throughout our travels around the city, we took a lot of public transportation. We noticed that the bus benches have this weird design- each bench is several individual seats which normally flip up unless you hold them down with your weight by sitting in them. (They're a lot like the seats in movie theaters, except without armrests in between them.) We couldn't figure out why this was. We discussed the possible rationale behind the design- maybe it used less material, or allowed them to stay relatively dry after rains because the water would slide off instead of pool in the middle. We finally decided that it was that it was made that way to discourage people from sleeping on them, but we couldn't see exactly how. I was skeptical that it would be that much more uncomfortable than sleeping on a regular bench (which isn't exactly comfy to begin with). Well, this was one of those things that can only be settled experimentally.

Conclusion: it was not comfortable. I know it might look like I'm smiling and enjoying myself in that picture, but really I'm laughing because I can't figure out how to get up without falling off. Maybe it operates as a deterrent- you try sleeping on the bench once, but only once...

Of course, no trip to San Francisco would be complete without a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge.

And no walk across the bridge would be complete without discussions of the design, the general concept of suspension bridges (you really can feel it move with the traffic), the importance of considering environmental factors (see: Tacoma Narrows), and the shape of the steel cables. (Did you know that uniform loading of a hyperbolic cosine stretches the curve into a simple parabola? This is one of those things I know, but do not understand, and could never explain.)

Then we hiked around the rocky shore (I'd never seen the Pacific Ocean before) around sunset.

Mason is really into breakdancing. Extreme breakdancing, apparently.

I'm not Yan, but I can take pretty pictures sometimes...

We spent one day in nearby Oakland, where Ruth '07 works. While there, I had to snap a photo of the following:

Again, not nerdy, but remember, I <3 Madrid. Sigh. Nostalgia.

We also visited UCBerkeley and checked out their mechanical engineering building which, by the way, was awesome. It just had all the personality of a building designed by architects and taken over by mechanical engineers who rearranged it in their own personal way. It's just an awesome building with...engineering spilling out all over the place. It was fantastic. Adelaide and I wandered around snapping pictures of the UCBerkeley equivalents of MIT classes.

"Hey look, there's a whiteboard filled with 2.003."

"Oh, that's the 2.002 room."

"Oh, check it out, 2.671!"

I even found their very own Formula SAE team.

(Once upon a time, I was on MIT's team.)

Walking to the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) stop, we saw something amazing across the street, and had to check it out.

"The Other Change of Hobbit: a science fiction and fantasy bookstore." Look at how excited we all are! We spent awhile browsing the shelves, discussing some of our favorites. Adelaide was looking for the V for Vendetta comic and didn't see it in their small graphic novel section, so she asked the clerk. "No, we don't have it. We've stopped stocking a lot of graphic novels now that comic book place opened up just next door." All of our ears pricked up. Comic book store? 20 feet away? How had we missed that? Well, now we had something to do for the next 30 minutes as well. Adelaide got her book, and I had to politely turn down a random customer who recommended something about elephants when I pondered aloud what to buy. (I ended up not buying anything. I've only recently started reading comics so I'm still not sure exactly what I like and don't like.) Well, wouldn't you know, two doors down from the comic book store was a Half-Price Books, where I was able to add a few new titles to my personal library- Eragon (which I've wanted to read since forever and was on clearance for only $1), The Riddle-Master of Hed by Patricia McKillip (an author I've been curious about for awhile), and Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. Yeah, it's a book for 13-year-olds. I adore young adult fiction, and am not ashamed to admit it. (Except for Twilight. Don't even get me started on that drivel.)

Later in the week we visited AT&T park, which is also not nerdy but ohmygodIlovebaseball so I have to share some pictures.

Look, it's me, and I'm STANDING ON A MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL FIELD. So cool. This might even be cooler than the cable car museum. It's hard to say, really.

Rick and Adelaide hang out in the dugout.

Nearly every single person on the tour stopped to take a photo of this sign, posted in the clubhouse.

On our last day in town, Sam '07 took us to the concrete slides, a hidden secret of the Castro district. It's sort of crazy, but there's this tiny park with nothing in it but these huge slides made of concrete, built into the naturally steep landscape. They're actually incredibly intimidating. (Not going to lie: I was legitimately scared the first time.) I don't know who designed these things for children, but they were crazy. You have to go down them on pieces of scrap cardboard that people leave around the park to keep yourself from ruining your jeans.

I'm moving so fast it's a blur. Or someone just took a lousy picture.

Rick always obliges by making ridiculous faces whenever I snap photos of him. (This one was probably involuntary, though.)

Adelaide and I enjoying our ride.

Whatever, I'm not an adult.

The thing we immediately noticed about the slides was that the left slide appeared to go much faster than the right. We pondered this for awhile until we realized that even two people of relatively equal weight going down at the same time was not a useful experiment- because they were using slightly different pieces of cardboard. We quickly designed a series of tests to determine the true culprit behind the difference, taking into consideration the slides, the riders, and their cardboard. We tentatively concluded that the left slide was in fact slightly faster, but that varying the cardboard used had a greater effect on speed than switching slides. Of course, these were very rough experiments completed without real tools. We discussed how we could improve upon our experimental design, and concluded that we would need to blindfold the riders so they wouldn't alter their behavior based on which slide they were on and use simple light sensors to determine when a single "ride" started on stopped, to ensure that all trails included the same physical length by eliminating human error, reflex time, and bias. The conversation concluded with me saying the sentence, "And that's how you design a double-blind research study." Then we brushed our hands together and went for some drinks at a nearby bar. (Actually. Those last 2 sentences were 100% true.)

In other nerdy exploits, my friend Sarah '09 (who is majoring in CMS and looking to get a job in the gaming industry next year) has introduced me to the wonders of XBox Live. I've always said I had a gamer somewhere inside, and I was just glad she hadn't come out yet because I knew once I started playing games I'd never stop. I was totally right. Thankfully I still don't own any consoles more recent than N64 (which is at home, anyway) so I have to rely on Sarah for my gaming fix. But I've still played way more hours of Halo in the past 3 weeks than could possibly be healthy. I'm not all that great yet (it takes practice, ok?) but I'm no longer an utter embarrassment. But I'll totally admit, my favorite part of playing online (where you can match up with gamers from all over the place to play larger games) is the reactions Sarah and I get when people realize that we're female. As soon as any of us says something, we get, "Hey wait, are you a girl?" (followed by half a dozen friend requests). My usual response to this is something along the lines of, "What? Girls don't play Halo. I mean, is that even be allowed?"

This gaming has led to an even further increase in nerdiness. Sometimes I can't resist doing something stupid, then saying "I did it for the lulz," and whenever and someone informs the team, "There's a guy in our base," I really can't stop myself from saying "Is he killing all our dudes?"

On that note, this video is a year old, but I have to share. For an utterly epic YouTube experience, check out the utterly awesome Sauza '11 singing at the annual Conner 2 talent show. (Video courtesy of Snively. If you don't get all the jokes, don't worry, there are a handful of C2 inside jokes scattered around.) Enjoy.

... WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 9 PM THIS EVENING TO 5 PM EST MONDAY...

TODAYS SNOW AND FLURRIES IN SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND IS JUST A TEASE FOR WHATS COMING TONIGHT.

SIX TO 12 INCHES IS FORECAST FOR SOUTH CENTRAL NEW HAMPSHIRE WITH 5 TO 10 INCHES IN THE CONNECTICUT RIVER VALLEY.

THE JACKPOT... 10 TO 15 INCHES... WILL PILE UP IN THE HEAVILY POPULATED BOSTON PROVIDENCE INTERSTATE 95 CORRIDOR... WESTWARD INTO NORTHEAST CONNECTICUT AND NORTHWARD THROUGH WORCESTER COUNTY INTO THE MERRIMACK VALLEY OF NORTHEAST MASSACHUSETTS.

SNOW... WILL BE HEAVY AT TIMES BETWEEN 10 PM TONIGHT AND 10 AM MONDAY CAUSING NUMEROUS DELAYS OR CANCELLATIONS IN ALL SORTS OF TRANSPORTATION DEPENDENT BUSINESS.

SNOWFALL RATES OF 2 TO 3 INCHES PER HOUR ARE EXPECTED FOR A COUPLE OF HOURS NEAR OR JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT IN MASSACHUSETTS... CONNECTICUT AND RHODE ISLAND. THUNDER MAY ALSO BE HEARD.

SNOW WILL TAPER TO LIGHT ADDITIONAL ACCUMULATIONS LATE MONDAY MORNING OR AFTERNOON.

THE MONDAY MORNING COMMUTE WILL BE QUITE SLOW AND HAZARDOUS DUE TO A COMBINATION OF STILL HEAVY SNOW... RESULTING IN POOR VISIBILITY AND RAPID ACCUMULATION ON ROADS. TEMPERATURES WILL BE IN THE TEENS TO LOWER 20S WITH GUSTY NORTHERLY WINDS CAUSING BLOWING AND DRIFTING OF THE SNOW AND WIND CHILLS IN THE 5 TO 15 DEGREE RANGE.

------------------------

My thoughts?

1. The National Weather Service has apparently never heard of netiquette.

2. Isn't winter over yet? *grumble*

Thesis
Do a lot of work and write a paper. Details to come, so stay tuned.

21M.733: Design for the Theater: Scenery
The final component of my theater arts concentration. This is actually pretty cool, because we're learning and practicing a bunch of art techniques, like different types of sketching and stuff. Also, I get to keep a blog. No joke. Part of the requirements are to write reflective essays about each of the projects we do. Instead of this, we can also keep a journal about our work. When I found out this journal could be in the form of a blog, I thought, "well how can I not?"

1.851: Water and Sanitation Infrastructure for Developing Countries
Lots of reading and discussion about water and sanitation interventions in the developing world on their effects on public health. Plus every week we learn about a different "watsan" (water/sanitation) technology, which keeps me plenty interested. I've even managed to get myself tangled up in potential plans involving possible redesign and experimentation with the most recently showcased technology, fog harvesting.

2.722: D-Lab
Hydropowered lantern. 'Nuff said.

So then, after all that, hopefully (knock on wood), I'm going to graduate.

And then I have to be an adult.

I'm not sure you can fully appreciate how utterly terrifying this is.

June 5 is Commencement. June 6 is moving day. I was on the phone with my mom the other day and she asked me when I had to leave me dorm. I realized I didn't even know, so I looked up that little fact and wrote it in my planner. June 6th, at noon. I'll pack up my belongings and move away from Boston forever.

This is so unbelievably weird to think about, because I never really thought of Boston as my home exactly. I mean, it has just sort of become the place I've lived for several years- there was no conscious thought process that went along with it. Also, I've never moved away from anywhere before. I've lived on the same street in suburban New Jersey for my entire life. When I was four, my family moved from our house to the house next door. I'm not kidding. Two of my earliest memories are of carrying boxes of my toys across the backyard, and playing tic tac toe with my mom on the wall as we painted what would become my new room. Sure, technically I left home to come here, but NJ was still home in my mind. I knew I'd be going back there every few months to visit. That will still be true, no matter where I end up next year. But this is different.

In a few years I'll be able to say things like, "Oh yeah, I used to live in Boston." That's SO WEIRD. You don't get to say things like that unless you're an adult who has led an interesting and fulfilling life and have LIVED long enough to spend a few years living in whatever random city before moving to the next one. Ok, so this is clearly biased by the fact that, as previously mentioned, I lived on the same street my whole life. Also, almost my entire extended family lives within a half hour drive of my house. But it's still weird, okay?

So. On June 6, I move away from Boston.

June 7 is a black hole.

It's kind of like hundreds of years ago, when people thought the world was flat and that you could get to the end and just drop off. June 6th is that edge of the flat, flat world. Or if you're looking for a more contemporary example, it's kind of like when you stretch your brain to try to figure out what's at the edge of the universe. Is there a plexiglass wall? Is there another universe? Where does that one end? Try as you might, you just cannot see past a certain point. That point is June 6.

