A lot of work went into that video. Elizabeth and I began writing the script in July 2011. We started filming in September. We recorded the music in March. We premiered in in April. That's nine months. That's like a human baby. And like a human baby, this big, drooly, adorable video is something that we love and are very proud of. 

The credits in the video say simply "created with love by many people at MIT." And, as the full credits in the post show, it was indeed many people. 

But there's one person I'd like to thank specifically. 

Michael Rodrigo is an MIT senior. He worked in the same office as me for a summer or two. We played rock band in 10-100 together (enough to get rock band taken away). 

But Rodrigo is also something even more awesome: he's Tim. Or at least one of the rotating cast of characters who played Tim. 

Now as you know, Tim was featured extensively in MIT Imagination. And that means Rodrigo was featured extensively, even if you didn't see his face. But he spent hours and hours in that suit, in broiling September humidity, taking a lot of lumps as we had him try to do sillier and sillier things in a big, bulky beaver suit. 

So this video is for you, Rodrigo. A highlight reel of your finest moments in MIT Imagination, as a big fat thanks for being the best Tim we could ask for. 

Professor Woodie Flowers once told me that "MIT can be either a steamroller or a candy store: it depends entirely on how you look at it." We wanted to make a video that showed the candy store side of things. 

Soon I'll post up more on the making of MIT Imagination, along with some b-roll and a montage of mascot pain. In the meantime, I'd like to thank everyone who made this video possible over the last six months, since it was, as the credits said, a labor of love by many people at MIT. 

CREDITS:

Written and directed by:

• Chris Peterson
• Elizabeth Choe '13

Starring:

• Shanasia Sylman '15
• Estefania Avila '15
• Kayla Esquivel '15
• Delian Asparouhov '15
• Chris Mills '12
• Michael Rodrigo '12 (as Tim)

Featuring: 

• Connie Huang '15
• Ana Vazquez '15
• Kenton Williams S.M. '12 
• Stephan Boyer ‘13
• Nexie, TOFU, and the Mustachioed Bear
• The Lobby 10 Ensemble
• The MIT football team

Music:

• Orchestral arrangement by Adrian Grossman '14
• Performed by the MIT Symphony Orchestra
• Conducted by Dr. Adam Boyles 
• Sung by Chris Puchi '14
• Produced by Michael Miller '09
• Advised by Mikey Yang '05

Special thanks to:

• Rachel Fong '12 and the East Campus i3 Team
• Jack Carroll, Suzanne Flynn, Paelle Powell '15, and other residents of Maseeh Hall
• Emerald Ferreira-Yang '13 and the Random Hall Cryomaniacs
• The MIT Glass Lab
• Robert Urban and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research 
• Polly Guggenheim of the MIT Media Lab Personal Robotics Group
• Craig Bryer and MIT Environmental Health and Safety
• The MITAdmissions Bloggers
• The MITAdmissions CommTeam

Caine loves arcades. So last summer, while home on break, he began making arcade games out of cardboard. He made claw games and soccer games and all sorts of different games, rummaging for raw materials in the junk yard and the trash and in school recycling bins. But he never got any customers. 

One day, independent filmmaker Nirvan Mullick of Interconnected.is chanced to stop by the store to buy a handle for his old Corolla.  He started playing Caine's games. Then he made a movie about him. 

Fair warning: wherever you happen to be, it will get real dusty real quick once you hit play. 

I thought about writing something kitschy and sappy here about doing whatever you want with your imagination, following your dreams, being creative, etc. But something that cute and pat I think does a disservice to the small miracle of beauty that is this movie and its star. 

I will, however, say that the Caine's Arcade website is collecting donations for a college scholarship fund, should you, like me, be interested in seeing what Caine can do with an engineering degree. 

In support of his subversive educational enterprise Nelson has mustered both heavy artillery and covering fire. The former comes from Benchmark Capital, the VC behemoth which has invested $25 million dollars to found Minerva. The latter comes from the long list of luminaries Nelson has recruited to form his advisory board, including such superstars as Larry Summers (former President of Harvard), Senator Bob Kerrey (former head of the New School), and Pat Harker (president of the University of Delaware and former dean of Wharton, Nelson's alma mater).

I am a big believer in educational access. Education is awesome. Extending education to those who cannot presently achieve it is extra awesome.

And yet I'm troubled by the Minerva Project; specifically, by the lack of credible answers to a few questions that the painfully shallow news coverage have yet to actually address. So I'm posting them here and trying to think through what some of the answers might be. 

Question 1: Who will the students be?

According to Minerva's website, their admissions process will rely "strictly on the world's most demanding intellectual standards, while giving no weight to lineage, athletic ability, state or country of origin, or capacity to donate." For the sake of argument I'll accept this as a reasonably meritocratic mission, at least for an online university that doesn't have to worry about cultivating diverse perspectives in a brick-and-mortar classroom.

But let's compare two quotes from adjacent paragraphs in this Economist interview:

“I don’t want or need to disrupt Harvard. I care about the kid who should have got into Harvard but didn’t,” says Mr Nelson.

...

The plan is for admission standards to be higher than current Ivy League levels,

Wait, what? Who wrote this? Forget that: who edited it? Who allowed these two sentences to appear so closely together and make my brain feel like it'd been filled with coarse sand?

If Minerva has higher standards then Harvard, than how is a student who can't get into Harvard supposed to get into Minerva? Even the most cynical critics of elite admissions processes tend to make their cases at the perceived academic margins (legacies, athletes, disadvantaged students, etc) as opposed to the intellectual core of your class. Put another way: any student who is capable of meeting some undefined "higher standard" of admission than that held by an elite institution would by definition be one of the most attractive applicants in their pool. In other words the kid who "should" have gotten in already will have. 

An article in the Atlantic described Minerva's mission slightly differently:

[Minerva is for] those students who are being shut out, whether it's a smart American kid who has to opt for a solid state school when they had their heart set on Brown, or the child of a well-to-do family in Beijing, by offering them a great education and a worldwide network of contacts...Worldwide, [Nelson] believes there are anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 students who fit his target demographic.

This is a different argument, one which does not suffer from the incongruity above. Here, Minerva is cast not so much as a university for Schrödinger's student, who simultaneously is and is not one of the top students in the world. This goal is much more modest: Minerva is intended for very good students who wanted to attend elite schools which could not find the space for them.

The problem with this goal is that it is driven, not by the merit or match of the educational environment, but for the desire for prestige, affirming, shining, oily; the sweet and sensual nectar of life-giving prestige.

Take the reference above of a "smart American kid who has to opt for a solid state school when they had their heart set on Brown." This is a poignant example: it sounds tones of rejection and loss which resonate with everyone.

But hopefully the reason that student had their heart set on Brown was because they felt it was the right match for them: because they loved its open curriculum and brick buildings and Providence location and fantastically creative culture and all of the other things that make Brown Brown. But just like that state school isn't Brown, neither is Minerva. In fact, the only thing Minerva has - or could have - over that solid state school is the glorious glow of prestige descending like an angel from the advisory board on high.

I did not attend (or apply to) MIT as an undergrad. But I did have a prestigious private school I was in love with. I didn't get in. I went to a solid state school. I wasn't as happy as I thought I would have been at the private school, but that was not because of the (lack of) prestige: it was because my state school didn't have all of the things that made me fall in love with the private school in the first place. Neither would Minerva. 

When viewed from this angle, Minerva only solves one of two problems: 1) a problem which doesn't credibly exist, or 2) a problem of providing prestige to those who value it above all else. Either seems like questionable ground on which to found an institution. 

Question 2: How will they pay?

But let's assume, for a moment, that there are hidden masses of  brilliant spurned students who feel matched to Minerva. How will they pay for it?

Nelson makes a big deal of the fact that Minerva's thus-unspecified tuiton will be "half that of the Ivy League or less." The Atlantic ballparks this at $20,000 annually or less, which is indeed less expensive than MIT without financial aid, which will run a wealthy family north of $50,000 a year.

However, MIT, like most of our prestigious peers, gives an awful lot of money away to students who need it: last year, our financial aid budget exceeded $100 million. And we do this because we try to make the best education in the world affordable to the best students in the world.

This is particularly relevant to Minerva's target demographic: smart students in the developing world. We give a lot of money to these students. And I mean A LOT. OF MONEY.

Why? Because otherwise, they couldn't afford it. MIT is extremely expensive in America, where median household income is about $50,000 a year. It's unfathomably expensive in the rest of the world, with a median global income of $1,700 per annum. And of the difference is provided out of our own pockets because international students aren't eligible for federal aid. But we still must - and gladly - give every student we admit enough money to attend.

These financial realities are part of the reason why international spots are capped at a certain percentage of our class. It gives us the freedom to take the best students in the world, without having to compromise our process by taking only those international students who can pay, or rejecting top international students because they can't.

So how is Minerva going to make itself accessible to all of these students in foreign countries? Nelson says he wants to make Minerva the elite university of choice for "the child of a Foxconn line operator in China." But according to Forbes, average income in China is only $10,200 annually. It's hard to imagine even a relatively well-paid worker being able to balance a tuition check with rent and food and everything else. In short: if you don't have financial aid available to your best international applicants, you will not be able to enroll and educate your best international applicants. You will instead be left with a very, very small number of good students who can pay, and a larger number of not-so-good-students who can pay. This creates obvious problems for Minerva's stated goal of high educational standards.

But while discussions of financial aid appear nowhere on Minerva's website, a recent tweet by them assured me that aid would be offered.

So what kind of aid will it be?

I apologize if this sounds cynical but I am extremely skeptical that a for-profit university is going to be profligate with grants. All colleges are businesses, but some are more businesses than others: in 2009 the President of Harvard made a very respectable $700,000, while the CEO of Strayer (a chain of for-profit universities) banked over $40 million. Believe it or not when you don't give any of your money away you can make an awful lot of it!

This is not to say that for-profit schools can't give financial aid. To the contrary, as this article reports, the average for-profit college receives 75% of its revenue from federal grants and loans. This is accomplished in part by aggressively recruiting educationally risky students as a vehicle for securing federal aid, a set of practices which led to the recent Congressional investigation of for-profit colleges for educational fraud. Consider that though for-profit colleges only enroll about 12% of the nation's students, those students are responsible for over 50% of student loan defaults.

If I may draw a very deliberate analogy to the most recent debt-fueled financial crisis: counterparties (the student and the federal government) take on all of the risk of an asset of a questionable value, while the university, playing the role of financial intermediary, cleans up on the fees (the federal financial aid).

But even this is beside the point, as Nelson envisions "only 5-10% of Minerva's students will be U.S. citizens", which is to say that only a very small portion of Minerva's students will even be eligible for federal aid.

So what happens with the other 90% of international students who need 90% of their tuition covered?

There is, as Forbes reported one huge and relevant difference between Chinese and American households: debt, and the lack thereof. "The average US household debt is 136% of household income, compared to 17% for the Chinese." This is especially true in education. Student loan debt in America now exceeds $1 trillion; the domestic loan market is already near the saturation point. But the emerging markets of the developing world are not nearly so highly leveraged in higher education.

