I hope you are still celebrating, but I also want to remind you of a few things to do now as you make your final decision over the coming weeks.

Tune in to the Campus Preview Weekend (CPW) Webcast:   Sunday, March 24 at 2pm EST, admissions counselor Katie Kelley and a current undergraduate student will be on hand for an hour to answer all your CPW questions and give you a preview of all the fun that we’re planning this April. Check your email later this week for the details from us about how to tune in. 

Financial Aid Tracking & Award Letter: Your award letter will be posted in MyMIT on March 18. If you don’t have one yet, you can find out what documents are still required. There is also a link to the contact information for your financial aid counselor. See this guest blog post for more information.

Some other things to look out for in your MY MIT Portal:

• Campus Preview Weekend Registration: Please register for CPW by Thursday, March 28. And don't forget to complete the Medical Release Form!
   
• CPW Fly In: If you're flying in, book your plane tickets early. If your parents are joining you, have them book their hotel early too (today or tomorrow even). We highly recommend hotels that are within walking distance of MIT. Driving and parking in Boston can be super frustrating.
   
• Local Admitted Student Gatherings: Over the next few weeks, MIT alumni across the globe will be hosting gatherings for the Class of 2017. Check the blogs this week for a new post dedicated to these gatherings.
   
• The MIT Reply Form: As soon as you've made up your mind for sure about whether or not to attend MIT, let us know your decision through the online reply form by May 1. You have three choices: tell us you're enrolling this fall ☺, or that you're declining our offer of admission (it's okay, we know you're making the best choice for yourself), you can also request a deferral/gap year(s) before enrolling at MIT.
   
• Overnight Program Registration: If you can't make it for CPW, you can still come visit through our Overnight Program. Please register at least two weeks in advance. 

We had more Early Action applications than ever this year, 6,541 to be exact. Just as in previous years, this was an extremely selective Early Action cycle. Of those 6,541 early applicants, we admitted 650 students. 

These students represent some of the best minds and exceptional stars of our future. We welcome them to campus, where they will join the similarly accomplished, and diverse community of students at MIT. Our Early Action admits come from 48 states and dozens of countries, bringing with them all their talents in music and art, their athletic prowess, their love for the quirky, their various interests in cooking, origami, computer programming, architecture, and all things math and science.

We deferred 4,397 applicants. These students will be considered again in Regular Action. If you are a deferred student and you have questions, see our recent blog post and join the discussion thread.

For all the students who we were not able to offer admission this year, please believe that you are also exceptionally talented, intelligent individuals. The highly selective nature of our process means that we have to turn away many students we would love to take. We wish all of these students the best of luck in the rest of their college admission process.

Again, congratulations to the newest members of the Class of 2017. (Keep checking those mailboxes!) The open blogs will stay open for a bit longer for students to continue with the conversations that have been started since Saturday.

Happy Holidays!
 

I make a big deal over birthdays in my family and celebrations usually last for the entire day and are structured around a central theme, like flight, or pictures, and once even The Sound of Music. (I know, that one is a little out there.) But the point of the theme is to have an organizing principle that helps convey the message you want to get across in a strong and memorable way. And that’s why I am so appreciative of MIT’s theme for the Inauguration of our new President L. Rafael Reif.

One Community: Together in Service.

This theme says a lot about MIT. It says the kind of things about MIT I will be trying to communicate when I travel to Miami next week and talk to students and their families. It says that MIT is community oriented. Truly. The week of symposia that is free and open to the public and organized by many volunteers at MIT, all who hold other fulltime jobs, is testament to that. MIT believes in service; service to the world and service to each other.

During the first Inaugural Symposium Infinite Innovation, one of three this week, I heard from members of our faculty and students who wowed the audience with examples of the work they are doing: Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences,  creating cameras that can see around corners, Robert Langer, David H Koch Institute Professor, using nanotechnology to target a drug right to the cancer cell, and Kim Gordon, student in the Sloan School of Management who is using an algorithm to help people discover art in an online digital repository.

There were so many of these innovative inventions, I could go on and on. But more remarkable to me than the inventions themselves even, were the attitudes of everyone on the stage.

The prevailing feeling at MIT is that for world-changing innovation to take place, you need the right ecosystem. You need a culture where people help each other. You need labs where 50% of the people are engineers and the other 50% are biologists. You need a place where the myth of the lone genius working alone is turned on its head. A place where students learn from failure as well as success, where teamwork is paramount, where the work is hands on and interdisciplinary, and where diversity is celebrated.

I’m not sure who it was that said this, but it was a statement that almost anyone – faculty, student, Provost, President – could have said. It went something like this:

Smart is just the tip of the iceberg when you are trying to describe MIT students.

So how should we describe them?