The only things I know about June 7 is that I will presumably be on this earth, that I will no longer be a student, that I will hopefully be employed somewhere, that I will need to find a place to live and pay rent that is not managed through a student loan system and of which no portion goes into a social budget, that I will have to start filing tax forms....tax forms! I mean, right now I technically pay taxes and all, but then I just go like, "Hey IRS, I'm a student and make like 4 grand a year" and then they're like "alright you don't really count yet" and give most of it back. But next year I will have to actually file tax forms. This boggles the mind.

I will also presumably have a job. But who knows.

The job search, FYI, is not going well. I feel like I've scoured the farthest reaches of the internet and have subsequently discovered every single development organization that exists.

The problem is that there is no obvious solution. If I were Course 6, I'd just be like, "Okay, I'll just go apply to Microsoft, and then go to a career fair, where 90% of the companies will recruit me." But instead, I've got to search pretty hard. Most places aren't really hiring, at least not college grads, so I've got to whip out that whole "cover letter" routine and hope for the best while trying not to sound too desperate (which I am). Also, I hate cover letters with an intense, fiery passion.

It's just slow going, in general. I spent something like 8 hours last weekend searching for a job. I eventually had to force myself to stop, just to get some homework done. It's like wasting time on YouTube, but less entertaining, or on Wikipedia, but less informative.

Let's just hope the Peace Corps takes me. Just keep your fingers crossed for me, okay?

EDIT: Here's a piece of good news I'm bursting to share: Teach for America just invited me to the first round of interviews. Woo!

Back in the day (TM) when I was a prefrosh participating in the awesomeness that is Campus Preview Weekend, I noticed an event in my 500 page calendar called "Rainbow Lounge Open House." I had no idea what that meant.

Perhaps you are as sheltered and/or clueless as me, so I'll break it down for you. The rainbow is the symbol of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) Community, so the Rainbow Lounge at MIT is the home to the Institute's various LGBT student groups and support staff.

More loftily (and according to the sign outside the door):

The MIT Rainbow Lounge exists as a place and a home for all people - lgbt, questioning, allies & friends - to feel comfortable about themselves, while learning and sharing with others.

Through the establishment of the Rainbow Lounge the MIT students, staff, faculty and guests strive to:
- provide a safe space for the MIT LBGTQ community, including allies
- achieve a better sense of community with its cross-cultural perspectives
- educate about gender issues, safe sex, and LBGT-related topics
- present resources available at MIT and in the surrounding community
- encourage participation of allies and friends
- provide a comfortable space for meetings, relaxation, learning and social interaction

The entrance to the Rainbow Lounge has a big collection of those informative booklets for anyone to take, and posters about various LGBT events that are going on around campus. (By the way, as you can tell from the number in the photo above, the room is in the basement and doesn't have the greatest lighting- so I apologize for the quality of the photos. I did the best I could, but hey, I'm not Yan.)

The Rainbow Lounge has a whole bunch of resources for students. There are two full-time staff members who are around to talk to students, plan events, and generally hang out.

There's also a reading room with a huge collection of LGBT related books...

...and movies.

Any student is welcome to sign up for lending privileges and borrow any of these materials for a few days at a time.

There's even a small kitchen which is useful for things like making PB&J sandwiches during movie nights.

The Rainbow Lounge, just like the Center for Health Promotion and Wellness (who are totally cool people, btw), also functions as a resource for safe sex information and materials (like free condoms).

The main room is used for club meetings, informal gatherings, movie nights, and occasional special events, like movie screenings, discussions, or last week's "Make Your Own LGBT Valentines." As the name suggests, the room is very colorful.

Also, those couches are seriously comfy.

One of the most well-known projects to come out of the Rainbow Lounge is the "You Are Welcome Here" campaign. (Money Man has blogged about this before. The idea behind the campaign is this: any member of the MIT community who would like to participate can get a copy of a small slip of paper, about the size of an index card, to place on their office door.

The presence of one of these cards on a door indicates that those behind the door are friendly to and supportive of LGBT people and causes.

I see these cards everywhere, so to demonstrate their ubiquity, I took a camera with me on a brief trip around campus and compiled a bunch of photos. This is by no means anything approaching a comprehensive list, but possibly a representative sample? (Does it matter that I was lazy and never made it up a staircase?)

So, who are all of these people who went through the trouble to stick one of these cards on their doors? From left to right and top to bottom: the staff at the Career Development Center, Chris Colombo, the Dean for Student Life and Kim Vandiver, the Dean for Undergraduate Research (also the Director of the Edgerton Center and my 2.009 instructor), Professor Gibson (from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, according to the MIT "people search"), Steven Lerman, the Vice Chancellor and Dean for Graduate Education, the people in room 10-183 (whoever they are, they are apparently LGBT-friendly!), and me (I grabbed a copy for my dorm room door while in the Rainbow Lounge to take photos).

And of course...

I know the LGBT@MIT category is....basically empty right now, so if anyone has any questions that might inspire some content for that page, send 'em this way.

EDIT: This blog entry is not about tolerance or intolerance, or justifying or glorifying or encouraging or discouraging anything. It's about providing interested people with factual information about life at MIT. Obviously I have presented the facts with a bit of my own personality interwoven, because this is a blog and not an encyclopedia. However, the fact remains that this is not about whether anything is right or wrong. Some of you started a discussion about LGBT issues in general, and I'm ashamed to say that it got quite ugly on both sides. It did not want to have to do this, but I have deleted all of the comments from this discussion, and I will delete and future comments that reopen the argument. Please feel free to continue commenting on the content of the blog entry, asking questions etc, but I will delete any future comments that make judgments or are in any way uncivil. There are plenty of places on the internet where interested parties can have such arguments. This is not one of them.

1. I'm being published. For realz.

This is sort of weird because...well, I don't have much interest in going into academia or research, so being published is just sort of generally interesting to me. I mean, I want to spend my life designing corn shellers for poor people in Africa, it's not like being published is really in the same world, you know? Right now I'm just hoping the Peace Corps accepts me, and I really don't think that sending an addendum to my application saying "Hey look! I'm published!" is really going to make a difference. It's sort of like when Columbia accepted me but I was already so psyched about going to MIT that I just looked at the envelope and went, "Oh, that was nice of them."

Okay, now I'm just being a snob. It also doesn't help that the paper was well outside my normal field of study. So while I've been told that the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference is a Big Deal, it's not like I actually know anything about the IEEE.

Anyway, if you migrate over to the "Accepted Papers" section and happen to see a paper entitled ECall-compliant early crash notification service for portable and nomadic devices, rest assured that the third author is in fact yours truly and not some other Laura Nicholson from MIT. (True story, there's actually a Laura Nicholson who is my year at Harvard. I was not blessed with a unique name.)

My influence is most clearly seen in the acceleration charts which made their way into the final paper. As a mechanical engineer, I was feeling a little lost when they asked me to create an emulator for the project. So I sort of threw something together and spent a bunch of time running crash simulations and plotting the results. I had no idea how to capture the data from Java directly to an Excel sheet (remember, mechanical engineer!) so it involved a lot of hacked solutions (ahem, copy paste). But when I showed the graphs I made to my coworkers, they were amazed. I guess they never would have thought of that. =)

Anyway, the point is, I know it's awesome...but in my world, still less awesome than that time I was slashdotted.

2. I love MISTI.

I mean, first gave me my awesome experience in Spain. Then, they also sent me to Italy. (Blog entry to come, I promise!) Then, after I spent hours scouring the internet for employment opportunities last night and found absolutely nothing and finally went to bed miserable and depressed, I find this email in my inbox.

Dear MISTI program participant,

MISTI publishes an online resumebook for our corporate partners interested in hiring MIT grads. If you are going to be on the job market in the next six months, we encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity. The resume book has been effective in helping MISTI participants establish careers with firms such as Motorola, Siemens, and UTC in Asia, Europe and the US . For a complete list of MISTI corporate partners, visit http://mit.edu/misti/partners/sponsors.html

I replied within 30 seconds. MISTI, I love you. Thank you for helping me find a job. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

3. My D-Lab project kicks your D-Lab project's....

Okay, 99.999% of the people reading this blog don't have a D-Lab project. But anyway.

Kim already blogged about her favorite projects. Luckily for you, my favorites were totally different, so you get to hear about almost all of the proposals:

6. Bamboo pencil maker- bamboo grows quickly, so using it instead of other types of wood helps the planet. Also, making useful things out of bamboo can be a good source of income for people in developing nations. This project is to design a device which turns bamboo into pencils.
5. Recycling plastic bags- into fishing nets. How cool is that?
4. Yunus Challenge- energy storage is a tricky problem. How creative can you get in solving it?
3. Chlorine dispenser- the current design for dispensing chlorine to disinfect dirty water could use some improvement.
2. Cell phone baby scale- malnutrition is a big problem for young children in the developing world. This scale would measure a baby's height and weight and use Bluetooth or cell phone signals to send the information to a central database at the nearest health clinic. This saves mothers from having to walk hours or days to reach the clinic and have their baby weighed. The health clinic could send back messages indicating if the baby's weight is of any concern.

And, by far the coolest project evar, which I was lucky enough to be assigned to:

1. Hydropowered lantern- imagine you live in Peru, and you don't have electricity in your house. In order to see at night, you use lanterns which use expensive kerosene, produce irritating smoke, and pose a fire hazard. The weather is usually cloudy, so there's not much solar power to be harvested, but you (and nearly everyone in your village) live only a few hundred feet from a small stream. You have a nifty lantern that you can just drop into the stream and let the running water charge it up for use that night.

I am officially going to spend the rest of the semester designing such a device.

How. cool. is that? =)

Okay, yeah, I know, that was over a week ago, and the last time I blogged was last year, but I never claimed to be any good at this updating thing, okay? (But for real, I have so many awesome entries planned, and I have to write them, because then I graduate and don't get to be a rockstar blogger anymore. Ack!)

So. About my Reg Day.

The thing about Reg Day, is that you run into every single person you ever knew, I swear.

While walking around campus I passed a handful of old acquaintances, one of my problem solving partners from 8.02 (electricity and magnetism), a couple of people from the best 2.009 team ever (Go Yellow!), and every single one of my ex-boyfriends that happens to be on MIT's campus. Which is only 2. But still. 100%! Also I just wanted to through that in there to prove that MIT students do in fact date, because seriously, people somehow think that because no one except Mollie (who is now actually married to Adam) feels the need to be all "Sooooo, I'd just like the thousands of prefrosh who read this to know about the really cute thing my boyfriend/girlfriend did for Valentine's Day!" that means that we're all huge nerds who have no social lives and never get involved in romantic relationships. Well, we are huge nerds, but we do have social lives and relationships. It's just that Valentine's Day serenades are more likely to go a little something like this:

(A friend sent me that and I had to share. Tensor! Ha! Get it? Don't worry if you don't, a lot of it was way over my head too. Apparently it's a lot of topology. Who understands topology? Not me, I practically went certifiably insane taking 18.02 and 18.03 at the same time.)

Um, so I was talking about Reg Day.

The thing is, it was my 8th and final Reg Day at MIT, and despite how eventful it was....everything was sort of...boring.

I woke up early and went downstairs to get some breakfast. (Wait, downstairs? Check it out: after all this time, I finally decided to move to Conner 4 but hadn't moved my food yet. 3 years later, and my kitchen has traded places. How ironic.) I went to the MISTI building for a wrap-up meeting from my IAP adventures in Italy (which I still haven't told you about, man I'm bad at this!) and chatted with Serenella, the MIT-Italy coordinator for awhile. I wanted to poke my head into Alicia's office (she's the director of MIT-Spain) but she was in a meeting.

On my way to my advisor's office I waved to a couple more friends and grabbed a Concentration Completion Form, which I knew would be due in a few days. I got my forms signed, chatted with the student volunteer who stamped my white and pink copies of the carbon paper, and took the LSC schedule they're always handing out on Reg Day.