Suppose Minerva provides not grants, and not federal aid, but instead extensive private loans to the students of the developing world. Then, the relevant questions of the university change from "what education can we provide at what standard" to "are we achieving a sufficient return on investment for our student loans."

If this is the case, then the old insight about ad-supported media maps nicely to Minerva. Remember: when you watch a show, or read a newspaper for free, you're not consuming the product of content; you are the product, and your attention is being sold to advertisers. If Minerva's financial aid is primarily private loans at high rates of interest to underleveraged students in the developing world, then I'd be willing to bet the real product is the debt being sold to investors. 

If that's true, then Minerva isn't a university: it's an emerging markets fund hiding behind the mask of higher education.

Question 3: What's really going on?

As far as I see it there are two explanations here.

Explanation 1 is that Ben Nelson, altruistic visionary, earnestly believes, against the odds and experience of literally every other educational institution, that there are hundreds of thousands of students in the world who are:

• of equivalent or higher academic caliber than current students of elite, prestigious universities, but who are not admitted to elite, prestigious universities, and
• have the resources to pay Minerva's tuition, which will likely many times global median income, without compromising the first two characteristics or being plunged into hopeless, crippling debt, because
• they have been given generous, reasonable aid by the benevolent benefactors who inhabit the halls of high tech venture capital.

Explanation 2 is that Ben Nelson, Wharton grad and former M&A consultant, has realized that:

• there is more international demand for prestigious, name-brand American education than there is supply, and
• if he can conjure prestige ex nihilo then he can tap that demand by distinguishing Minerva from the unsavory, disreputable actors already choking the for-profit university market, and
• in the process, and of financial necessity, load his comparatively underleveraged international students with loans that will return an appreciable rate to his investors

Now, I don't know which one of these explanations is true, but I do know which one I personally think is a hell of a lot more likely, and hint: it's not the one that involves relying on the altruism of venture capitalists. In fact, in the Minerva spirit of treating colleges as investment properties, I came to conclusion that I didn't even care which explanation was true, because either way it's awful junk that I'd short in a second if given the chance. 

The truth is that if you're a student (especially an international student) who can't go to a place like MIT but still wants to learn something, the situation isn't great, but it's better than it ever has been before. Here at MIT we give away OCW and MITx for free; I also highly recommend Khan Academy and Stanford's Engineering Everywhere.

Granted, it might not be the same as actually attending an elite school with a terrific education and meritocratic admissions and financial aid.

But then again, neither is the Minerva Project.

Emily Sheldon, who coordinates transfer admissions for our office, will be emailing all applicants with their decisions this afternoon, so you should expect to hear from her directly.

During this transfer admissions cycle we had 517 applicants. After several rounds of an extremely rigorous transfer committee process, we eventually were able to offer admission to 25 of them.

Transfer students are some of the very best MIT has to offer. I highly recommend reading the profile of transfer student Ian McKay featured on the MIT homepage last fall. It's pretty wild stuff.

As always, thank you to all of our transfer applicants, and congratulations to those we were able to admit!
 

One such example is Mark Fayngersh '15. Mark is an exceptionally talented web developer and photographer studying Computer Science here at MIT.

Now, Mark could do a lot of things in a lot of organizations, and all of them would be great and cool. But the project he's currently working on is a kickstarter called The Institvte: A Photobook:

Hi! My name is Mark, and I'm currently a freshman studying Computer Science and Philosophy. When I'm not doing homework, I'm writing programs and taking pictures of objects and places around me. I need your help: I'm striving to create a photobook that encompasses environment and culture while focusing on architecture, people, and events representative of life at MIT.

The Institvte is a story about a school, its architecture and environment. Most of all, it's a story about culture, mindset, and people. MIT is known as a rigorous research facility and one of the best universities in the world, but there's more to the institute than numbers.

The goal of this project is to present MIT to the world under new light, exposing its multidimensional nature while telling a story from a fresh perspective. By helping Kickstart this project, you're not just getting a photobook, you're getting an experience.

Now I have no idea whether this kickstarter will be successful or not. But to some degree that's beside the point (though I hope it will be, and am backing it, because I would like a copy of the book). The point is that this is an excellent example of a student just doing something simple, creative, and cool. Remember this! There's no reason not to try to do cool things when the cost is low and the opportunity awesome. 

I know I've been *admitted* to MIT, but I don't know if I am actually smart enough to perform at this fabulous school with you amazing people!

In the comments some of his classmates shared similar sentiments:

*dislike* for not recognizing your own awesomeness, but *like* because i feel pretty much the same way... 0.o

...

I keep reading about these national scholars and competition people and I'm just a guy from Arizona. lol. Not that I haven't performed well or worked hard, I have. But still. :)

...

I sort of want to email admissions and ask "So thank you very much, but uh... why?"

These comments aren't fishing for compliments or falsely modest. Many students have told me over the years that after they were admitted, once the glow of joy dimmed down, there lurked in the shadows some existential unease over their admission which only intensified after they learned more about their fellow admits. Online, at CPW, and eventually after enrolling, MIT students often meet classmates so well-accomplished that they begin to question themselves, and wonder why they were among the chosen few. They begin to wonder, in other words, if they were a mistake; if they really deserved admission.

To the members of the Class of 2016 who feel this way: you are incorrect. But you are not alone.

See, there is a well-documented psychological phenomenon called impostor syndrome. Impostor syndrome, says Wikipedia, is "a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments." It's extremely common in education, especially in programs with competitive admission and high achievers, and especially at graduate school (one grad thread on a forum I frequent is subtitled "Everyone Else Feels Like An Impostor Too"). This article from Science Magazine opens with an anecdote with which some of the 2016s quoted above could probably relate:

When a tenured professor admitted in a panel discussion that she had felt like a fraud as a graduate student, Abigail* knew exactly what she meant. The professor told the group that she had worried that she'd been let into her graduate program on a fluke and that someday she'd make an error that would blow her cover. She had always believed her peers in graduate school were much smarter despite knowing that she had the best grades of the bunch. "She said that she realised much later that this was completely ridiculous thinking and that obviously she was smart enough," says Abigail, a Ph.D. student in cell biology. "What she said really spoke to me."

...

"Impostor syndrome" is the name given to the feelings that Abigail and many other young scientists describe: Their accomplishments are just luck or deceit, and they're in over their heads. The key to getting past it, experts say, is making accurate, realistic assessments of your performance. Perhaps equally important: knowing you're not alone. Abigail thinks that sharing her feelings with other people is how she will eventually come to grips with her sense of feeling like an impostor. "It's fantastic to hear other people say, 'I've felt that way, too.' "

In some ways impostor syndrome is the mirror image of the similarly common (though much more hilariously frustrating) Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that the unskilled are unaware of it. Those who lack cognition necessarily lack the metacognitive abilities to realize it. Bluntly: stupid people are too stupid to know they are stupid.

Impostor syndrome, on the other hand, strikes when exceptionally intelligent people are acutely and appropriately aware of the limits of their own expertise, but unaware that the poised people around them also have their own blind spots, their own weaknesses.

I think back to a story one of the bloggers told me about coming to MIT. This blogger had been an all-star at a small, somewhat rural high school. Never had to study, always aced everything. And some of the GIRs just flat out crushed him. Chemistry was the worst, and one of his study buddies was a real whiz. Amidst his despair this blogger felt something akin to the impostor effect.

But second semester, when both of them were in 8.02 - the second semester of physics - the blogger was acing everything, and his chem friend was barely scraping through. It then became clear: they were just playing to their respective strengths and weaknesses. This is a small and simple but demonstrative example.

I actually like the fact that our students are so aware of their own limits and weaknesses. Anyone who thinks they're going to breeze through MIT is rather dramatically mistaken. And the fact that MIT punctures these delusions like balloons early and often means that students stay appropriately grounded.

When I first came to MIT - having never stepped foot on campus before my interview - I frankly expected the students to be, well, a bit insufferable. Prestigious institutions are particularly fertile soil for pridefulness: plant high-achieving people and shine upon them the bright light of external validation and they soon grow into towering egos. But this doesn't happen often at MIT. It's fertile soil all right, and all the nutrients are there, but your fellow students and brilliant faculty are there to provide some prudent, healthful pruning. 

With that said, I don't want to see any student's sense of self-worth clipped to the quick. So for those who are feeling a bit impostory - for those who are worried that they don't deserve this opportunity - let me drop some knowledge on you:

We admitted less than one in ten of the awesome people who applied to us this year. You may - you will - have a different distribution of talents, of skills, of interests, of experiences, than your classmates. That's rather the point of our process. But if you were admitted, you are not an impostor. You are here because you are the genuine article. You are here because you belong at MIT. 

Keep your head out of the clouds - but don't be afraid to hold it high. 

You can log in using the same username and password that you use to log into your MyMIT account. There are no interim screens, so you should be sure you are ready to receive your decision online before logging in to decisions.mit.edu

18,109 students applied for admission to MIT this year, the most in our history, and the first time the number of aspiring students has exceeded 18,000. As a result, our admit rate this year is the lowest in MIT's 151 years; we had to turn away the vast majority of excellent, qualified, well-matched students who applied to us, something difficult for all involved.

Of those 18,109 applicants we admitted 1620 students. They are all amazing individuals, from rich and varied backgrounds, perspectives, locations, and experiences: over 1,100 high schools are represented amongst our admits. Every day at my job I am constantly amazed by the caliber of character, intellect, and achievement of these students. They are all superstars in one way or another, and when arranged together they constitute the constellation of the Class of 2016, which is, to me, just about as awe-inspiring as any other in the cosmos.

There are also those stars who will compose different celestial bodies next fall. If you are one of the students to whom we were unable to offer admission, please remember that, as one of our bloggers posted earlier this year, MIT is just another place. It is an awesome place, but it is not awesome because of some immanent force radiating from beneath 77 Mass Ave, where the Great Wizard Rogers once cast his spell of special. It's awesome because of the people here. The corollary of this is that if you are an awesome person, you will be awesome wherever you go. Even more importantly, you can make wherever you go more awesome for everyone else. I hope you do. I know you will.

I'm closing comments on this blog post to concentrate conversation in the open threads for admitted, waitlisted, and not admitted students. 

Congratulations to the Class of 2016. I wish all of our applicants well. It's been an honor to learn so much about your lives. May Pi, Tau, and peace be with you. 

In the past, the commenting system has been relatively simple. There's a big open box at the bottom of each entry, with fields for name, email, your comment, and a captcha. It then populates the big long list of comments at the end of the blog. See, e.g., 

These comments are incredibly simple and clean. They've basically allowed people to append notes to each comment. 

What they're not terribly well equipped for is the sort of conversation we hope to foster on the blogs. The convention of @replies has entered our blogs by necessity. There is no "threading" of comments such that a distinct topic or idea can be pursued apart from the general hubbub of the comments. The comments, in other words, are exactly, and only, that: comments, not a conversation. 