I met up with Adelaide and Mason and we grabbed some coffee (or hot chocolate, in my case) and ran into another one of my 2.009 teammates in Lobby 7. We sat in the corner of the lobby, enjoying our drinks and chatting about the upcoming semester.

Then I headed off to another meeting I had scheduled, waving an awkward hello to the first of the ex-boyfriends as we passed in the Infinite.

I just went through the whole day, greeting the many people I've come to know and working through the system of the school I've gone to for three and a half years. And the thing is, I'm over it. I've got it figured out. That's not to say that I would ever consider the stuff I've learned here to be easy, but if I look at MIT as a whole, it's completely solved. I know where everything is, I know lots of professors and even a couple of administrators, I've been involved in what must be a couple dozen student groups at various points, I know how to reserve space on campus for events, I know how to apply for funding from a half dozen different departments, I know the best place to eat lunch on campus, I know which forms need to be turned in to which offices by which deadlines, I know all the best shortcuts and how to use the tunnels when the weather isn't any good, I know my way around the office where I work and as a result I probably can actually fix your computer, I know some pretty nifty ninja commands on Athena...

I've just...cracked it. I've got it figured out. It's not that there isn't anything left here for me to learn (because seriously guys, it's still MIT you know) but I'm satisfied and comfortable in my understanding of the inner workings of the Institute. It's not a challenge anymore.

So that's how I know I'm ready to move on.

I'll enjoy one last semester. I'll finish out my requirements taking a few interesting classes and writing a thesis. I'll keep working at my campus job, and go to study breaks on my new floor. I'll enjoy the company of all the many people I've already met and became friends with. But I won't be that person frantically waving her arms in the air, volunteering to take that story for The Tech, or to be Rush chair for the second time in a row, or to organize a 150 person CPR class. I'll sit back and let the underclassmen have their turn working it out. Because I'm busy getting ready for the next step.

You know, whatever that is.

Why? Because the end of the semester has me totally and completed hosed. I can't even believe I'm taking 15 minutes to write this entry, but I thought you guys deserved at least an update, and a taste of things to come.

Item 1: How hosed am I? According to the timesheets we're supposed to keep for 2.009, I've spent THIRTY HOURS working on that class this past week. It's a 12 unit class, which means the professors think you should be spending 12 hours per week on the class. Sometimes professors are wrong. *glare* But, it will all be over soon: final presentations are tomorrow night! I just bought a yellow accent piece for my business outfit (go Yellow Team!) for the final presentation and am about to head off to a team meeting.

Come to think of it, I've been so busy this term I don't know if I've even told you guys about the project we're working on. So here's a small taste- expect a full entry about it sometime next week!

Item 2: The other day, I got an email from the administrative head of the Mechanical Engineering department, informing me that I needed to fill out my degree application online.

!!!!!!

This is terrifying.

Item 3: Airline prices make NO sense to me. Somehow, flying round trip to Milan from Boston THROUGH New York is significantly more expensive than flying round trip straight from New York. Does that make any sense at all? Also, check this out:

Yup, that's the SAME exact itinerary, from the same website, found within 5 minutes of each other with different prices. I give up.

Oh, but why am I looking up roundtrip plane tickets to Milan?

Wouldn't you like to know...

Thanksgiving is when Americans gather together with their families to take part in a few time-honored traditions: huge, home cooked meals centered around a turkey, football (the American kind, not actually played with your feet), and preparation for the holiday season.

I just watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, another staple of the holiday. Apparently (according to Wikipedia, anyway) the parade began back in the 20s because a large number of Macy's employees were new immigrants who were eager to embrace American traditions. (You learn something new every day.) Macy's is a huge department store, the main branch of which is located on 34th street in New York City. (Hence the movie title.) In fact, I just passed Macy's on Tuesday night- the bus I take drops me off at Penn Station, right across the street from the famous store. So back in the 20s, a bunch of Macy's employees put together a big parade with balloons, floats, and animals from the Central Park Petting Zoo, and a great American tradition was born. Ever since its first incarnation, the parade ends with the entrance of Santa Claus- the official ringing in of the holiday season. (In fact, before Thanksgiving was officially encoded as the 4th Thursday in November, presidents during lean times attempted to move the holiday earlier in the year to increase the length of the shopping season. I really need to read less Wikipedia.)

At my house, Thanksgiving morning is pretty lax. While delicious cooking happens in the kitchen, the TV in the living room is left on channel 4 (NBC) which broadcasts the parade every year. My mom and/or sister and I take breaks from preparing some food to bring to my grandparents' house to catch snippets of the parade on TV. We never sit down and watch the whole thing, but everyone makes sure to catch the very end, when Santa makes his appearance.

But before the climactic end, the parade features marching bands from across the country, floats with famous performers singing and dancing to holiday tunes, and huge balloons of characters from all arenas of pop culture: books (the Cat in the Hat, Clifford the Big Red Dog), TV shows (Kermit the frog), movies (Buzz Lightyear), toys (Mr. Potato Head), and even commercials (the Energizer Bunny, the M&Ms characters.) And a fun fact: apparently, engineering students from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ volunteer at the parade by inflating the balloons and using their physics knowledge to train the handlers in keeping the balloons under control. I almost went there, and I never knew that!

After my family enjoys the parade, we head to my grandparents' house with as many of my mom's sibilings as can make it (my mom's sisters both live nearby, but her 2 brothers live out of state and only make it back to Jersey every couple of years for important family events) for a traditional dinner: turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and all sorts of other autumn foods. Not only that, but my grandmother actually works in a bakery, so the pies and cookies are always top-notch (and in oversupply, normally).

My extended family is huge, so we almost never have a formal sit-down dinner like you see on TV. All sorts of food is set out and everyone grabs what they want and finds a place around the house to sit down and enjoy. As for the football: the TV in the background is set to the football game, and after we've digested a bit, we head outside for a family match. A few years ago, when we had a larger crowd than usual thanks to my uncle and his family flying in from Utah, my mom actually borrowed pinnies from the basketball team she coaches so we could have proper teams. It can get pretty intense.

The story behind the first Thanksgiving goes as follows: the pilgrims who landed in Massachusetts had no idea what they were doing. They were totally unprepared for New England winters and certainly wouldn't have made it through the first few years without the help of the Native Americans in the area who taught them how to fish and hunt local game, which crops to plant, and generally how to survive on the terrain. To express their thanks, the pilgrims and the Native Americans held a big feast together to celebrate a successful harvest.

But every story has two sides. If it seems a little bogus to you that one of the biggest, most culturally important holidays in the U.S. celebrates the help of an indigenous population which we've historically, to put it mildly, treated very poorly, you're not alone. The United American Indians of New England agree with you, and since 1970 they've staged a protest on Thanksgiving Day (called the National Day of Mourning) in Plymouth, Massachusetts- the site of the original Thanksgiving to protest the "myth" of the First Thanksgiving (because we all know the story wasn't that simple, and the way we celebrate the holiday now almost certainly bears very little resemblance to the original) and the even bigger myth of cooperation between the natives and the settlers.

I think that's a pretty comprehensive overview of the holiday. Enjoy your turkey, your protests, or your ordinary autumn day- whatever is in store for you.

Yesterday and today, MIT hosted hundreds of middle and high school students for a program called "Splash." Hosted by the Educational Studies Program, Spalsh is a huge project that encourages dozens of MIT students to teach literally "whatever they want." The organizers recruit student volunteers to create classes in everything from "Alebgra 1" to "The Atomic Science of Space Weapons" and everything in between. You can check out some of the interesting offerings in this year's Spalsh course catalogue.

Well, a couple of years ago I actually volunteered to teach at Spalsh, an experience which I blogged about, unfortunately in the same entry in which I posted a really embarrassing photo of no less than 4 bloggers. (Yeah, now you're definitely going to click on that link.) I taught two classes: Intro to HTML, which I had no problem crafting myself, and Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism, for which I sought out a little help.

The Edgerton Center is quite possibly one of the coolest things about MIT. Named after the famous Doc Edgerton, the Edgerton Center has a lot of stuff going on.

But first things first: who's Doc Edgerton? Have you ever seen that famous photograph of a bullet going through an apple? We have Doc to thank for that. He developed all kinds of strobe light technology, making it possible to photograph events which happen more quickly than the human eye can detect.

(WARNING: PDF...written by my 2.009 instructor, actually!)You can read a biography of Doc here.

Doc was famous for his love and talent for teaching, making him incredibly popular among students. Apparently he is credited with once saying, "The trick to education is to teach people in such a way that they don't realize they're learning until it's too late," which just goes to show you how cool he was. To fully appreciate this story, please try to understand that Doc Edgerton is something like an Institute legend.

So rather fittingly, the Edgerton Center was named after him. What does the Edgerton Center do? I think a better question might be "what doesn't the Edgerton Center do?" It's sort of like the hidden engine behind the "manus" part of "mens et manus" (MIT's official motto, which means "mind and hand.") They still operate a strobe laboratory on the 4th floor of building 4, right next to a couple of classrooms they use to invite local high school students to MIT for special educational programs run by undergrads who can get paid for their efforts through UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program). Across the hall is an electronics lab where various courses and seminars are taught throughout the year. The hallway in which all of these things are located is half museum exhibit, half playful laboratory- the walls are lined with mini interactive exhibits which demonstrate different concepts of electricity and strobe lights. The Edgerton Center operates a machine shop for students in a different building on campus, co-sponsors the IDEAS competition (which encourages students to form teams and work on developing technologies which will aid the developing world), and is the financial, academic, administrative, and intellectual backbone of a whole list of "hands-on" student groups, like Formula SAE (of which I used to be a member, actually), FIRST Robotics (of which I also used to be a member...I really got around the 'tute in my day...ahem), Solar Car team, Rocket Team, and others.

Not only that, they also offer general moral support for the student body. Like, officially. To quote their website: "Throughout the year students may also come to the Edgerton Center for help with independent projects for which they may need a workplace, test equipment, access to a shop, or simply advice and encouragement."

It was precisely this vague and generous offer of which I decided to avail myself while preparing for my class in Electricity and Magnetism. So I just happened to be hanging out in the electronics lab, getting advice and supplies for a whole range of supercool E&M demonstrations from one of their staff members, on the night that one of Doc Edgerton's collegues happened to drop by to say hi.

I am so not kidding.

I was just sitting at a lab bench, taking apart a cheap music speaker so I could demonstrate to my students how sound is created through alternating electric current which is translated to alternating magnetic fields and then into motion of the speaker cone, when there was a knock on the door.

The visitor was a graduate of MIT's class of 1950-something and basically worked with Doc Edgerton as a UROP and helped develop some of the groundbreaking strobe technologies. After he graduated he went on to create his own company in underwater strobe technologies and just happened to be in Cambridge for some conference or another, so he decided to stop by and ask for a tour of the lab. He even showed off his Class of 1950-something brass rat to prove it (maybe if I had written this entry when it actually happened 2 years ago I would remember the details better...) and had a conversation with me about how the culture behind the MIT class ring has changed in the intervening years.

So I abandoned my half-disassembled speaker to get a tour of the famous strobe lab myself (I'd never been inside before) and sat around with a group of staff and students as we listened to this alum tell stories about Doc and the escapades in the lab back in the days of its infancy.

And that's the whole story. So the story itself is maybe one sentence long. But in the context of the culture of MIT, it's like the COOLEST STORY EVER.

I don't quite know how to summarize it except to say....these are the things that MIT is made of.

Like, completely. I hadn't been grocery shopping for weeks, and after making a meal out of crackers one night, it was time to own up to the fact that I was going to have to order out.

Thank God for credit cards and the internet. Within a few minutes I had placed an order for Hawaiian pizza and a side of cinnamon sticks at Dominos without even having to pick up the phone.

But here's the really weird thing: then they started tracking my order.

Now, I'm used to tracking my Amazon.com shipments via UPS number, but Dominos has brought the concept to a whole new level.

I just think this is kind of creepy. The bar corresponding to what's currently going on with your pizza flashes red, and turns solid once its been completed. Then the status text on the bottom updates to say something crazy like, "Our delivery specialist Ryan has just placed your pizza in his Domino-mobile as of 6:08 PM."

Not only that, this system is apparently patent pending. Does anyone else find this sort of weird, or is it just me?

God bless America, or something.

In other news, this is what I see when I log in to my MIT libraries account:

That's right. TWELVE. I currently have 12 books checked out of the libraries- plus another 2 from the Boston Public library. (Fun fact: you can get your very own BPL card by showing proof of residence in Massachusetts. All I had to do was bring a credit card statement that had been mailed to my dorm room to the library and they gave me an account. This made me really happy, because I'm a super dork who loves libraries.)

Where are these books? Strewn all over my floor, obviously. The point of this is that...well, I'm hosed. So I'm going to stop writing this blog entry and get back to one of my two 20 page term papers.

I will just leave you with this visual of things that are consuming my life right now, in MIT speak:

In fact, that's the source I used to find my job 3 years ago- but the website has thankfully undergone a dramatic improvement in style since then. In any case, you can see that there is a huge list of interesting things you can work on. I have a pretty generous financial aid package, but I pay for all of my own personal expenses myself, with pretty limited support from my parents. Tuition, housing fees, and a few other things are charged directly to my student account, but everything else- food, textbooks, travel, clothes- I pay for myself, so having a campus job definitely helps take money issues off my personal list of "things to stress about." (Especially because I like my job, and that list is long enough already.)

Ever since my freshman year (sort of), I've worked at the Computing Help Desk, which is part of Information Services and Technology. (Yeah, IS&T's website is sort of an embarrassment, isn't it? Apparently they were planning to replace it with a new, fancy, way better version since forever ago but it's still stuck in bureaucracy.) So what does all that mean? Well, IS&T runs all of the computer related stuff at MIT...which, as you can imagine, makes it a huge department. Within IS&T there are people in charge of running Athena (the computing environment on the campus computers), the email servers, all of the web space (anything with mit.edu in it), plus tons more stuff. Within IS&T there is a division called Client Support Services (CSS), and within CSS is there is a group called the Help Desk.

If you've ever wondered what it's like to be the person on the other end of the line when you place a call to tech support, I'm about to tell you.

When I show up at IS&T's office on Massachusetts Ave, the first thing I pass is the reception desk and the walk-ins area.

The whiteboard keeps all the useful information in one place- things like useful phone numbers that we often transfer clients to, updates about network outages, and common problems that we've been seeing lately. I grab my notebook out of the filing cabinet, which also serves as a table for the free food that is occasionally set out for computing consultants. Right now it's a little bare, but pizza, Bertucci's rolls (a favorite of any MIT student), and bagels have known to appear on occasion- sometimes just as an incentive to get us through the day (like during the memorable week when an entire mail server was down for several days) or because there were leftovers from some event, meeting or conference that was held in the building.

(Yes, after I snapped this photo I did grab a few pieces of candy corn. Yum, candy corn. I miss Halloween.)

Then I take a seat at one of the stations, which comes complete with a Mac, PC, telephone, and snazzy headset so I can talk and type at the same time and feel super cool.

I log into the computers and follow an absurdly complicated set of instructions to log into the phone system, and wait for calls to come in. While I'm waiting, I check out the "queue," which is a list of all of the unresolved cases that we're still working on. If there's an incoming call, my headset beeps a couple of times to let me know someone's on the line. I open up a blank case file and take the call. I talk the client through some troubleshooting steps, and if I'm lucky (and they have an easy question), I can solve it easily. If I'm totally stumped, unable to deal with directly (sometimes the solution requires superpowers within IS&T that are not normally rewarded to students), or don't get anywhere after a certain length of time, I write down everything that happened in the case file and add it to the queue, so that other consultants can take a look at it and try their luck.

What sort of stuff do we deal with? Lots of stuff -there's a whole list of software which we recommend and support. IS&T provides MIT users with all of the stuff they'll need to get through their virtual lives at MIT- generic stuff like email clients, calendar applications, file transfer applications, file backup systems, and more specific stuff useful to MIT's system (complete with their own set of MIT-specific configuration settings): Fetch, SecureFX, Kerberos, web certificates. We troubleshoot connectivity problems, email problems, software problems, hardware problems, printer installation, VPN, VNC, Office, and VirusScan. We get frantic calls from people who saved the only copy of their thesis in their email account and somehow deleted their entire inbox (seriously guys, BACK UP YOUR DATA), people who forgot their passwords, and people who want to make their computers do crazy (impossible?) things. Sometimes the person on the other end of the line says, "Hi, I'm the IT person at my lab but I can't figure out this problem," which always sucks, because you know right from the start that the person asking you for help probably knows way more about computers than you do, but you've got to pretend otherwise anyway. It might seem like we know a whole lot about a whole lot, but that's not necessarily true. And it might seem like we support a whole lot of stuff, but that doesn't mean we like it. I obviously can't hear what's happening at the other end of the line when my coworkers answer the phone, but one look at their facial expression can be a dead give away that the client just said, "So I'm using Oracle Connector for Outlook, and..."

Every Tuesday we have a training meeting in the Demo Center, which is basically a room set up for computer-related presentations, with a projector and a fancy interface that can easily switch the projector feed between many different monitors.

During training meetings, all of the student consultants get together to eat free food.

Well, then we also have to undergo some training in exchange for the free food, but it's not so bad. Usually there's a guest speaker from some other department within IS&T who has come to explain to us the project that they're working on. So for example, a few weeks ago we heard from the person who is overseeing the upgrade of the campus wireless network, who explained how the new routers work and what sort of questions we could expect to have people call us with based on the bugs that they're still working out of the system.

Last week we had delicious cake, because it wasn't Joanne's birthday. Andrew (the student consultant responsible for stocking the food supply) wanted to buy a cake and couldn't resist the urge to have the bakery attendant write something on it. This week we learned lots of useful stuff about Athena, which made me happy, so it's a good deal all around.

So, how does this fit into my life at MIT? Well, I work anywhere from 6-10 hours per week, depending on the semester and my work load. And honestly, it's a nice break from everything- to spend a few hours a week working on something not related to mechanical engineering, outside of the labs and classrooms of the academic buildings.

You've probably heard that working in tech support is an awful job, but I love it. Sure, sometimes you get phone calls from people who should never be allowed to touch anything with more processing power than a four function calculator, but I usually find those experiences entertaining. (Then again, I'm the person who absolutely loved being a lifeguard mostly because of all of the nutty people I had to deal with on a daily basis- they gave me such good stories to tell at the end of my work day.) Also, the people I work with are great, both the students and staff. We are a really close knit group, and training meetings (when we're all together at the same time) are always an entertaining affair. We always have a good time together, relating Help Desk war stories and cracking all kinds of jokes...and only some of them are computer related. Okay, maybe half. =)

I used to be really good at taking tests. I never had any kind of test anxiety or anything like that. But tests at MIT...well, they're hard. So right from freshman year, I came up with a plan to help me to stay calm and ward off test-taking anxiety.

Quoting myself from a blog entry freshman year: "Considering my track record in math, I figured I'd need reminding that stressing out over tests never helps anyone during my last 18.01 exam. So on the back of my index card, after writing in all the last minute derivatives that I never bothered to memorize, I wrote myself an important message in what I hoped were large, friendly letters."

This quickly became a tradition. Every equation sheet I've ever written for an exam at MIT has had those words written across the bottom. After freshman year, fewer classes allow equation sheets, so I started writing it on my hand before the exam. (Despite the fact that I was always sort of afraid that a TA or professor would notice ink on my palm and think that I was trying to cheat, only one professor has ever noticed and said anything. He seemed to think it was kind of pathetic, actually.)

I even took to writing my mantra on my hand during particularly stressful periods in general- with or without exams. If I was having a rough day, or knew I had a hard pset or tons of work in general, I'd grab my pen. During one memorable week (I believe it was while planning for CPW last year, and around the time of my famously long to-do list) I must have re-inked the fading message on my palm at least twice a day for 5 or 6 straight days.

And seriously? It works. Every time I glance down at my hand it seems like I suddenly remember how to breathe.

The tradition has served me well. So Douglas Adams? So long, and thanks for all the wit.

But in Sustainable Energy we learn lots of actual, concrete stuff in every lecture. So every Tuesday and Thursday I leave class thinking, "So that's how carbon sequestration works," and feeling all enlightened and such. Part of this is because the class is HUGE in scope. We tackle the energy problem from what seems like every possible angle- economics, engineering, science, politics, nuclear, mechanical, physical, electrical, you name it.

To illustrate this, I documented some of the sleepless night I spent the other day working on what was quite possibly the most epic pset of all time.

It started out with a pair of daunting circuit problems which I probably would have breezed through back in the Stone Age when I was taking 8.02 (seriously, I feel so old now it's not even funny) but were definitely beyond the rusty remains of my E&M skills.

I eventually had to give up on the circuit problem for a little while, even if just to give my mind a break. Problem 2 was about carbon dioxide emissions. If there are 0.9 hydrogen atoms per one carbon atom in every molecule of coal, and 2 oxygen atoms per one carbon atom in carbon dioxide (well, duh) then how much CO2 is produced by burning one kilogram of coal? I had a feeling this was some kind of chemistry problem, but I shoved that thought to the dusty back corner of my mind, right next to the word "stoichiometry." I just made up some ratios that made sense and went on with my life.

But then I checked the forum on the course website (MIT has a system called "Stellar," which is sort of like an automatically generated website that professors and TAs can use to post materials for their classes) where the course TA had posted some answers to questions people had been asking about Problem 2...and they were all talking about molar mass. I'm going to be honest with you, I cannot for the life of me remember the difference between atomic mass, atomic number, atomic weight, molar mass...I mean, I used to know them all at one point but...that was also back in the Stone Age. So I headed back to the Conner 2 library and found someone's used copy of the 5.111 (basic freshman chem) textbook. I could not find anything about molar mass in it. I was either really sleep-deprived by this point, or had managed to pick up practice problem book or something weird that didn't actually explain anything. Back to the library to trade it for someone's old 3.091 (alternate "flavor" of freshman chem) textbook. Right before the section in stoichiometry was a section on molar mass. Hey, the 3.091 textbook is organized just like that dusty corner of my mind! By this point the kitchen table had been consumed by my psetting.

I read some more about this "molar mass" thing and just ended up feeling more confused. Basically, the moral of this story is that I forgot everything I learned freshman year. I turned to Problem 3 for inspiration. The problem statement came complete with a full chemical equation, which was totally not helping. Thankfully, Adelaide appeared soon after this, and graciously attempted to teach me something I swear I mastered in my junior year of high school. (Ask Ms. Lyons. Seriously!)

Alright, time for Problem 4. Problem 4 was an essay. I'm not kidding! Write two pages about fuels derived from biomass and carbon sequestration and whether you think these are sustainable technologies. This pset has everything. Except like, some nuclear problem.

Oh wait, that was Problem 5.

Okay, the essay is done, Problem 5 is actually super easy despite being in the one topic that I didn't learn 3 times already during my academic career, and now, that final moment of absolute blissful satisfaction: when you take out the stapler and feel satisfying clunk of attaching all of the pages together in a neat pile, ready for submission.

Trinity, of course.

Vinyl jacket, fashionable sunglasses (which I of course had to wear inside and at night), all black clothing, combat boots, and fingertip-less gloves...I even dyed my hair...and I was totally in character.

I basically walked around campus for a few hours feeling like the coolest person in the world. It was awesome. Then I headed over to SpookySkate, which is a Halloween event sponsored by one of MIT's student groups. Where I met Neo. We ran into each other on line waiting for skates, introduced ourselves in real life, and chatted every time we saw each other for the rest of the night.