Lots of sites manage to do this, and to do it well. Probably the best known example is Slashdot, which has a robust commenting community. It allows users to tag each other's comments, rank them, surface highly ranked posts, bury trolls, and so forth. Of course, we don't use Slash, so we needed to come up with our own solution. 

We thought about going with Facebook's commenting system, but to me that seemed like a bad choice. It excludes not only those who don't have a Facebook account, but also those who would prefer not to identify themselves via their Facebook account, and even those who might be comfortable identifying themselves here but don't want everything posted on this page to be imported back into Facebook. These are all very real and important privacy concerns. We have a long tradition of hosting and protecting anonymous comments, and having the option for a fully anonymized system for those who preferred it was definitely a prerequisite for whichever solution we chose. 

So we then approached an ExpressionEngine development company, hoping to invest in our own, custom-made comment system. We described all of the things we wanted, and all of the things we needed. They listened, conferred, and came back to us saying, "you know, basically 90% of what you want can be done out of the box with Disqus." 

Disqus is a commenting platform. Many large sites use their system to handle their comments. It has a bunch of sexy features. They have good support and employ MIT alumni. And, critically, they contain many of the community conversation tools we wanted while preserving the option of anonymous speech. 

All blog entries before  this one will retain their comments made under the old system. This and future posts will have Disqus. 

Give it a spin below! We want to make sure that everything is working great, especially with Pi Day coming up next week. We also want to make sure it is as clearly and intuitively navigable as our old site. Let me know what you think, what works and what doesn't, and we'll tweak things as they come, rapid prototyping in true MIT style. 

Thanks for continuing the conversation. 

Few intellectual mancrushes of mine are as profound as the one I have for Professor James Grimmelmann of New York Law School. Grimmelmann is flat-out one of the most brilliant thinkers what might loosely be called "cyberlaw" today. And, in a landscape strewn with shoddy writing, his articles are breathtakingly well written and fun to read. His Ethical Visions of Copyright Law is an illuminating insight into an otherwise tired subject; his similarly striking Saving Facebook is hands-down the best law review article ever written on the subject of Facebook privacy. 

So you can imagine my surprise and delight when Prof Grimmelmann posted a blog entry about the MIT Mystery Hunt last month (as did our own Anna). It turns out that not only did Grimmelmann participate in this year's Mystery Hunt; as the 2011 winners of the Hunt, he and his team created the challenges for this year's edition. 

I asked Professor Grimmelmann if I could post his entry here as a guest entry, and he graciously agreed. He also pointed me to this LiveJournal archive of many years of many participants of Mystery Hunts past and present. So thanks to him, you may now enjoy some insights into this year's Hunt from one of its creators. 

Take it away, JG!

This past weekend, I made my annual pilgrimage to Cambridge for the MIT Mystery Hunt, a puzzle competition on a grand scale. Teams of up to 200 people attempt to be first to solve over a hundred puzzles and put the answers together to find a coin that has been hidden somewhere on the MIT campus. This past year, my team, Codex, won the Hunt, which means that by tradition, it was our turn to write and run the Hunt this year. It was an intense, exhausting, and deeply fulfilling experience.

I like to think of the Mystery Hunt as a gift economy. Each year’s Hunt is a gift given by the previous year’s winner to the other teams. I put in hundreds of hours writing and test-solving puzzles, plus an intense final sprint behind the scenes at Hunt HQ from Friday morning until late on Sunday. Codex’s leaders easily spent thousands of hours each making the Hunt come together. All of this was completely unpaid.

Why would any sane person sacrifice a year this way? Part of it is pride: just like solving a puzzle is a way to show off your cleverness, creating one lets you show off your creativity. But I think the reciprocal obligation that gift exchange creates best explains why every year the winners take on this tremendous burden. The winning team in a Hunt is the one that has most fully enjoyed the puzzles, that has been the greatest recipient of that year’s gift. This creates a social debt, one that can be repaid only with a return gift: another Hunt. Every year, teams joke that they will locate the coin, then walk away and leave it alone so that someone else can write the Hunt. No one ever does it: everyone understands what cheap move it would be.

This also explains something else. Each year’s Hunt is typically a little more ambitious than previous Hunts, on average. The overall number of puzzles has been rising with time, and the writing teams are always adding some new element. Last year’s Hunt had an incredibly clever structure, with unusually imaginative metapuzzles. (A metapuzzle is a puzzle based on combining the answers to other puzzles.) This year, we had teams come and put on fake Broadway productions. These something mores, I think, are a way for the writing team to demonstrate that it isn’t just returning exactly the gift it was given and is obligated to give back. They show that the Hunt, a labor of love, is freely given, that we chose to add something unique and not required.

This year’s Hunt theme was musical theater, as filtered through The Producers. It’s an apt metaphor: running the Hunt reminded me of working backstage on college theater productions. Everything is a complete disaster up through and including the dress rehearsal, but on opening night, everything always comes together in front of the curtain. I had the best seat in the house to appreciate the brilliance and inexhaustible work of my teammates, and to see the ingenuity and enthusiasm of the Hunters in the audience rising to the occasion. At the Hunt wrap-up — presented as an awards show for things like “Best Wrong Answer” — I found myself choking up. Getting to be part of a Mystery Hunt is an emotional, uplifting, humbling thing.

Some links:

• This year’s Hunt
• My photos
• Video of the kickoff
• Videos of teams’ performances
• Video of the wrap-up

And now for some details of the puzzles I worked on, and my favorite puzzles. Warning, some mild spoilers lie ahead:

Written by me:

• My favorite is 25th Annual Putnam County Debate Tournament. It requires solvers to classify the syllogisms hidden within a series of intentionally terrible arguments. The difficulty was slightly miscalibrated: many teams got stuck on the step of realizing that there were syllogisms involved, rather than on the more fun step of peeling away the informal arguments to find the (amusingly invalid) syllogisms within. It got called “this year’s WTF puzzle” by one solver.
• Tax in Space, was described by one reviewer as “straightforward(ish).” This puzzle started life as a logic problem that would actually use some real legal doctrine, and mutated repeatedly. In its final version, it’s a shaggy-dog puzzle: a long and convoluted joke. As a bonus, there are in-jokes for anyone who’s studied basic tax law (e.g. “Capital Gains” and “lower-case gains”).
• Raw Bar was a late-in-the-day idea. I was looking over a sushi menu and thought, “You know what looks kind of like a puzzle: sushi menus.” It seemed obvious that the ingredients in a roll could make a cryptogram, and from there, what could they be a cryptogram for? This one didn’t quite work; it was both too hard and too easy, even if the concept is decent.
• I also helped write a piece of the endgame, which isn’t yet online. As part of it, I got to dress up as Watson 2.0.

My favorite other puzzles:

• Potlines: A cute, well-executed idea. Once you have the “aha” about what the diagrams represent, what remains is just the right level of difficulty: doable but not trivial. The elegance of the illustrations makes this one work.
• The Measure of All Things: Nerdy but silly.
• Slash Fiction: Very nerdy and very silly. The idea is clever (although likely to be baffling if you don’t have computer experience), but the execution absolutely sells it. Seth and Vera took a secret four-day trip to Paris to film it.
• Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts: A multiply recursive puzzle that requires no special expertise to solve, this one’s construction is absolutely brilliant. And it had the best title in the Hunt. Whenever we called a team about this puzzle, we’d lead off with “Yo Dawg, …”
• Paper Trail: A nice little diagramless crossword with a twist.
• Winning Conditions: Play with this for a bit, until you get the idea. Then try to win. Yeah, it’s devious. And fun.
• B.J. Blazkowicz in ‘Wintertime for Hitler’: Yes, it’s a Wolfenstein 3D / “Springtime for Hitler” mashup. And yes, it really is playable. And yes, it’s a good reminder about how much we’ve learned about FPS level design in the last two decades.
• Incredible Edibles: Another cute, well-executed idea. A good one for non-puzzle-experts to try their hands at.
• Critical Thinking: Like my puzzles, this one has a prominent humorous strain. But this one has an actual humorous payoff each time you make progress in solving it.
• Dawn of a New Era: Kai has a real gift for elegant puzzle mechanics. You’ll learn a lot in the course of solving this one.
• Collect Them All: Again, plenty of fun for non-experts.
• In Vivo and Makefiles: For heavy UNIX users only, but lots of fun for them.
• Twosquare: I helped fact-check this one, and it was plenty of fun. Prepare to watch some truly stunning magic tricks, I mean illusions. Be sure to read the alt-text on the images; it provides a significant but important hint.
• Picture an Acorn: Not only are the individual pictures fun to identify, but the extraction of the final answer is exceedingly clever.
• Itinerant People of America: I didn’t solve this one, and I admire anyone who can. Notable because we got John Hodgman to embed an important clue in one of his blog posts.
• The Voices in Your Head: Seth’s music puzzle.
• Stage Lines: Another elegant Kai construction.
• Award-Winning Poetry: Another puzzle whose humor is perfectly embedded. Broadway musical fans have a shot at this one; anyone else should just keep moving on.
• Carb Pool: We gave each team two bags of pasta: one intact and one broken. And just to be sure that they didn’t think the number of pieces was important, we broke it in front of them, violently. This one required several hours of cutting dry pasta by hand. Here’s a photo:

• Set Theory: Not a novel idea, not that difficult, very well-executed.
• Cross-Breeding: A puzzle whose implementation perfectly reflects its concept.
• Course 7E: The first puzzle I test-solved, and still a favorite. Not quite “funny” per se, but definitely enjoyable.
• Functions: Arguably the most widely admired puzzle in the Hunt, judging by the number of Codexians who were raving about it.
• Rats: You had to see Michael (an actual MIT alumni interviewer) in action to get the most out of this one, but having a interview to be admitted to the second half of the puzzle was an idea of loopy genius.
• Sovereignty: I fact-checked and helped edit this puzzle, and in its final form it requires some very nice logical reasoning. Per the references to “players,” should probably not be attempted by non-gamers.
• Argh: Like Andrew, I couldn’t believe this one hadn’t been done before. But it hadn’t, and now it has been, and in style.
• Cookin: Another fun-for-all food puzzle.
• JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS: Yes, this puzzle has no content. Yes, it’s solvable.
• Encoded: I haven’t otherwise coded in at least a year, but I installed two programming environments and learned some new libraries to do this one.
• Screen Test: I like the concept, but I couldn’t have solved this one alone.

My favorites metapuzzles were:

• Charles Lutwidge Dodgson: play chess and Scrabble simultaneously, each with a hidden twist. I spend a day grinding through the chess half during test-solving, and never noticed the time flying by.
• Into the Woodstock: Aha-based, but both clever and fair.
• William S. Bergman: Mad wordplay in the house.
• Mayan Fair Lady: Manages to combine the two source elements in the show in a surprising but highly amusing way.
• Ben Bitdiddle: Here’s a bag of parts; hope you brought a soldering iron like we told you to.
• Ogre of La Mancha: Worth it for the answer alone.