Unfortunately I quickly discovered after dressing myself up that I was unable to do a halfway decent cartwheel under normal conditions and therefore doing one in a full length vinyl jacket while shooting a Nerf gun was going to be totally impossible. Also, my awesome sunglasses did not give me the ability to run up walls. But the whole get up did greatly inflate my ego by making me feel like a total badass.

But I still looked really cool.

Feel free to tell me how awesome I am.

- Velma (from Scooby Doo)
- a non-sucky female Disney character (meaning Jasmine or Mulan or anyone who does something OTHER than sitting around waiting for Prince Charming's white horse to get in gear)
- a witch (even though I dressed as a witch like 5 times between the ages of 3 and 8)
- Trinity from the Matrix (this would be THE coolest thing ever, but...so much leather! I'm not sure I can pull that off!)

So...any suggestions? Either other ideas, or how on Earth I can pull any of these off within the next week...bonus points given to awesome characters I haven't thought of (I'd SO be Veronica Mars if I thought anyone would get it).

Ready....go!

Obviously not everyone in my hometown is a classist jerk, but more than once have I or a member of my family found ourselves in the following awkward situation while in the center of town:
Person 1: "The houses south of 35 really are beautiful, it's a shame this area of town isn't as nice."
Person 2: "Yeah, but at least we aren't on the other side of 36!"
Me/family member: "Umm....guys?"

These socioeconomic differences manifest themselves in the township's public education system. The town's 17 elementary schools feed into its 3 middle schools, which feed into 2 high schools. Despite the fact that they're in the same town and governed by the same school board, Middletown South High School is better funded than Middletown North High School. Period. This is just a fact of life which I've known since I was a little kid. North is far older than South- several decades ago, back before the township was large enough to need two high schools, there was only Middletown High School. When the district decided to expand, the original building was re-named Middletown North, and the new one became High School South. Since then, South had been renovated numerous times, while North was left in the same dilapidated state it was in when South was built (until about 2001, when it finally got a much-needed makeover). In a ranking of all of New Jersey's high schools in 2008, South ranked 92 out of 316, while North ranked 143. It isn't fair, and it doesn't make sense, but that's just the way it is. Ask anyone.

I've known and understood this since I was a little kid. That's not to say I accepted it, of course. When my mom couldn't explain the rationale for this discrepancy to me in the 7th grade, I declared my ambition to one day run for a position on the Middletown Township Board of Education, claiming to my mother that I, as a 12 year old, could do a better job than the current members. (Sorry to offend anyone out there who might serve on their local Board of Ed, but I rather agree with Mark Twain when he said, "In the first place, God made idiots. That was just for practice. Then he made school boards.") Throughout my life I remember instance after instance of hearing about the schools (at the elementary and middle school levels as well) on the richer side of town getting everything first. New athletics uniforms, fancy science labs, you name it, South got it, and North wondered if anyone would ever replace the masking tape holding the plastic covers on the unfriendly fluorescent lights together.

In the interest of full disclosure: I never attended Middletown High School North. I would have- I attended its "poorer" cousins at the elementary and middle school levels, and was all set to enroll in the decades-old building in the fall of 2001. But my mom found a pamphlet in the Sunday newspaper one week about the Monmouth County Vocational School District (MCVSD)- a district of competitive "magnet" high schools with pre-professional specializations. Students from all across the county could apply to one these magnet schools, which each had a different focus- one in marine biology, one in health and medicine, one in communication technologies, and one in engineering. (Since my high school graduation they've added another one in biotechnology.) I had absolutely zero interest in these schools, but my mom wasn't going to let me get away so easily. She dragged me to the information session of the engineering school, the dreadfully named "High Technology High School." I mean, really. What, do they call it "High Tech" for short?!

Answer: yes. How do I know? Well, after 4 years of being asked the same dumb question, you start answering with "Well, what would you call it for short?"

So what happened? What changed? I started out that sleepy Saturday morning in the fall of my 8th grade year resentful that I had been woken up at some ungodly hour and dragged away from my cartoons, and left the school in the afternoon eager to start filling out my application. I'm going to be completely honest: the descriptions of the rigorous academic program weren't all that exciting. The list of technology-related classes seemed okay, but I could take them or leave them. The student to computer ratio was insane, which was sort of impressive, but that's not to say I cared much. No, what won me over, I'm ashamed to say, was the building itself. It was clean. I had never seen a school building like it before in my life. The hallways were bright, the desks were free of graffiti, and after one fateful trip to the bathroom in which I discovered a door on every stall and actual running water in the sinks, I was sold. (Do as I say, not as I do. This was a stupid way to pick a high school, and would also be a stupid way to pick a college. Just sayin. =) It had astounding ramifications on my life path, but I do think it all worked out for the best in the end.)

High Tech High began my second adventure into the social ill of unequal educational opportunity. The MCVSD practices "affirmative access"- which means they take one student from each of the middle schools that fall under its jurisdiction, which creates maybe half of the class. (It's sort of like geographic affirmative action.) The rest of each incoming class is filled strictly by merit (meaning mostly grades, standardized test scores, and performance on an admissions exam which all applicants take), with no regard to where the students are from. The result? Holmdel, (median family income $122,785, 2.7% of families below the poverty level), is always one of the most common hometowns in each class. In contrast, Asbury Park (median family income $26,370, 29.3% of families below poverty level) usually sends one student. That student is nearly always black. In my class, he dropped out.

Now you tell me: do you think that students in Holmdel are just naturally that much smarter than students in Asbury Park? It must be something in the water, right?

The MCVSD is sort of like the Ivy League of public high schools. But it is public, which meant I didn't pay for it. So how did I end up with such a great education, basically for free? Extra funding from the government and, oh yeah, the little detail that each student's "home" school district is required to pay for the student's tuition in the MCVSD. I always felt a little weird about that. No doubt the extra expense of my top-notch education meant one more semester without new biology textbooks at North. (I figured South would get along okay). And what about that student from Asbury Park, whose school district had to spend to send him to a school that they hadn't even adequately prepared him for? And just like the Ivy League, my school district had its own particular flaws. I call it the legacy effect. Having a relative who attended the school doesn't give you a boost in admissions, but you're more likely to know about it and apply. If your parents went to college, they're more likely to seek out extra challenges and programs for you in high school. If your parents are professionals, there's a much higher emphasis placed on something like going to a fancy "pre-professional" school.

My best friend from high school is named Sarah. Her mom is a bank teller and her dad is a truck driver. My mom works in an elementary school, and my dad is a construction worker. We were pretty alone in our lower-middle class upbringings. Most of our classmates' parents were doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer scientists, and consultants. It made life sort of difficult right from the start.

Teacher: "Okay class, today we're going to learn about resistor color codes."
Friend from Colts Neck (median family income $117,980): "Oh, my parents taught me this years ago."
Me: "What's a resistor?"

(For the record, my hometown's median family income is $86,124- but if you look at the neighborhood I'm from, that little section off on the north side of Highway 36, that average drops almost 30% to $60,893.)

Teachers often assumed a lot of us. They usually taught for those engineer's kids, who almost didn't need instruction. They didn't usually notice the handful of us with glazed expressions on our faces. We were High Tech High students, we'd been brought up from the crib knowing about the ferromagnetic properties of molecules, right?

It got almost surreal when I started to realize that not only were my friend and I fairly alone in having non-professional parents and feeling slightly (okay, completely) overwhelmed by this school, but that we were often alone in realizing it. My richer friends had no idea how much better off they were than me to begin with. I worked hard, happened to have a natural aptitude for subjects like physics, and ended up near the top of my class- so I can almost hear their reactions to this, telling me I'm exaggerating and that there's no way that they were better off when I ended up with a higher SAT score or what have you. But the honest truth was that I spent the first half of my high school career in some kind of terrified misery, drowning in math and science. I came through the fires tougher than before, but it wasn't an easy road.

One memory that really sticks out in my mind is the discussion that happened during "Bullying Awareness Week." My classmates and I found the week's programs to be pretty silly- sure, bullying is a problem, but when you go to a school full of people who are ALL nerds, it's much less of one, and after a week we were getting kind of sick of doing express-your-feelings-positively exercises. A discussion to this effect began on our school's message board system. A good friend of mine chimed in with a bitter and mocking comment: "I mean come on, it's not like fistfights are a real problem. Name one fistfight that happened in your middle school that wasn't a total joke or quickly broken up by the teachers."

Name one...per week? Or per day? Wait, was he serious? Apparently, yes. Apparently, where my friend comes from, fistfights are rare and usually happen between kids who wouldn't know how to do each other damage no matter how badly they wanted to. I asked him what happened if people arranged to meet after school for a fistfight, like at the local park? What if someone brought brass knuckles? What then? "Oh come on, we're talking about real life, not T.V."

Fistfights were a fact of life in my middle school. "Meet me at McMahon Park at 3." Notes were passed, word spread, and a crowd of spectators would gather at the chosen baseball field or other landmark. Gossip about brass knuckles or a "caged match" on the fenced-off tennis courts would be whispered in class or passed through scribbled notes passed in the halls.

A general fact of my life from the ages of 11-14, in my mind not good or bad, just the way things are. And only ten miles away, another 11 year old who would one day be one of my closest friends thought that those things only happened on T.V. His hometown's median family income? $109,760.

These experiences have really driven home to me, in a pretty personal way, the very real effect that socioeconomic status has on...everything. How you grow up, your childhood experiences, your worldview, and most importantly, your educational opportunities.

Well, it turns out that I'm not the only person to notice these patterns. Wendy Kopp noticed it too, so she started Teach for America, an organization which recruits top students from prestigious universities and hires them to work as teachers in low income communities. In theory, these students have a double impact. First, they are intelligent and enthusiastic young people fresh out of a college, who really believe they really can make a difference in the short term and on a small scale. Second, participants will have a deep personal understanding of the problem, so when these "future leaders" end up in powerful positions, they'll use their understanding of the problem of education inequity to affect change on a larger scale.

Obviously, the organization has its flaws. Some critics point out that most teachers study to be teachers, whereas members of Teach for America do not. Also, it's sort of interesting that the organization plays the system against itself. Which is sort of cool, but the idea of having the rich and priveleged kids who went to the fanciest, most expensive colleges head into the inner city to change things...well, that doesn't sit perfectly with me.

But I ultimately think the organization does a lot of good. In some interviews I've seen with the founder of the organization, she cites some truly incredible examples of success- like one teacher whose 6th graders entered the year with pre-K level writing skills. By the end of the year, they were on track with 6th grade skill levels. Their parents were amazed, and experienced the first ray of hope that their kids might actually go to college, something they had never considered possible before.

That kind of change is incredibly inspiring, which is why I'm submitting an application this year. It goes nicely hand-in-hand with my application to the Peace Corps. (Do I sound like a total hippy now? Don't worry, I'm eventually going to apply to some "real jobs" too- you know, with the UN or World Bank. =)

I know that my hometown is nothing like the inner city. I don't claim to be from a "bad neighborhood," but I do think my experiences show just how pervasive this problem is- it exists in all levels of society. Not only that, but my experiences provide my own personal motivation for (hopefully) joining the organization. I've known about educational inequality since I was a kid. And it's made me mad ever since then. (Man, if only I had kept a blog as a kid. I would love to have a more accurate representation than my own faded memory of the time I went on a crusade against the local Little League for giving unfair preference to the boy's baseball teams over the girl's softball teams. I was a raging mad 11 year old, circulating a righteously angry petition about gender discrimination. I really haven't changed much.)

Teach for America considers educational inequality "our nation's greatest injustice." That's a pretty hefty statement, but I have to agree that it's pretty bogus that despite all of our claims to be a land of opportunity, we have a long way to go for true equality. Luckily there are people out there working for change.