To recap, you may send your missing documents in via: 

• Docufide 
• Fax at 617.687.9184

Fax is the most reliable way to get us a document. It is automagically digitzed and put into our system, and today we have already received over a thousand faxes and are working on processing them. In a small number of cases - almost entirely international students in India - there has been some difficulty sending faxes. While we're not exactly sure why this is happening, or where the breakdown is occurring, but if this glitch is affecting you, you may, in the short run, have your teacher or guidance counselor email a scanned PDF of the missing document to admissions [at] mit [dot] edu. If we need to follow up for confirmation, we will. Please only email the document if the fax option has repeatedly failed for you. Faxing the document is quicker and easier for you and for us. 

Additionally, I received a number of comments on my last post from students concerned about missing test scores that they had sent some time ago. When I followed up with those individuals, in almost every case the same thing had happened, which is that the student had registered for the test with slightly different information (a different spelling of name, or choice of last name, or address, or high school) than they had used for applying via MyMIT. When this happened our system creates two records for a single individual - one with the scores, and one with everything else - because of the different data asssociated with the documents. 

If you are missing scores and you are positive that you sent them to MIT via the appropriate testing organization, it is very likely the case that it is because of this dual record problem. Please email admissions [at] mit [dot] edu and alert them to differences which may exist between your MyMIT information and your SAT/ACT/TOEFL/etc information so that we can work on merging those records for you. 

Don't be worried! We are here to help you get your information to us. Thanks for quickly sending in missing documents, and we'll get them processed as fast as we can. 

Quick update for our Regular Action applicants. As Matt posted last week, we have been working through our buckets and buckets of mail since the New Year. However, as of tonight, we have finished processing all mail, hand-checked all filing cabinets, scoured all of our faxes and emails, and loaded everything into our system.

If you are a prospective member of the Class of 2016, this would be a mighty good time to log into MyMIT and confirm your application tracking is complete. McGreggor also just emailed everyone who was missing components so you may have received a direct message from him.

If you have missing components - relax. This happens. We have not yet begun to review partial applications, and we never make admissions decisions unless we have sufficient information upon which to render that decision.

That said, you should move rapidly. All missing components must be received by 5 pm, Eastern Standard Time, on Monday, January 30, 2012..

Do not send your missing components by mail! If your school uses Docufide you may request that your Guidance Counselor submit the missing materials via that service. Otherwise, fax the missing documents to 617.687.9184.

Please allow for five days before contacting our office to make sure we've received and processed your newly submitted documents. If at this point you would like to withdraw your application from consideration at MIT just email us.

Ok, I'm going to go read some more apps. Thanks everyone!

(p.s.: read Elizabeth's blog entry)

Instead, what's there is this:

So what's is this all about?

As Schoolhouse Rock taught us, Congress proposes bills which may, with sufficient support, become law. There is one such bill working its way through both houses of the Congress right now. It is a bad bill, which if enacted would become bad law: bad law with bad consequences for the entire Internet as we have come to know and love it.

H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), along with Senate Bill 968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) are corresponding versions of a bill intended, according to its authors, to curb copyright infringement. It is the latest battle in a war which began when the Internet began an age of selling wine without bottles.

This post, however, is not about whether one should ally with Lessig or Valenti in the interminable copyfight. Nor is it a comment by me, or the admissions office, or MIT on the politics of these policies, nor on the proper configuration of copyright law. These blogs are not a partisan platform, and our office is not a partisan policy shop.

However, today MITAdmissions.org is joining a number of websites, including Wikipedia, reddit, Reports Without Borders, Google, Mozilla, and many other in disrupting our service to protest SOPA and PIPA.

Here's why: 

reddit has a good breakdown of the bills and some of the worst they would do, including: 

• Create a blacklist of banned websites comparable in its effect to the Great Firewall of China
• Kill websites that rely on user generated content like Etsy, Flickr, and Vimeo (and Facebook, and YouTube, and Wikipedia, and, for that matter, MIT Admissions) by creating an "end-run" around the DMCA safe harbor provisions
• Suffocate startups by imposing intolerably high liability costs that will drive investors away

The breadth of SOPA/PIPA is breathtaking. As Cory Doctorow writes:

SOPA would allow private entities to produce enemies lists of sites that offend them, and to give these lists to DNS providers, ISPs, payment processors, and ad brokers, who would then be required to remove the accused sites within five days. It also encourages payment processors to engage in self-censorship, by pre-emptively severing ties with firms they believe are likely to cause a complaint, before any such complaint is received.

As bad as this is, it gets worse: SOPA would also expand the definition of copyright infringement to include hosting a single link to a site that is alleged to contain infringing material. Thus, if an author’s blog, or a book discussion group, attracts a single post that contains a single link that goes to a site that someone accuses of copyright infringement, that site becomes one with the alleged infringer, and faces all the same sanctions—without any proof required, or due process.

You may have noticed that the first link I posted in this blog entry was a link to a version of the "I'm Just A Bill" video from Schoolhouse Rock. To be honest, I'm not sure what the copyright status of this video is. I certainly do not intend to infringe. I intend to educate. With good intent, I can post this because someone uploaded it to YouTube, which can host it because they have "safe harbor" protection. If there is a copyright claim filed against it, the video will be taken down, and oh well, my link will be dead. The only reason a site like YouTube, or Wikipedia, or the MITAdmissions Wiki can function is because they are protected from copyright lawsuits as long as they respond to requests for takedown by copyright holders. This allows them to accept content from many people on the theory that the vast majority will be noninfringing and what does infringe will be removed.

Not only will SOPA/PIPA remove this protection, but they will create another level of intermediary liability for anyone who links to a site which contains infringing content. In other words, not only could YouTube be blocked if that version of "I"m Just A Bill" is unauthorized, but so could MITAdmissions for linking to it. For that matter, we could be blocked if we linked to an entirely different and totally legitimate blogger video on YouTube if any other video on YouTube infringed copyright.

Additionally, SOPA/PIPA could crush freedom fighters around the world who rely on the Internet as an avenue of activism. According to the EFF, the bills allow the government to "go after more or less anyone who provides or offers a product or service that could be used to get around DNS blacklisting orders", including those legitimately used by freedom fighters (and funded by our government) to evade censorship by authoritarian and autocratic regimes.

The issues implicated by this overbroad regulation - access to information, freedom of speech, democratization of production, innovation and creation - are important, even central, to the Internet. And they are important and central to MIT too. That's why MIT Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, opposes SOPA/PIPA. So too the MIT Media Lab, in many ways the beating heart of innovation here at MIT. SOPA/PIPA could kill OpenCourseWare and MITx, two online initiatives created by MIT to educate the world. And, as I said before, they could quite easily kill these blogs.

I said before that the MITAdmissions blogs are not a partisan platform. And that is true. But I'd like to quote the Wikimedia Foundation's statement on why Wikipedia is being shut down in protest. Emphasis mine:

In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position. That’s a real, legitimate issue. We want people to trust Wikipedia, not worry that it is trying to propagandize them.

But although Wikipedia’s articles are neutral, its existence is not. As Wikimedia Foundation board member Kat Walsh wrote on one of our mailing lists recently:

We depend on a legal infrastructure that makes it possible for us to operate. And we depend on a legal infrastructure that also allows other sites to host user-contributed material, both information and expression. For the most part, Wikimedia projects are organizing and summarizing and collecting the world’s knowledge. We’re putting it in context, and showing people how to make to sense of it.

But that knowledge has to be published somewhere for anyone to find and use it. Where it can be censored without due process, it hurts the speaker, the public, and Wikimedia. Where you can only speak if you have sufficient resources to fight legal challenges, or if your views are pre-approved by someone who does, the same narrow set of ideas already popular will continue to be all anyone has meaningful access to.

I think these same points apply to the MITAdmissions blogs too.

Here on the blogs we try to give you a sense of what life is like at MIT. And we do that by allowing a lot of students to write freely about their experiences. We could not do this in a world in which SOPA and PIPA were law. We could not allow our bloggers to link to any website because we could be liable if those websites contain infringing content. We could not ever allow them to post a picture or excerpt or class note unless we cleared with MIT's lawyers that it did not violate someone's copyright, somewhere, somehow. MIT students could not go off and create great startups because no one would fund them. MIT can do what it does - MIT can be what it can be - because of a particular policy ecology in which it lives.

That ecology is endangered by both of these bills. So I hope you understand why we support the strike against SOPA/PIPA. The ideals threatened by these bills strike at the heart of everything MIT stands for, and what we try to do here on the blogs every day.

In the spirit of access to information, please feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments below.

edit: 

You should also watch this video by Clay Shirky explaining SOPA: 

It was kinda nice:

In fact you may have seen this movie starring us. 

After returning from Colorado I went back up to New Hampshire to spend the holidays with my family.

As I've posted before, I come from a small town in the woods, a place where people generally agree that almost anything can be improved if it is shot out of a cannon and/or set on fire.

This year, my uncle, who hosts our annual New Years Eve party, and is known by local fire rangers for his 512 cubic foot brush pile blaze:

decided he wanted a little something extra.

See, last year I had brought the potato cannon a few friends of mine and I had made back in college. It was made out of schedule 40 PVC and would shoot a potato roughly an eighth of a mile with an extremely satisfying report:

This year, my uncle Ken wanted to bring back the cannon, but with a firing range. In order to do that, though, we needed a safer, more accurate cannon, which could be handled by just about anyone, and which could reliably fire with a known and controlled rate of speed.

But I didn't know how to make these, as my education in engineering potato cannons never progressed beyond the wildly unsafe and generally illegal combustion variety.

Enter Jack Queeney. Jack is an MIT freshman. He's one of my academic advisees this year, and he builds potato cannons. Extremely epic potato cannons.

I told Jack about our plan, and he sent some helpful tips and schematics to my uncle and I. The key tip was to build a compressed air potato cannon, so that we could precisely control the pressure to make sure it stayed within a safe range and ejected the potatoes at a safe speed. Ken worked with glee over the coming weeks to assemble the cannon, test it for safety and reliability, and scavenge the town dump (the social center of some New Hampshire towns) for stuff for the firing range

And so came New Year's Eve night, New Hampshire style: 

A snack bar, made out of wooden construction pallets, old window trim, surplus lumber, and Christmas lights

And of course, the main event:

Here's my dad taking the first shot, with a rundown of the safety features and design performed by Ken's friend Chris:

When the world ends and the zombies come as the Mayans foretold, I'm heading straigth to Ken's. Somehow I think he'll be just fine. And I'll have a place to watch the (zombie) Bruins. 

I hope you all had a similarly excellent holiday season. I'm going to head home and finish unpacking. By the end of the week I'll be reading the first round of Regular Action apps. I can't wait!

Happy New Year y'all 

You can log in using the same username and password that you use to log into your MyMIT account. There are no interim screens, so you should be sure you are ready to receive your decision online before logging in to decisions.mit.edu.

6,008 students applied for early admission to MIT this year. Because of the shifting admissions landscape, our applicant pool was slightly smaller but proportionally stronger, with more students well-matched to MIT. As a result, this was still an incredibly selective Early Action cycle, with us admitting almost 100 fewer students than we were able to last year, a difficult decision given how awesome so many of our applicants are.

Of those 6,008 early applicants, we admitted 680 students. They represent some of the best and brightest stars of our future. We are honored to welcome them to campus, where they will join the similarly accomplished, diverse, generally excellent community of students who already call MIT home. Our Early Action admits come from 46 states and dozens of countries, representing over 500 high schools all across the world. Though they all do different amazing things - math and music, oceanography and origami, art and athletics, cosmology and cooking - they are all united by their love of science and technology and their desire to deploy them to make the world a better place.

We deferred 3,731 applicants. These students will be considered afresh in Regular Action. For more information on how our Early vs. Regular and deferral process works you can read my post from last year on the subject.

In our review and committee process, there were 1,308 students to whom we were not able to offer admission this year. These students are exceptionally talented, intelligent individuals, but because of the highly selective nature of our process, we did not believe we would be able to admit them this year, and we wanted to let them to know as soon as possible. We wish all of these students the best of luck in the rest of their college admission process.

The balance of the applicants - 289 - either withdrew from our process before we issued decisions or had incomplete applications and were not able to be considered. 

We recognize it's a lot of work for all of you to apply to MIT. We appreciate it. It's an honor to be entrusted with this part of your lives. We try to do what's best by MIT, and what's best by you. And for all the fun we sometimes have on the blogs, we take our work very seriously.

Again, congratulations to the newest members of the Class of 2016. I'll be closing comments on this post to focus the conversations on the open threads for admitted, deferred, and not admitted students.

All best, everyone, and happy holidays.

My favorite observation comes from optimistic-mom:

1217 and 2011 are prime numbers and MIT selects "prime" candidates - is that a reason for the date and time!

While Pharyngula on CollegeConfidential mused that perhaps it is an appeal to something which happened on a historically significant December 17th.  

I am going to continue to keep our reasons a deep, dark secret, but following Pharyngula - and using their title - here are some other momentous events from history which occured on 12/17s past according to Wikipedia: 

• 546 – Gothic War: The Ostrogoths of King Totila conquer Rome by bribing the Byzantine garrison.
• 1538 – Pope Paul III excommunicates Henry VIII of England.
• 1777 – France formally recognizes the United States of America.
• 1790 – Discovery of the Aztec calendar stone.
• 1865 – First performance of the Unfinished Symphony by Franz Schubert.
• 1903 – The Wright Brothers make their first powered and heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
• 1935 – First flight of the Douglas DC-3 airplane.
• 1947 – First flight of the Boeing B-47 Stratojet strategic bomber.
• 1969 – Project Blue Book: The United States Air Force closes its study of UFOs, stating that sightings are generated as a result of "A mild form of mass hysteria, Individuals who fabricate such reports to perpetrate a hoax or seek publicity, psychopathological persons, and misidentification of various conventional objects."
• 1989 – The first episode of television series The Simpsons, "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", airs in the United States.
• 2003 – SpaceShipOne flight 11P, piloted by Brian Binnie, makes its first supersonic flight.
• 2010 – Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire. This act became the catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution. The success of the Tunisian protests sparked protests in several other Arab countries.

Some of these events I'd really prefer our applicants not to emulate (please: don't set yourself on fire or conquer any bastions of civilization ushering in centuries of dark ages tomorrow, anyone). Others would not be bad examples to follow (if you want to discover an ancient Aztec stone or fly a plane you invented, go ahead). 

Do any of these things have anything to do with why we're going live on 12/17 at 12:17? No.

What they have to with is this: history is awesome. 

Emily Sheldon, who coordinates transfer admissions for our office, will be emailing all applicants with their decisions, so you should expect to hear from her directly.

During this transfer admissions cycle we had ~50 applicants. While the selection process has not completed, we anticipate admitting a small number of highly qualified applicants at a rate characteristic of our extremely selective process.

Transfer students are some of the very best MIT has to offer. I highly recommend reading the profile of transfer student Ian McKay featured on the MIT homepage today. It's pretty wild stuff.

Good luck to all of our transfer applicants! 

What I got was war. 

And finally, outside the President's office, a portrait:

With a note: 

"President Hockfield,

We have waged infinite battles against our ruthless enemy known as term. But rest assured, victory is at hand. We will fight to brighten up MIT.

Please accept this portrait made from the sacrifices of my soldiers to brighten your day. May you win your battles just as we prepare to defeat our finals once again in this infinite war.

General Jack Florey" 

To check you decision on the 17th, visit decisions.mit.edu and login with your MyMIT username and password. As soon as you log in, you will receive your decision, so make sure you are ready! 

In order to verify that you will receive a decision on the 17th, you may visit decisions.mit.edu now and log in with your MyMIT username and password. I recommend you do this now. Strange things happen to people who don't verify they will receive their decision! 

If you've forgotten your MyMIT password, you may use our automated system to reset it. Simply visit MyMIT and click on the lost password link. There is a similar link for forgotten usernames. If you're having trouble using our automated username/password recovery process, please email mymitpassword [at] mit [dot] edu with your full name and mailing address. But please, be nice to our office, and don't email that link unless you've tried everything else! 

Admissions decisions will be available exclusively online. Decisions will not be released via email, snail mail, carrier pigeon, carrier dragon, or intergalactic radio broadcast:

However, following the release of admissions decisions, we will be mailing admitted students additional, cylindrical information. 

Good luck and sit tight! 

Anyway, a few weeks ago Professor Uricchio told us we would be having a guest lecture on fan studies. And who should walk in to deliver the lecture but Flourish Klink.

Now, Flourish - as you will soon learn - is known around campus as a CMS alumna, MIT lecturer, and cofounder of what might be thought of as a fandom consulting company.

I know Flourish, however, because a little over a decade ago, in junior high, we were members of the same Harry Potter Yahoo! Group fan club, and helped her and others cofound what was, for a time, the largest Harry Potter fanfiction community on the Internet, the now-mostly-defunct FictionAlley.org (though thankfully Schnoogle is still up).

So everyone in the room is going around introducing themselves with their names and their fancy-sounding graduate research projects pitches. And then it comes to me, and I raise my hand, wave, and say:

"Hey Flourish! I'm Chris. I work over in admissions. A decade ago we worked on FictionAlley together. I was in the group that fled FanFiction.net in the Great Exodus, and was a bit character in the exodus' autobiographic opus as 'Chris the House Elf.' 'Sup."

Everyone else just looked really confused but Flourish's jaw dropped to the table. After a few seconds of shocked silence she raised her hands in the air (rushing past her turquoise hair) as she excitedly announced:

"Ooh!! Ooh!! It's like the Internet has come to visit me!"

Which might be my alltime favorite way to have been greeted by anyone ever.

Anyway, after class, I asked Flourish if I could interview her for the blogs. While Flourish did not go to MIT as an undergraduate, she did come here for grad school, and now she teaches undergrads at MIT. I thought it would be really cool to ask someone who managed to turn her love of Harry Potter (and other things) into a career how she did what she did, and what advice she might have for other people who might want to do the same.

Who are you exactly?

I'm Flourish Klink. I'm a lecturer at MIT, and I'm the Chief Participation Officer for the Alchemists Transmedia Storytelling Co. I'm also a longtime Harry Potter fan, and the lead organizer for Ascendio 2012, a Harry Potter fan convention to be held in Florida in June.

What do you do at MIT?

Like I said above, I'm a lecturer -- in the Comparative Media Studies department. That is, I teach classes like Introduction to Media Studies, Fans & Fan Culture, and Transmedia Storytelling.

How did you find MIT?

When did you figure out you could be a fan for a living?

These two questions are deeply intertwined! When I was a teenager, I was contacted by Henry Jenkins, who at the time was a professor at MIT. He wanted to interview me for his book Convergence Culture. That was the first time I ever thought of MIT as someplace other than just an engineering school. But as an undergrad, MIT wasn't for me -- my childhood best friend went off to MIT, but I decided I'd rather go to a small school. So I went to Reed College, where I definitely got a very traditional liberal arts education! There, even though I knew I could be a "fan for a living" by studying fans in academia, I thought that fandom was still too "unserious" for me. I toyed with being a Classics major and eventually ended up majoring in Religion. But even while I was studying Catholicism, I realized that the things that appealed most to me about Classics and Religion were the aspects of them that connected up with fandom! So I applied to grad school at MIT, to be Henry's student in the Comparative Media Studies program. And that's all she wrote!

If you could bring any Harry Potter character to life and be friends with them, who would it be and why?

I think a lot of my friends think it would be Hermione, but actually, no -- I think she'd be very irritating and I'd want to meddle in her life and tell her that Ron's just not good enough for her! I'd rather be friends with Tonks. She seems like so much fun. Plus, we could have contrasting hair colors!

How is MIT similar to and different from Hogwarts?

Let's see. Like Hogwarts, MIT has miles and miles of twisty little passages that often seem like they lead different places on different days of the week! Also like Hogwarts, students actually get to do practical work with potentially dangerous substances, which sometimes looks like magic ("Any technology sufficiently advanced..."). There's also a bit of healthy rivalry between different dorms, like between the Houses at Hogwarts -- I knew that I had started to fit in at MIT when one of my students told me that my bright teal hair was "so east campus." Unlike Hogwarts, though, MIT is completely full of students who are top notch at what they do. There is no Crabbe & Goyle at MIT. That can be really hard to realize for some students who have come from a high school where they were always A1 -- you can be a supergenius and still be at the bottom of your class at MIT. It happens! But you shouldn't let it freak you out: you will be just fine.

What is your favorite part about MIT?

Roof & tunnel hacking! I love exploring the strange places on campus, and it's the one reason I wish I had done my undergrad here (even though really I know it was a good choice for me, personally, to go to Reed). Since I'm a lecturer now, I can't really be a hacker -- I can only admire what my students do.

What is something you always hope you keep "doing", in your jobs and/or in your life?

Being honest with myself and others. One of the great things about academia is that you are removed from some of the constraints which can make it hard to speak your mind. I'm pretty devoted to being part of the commercial sector as well, advising the entertainment industry on fan culture and so on, but I never want to be in a situation where I'm twisting the truth or fudging data to 'make a sale,' as it were. MIT is a great place to have that kind of intellectual freedom, and being here has helped me understand how much I value that.

The rituals of No-Shave-November, as practiced by natives of New Hampshire, are sacred, but simple: 

• shave on October 31st 
• do not shave again until December 1st
• see what happens

Please note that No-Shave-November is similar to, but distinct from, Movember, an Australian variant of the practice that focuses exclusively on the area of the face located below the nose and above the upper lip. As I often told my college roommate, who was from Adelaide: nice try. As a cosmopolitan, sophisticated friend of the world, I welcome their naive, childlike interest; as a High Priest of the Temple Of The Novembeard, I must denounce their heresy. Like putting beets on burgers, this is simply a case in which Australia got it backwards (or perhaps upside down). 