Some of today's other blog entries are much more far-reaching in scale. Obviously inner city schoolchildren are much better off than starving kids in Southeast Asia, or AIDS-ravaged families in sub-Saharan Africa. On the other hand, it's important to remember that poverty exists in all sorts of forms and at all different levels. But no matter what reference frame you're in, poverty really affects people in many ways, and we can't just turn a blind eye to it.
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Sources:
Top New Jersey High Schools 2008: By Rank

American Fact Finder

Interview with Wendy Kopp

Tomorrow is the second annual Blog Action Day, when thousands of bloggers dedicate their blogs to talking about one important topic to drive the popular discourse towards more important topic than lolcats...hopefully.

This year's theme is poverty, and a couple of MIT bloggers are planning to participate. If you have a blog, you should too! Check out the website above.

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Responses to questions:

BrittanyL, a '13 hopeful asked a really good question: Wow, great examples, Cristen and Laura, thanks so much for posting those. I visited MIT last month, and since then (even more than before), it's become the greatest center of my hopes for my future. Your essays provide great examples--and for students as anxious about the outcome of their apps as I am, that's wonderful.

Thanks for your help, and the great insight you provide to those of us looking in from the outside (though hopefully not for long!) :D

This is an excellent question. Just to give you a few ideas: if MIT hadn't admitted me, I think I probably would have ended up at Case Western Reserve University. Stevens Institute of Technology is another good technology school in Hoboken, New Jersey, but it was way too small for my own personal tastes.

For another perspective on this question, we can turn to the one and only Matt McGann. Starting with this entry (published on October 17, 2004) and this entry (published on November 14, 2004), Matt takes a minute at the end of each blog entry to mention a great school that often gets overlooked by students because it doesn't have the name recognition that people sometimes get too caught up in. Definitely worth a look, even if it's from back in the day. ;-)

Sam said: Laura, I can't make my lab printer duplex. Can you come fix it?
No.

Anonymous said: SOMEWHERE... there's a photo of a Burton-Conner room also with an amazing beach theme (jaw-dropping in its home makeover-like looks). Do you know anything about it? (JKim didn't.)
Arg, you know, I think I actually know what you're talking about. I feel like it was used in some previous i3 publication (the handbook with photos of the various dorms distributed to incoming freshmen during the summer), but I'm not sure where I could find it...

Sean said: So..can anyone paint any dorm room any style? How far can the "decoration" go?-Custom fish tank/mini fridge/plasma screen a possibility?
Ah, so it's important to note that only some dorms, namely the East Campus (Bexley, Random, East Campus, and Senior House) dorms plus Burton Conner allow students to paint their rooms. Other modifications, such as lofts, and I suppose, custom fish tanks, are allowed in these dorms if they meet safety requirements. Other dorms would be less understanding. As for your plasma screen TV and fridge, sure- you're welcome to put whatever you'd like into your dorm room (in any residence hall), except for microwaves and hot plates, which are usually allowed to be stored in some common area.

Snively said: The beads are so confusing!!!
Ha! I wish I had a good video of Snively trying to come into my room, it's hilarious. I sometimes refer to the beads as my "Snively trap."

Anonymous said: I'm sorry but I just have to tell the truth. Your room doesn't look like a 'I could be an interior designer' person's room. It's boring and looks like very typical college dorm. What makes you so proud?
Way to be a total killjoy. *eyeroll* Obviously a college dorm room is not ideal to demonstrate interior design skills. What exactly would a future interior decorator's college dorm room look like anyway? Would it look less like a college dorm room? Equally obvious, I would think, is that I'm not even actually serious about becoming an interior designer. I'm proud because I took what most people considered to be an awful room with a bad shape, size and lighting and through a lot of hard work made it seem more spacious and livable.

Steve said: good blog,I am doing research for my Daughter,she wants to apply to MIT but I think she may be feel somewhat intiminated,she is a hs jr in a sci.math.& tech. academy in the midwest ranked 8 of 667,she didn't get much respect going in as a girl,that know has changed, it if I can get her to read your blog ,it may help her. Thanks
Oh boy, I could go on for hooours about the topic of women in engineering, and I might not have exactly the opinions that you might assume. In any case, you can read lots of other people's perspectives on the topic here.

I said: I'm off to grab some food, head to a 2.009 meeting, and then pack for a spontaneous 24 hour trip back to the greatest state ever.
sauza said: but why are you going to colorado?
Oh, haha. Now that I'm back from New Jersey, I can say it was a much-needed break to get off campus for awhile. I'm even more confident to not continue on into grad school right away, because man, living on a college campus puts you in such a bubble. I think I even forgot that suburbia existed. It was also my first time home after living in Spain, which represented not only another culture, but my first time really living on my own, outside the whole college dorm system. So I think I looked at my hometown with even more adult eyes than ever before. I don't think I've actually expressed what I mean here at all, but basically, it was interesting. I was also lucky enough to come home on the weekend when my sister had her "Baby Think it Over" doll for health class- it's basically this electronic doll that will start crying at random times and will only stop when you feed it, change its diaper, whatever. It was hilarious. =)

So, on to my real entry.

I thought about posting my college admissions essay before, but it just sort of never happened. But Cristen has just posted hers, so it seems like now is the time, since it will give our dear readers a chance to compare and contrast how two different people approached the essay situation.

I started digging through my hard drive for this essay and of course couldn't help myself: I stopped to read the whole bunch. It was pretty interesting to read them with 3 years of perspective on life, and experience talking to people about college admissions. I re-read one of the essays I wrote for Caltech and the moment I finished I said, "that was a really good essay, but no wonder they waitlisted me!" It was well-written and engaging, but really didn't give them any useful information about me, I don't think. It was also weird to be reminded of the many colleges I applied to, and the fact that almost all of them admitted me. MIT is great and all, but I am very intrigued by the mysterious thought of where I would be if I had chosen the fork in the road marked "Columbia," "University of Maryland," or "Case Western Reserve." It's actually a little creepy.

So, on to the essay. For a little backstory and explanation, the essay prompt was "Life brings many disappointments as well as satisfactions. Tell us about a time in your life when you experienced disappointment, or faced difficult or trying circumstances. How did you react?" I had a pretty rough time writing this essay, as I described in my first application advice entry. I will now blatantly plagarize myself instead of writing the exact same thing over again.

For my essay, I decided to write about problems I had to overcome on my high school field hockey team. I thought I had a great, original story to tell. So I wrote my essay about overcoming obstacles and not giving up and gave it to a friend to proofread, and he told me it was horrible. I got pretty upset with him, as you can imagine. Here I was, totally convinced that I had this edgy, original story to tell, and he went and shot me down by telling me just how unoriginal it was.

It turns out we were both right. I did have a pretty cool and original story- after all, it was a true life story. No one else has had the same experiences as me. But while writing the essay, I tried to cram 3 years of experience into 500 words, so all that came across was "I didn't give up even though I came across obstacles." Well guess what- that has happened to everybody! So I sat down and completely started over. Only this time, I chose a very specific obstacle that I was faced with- one incident that happened on one particular day- and wrote a very detailed description about that experience. I showed this new essay to my mother, who told me it made me look like I was just whining about challenges! The actual story had been lost in all my details about that one specific incident.

By now I was really frustrated with everyone who kept telling me my essays sucked, and I was determined to prove that I actually did have a good essay in there somewhere! So I sat down with the 2 completely different essays and pieced together a hybrid with the most important parts of each. By the time I was done I thought I had a pretty cool college application essay. The key is to find the right balance between giving detailed descriptions that are about you, and showing the admissions people the big picture (how your story shows something about who you are, and how it relates back to the question they actually asked you in the first place!)

And just one note, for the record: I apologize for the last couple of lines. They are a bit ridiculously heavy-handed, and I recognize that they not necessarily absolutes. So before you start arguing with me about them, please remember that this is a college admissions essay, and I tried desperately to make the last paragraph into something both with an inspiring message and not cookie-cutter beat-you-over-the-head cheesy, and if I failed I am sorry. =)

Also, if Coach Bower is out there reading this...well, too bad.

I couldn’t breathe. If there was ever a time to quit, this was it.

I might have waited my whole life and never caught that lucky break necessary to capture my dreams, but it would have been impossible to succeed if I had given up before that chance came my way. There is no such thing as failure. There are only missed opportunities.

No, really!

Okay, so unlike some people in the dorm who live in the same room forever, I have lived in a different room (and a different suite) every year so far. Not only have I painted all of these rooms, but to date, no one has painted over any of my paint jobs, so I have officially left my mark on 4 different rooms on Conner 2.

Freshman year, April (my roommate) and I painted our room a very pretty blue. A few months later we bought a futon off Craigslist, squeezed it into her boyfriend's miniCooper, and installed it in our room. (I am unfortunately not kidding about the miniCooper.) The result was a pretty awesome setup, if I may say so myself. But that was easy, doubles in BC are pretty large, and there are a lot of things you can do with them in terms of design.

Sophomore year I had a pretty big single, and while I didn't do anything special to it, I painted, bought a floor lamp, and threw up a good number of posters. I did really like the color I picked, but it turned out to be a little too dark, especially in sun-deprived New England. The name of that color, I believe, was "Bali Turquoise," which led to a little inspiration: maybe I could get some posters of beaches and line the bottom part of the walls with them, and it would look sort of like a beach- yellow sand on the bottom and blue-green water on top. As a born and bred Jersey girl, I love the beach, so I figured this would make me happy. But the secret of room decorating is that if you don't do it all within the first week, you'll never do it, so the sandy posters never materialized.

Junior year I picked a new room, which was actually smaller than the room I had sophomore year. Everyone thought I was crazy, because they had poked their heads into that room a few times over the past 2 years and were pretty convinced that it was a tiny, cramped, awful room. This time my beach plan was a little more defined, so I spent a good amount of time comparing colors and eventually painted the walls yellow and blue. I also learned a very important lesson of interior design, namely, furniture placement is everything. All I did in that cozy room was swap the bed and the desk, and lower the bed down to a more normal height off the floor. Everyone who walked into my room did a double take and had to recheck the number on the door. "Wait...this is the room that Rob and David lived in?! But...it's such a nice room!" I was quite proud of myself and a few weeks later decided the next step in the beach theme would be to paint a palm tree on the wall. But, as noted above, since this didn't happen within the first week, it never got done.

Senior year I picked an even worse room than the year before. At this point everyone thought I was completely insane. As a senior, I pretty much had my pick of all the rooms on the floor, and I picked this awful, dark and awkward room. The room itself is actually pretty large, but it's very long and narrow, which really limits the great equalizer of design which I had discovered the year before (furniture rearrangement). Also, there is one very lousy window at the end of this tunnel of a room which does not allow very much light into the room at all.

So this year I was determined to get the beach theme right. Before I started to paint I had to spatcle over all of the holes in the wall, which were quite numerous and actually took a couple of days. Just to give you an idea, here are some before pictures of the room:

I started painting, and unfortunately wasn't able to finish before REX. Which meant that I spent the busiest week of my year living in a half-painted room with all of the furniture pushed into the middle, no access to the closet, and the 2 suitcases I had brought back with me from Spain shoved under the bed. It was awful. Once REX was finally over, I finished painting, and was quite proud of myself. I did sort of cop out and use the exact same colors as last year, but they were perfect! Also, credit to Adelaide '09 for the diagonal idea. I decided that painting the bottom half of the walls one color would be pretty silly, because it would almost entirely be covered by furniture, and defeat the purpose of the half-and-half idea.

As you can see, light really is a problem in this room...but now it was time to start on that palm tree that I swore up and down to paint eventually. I did a trial run on a large sheet of paper, and came up with this sad excuse for a palm tree:

Well, I wasn't convinced that I could do much better than that, so I just dove right in and started penciling it on the wall, making adjustments as I went. I was really and truly skeptical of my ability to paint anything that remotely resembled a palm tree, but my second attempt was pretty respectable.

And once I started mixing paint colors, things really started to come together.

The final product actually kind of ROCKS.