Anyway: 

My Novembeard is now 20 days old, and I am happy to share my current advanced state of cultural observance with you: 

Now, you may say, "but Chris, that's hardly a beard at all!! It looks like a very flat baby sloth is hugging the underside of your chin." Of course, you saying that would but betray your understandable, adorable, but nevertheless lamentable, understanding of proper production of a Novembeard. 

For example: 

It is true that my beard appears to be growing only my neck, like a dank bread mold on the underside of a loaf hidden at the back of the supermarket shelf. This is, however, a cultivation (and not just in the bacterial sense). You see, though it is impossible to see in this photo, I actually do have hair on my face, and beneath my nose. It's just blond, even blonder than the hair on my head. I do not know why this happens, but my going theory is that when those brave pioneers of hair peek cross the boundary of my jawbone onto the vast plain of my face, they become struck, instantly, by its almost insurpassable beauty. Most are not brave enough to venture forth, and those that do are struck, like a young child who has seen a ghost, white with shock at how good looking the ground from which they sprout is. I am like a great lion, tawny and magnificent in my visage, king of all I survey.

 Additionally, this beard serves an inspirational, aspirational goal for others. Consider star Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck: 

This is unquestionably a tribute to me, personally, and to the leadership I have shown in the realm of proper beards. It is indeed through my pioneering work in the field that  Andrew Luck has become the most highly acclaimed college quarterback since Peyton Manning. While I have done so much for Andrew, I ask almost nothing in return. What's that, Andrew? You'd like to give me your signing bonus after holding out until the Patriots draft you to eventually replace Tom Brady in five years when he goes off to retire with Giselle? Why I couldn't possibly...well if you insist... 

Where was I. Ah yes, Novembeard. 

Though Ben and Stu once grew beards throughout a reading season, I am, to my knowledge, the only native Novembearder the office has had. You might ask - what do my fellow admissions officers think of my Novembeard? I am sadly unable to know. Few address it, or indeed are able to bring themselves to even gaze upon its magnificence. Just the other day, Mikey became physically ill after I asked him to take a closer look. Like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, a heathen like he could not bear my beauty. 

A Novembeard can, in this way, be a burden, as few around you are of such refined intelligence and aesthetics to appreciate it. Indeed, the life of a monk in the Church of the Novembeard is a lonely, unshaven one, but it is beautiful and transcendent too. It allows you to ask important questions, like "Who am I? Why am I here? When will my neck stop itching?"

With ten days to go in my annual observance, I am glad to have brought some of my culture to yours. As we say in New Hampshire: "ahhh shaaw", and go in peace. 

If you did not receive an email: your application is almost certainly complete. I say "almost certainly" because there are still some students whose November SAT scores have not yet arrived, because the College Board has not yet released them. If you ordered a score report from the College Board to go directly to MIT, we will receive them in time for consideration. 

If you did receive an email: it contained information on what we required from you.  

The most important rule of having a application missing component is this: don't panic! We do not consider applications until and unless we have sufficient information upon which to render a decision. Calmly walk into school tomorrow and ask your teacher or guidance counselor to fax the document to us. The fax number you should use is included in the email. We will receive it and process it postehaste. 

Our documents team has worked incredibly hard this year to process a record number of documents in record time. As a result, we are already having a great reading season. I myself have thus far read well over 100 applications, and they have all been astonishingly excellent. I know it will be an especially difficult committee this year, which is always a mixed bag: it makes our decisions especially tough, because it means that our applicants are especially awesome. 

Thank you for being awesome. Full speed ahead! 

edit: some of you appear to have had multiple copies of the email sent from McGreggor. It appears some of the MIT mail servers love you so much they couldn't bear to send you a single  email. Apologies for the duplication!  

What does this have to do with MIT Admissions? Nothing really. Then again, neither did 50 Things, at least strictly speaking. I just enjoyed reading about the perspective of an 86 year old veteran and videogamer on life in a rage comic. Maybe you will too. And if so, you can join me in a virtual toast to 1925gamer; may he, and Mrs. 1925gamer, live long and headshot n00bs for many years to come. 

Love you, Papa.

Many people have today off for school or work in honor of Veteran's Day, including at MIT. However, I'll be spending today doing what I'll be doing for the next several months, which is reading all of your applications. Because I'll be buried with that, I won't be posting quite so much. But I did want to take a moment to talk about where we've all been, where we all are, and where we are going.

Over the past month I've tried to unpack for you some of our operating ideas about holistic admissions and diversity and merit. I've discussed data and how to understand its validity. All of these posts have been attempts to shine some light on what is too often a dimly understood process and, to the extent possible, explain how and why we do the work we do.

But now our Early Action applicants have all applied, and our Regular Action applicants are about to. So what do we do next?

Once your applications are complete and all material received, your application goes to a senior admissions officer, someone with extensive experience and knowledge, who will evaluate your application in its proper context. Strong applications will then be sent to additional admissions "readers" (like me) who will really dig deeply into the application and prepare a summary - almost like a legal brief - for the committee.

These briefs, along with your entire application, will then be presented to the selection commitee. Multiple rounds of these committees then whittle the class down into its final shape. By the time an applicant is admitted, easily more than a dozen people will have debated and discussed their application. The effect is that, just like our government has a system of "checks and balances", so does our admissions committee. The process is long and arduous. It's lots of nights and weekends of work. But at the end, the final class will be a product of all of these different levels of committee and expertise all agreeing that each admitted student is an indispensable member of the class.

That's what I'll be doing from now until April.

But what will you be doing?

Sometimes I get worried calls or emails from students (or their parents) during senior year, asking what they (or their child) should be "doing" as the college application process plays out.

The first answer, of course, is to keep on keeping on. Keep doing well in classes, keep making your teachers love you, keep inventing and creating, keep writing, and doing all the of the things that you love to do. You don't need to "do" anything beyond that.

But also remember to make - or keep - time for yourself and your friends. Senior year goes by really quickly. In a few short months, you will be graduating, and soon after that you will be leaving your friends and family for the next phase of your life. This is not a reason to be sad. It is a reason to be glad. You have the opportunity to go out and get a college education at a school of your choosing. That's amazing.

But please, don't get caught in the rat race of doing things just to do them, or to further burnish your resume, or because you think it "looks good." This is not the time for that. Maintain, yes. But take the time to make those memories that you will have for the rest of your life. Most of you will have spent most of your lives in your current communities. A lot of people have helped you become as awesome as you are. Thank them. Appreciate them. And enjoy yourself.

Be in touch.

See, the weird thing about the Patriots this year (and the last few years) is that the team has been consistently inconsistent on both sides of the ball. Earlier this season, when the Patriots offense was setting records for scoring, the defense was setting records for being scored on; the Patriots barely squeaked out with shootouts in games they should have won handily.

Then, last night, the defense stepped up and held off the Giants for a scoreless first half...but the Pats offense itself was held scoreless as well. Through the second half, the Patriots would make a stop, and then have to punt; then, they would score, and immediately give up a score themselves.

That's when I realized that the 2011 New England Patriots could be roughly modeled using the following equation:

k = (o)(d) +/- (r)(s)

where:

• k = a constant value of the team's actualized potential to be good
• o = the offense
• d = the defense
• r = a coefficient of random chance
• s = special teams

Thus, how good the Patriots are is distributed proportionally across the offense and the defense, plus or minus the dice roll of Julian Edelman doing something awesome or horrific on any given play (it's a loaded die) (and it's loaded on "horrific").

There are obviously a few more complexities here. For example, the degree to which other teams match up against any given manifestation of k depends on the opponent and the game. And this model, like any model, is a simplification: it doesn't truly describe the ability of, say, Kyle Arrington to make a terrific pick on one set of downs before failing miserably on the next, though of course such variations are themselves merely another iteration of k.

Readers of this blog - MIT applicants and students - may be able to help me further refine this model to account for additional complexities, such as the chance of Vince Wilfork catching an interception because he sees the football and reflexively thinks it is a Christmas ham, or the chance that Tom Brady sees his own reflection in the shine of an oncoming linebacker's helmet and gets so distracted by how handsome he is that he forgets to dodge the sack. 

However, one thing is true:

The constant value of k, no matter how it is composed at any given period of time, is almost certainly insufficient to beat a good team in the National Football League.

Ugh.

This is a common misconception. For what all of these millions of people across the continents are actually celebrating is not an event which grew out of the ancient battles for Anglicanism, but rather an even more historically significant and culturally stupendous event: my birthday.

Today, I turned 25. It's an interstitial age. I'm halfway to what is called "middle age", and am a third of the way along a reasonably optimistic life expectancy. I'm out of college myself, but people I went to school with are still in college, or, blinded by the bright lights of the Beyond, have reëntered as grad students.

At work the interstitial space feels even more defined. Almost all my colleagues are older than me - I love to "accidentally" remind Stu that he graduated from MIT the year I was born - and I'm still one of the "young guys" at the office. But yet the undergraduates whom I advise, and who work for me, think of me as being almost impossibly old, even though, had I attended MIT, it would have been contemporaneous with Chris, Rachel, and other 2012 bloggers.

But rather than mourn my generational unmooring, I've decided to always look on the bright side of life. Being both an old person and a young person, it stands to reason, must magically confer unto me the insight of both. I'm clearly twice as wise, or at least wise twice. I am confident this is how wisdom works.

So with that established, here at 25 things I've learned in my 25 years: 

1. People are basically good. If someone does something that seems rude or mean, even if there is not an excuse there is almost always an explanation. Knowing and understanding this can be much less satisfying, but much more fulfilling, than responding in kind. 
2. Sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, but only if you are really, really sure you'll get - and deserve - the forgiveness. 
3. Always wash your hands. No exceptions. 
4. No amount of money, fame, or fortune is worth good health and general security, nor, past a certain point, can it procure it. 
5. You can buy fancy clothes and blue steel at the mirror in the department store all you want. But if you're naturally slackjawed like a morose cow and your posture looks like someone hit a chrome penguin with a shovel then they are not going to help. (Still working on this one). 
6. Pizza is properly eaten by folding it in two along its symmetrical axis and munching on it like a burrito. If you are not eating pizza this way then you are doing it wrong, or you are eating deep dish, which is a different way of doing it wrong. Sorry Chicago. 
7. You can confide in other people, and other people may confide in you. But don't confide in other people what other people confided in you. That's not confidence. That's gossip. 
8. One of the most satisfying feelings in the world is being a regular somewhere. It doesn't matter if it's a deli, or a barber, or a bike shop. But few simple things can make you feel so at home as walking up to a lunch counter and found that someone is already making the sandwich you were going to order. 
9. Games, movies, books, sports, and soap operas are all the same. They aren't done for their own sake. They are done with other people so that you can relate to them, talk with them, share with them something: a goal, a history, a narrative, or an experience. Don't miss this. 
10. Sometimes something hasn't been tried because it's a bad idea. Sometimes something hasn't been tried because it's a good idea but no one knows it yet. The important thing is to know how to recognize the difference. 
11. You can pick your friends. And you can pick your nose. But you can't pick your friend's nose. Because then they won't be your friend anymore. Then whose nose will you pick? I thought so. See, you have to think about these things ahead of time. 
12. Most of the most important things in your life will be determined by complete serendipity. You can't plan it. You can only prepare for it. Learn to improv. 
13. Sometimes really, really awesome people have never been told that they are awesome. Change that. 
14. Don't aspire to be things. Aspire to do things. Saying "I want to be this" is too limiting. Figure out the skills and interactions you enjoy (interpersonal contact, or high pressure, or working with your hands) and then find out what occupations, vocations, or diversions incorporate those skills. You may be surprised by the things you like to do, and the things you end up being. 
15. There is nothing sufficiently shameful about Spaghettios to make them not worth eating on a Saturday afternoon in your pajamas. 
16. Don't be afraid when you love someone. It is awesome. Yes, sometimes it will really hurt. Non, je ne regrette rien. 
17. A lot of people leave jobs, situations, or significant others they love so they can attain the fame or fortune to allow them them get a job, situation, or significant other they love. That's kind of backwards. Sometimes you need to go backwards. Sometimes it's ambition confusing ends for means. Learn the difference and you'll be much happier.
18. Don't call in to sports talk radio. No one benefits. Ever.
19. Never, ever underestimate how vastly different other experiences in other parts of the world are. Travel sometime. It will make everything make so much more sense.
20. A corollary: never, ever understimate how vastly different someone else's experience or perspective is. No one thinks like you do except for you. 
21. There is never a wrong time for hamburgers. 
22. Don't be afraid of coaching. You may be very good at what you do, but almost always someone can help you learn to be a little bit better. Even if they are outside your field. You just have to be able to recognize insights and transfer them appropriately. 
23. Structure unstructured time into your day. It is OK to do nothing in particular for awhile. If you don't occasionally shut off your brain it will burn out like a bulb. 
24. A proper sandwich is the highest form of civilization to which humanity can aspire. 
25. The most important thing you can do is find a community - a job, a school, a club, a town - where you feel a deep, profound sense of belonging. Home is where the heart is: if you have a big home, you'll have a big heart. 

So basically, it's a perfect setup for the Illusion of Validity

Why is MIT's admissions process better than random? Say you weeded out the un-qualified (the fewer-than-half of applicants insufficiently prepared to do the work at MIT) and then threw dice to stochastically select among the remaining candidates. Would this produce a lesser class?

The link in mihcal1's post takes you to an article from New York Times magazine by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman is a pioneer of behavioral economics and the psychology of decision making. He is one of my favorite social scientists, and his work laid the foundation for much of the social science research I love best. 

In his article, Kahneman describes his time working as a psychologist for the Israeli Army. They were tasked, among other things, with putting officer candidates through a series of challenges (an application, as it were) to test their leadership potential. They would watch the candidates as they completed challenges, and then they would predict how well they would succeed at officer candidate school.

According to Kahneman:

...as it turned out, despite our certainty about the potential of individual candidates, our forecasts were largely useless. The evidence was overwhelming. Every few months we had a feedback session in which we could compare our evaluations of future cadets with the judgments of their commanders at the officer-training school. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. Our forecasts were better than blind guesses, but not by much.

...

I thought that what was happening to us was remarkable. The statistical evidence of our failure should have shaken our confidence in our judgments of particular candidates, but it did not. It should also have caused us to moderate our predictions, but it did not. We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses, but we continued to feel and act as if each particular prediction was valid. I was reminded of visual illusions, which remain compelling even when you know that what you see is false. I was so struck by the analogy that I coined a term for our experience: the illusion of validity.

Why, asked mihcal1, were we, as admissions officers, so sure that we were right in our decisions? What made us think our decisions would be better than random guesses? And how can we know?

This is a very good question to ask, and a very difficult one to answer.

Part of the reason it is so difficult to answer is because of the problems I discussed in the last post, which is basically: well, what makes our decisions "better"? How do we know if one applicant is "better" than the other? What does "better" even mean? We could cherrypick any number of metrics that would make the case in our favor. For example, over the last decade or so, our average applicant SAT score has gone up, and our average rate of admission has gone down. You might intepret this to say that we are admitting smarter students, and that we are doing a good job of recruiting applications too, so hey, we're all going a pretty good job!

Of course, I think those are terrible metrics by which to measure an applicant or an admissions process. What matters isn't raw SAT score, or how many people we can convince to apply. What matters is making sure that we bring smart students who feel at home here. Who love the community they are in. Who believe in the things that we do here at MIT and who will go out and change the world to be a better place. 

As it turns out those things are much, much harder to measure.

Does this mean that our process is no better than random? That all we are doing is admissions shamanism, voodooing behind closed doors of admissions committee before coming out into the light and announcing the signs we've read in the application's entrails? 

I don't think so, for a few different reasons. 

One reason is to remember a fundamental limitation of social science, which is that it is situation dependent, and thus it is most usefully and reliably deployed for falsifying specific hypotheses rather than drawing conclusions across contexts.

For example, Kahneman cites research into decades of data which demonstrate that most stock pickers and fund managers basically do no better than random guessing would predict. This sort of question is right in the social science wheelhouse. Hypothesis: variance in skill explains differences in performance between investment managers. Test: do stock pickers routinely perform better than random chance would predict? Result: mostly, no. Hypothesis false, or at least seriously weakened.

But it's not clear that an admissions process is anything like picking stocks, so it's also not clear that the same phenomena can be generalized to the work we do. Trying to carry such a slippery situational insight across different contexts is an intellectually dubious exercise.

Another problem with the Army example I alluded to earlier: what's to say that the psychologists weren't "better" at picking officers than their future commanders? What does "better" in this context even mean? Without measuring the judgments of the commanders, how could we know? And how would we measure it? 

Clearly Kahneman thinks that some people (Israeli Armi commanders) are better at picking some things (future officers) than other people (inexperienced psychologists). And this assumption actually reveals a pretty interesting premise: that there are some real experts. So let's approach this from another angle: what conditions, according to Kahneman, might make you think that an expert is actually an expert? That a professional is actually good at their job, and not merely reproducing the random and taking credit for it?

Quoth Kahneman:

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes. You are probably an expert in guessing your spouse’s mood from one word on the telephone; chess players find a strong move in a single glance at a complex position; and true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians. To know whether you can trust a particular intuitive judgment, there are two questions you should ask: Is the environment in which the judgment is made sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence? The answer is yes for diagnosticians, no for stock pickers. Do the professionals have an adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities? The answer here depends on the professionals’ experience and on the quality and speed with which they discover their mistakes...Many of the professionals we encounter easily pass both tests, and their off-the-cuff judgments deserve to be taken seriously.

In other words, if you have a lot of experience, and if you have good, quick feedback on mistakes, then your intuition is likely to be better than random chance. 

This, I think, characterizes our admissions office. In any given admissions committee, decades and decades of admissions experience are directed towards examining a single applicant and all of the information - essays, interviews, letters of recommendation, awards from external experts - we have about them. In fact, I laughed a little at Kahneman's reference to "true legends of instant diagnoses are common among physicians", because McGreggor Crowley, who directs our admissions process, is a physician, and if there is anybody who is legendary for his ability to "diagnose" an applicant, it's him.

And we have good, rapid feedback too. We meet most students we admit soon after at CPW. We then spend four (or more) years living with them. They work in our offices. We advise them academically. We become friends as the years go on. So we don't just have feedback on our decisions. We quite literally live with them. 

Finally, there is the point that David made in his last blog post, which is essentially that there are many types of admissions processes, and that it doesn't matter whether they are "fair" as much as it matters that they "work", which is to say that they produce the sort of community that you aspire to be a part of.

I think there is a lot of truth in that. Fundamentally an admissions process is measured not by what it is but by what it does, which is of course to constitute a community. That doesn't mean we aren't reflective or analytical about the way we do things: in fact, we employ two terrific statisticians within our office alone specifically to run the data and tell us how to do things better!

But it does mean that the only real standard which matters is whether the students, the faculty, and the rest of the world think that MIT students are awesome people who do awesome things, and that our students feel at home here. By this standard, I think our process does a very, very good job.

And that, my friends, is no illusion.

As you may have heard the northeastern United States was hit by a devastating snowstorm this past weekend. The storm, which featured winds and pressures (975 mb) characteristic of a Category 2 hurricane, dumped heavy, wet snow across the region, exceeding two feet in areas of Western Massachusetts. This kind of snow, which is unusually dense, can exceed 10 pounds per square foot in weight. And because of a mild fall, many leaves are still on their trees, increasing the surface area vulnerable to the storm. Heavy snow, catching on leafy trees, freezing to them, and then being subjected to 50+ MPH winds is the landlocked equivalent of the perfect storm which occurred almost exactly twenty years ago. 

The results have been disastrous. More than three million people lost power by the peak of the storm. Because of comprehensive damage to all levels of the infrastructure, approximately 70% of Connecticut remains entirely without power, as well as approximately 50% of Western Massachusetts, along with wide swaths of Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Maine, and other areas in the region. This storm has caused more damage to the electrical and telecommunications infrastructure than any other in history. In most of these places the power will not be restored for several days; in the worst, a week or more. And the Internet will likely lag behind it. 

While snow, in moderation, is a cause for celebration, in excess it can be catastrophic. Millions of people are without heat, light, or the ability to cook food, boil water, and generally care for themselves at this time. And our best thoughts and wishes are with them.

A much less severe, but nonetheless important, implication of this widespread loss of power is that many prospective students to MIT who were affected by the storm will be unable to meet tomorrow's Early Action deadline for application to MIT. That is OK. There are more important things to worry about, like heat and light, than this.

However, as a result, we are extending our application deadline for for students affected by the storm, i.e. lost power / Internet for 24 hours or more. The new deadline for those students is November 6th, 2011, at 11:59 PM. For all other students, we will still require you to submit the application by the old deadline, which is tomorrow.

Some students have called in to ask about the essay questions, because they haven't been able to work on them with the power out. While I can't restore whatever drafts you may have saved to you, here are the essay questions we ask with this year's application, so that, if nothing else, you may work on them with pencil and paper:

• We know you lead a busy life, full of activities, many of which are required of you. Tell us about something you do for the pleasure of it. (100 words or fewer)
• Although you may not yet know what you want to major in, which department or program at MIT appeals to you and why? (100 words or fewer)
• What attribute of your personality are you most proud of, and how has it impacted your life so far? This could be your creativity, effective leadership, sense of humor, integrity, or anything else you'd like to tell us about. (200-250 words)
• Describe the world you come from; for example, your family, clubs, school, community, city, or town. How has that world shaped your dreams and aspirations. (200-250 words)
• Tell us about the most significant challenge you've faced or something important that didn't go according to plan. How did you manage the situation? (200-250 words)

If you are going to be without power for an extended period of time - beyond the November 6th deadline - I advise you to fill out your application at school. And obviously, anyone without power now will not be able to read this blog post, so I would ask those who can - friends, teachers, guidance counselors, etc - to please forward it on to them and spread the word so that they know.