I'm super proud. =)

The next task was to build a loft. This idea came to me in a flash of brilliance, as we were discussing with the new freshmen if they wanted to loft their beds for more space in their doubles. I suddenly had the realization that I had seem this awfully shaped room of mine in both possible furniture configurations, and they both sucked- so why not loft the bed? I had nothing to lose, and it just might be the touch I needed. Of course, if I was going to loft the bed I needed something to put under it. Craigslist came through for me again- so I rented a UHaul, made an adventurous trip to Home Depot to buy lumber for no fewer than 4 lofts, an picked up a futon all in one day.

At this point I was getting pretty discouraged. If you're keeping track at home, remember I spent a full week with the room half painted and all of the furniture shoved into the middle, another 2 or 3 days to finish painting, another day running around buying materials, and was still living out of one suitcase and had basically unpacked nothing despite having been back on campus for over 2 weeks. Adelaide's room was so nice and prettily painted, and she had arranged all of her books on her shelves, and every time I peeked in her room I felt so jealous. And I still had to build a loft.

Rick '09 graciously offered to lend me a hand. Halfway through the construction of this loft, the dorm's saw mysteriously disappeared, so I was stuck with a box on stitls and no way to actually stabilize it, and was going to have to spend another night sleeping on the floor. I thought I was going to cry. But luckily, we found someone in the dorm who had their own saw and was willing to lend it to me.

Throughout this whole process, I had basically tried the furniture in every possible configuration I could think of, including the really stupid ones. So by the time the loft was done being built, I had figured out the configuration of the room, and the end was in sight!

Thankfully, now all that was left was unpacking...and picking up a few more minor touches to fill out the beach theme, like a bamboo bead curtain for my door, a sunset poster for one wall, and a comfy chair for my reading corner...and finally, I was done!

A few days later I ran into the room's previous occupant, Javi '08, on campus. Javi graduated last year but stuck around and got a job in the Boston area, so we still see him from time to time. I was bouncing around in excitement about the success of my room, so I dragged him back to the dorm to show him my take on the space that he lived in for 3 years.

He walked in and said, "No. No. This isn't my room. My room isn't this nice. Where did all this space come from?! I want it back!"

And just to refresh your memory as to how far I came...

I win. =) In case that international development thing doesn't work out, I can always fall back on interior design. Or at least Trading Spaces.

So, who am I? I'm Laura, and in my first entry ever, I introduced myself to the blogosphere. (I still really like that entry, it's definitely worth a read if you've got the time.) What did prefrosh Laura think she'd major in?

When I do get to MIT, I'm planning to declare Course 2 (Mechanical Engineering) as a major and possibly minor in Course 17 (Political Science).

Interesting. I got the major right, but probably on accident. Also, unless something changes drastically (again), I'll graduate without taking a single political science class. But, if you think about my sudden realization that I want to work in International Development, everything comes full circle.

If you're a prospective student and you're thinking, "Man, I wish I could do some of those things MIT kids do, it seems like so much fun. But I don't know the first thing about it, so I guess I won't apply-" STOP.

Good advice then, and good advice now.

I am here, ready and willing to be the poster child for "people who get headaches listening to conversations at MIT but still love every minute of it."

Huh. This is really interesting, because I remember writing it, and really meaning it. But I have really transformed into the type of person who leads those headache-inducing conversations. I really remember being so overwhelmed by MIT, and how smart those kids were, and how much more they knew than I did about...well, basically everything- computers, science, the WORLD, whatever. Well, the dirty little secret is, freshmen are all dumb. What I mean is, people start on a pretty level playing field. Even people who have some crazy experience that's totally outside your realm of comprehension, they're gonna fail some tests too. Years later, most of these dumb freshmen have transformed into those crazy intimidating MIT students. I guess what I'm getting at here is this: the point of college is to become educated. And in some ways, MIT does an awesome job of that (yes, some, not all)...so being intimidated because you don't think you know anything is really silly. That's the point. If you knew everything, why would you go to college?

My prefrosh blogger self was a little strained for topics, seeing as how she was writing before even showing up at MIT. (This was well before being an admissions blogger was cool, so there was no super competitive blogger selection process, which is how you all ended up with me.) So I wrote about the summer housing lottery.

So I filled out the Freshman Housing Lottery like this: I tied Baker and Burton-Conner for first and listed New House as my third choice. After that I barely even remember. I know I'd be happy in any of those 3, so it'll all work out okay.

HA! Ahahahaha. This is priceless. Let me let you in a little secret: my summer housing lottery preferences were COMPLETELY WRONG. I forget the exact order of my preferences after that, but I believe Random came in around 5, right before or after Simmons, and East Campus made its appearance around number 9.

WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.

I mean, for me, obviously. I fell into the same trap as nearly every prefrosh ever, so hopefully enough people will read this and believe me, as someone who got it wrong and then spent 2 years as REX chair trying to convince others not to make the same mistake: Burton Conner IS NOT Baker. I mean, not even close. I would not have been happy at Baker. Matt lived there happily for 4 years, and I've heard it's a cool place and all, but just....no. I got to campus and realized that I thought East Campus might actually be cool. Which really confused me, because I was terrified of it before arriving. I was suddenly torn. Stay in BC, or request a transfer to EC? I even trudged across Mass Ave in a torrential downpour to ask the poor, exhausted deskworker for a tour. I asked a upperclassman BC resident who was on the waiting list to move to EC for his advice. I agonized over the decision, and finally confirmed my assignment to Burton Conner.

3 years later, I still don't know if that was the right thing to do. If I were to do it all over again as a prefrosh, knowing what I know now, my preferences might look something more like:

1. East Campus/Burton Conner
3. Random
4. Bexley
5. New
...
10. Baker

What is the moral of this story? For the love of the Almighty- DO REX!

The next step was to upload [the banner for my blog back in the day before mitadmissions.org]. Any images we bloggers post here need to be hosted in our Athena lockers. All MIT students get Athena accounts, which allow you to have your @mit.edu email as well as some server space with MIT. This space is known as your Athena locker. So Ben sent me a link with info about how to upload to this Athena locker, only Ben is a crazy Mac user and my parents (who buy the computers we use) would be so totally confused by the concept of a different kind of OS that they always stick to Windows. So Ben's help didn't really work.

You guys, I'm so, so proud of myself right now. It was probably the simplest thing I ever had to do on a computer but hey! It worked! I'm excited! I can use the Internet now!

Awww. I was so scared of computers! I had never used anything more complicated than Powerpoint, which I taught myself in my 7th grade computer applications class. Within 10 months of those blog entries, I'd been hired by MIT's Information Services and Technology Computing Help Desk. I still work there, and it's actually turning out to be the activity at MIT that I've stuck with the longest. Every time I work, I answer a whole range of phone calls- everything from people who should never be allowed to own computers right through clients who work as the tech support of their lab who have run into a trickier problem than they're capable of dealing with. I won't say that I answer all of these calls with the utmost amount of grace and intelligence, but I do well enough. Incredible, when you consider how puzzled I was by connecting my computer to the wireless network the first day that I arrived on campus. Now when I answer the phone at IS&T, I silently pray that the person on the other end of the line says, "I can't get my computer to connect to the Internet," because I know I can likely resolve that within 5 minutes.

We excited prefrosh also received the results of the HASS-D lottery. I was lucky enough to be assigned my first choice class here too- 21F.716 (Introduction to Contemporary Hispanic Literature). Let me just say that I really have no problem with this concept where everyone refers to classes by their numbers, I've even got some of them figured out already. But "21F.716" is way too much for me. How do you even say that out loud? Isn't it just much easier to call it "Spanish Lit" or something? Really now. Anyway, I made a stop at Barnes and Noble yesterday and picked up a new Spanish-English dictionary and now I'm fully ready to take some Spanish at MIT. I'm not sure if I'll have to meet with the professor to "prove" my proficiency at Spanish, so we'll see how that goes. Maybe my AP Spanish score will count....

Aw, another cute one. "But...but...everything is numbered?!" Yes, Naive Prefroshling, everything is numbered. Get used to it. Also, when I asked the Spanish professor how to "prove" my proficiency in Spanish, she basically told me in so many words, "You're a big kid now. You know if you can handle the class, not me. If you want to sign up for something that you know is over your head, that's your problem." I took the class, was one of 3 non-native Spanish speakers, and got an A-. (Hidden grade, of course.)

I'm getting a little tired of every single person I run into at Bed, Bath and Beyond asking me if I'm excited about school. No offense to all the adults out there, but that one definitely ranks at the top of the list of "Lamest and Most Annoying Questions Ever." Just a heads up.

HA! This one made me burst out laughing when I reread it, because it reminded me of reading blogger applications. While you all had highly engaging blogs and everything, I think I read about 15 trips to Bed, Bath, and Beyond (which took me back to fond memories of my own trip to the same in my hometown) and I swore I would strangle someone the next time I heard the words "the next four years of my life." Also, it's interesting because "So, are you excited about graduating? What are you going to do with the rest of your life?" is now officially the new "most annoying question ever."

This trip down memory lane brings me to...my first day of classes at MIT. Seriously. I was prolific back in the day. I probably even rivaled Snively in terms of blogging frequency. Don't believe me? Go check out the archives. To be fair, my entries were all pretty short, and they've gotten a lot longer over time. In any case, this still leaves me with quite a bit of material left to reminisce over from freshman year, so look forward to similar entries in the future.

Apparently I used to end every entry with "Have a nice day." I also used to say '09er instead of just '09. It's actually really annoying to read. Would it be wrong of me to go back and change those entries? And P.S., I had really long hair!

Here's a photo of me posing with Susan Hockfield during Orientation of freshman year:

My hair has been getting progressively shorter since then. In fact, I got a haircut just a few days ago, and decided to show off both my new style and my civic responsibility by posing with my completed, sealed, and stamped absentee ballot:

Claire said: mattress alarm clock = clock that vibrates the mattress at a specified time, really useful for deaf and blind people.

Ha! Actually, it's an alarm clock that flips your mattress upside down and throws you out of bed. I think the idea has merit, but my 2.009 group is currently going in a different direction...

Oasis '11 said: A good entry into ID is doing Peace Corps after you graduate.

=) At the time of your comment, my application to the Peace Corps was about 3/4 complete. I've since submitted it, and have scheduled my interview for next week- so wish me luck!

RobotGrrl said: Robotics is more than designing vacuums. It's mainly about research and innovation- which makes it way more fun than what you mentioned! For instance, ever since the Dartmouth Conference about AI in 1957, we've been trying to create something that has a 'general' AI. We assumed it would be incredibly easy, when it actually isn't. The amount of thought that has to go in to programming something how to perceive its surroundings is astonishing!
....
My point being, the future of robots just isn't in household maintenance. It's in interaction between the robot, its environment, and humans. Maybe you just were introduced to the wrong view of robotics. ^_^

Okay, don't get me wrong, I know robots are awesome. I just can't see myself working on them for the rest of my life. I think it's kind of silly that we spent millions of dollars in research into things like AI when we still haven't figured out how to feed all of the hungry people in the world. Trust me, when I showed up at the Career Fair a few weeks ago, I couldn't help myself- I handed a copy of my resume to NASA, because there's still that small part of me that's sad to be turning away from my dream of designing Mars rovers. But, I ultimately think I'm doing the right thing for me right now.

John Wong said: As a older person living beyond school I have an independent perspective on this. I think your primary passion was Spanish, yet somehow you ended up as a science/engineering major. I think you let other people influenced your career decision. However it's never too late to do things on your own.

With all due respect, not so much. =) I mean, sure, I sort of turned my back on things I've been interested in, and probably too much...but that's not to say that I'm not into engineering. Also, majoring in Spanish? No way. I could never do it. Just like I could never be "just" an engineer. The point is, I really need the mix, or I can't function, and I've finally figured out how to do that!

han dijo: que buena historia... me gusta...creo q nos parecemos jjaja a mi siempre me gustado la mate y las ciencias pero ahora veo q tambien me gusta dibujar... aunq dibujo horrible y no tengo paciencia pero me gusta jajaj es raro tengo un dilemma por momento, quiero estudiar pure math pero no se que puedo contribuir a la sociedad con eso cuando graduo :-( parece q esta major no es muy practico.(escribo en español porq solo quiero q tu lo leas eso... y tambien queria probar cuan bueno es tu español)
really thank u for this entry... It is the longest post I ever have read completely at mit blogs.

Pues, como otra person también dijo, me imagino que no somos las unicas personas en el mundo que hablamos español. Y también me parece un poco maleducado decir algo en plan "quiero probrar cuan bueno es tu español," especialmente porque hablo lo suficiente para poder encontrar el error en tu comentario...

Alright kids, this might be the longest entry EVER. I'm off to grab some food, head to a 2.009 meeting, and then pack for a spontaneous 24 hour trip back to the greatest state ever.

21M.705: The Actor and the Text
You've probably heard about the required Humanities concentration. If not...well, now you have. I chose to do my concentration in Theater Arts. This will actually be the third acting class I've taken, and we're really getting into some good stuff. I'm super excited about this class, basically we work on scenes all of the time. A typical 2 hour class starts with a warmup, some yoga/stretching type exercise to get us loosened up physically, and maybe an improv activity to get us loosened up mentally. Then we get to acting. Every week we're responsible for memorizing a monologue or a scene with a partner or two. Then we perform, and get critiqued. We haven't really gotten too far into anything yet, but I've already memorized a super awesome anti-establishment monologue from a play called Another Antigone and I'm really looking forward to it. =)

21M.604: Introduction to Playwriting
Another Theater Arts class. This one might not make the final cut when (if?) my schedule ever finally calms down. But I'd hate to drop it, I've been wanting to take it ever since I was torn between concentrating in Theater Arts or Creative Writing. Intro to Playwriting was the obvious solution to this dilemma. As much as I love writing, creative writing is really, really hard to stick with. It's incredibly difficult to make yourself sit down and write something from start to finish. My hard drive is littered with scraps of nonsense that will probably never blossom into full-fledged novels or even short stories, so I'd be thrilled to have a few one act plays to my name by the end of the semester. Also, the course instructor is supposed to be really, really good. Yay for HASS classes.

2.65J: Sustainable Energy
You might be wondering what the "J" at the end of that course number means. You've probably heard by now that all of the courses at MIT are numbered, but where do we get off throwing letters into the mix? I remember as a freshman being told that courses with more numbers were harder, while courses with letters were easier. This is a total lie. It all depends what the letter stands for. Well, I'm not actually sure what the J "stands for," but it means that a course is offered under multiple course numbers. What's the point of that? Well, it can count towards your degree in any of a number of majors. Courses designated with a "J" are interdisciplinary, so students from more than one major might be in the class- but they might all also be fulfilling a graduation requirement! Most of these courses represent only two different courses, but 2.65 J is officially called 10.391J/1.818J/2.65J/3.564J/11.371J/22.811J/ESD.166J- that's seven different departments! The numbers are only for administrative purposes- everyone in the class shows up in the same lecture hall at the same time and turns in the same psets, they just have a different course number listed on their transcripts. The point of the course is to analyze different types of energy and figure out what might represent the right solution for a given application based on technological, economic, and political concerns. The first pset for this class doesn't look so bad- there are some very practical problems about things like estimating how long you'd have to own a hybrid car for the extra initial cost to outweigh the money saved in gas mileage, and figuring out the impact of switching all the lighting in Boston to high efficiency lightbulbs.

11.366 Planning, Participation, and Consensus Building for Sustainable Development???
Hopefully I'll be able to add this class as part of my newfound purpose in life. According to the course catalog, the course analyzes the competing interests that come into play in the field of sustainable development by looking at case studies in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. I'll be sure to keep you updated if I manage to add the class!

2.009: Product Design and Development
This is it, the moment you've all been waiting for. Course 2 majors look forward to first semester senior year with equal parts excitement and dread. 2.009 is sort of the be-all and end-all of a Course 2 degree. Every fall, of the seniors hoping to graduate in the coming June eagerly await the announcement of the 2.009 "theme," which is the area in which the different teams must design and fully develop a new product. This year's theme is "the home," so we're already busy filling our design notebooks with brainstormed ideas about better mousetraps, energy saving and water recycling systems, and mattress alarm clocks. (Guess what that is.) Within a few weeks we'll settle on a final product, do some detailed design, analysis, testing, marketing...the whole deal. Definitely check out the website, it's insanely detailed, regularly updated, and full of tons of pictures. They take photos every day in class, and there are definitely a few of me in there. See if you can spot them. ;-)

So, those are my classes for this semester. They seem pretty awesome so far. Of course, I say that now...

Also, at this point it's necessary to wish both Matt and Mollie a happy anniversary- they married their respective spouses (not each other!) one year ago today. So go spam them with comments. =)

I only know this because the crayon drawing still exists, in some scrapbook in the back of the kitchen closet. I don't remember why I wanted to be a mailman, but I guess it just seemed like a fun job at the time.

During primary school, I remember wanting to be a librarian. I just thought all the electronic scanners and stuff they used all the time were really cool. I also wanted to be a novelist. One year the PTA sponsored an "Author Day" at my school. They invited a children's book author to speak, and donated a copy of one of his books to all of the students. We each got it signed. I still have mine. It's called "They Came From Center Field," and it's about this group of friends who teach a bunch of aliens how to play baseball. It's like 50 pages long and awesome. Apparently a local newspaper covered the event as a feature story. Somewhere in that scrapbook in the kitchen closet there's a newspaper clipping with the line: "It was really cool, because I want to be a writer when I grow up," said Laura Nicholson, a third grader at Ocean Avenue Elementary.

Later life goals have less charm. In fifth grade I wanted to be President of the US. In middle school I wanted to be popular. Freshman year of high school I wanted to be anything on Earth but dear God not an engineer. Junior year of high school I secretly wanted to be an engineer. Senior year of high school I came out as a wannabe engineer and applied to MIT. Freshman year of college I wanted to never have to pick a major. Sophomore year of college I "wanted" to work in robotics, because they make you pick something eventually. Junior year of college I wanted to be a baseball announcer, a wedding planner, a movie producer, or one of Santa's elves.

If I told you that now, right now, I finally actually figured it out, would you believe me?

Speaking Spanish started the whole thing. I'm going to let you in on one of the not-so-pretty secrets about MIT: it makes you feel really, really dumb. Some logical portion of my brain knows that I must be pretty smart, after all, I was accepted here and everything, and that's not exactly easy. But after just a couple of years of never breaking 65% on an exam, you start to feel pretty stupid. In fact, it got to the point last year where I wasn't sure what I'd learned since coming here. The professors obviously taught me something, but I wasn't convinced that I had learned any of it.

In high school, I was good at Spanish. I mean really good. I was the teacher's pet in every Spanish class I ever took. If I stumble across a Spanish word I've never heard before, there's a decent chance I can figure out what it means- either by context, word roots, or just a gut feeling. Don't ask me how you can have a gut feeling about what a word you've never heard before in your non-native language means, I just do. Languages just make sense to me.

I studied Spanish for about 7 years in high school, but after my first semester at MIT I didn't touch the language. I was a little rusty starting out, but despite that, literally almost every person I met in Madrid exclaimed over how good I was at Spanish.

And I started back at them blankly. "Wait...you mean...there are things I'm good at?" After 3 years of MIT, I know there are lots of things I'm not good at. Like differential equations. They're super useful, and controls engineering fascinates me, and I wish to God I understood it better, but it's just HARD. It doesn't "just come to me" the way that language does. And to be perfectly honest, I was getting more than a little jaded. My concentration in robotics was almost entirely influenced by the fact that I had fun on my high school FIRST team. Which is great and all, but doesn't necessarily indicate lifelong interest. Okay, so I get this major in robotics, and then what? I work for iRobot and build a better Roomba? Am I really going to dedicate my life to designing robotic vacuums so that rich people can show off flashy toys to their friends? Uck, talk about dissatisfying.

So while in Spain, I suddenly realized, "Hey, here's this thing that I'm actually good at, which I've forsaken for years in order to bang my head against various engineering textbooks. Clearly this means I was always a humanities person at heart, that I've been wrong this whole time, and I could never spend the rest of my life as an engineer."

So I sat down at the desk in my room and started to list math-less fields which interested me. Within 30 seconds I had written the following:

-languages
-linguistics
-cultural studies
-education/teaching
-public policy

I re-read the list and immediately freaked out. "I could never spend the rest of my life doing these things, there's no engineering on this list!!!"

Wait, did I just say that?

Okay, this is getting ridiculous. I apparently hate engineering so much I can't live without it. Or something. But I mean, it does seem like a shame to get an engineering degree from MIT and then...you know, not use it. Clearly I needed to consider some interdisciplinary career paths. Which makes a lot of sense. I've always had one foot in each world. Surely the world needs people like me for something.

So, I went to my fall-back: the web method. My brain works best when it can see the interconnections between my own thoughts. Whenever I have a problem to work out, I write down all of the components of it and look for the connections between them, and portray it in a neatly organized web. Actually, it's a perfect example of the double life my brain leads: a weird cross between creative and analytical thinking.

I took out a sheet of paper and wrote on it all of the different topics I could think of that I found interesting. I rearranged them, clustering related topics together, drawing arrows between logical paths and lines between indirectly related groups. My plan was to find the dream career which would magically involved all of the diverse things I was interested in.

Well, that would have been a bit of a stretch. But after a few minutes of writing, erasing, and rewriting, I had a pretty coherent web of interconnection between all of these seemingly disparate topics. I drew a dotted line circle around the core of the web and next to it neatly printed the words "international development."

And froze.

Did I just...choose my career path? Just like that? Thirty minutes before this I was still contemplating the pros and cons of announcing baseball games, and then I just started writing and doing my diagramming method without really giving much thought to what I was heading towards and then just- BAM. There it was.

And it makes so much sense! I remember one time a few years ago someone asked me if I wanted to be a doctor. When I said no, they started talking about malpractice insurance. I said, "oh whatever, the only reason I would become a doctor would be to open a health clinic in sub-Saharan Africa or something like that." Meanwhile, I was going along studying engineering and wondering how I could make a fulfilling career out of it.

It's sort of like a retrospective facepalm moment. Duh! It was all right there, in front of my face, and I just couldn't put 2 and 2 together.

But after a little traveling, some international experiences, a little returning to some non-science loves, and finally realizing that it is possible to combine science and humanities...everything came together.

Of course, I'm a little late in figuring this out. There's even a 2A concentration actually titled "international development." Too bad I didn't have this revelation 2 years ago, huh?

Ok, you know what, forget it. Sure, it's my senior year. Sure, this idea might be sort of insane. But I'll just change my 2A concentration. That's really only like half of my major. I have 8 classes left. It's totally doable.

...and if it's not, you might just get an extra year of blog entries out of me...

Anyway, I don't really have time to sleep lately, let alone blog, but I just thought I'd give a quick update to say that I made it safely back to Boston after 20 hours in transit (mostly spent reading blogger applications, and oh my God was that YouTube video question the sharpest double-edged sword of all time). I'm absolutely swamped with field hockey- this week it consumes my entire day, not to mention that I'm attempting to paint my room and plan for REX and all that good stuff...Tuesday and Wednesday nights I was asleep before 10 PM, which was glorious in a way, but just meant that I got far less sleep last night as I scrambled to put together some last minute stuff for REX and find time to read even more blogger applications. I feel like an Admissions Officer, it's weird. So this is what the power feels like. Mwahaha!

That's it from me, practice starts in 20 minutes. Thankfully, as every athlete knows, Day 3 of getting back into shape is by far the most painful, so I'm on the downhill now. If I can just make it through Orientation, I might be able to start sleeping again.

Right.