I would also take this opportunity to reiterate that there is no difference in our application process between Early and Regular Action besides the date by which you must apply. We do not have preferences or different admission rates for students in different cycles. So if you were planning on applying Early Action, but need to dig your house out from under the snow, you may do so with the knowledge that it will not disadvantage your application.

Thank you, everyone, and please, stay safe.

MIT should release the full set of admissions data stripped of personally identifying information and let the community analyze it, because in the scientific community we trust data and analysis, not assertions.

So let's discuss admissions data.

First, I'd like to say that I'm a huge fan of statistics. I read 538 and Football Outsiders every day. When it comes to baseball I'm a converted sabremetrician. In the natural world, I believe in the scientific method, which is to say I believe in data-driven analyses of phenomena, empirical evidence, and testable hypothesis as the best, and sometimes only, route to understanding most things which occur in our universe.

But there is a problem with social science, and that problem is this: sometimes, you don't have all of the data, either because it is unavailable to you, or because something can't be captured. And then, if you try to build a model based on these incomplete data, you are liable to draw conclusions consistent with the data but descriptively incorrect. 

At its most basic form, it's a variant of post hoc ergo propter hoc - "after this, therefore because of this." The rooster crows, then the sun rises; all hail the befeathered Sun King! In more complex forms, it's a very subtle misattribution of traits based on the ontologies used to characterize them, which begets an epistomelogical crisis: what do we measure and how do we measure it? Is the trait thus measured determinative or merely descriptive? And so forth. 

But let's back away from the analytical theory for a moment and ground what I'm saying in some concrete examples.

Here's another comment from my diversity vs merit post about SAT scores:

This pretty much sums it up:

SAT Math
750-800 15%
700-740 10%
650-690 5%

From what you wrote you'd think being in the 700-740 range and being in the 750-800 range doesn't have much impact on your chance of admission, but there's a 50% difference.

Now, I and others are on the record as saying that we admit people, not test scores, and that in any case there is really not a difference in our process between someone who scores, say, a 740 on the SAT math, and someone who scores an 800 on the SAT math. So why, as the commentor asks, is there such a difference in the admit rate? Aha! Clearly we DO prefer higher SAT scores!

Well no, we don't. What we prefer are things which may coincide with higher SAT scores. For example, a student who receives a gold medal at the IMO is probably more likely to score an 800 on the math SAT than a 740. But if we take an IMO medalist (with an 800) over random applicant X (with a 740), does that mean we preferred an 800 to a 740? No. It means we preferred the IMO medalist, who also happened to get an 800!

The same goes for people who are highly ranked in their graduating class. Almost half of the class of 2015 were valedictorians of their high school. Aha! MIT must highly value class rank in our application! No, we don't. Then why does this happen? Because we do highly value certain academic accomplishments, and if you are doing well enough academically to achieve these things, then you are probably doing pretty well in high school. Additionally, we highly value strong letters of recommendation, and often teachers strongly support students who really blow them away academically.  

So we select for these other traits and end up, as a side effect, with a disproportionate number of valedictorians. But it's not because they're valedictorians that we select them, but rather that because of the things for which we select they are valedictorians. Or, to paraphrase a line from Llewellyn: being a valedictorian isn't the reason for the decision; it's the result of factors which were reason for the decision. 

You see what happens here. It's correlation misdiagnosed as causation, and then interpreted through a particular narrative frame to conform (and confirm) to prior expectations. This happens all the time in shoddy social science. And it inevitably occurs with whatever data we do release. If we released admit rate by state, it would be: The admit rate for students from Wisconsin went up 2%, MIT must really want applicants from Wisconsin! When the reality would be much closer to: we took whom we wanted to take, and they were from Wisconsin. Was Wisconsin considered in a complex ecology of decisionmaking? To some degree, yes; that's what we mean when we say we "read everything" and have a contextual, holistic process. But was it a determinative characteristic, one which could be separated out as a causal agent? Could Wisconsin be assigned a standard weight in a model of our decision process? Absolutely not. 

What's happening here is a fundamental confusion between our admissions process and the results of that process. When we say that the admit rate for students with a 750-800 was 15%, it does not mean that the chances of a given applicant who scores between 750-800 if 15%. It means that those students whom we chose to admit included 15% of those who scored within the 750-800 range. It's a subtle distinction, but an important one in understanding the agency of admissions. 

Think of it as the difference between a living thing and its fossil. A fossil isn't the plant or animal itself: it's the mineral imprint of the stuff that's left behind. Or think of it like a shadow. A shadow is not the thing which casts a shadow. It's the contours of where the light isn't.

That's how our admissions data work. It shows you where the decision wasn't. It shows you the shape of our decisions, not the basis on which they were made. Admissions data are an accretion of the the sediment which dropped to the bottom of the decisions delta, and not the moving river where the actual action happened.

But Jurassic Park was a work of fiction, and just like you can't reanimate a velociraptor from its fossil, you can't understand the life of an applicant from the shadow of their data. This is why I hate "chance" threads so much. When an applicant says "I have X SAT score and Y GPA, what are my chances to get into MIT" it's not a question I or anyone else can answer. Because, within certain bounds of sufficient academic preparation, the decision isn't made on these easily extracted and quantified points of data. The decision is about everything else.

The response to this, of course, is "well, so release the data on everything else!" To which I ask: how? How can we meaningfully quantify how much a teacher supports a student? How can we meaningfully quantify that particularly poignant essay which shows a student's resolve, or that particularly funny essay that makes us love their personality? Even if we did construct, ex nihilo, categorical cubbies to shove these interactions and experiences into, isn't that the same subjectivity wearing an objective mask? I don't think that "Rate this applicant's leadership from 1 to 5" is a particularly objective exercise just because we slapped a number in it. Trying to convert inherently subjective interpretations to objective quantities is like wearing fashionable glasses of an incorrect prescription: it may look hip, but all it ultimately does is cloud your vision.

I understand that for the initial commentor and others this may be an unsatisfying explanation. MIT is a community which loves data, where people believe data can do anything, and where any explanation which undercuts the utility of data seems suspiciously unscientific.

But Clay Shirky once gave a talk about how memes - jokes, YouTube videos, lolcats, whatever - spread through the Internet, and he said something to the effect that the physics of memes were more like the physics of weather than the physics of a falling object. We understand how things fall pretty well, and we can be pretty accurate in our understanding of when and where and how fast it will drop. But even though we have reams and reams of data about the weather, because of its utter complexity the best way to characterize what will happen the next day is often no better than "partially cloudy with a chance of rain."

Well, the physics of holistic admissions are akin to Shirky's idea of "social weather." Based on easily apprehendable information, you might know roughly what the temperature (of an applicant) will be, and hazard a guess as to whether it will rain. But until all of the ingredients mix together in our admissions committees, like a storm forming over the gulf, you don't know upon whom a ray of sun will break through the clouds until it actually, finally happens. 

One of the most important things about college is its role as a socializing institution. College is a place where you meet all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds and you learn from each other. It is, properly constituted, an environment which fosters intellectual, ideological, and social cross-pollination. You need diversity - broadly defined - for college to matter.

I hope that this quote is somewhat self-evident. When I said college was a "socializing institution", I didn't mean that it's a place to idly chat with people (although it is that). I mean it is an environment within which one undergoes socialization. And so we have to take a great deal of care in constituting the class, because whom it is composed of will greatly affect your experience within it. 

This leads me to another point I'd like to discuss, which is the importance of the idea of "holistic admissions." We have a holistic admissions process here at MIT, and we talk about it a lot. But what does it mean? Why do we have it? And what does it do for our class? 

When we say that we have a holistic admissions process it essentially means that our admissions process takes into account many different factors, and that we understand that it is the interaction of these myriad factors which constitutes the applicant. We deploy "holistic" to differentiate against admissions systems which only consider so-called "objective academic data" (and I am air-quoting so hard I might sprain a knuckle) in their admissions process.

Sometimes, holistic academic processes are criticized as being misguided. "Academic merit", it is suggested, should be the sole dispositive factor controlling the admissions process.

Suppose, for a moment, we didn't have a holistic process. Suppose that we wanted to build an application system around "merit", defined, as it always seems to be, by test scores and grades. (I'd certainly contest this definition, but will concede it here for the sake of argument).

We could build a working admissions system around this premise. A very simple version might look something like this: create an index by multiplying SAT score and GPA. Rank-order the list by the highest product of the two, admit the top 1,000 students automatically and deny the rest.

Would this really be a better admissions process? Well, I guess I could go home pretty early to get a full night's rest after turning on the Admissions Machine the day after applications are due. Then again, I'd probably not sleep very well if this is all I did. And the students we admitted wouldn't feel as home here. Because what we try to do is build a community, and an admissions machine cannot produce a community. It can only produce a bunch of test scores and GPAs crammed into classrooms.

Even worse, such a system would produce a very thin slice of the population, because the segment of students perched atop the SATs are a comparatively homogenous bunch. SAT scores are strongly correlated with parent income, and parent income is strongly correlated with their parent's income. Now obviously there are many factors at play here, but the trend is clear: the (multigenerationally) wealthier you are, the higher you score. All of this is to say that, if scores were all we cared about, our campus would be overwhelmingly socioeconomically similar.

That's limiting. It's limiting because of the scope of issues and problems which people have experienced, and it's limiting because of the solutions which are likely to come to the minds of people. In short, it lends itself to group think and experential echo chambers. At that point, it's not a college as a socializing institution: it's a Great Gatsby garden party. 

I think that most people intuitively understand this. I think that most people intuitively agree with the idea that the best function of an admissions office is to constitute a class of sufficiently prepared individuals who have a diversity of skills, experiences, knowledge, background, who can all learn from each other. That there is something important about considering things besides test scores and grades - things like teacher letters, essays, and backgrounds - in a holistic process.

Now, in a holistic - and fundamentally subjective process - not everyone is going to agree with every decision we make. Some people would strike a slightly different balance in terms of class composition. Students who were admitted tend to think the schools that admitted them made the right decision; students who were not admitted quite understandably disagree.

Point is: when people bring up hypothetical comparison cases, saying "well this person got in, and this person didn't, and that's not a good decision", it's really just arguing over the margins. Folks aren't really disagreeing with the overall model of holistic admissions. They just don't like the marginal output that any particular iteration of the process might produce. But they all agree in principle.  Because selective college admissions is about finding the right mix of students who will, as a collective, form the best class that can be admitted to that particular university at that particular time.

In fact, in a certain sense you could say that our job, as an admissions office, is emphatically not to admit the "best students" to MIT, but rather to admit those applicants who will become the best MIT students. We are selecting the right mix of ingredients from which MIT graduates will be produced. This is why, incidentally, David put so much emphasis on making the most of your opportunities. Because we don't care about what you've done so far as much as we care about what you're going to do at MIT. 

As Booker T. Washington wrote: 

"Success is to be measured not so much by the positions that one has reached in life, as by the obstacles one has overcome trying to succeed." 

The idea is best understood with a metaphor drawn from my favorite sport of football:

MIT isn't the end zone.

It's where you get the ball when you start the next drive.