Students here are engaged problem solvers but mostly they are optimistic; optimistic about learning and about changing the world. Troy Van Voorhis, Associate Professor of Chemistry, who is working on solar energy and who described the problem of solar cells being too heavy for the backs of donkeys in the developing world, said, “The reason I love working at MIT is because the people who can do this kind of work take an idea and make it work in the world. "

Now that’s a theme I can really stand behind.

Many of you may have received a shiny silver packet in the mail recently. This is our official MIT Application Guide to help you when you start to fill out our application. If you haven’t received one, we will be sending out more this month, so check your mailbox.

Once you register on MyMIT, you will be ready to begin the application process and it’s not too early to start. You’ll want to do a few things right away: schedule your interview and give your teachers the personalized teacher recommendation forms.

In your packet, and on your MyMIT site, you will find the contact information for your MIT interviewer, or Educational Counselor (EC). You should contact your EC as soon as you are ready to schedule the interview, but well before the application deadline. Remember, if you are applying for the November 1 Early Action (EA) deadline, you should set up your interview before October 20th. If you are applying for the January 1 Regular Action (RA) deadline, you should set up your interview before December 10th.

From MyMIT, you should print out personalized teacher recommendation forms. Teachers may use their own forms and format, but please include the personalized teacher recommendation form with each recommendation letter.

Also note that MIT is not a member of the Common Application. MIT has its own application, which is only available at MyMIT.

But most importantly, remember to take a deep breath. You have plenty of time to do this and I think you’ll find the process isn’t so bad once you get started. You may even have fun and learn something new about yourself. We’ll be in touch over the coming weeks with more tips and advice.

I’m looking forward to seeing some of you when I’m in Florida later this month and I’m looking forward to reading your applications!

This last one is one of my favorites and I get a number of emails in my inbox from The MIT Food and Agriculture Collaborative (MITFAC).

What’s that, you ask?

MITFAC brings together students – and other MIT community members – to coordinate and support work in the areas of food and agriculture. Members are actively engaged in advocating for and supporting the development of a more sustainable food system on our own campus.

They also work to enhance MIT’s role in contributing to the broader discourse on agricultural sustainability across the global system.

Just the other day through one of my MITFAC emails, I was warmly invited to a free sustainable luncheon in the Flowers Dining Room at Maseeh Hall by the Dining Manager for Baker House and MIT|Bon Appetit Management Company.

The lunch was delicious. 

But the conversation around the table was just as good. A mix of perspectives and backgrounds was represented by those attending--as is the MIT way-- undergrad students, grad students, MIT staff, and research fellows who work with the farm to fork program researching labor practices throughout the entire supply chain. All of us chatted informally with Maisie Greenawalt, Bon Appetit VP of Strategy during the lunch about food industry ethics, sustainability, growers and pickers rights, and of course good food!

Here’s Maisie speaking at TEDx Fruitvale

I learned a lot of great things from attending this lunch, like the fact that MIT has a couple of great courses dedicated to Sustainability in Business and I discovered some great resources for myself, too.

Check out this list of  Questions for Caterers to assess their sustainability that I pulled off of the MITFAC website. 

1) Can you offer a seasonal menu featuring locally grown ingredients? Do you have local suppliers you could source these ingredients from? Which ingredients can you procure locally, and how would you define ‘local’?
2) Can you cater a meal using all or mostly certified organic ingredients? Which ingredients are or are you not able to procure organically? Do you have the means to confirm their certification?
3) Will you prepare all of the items you serve? What will be frozen, and what will be purchased fresh?
4) Are you able to provide dietary information on the menu you serve?
5) Are you able to offer a healthier menu (e.g. lower in calories), either exclusively or as one option for an event?
6) What types of vegetarian and vegan menus can you offer?
7) Are the coffee, bananas, and/or chocolate you offer fair trade certified?
8) Are you able to serve on china and/or offer reusable serving ware? Can you use reusable tablecloths and napkins?
9) Are you able to serve on compostable dinnerware? How about recyclable? Do you provide any materials to assist clients to process their waste properly?
10) Do you pay your employees a living wage?
11) What will it cost to meet the issues we have discussed?
12) Can you detail these items in the catering contract?

If you eat on campus in the dining plan, you can be sure that all of these questions have been considered when providing and preparing the food in your dining halls. This is just another example of how MIT students are privileged to have such opportunities, facilities and programs at their disposal.

 And if you want to, you can always find a free lunch somewhere. Bon Appetit!

Hi! I’m Katie Kelley, one of the Admissions Counselors here at MIT, and with my second season of reading applications behind me, its time to start getting to know all of the wonderful people I have been able to read about over the past several months!

Kris was kind enough to let me guest post on her blog to let you know about some exciting opportunities for admitted students. Although a lot of my time is spent preparing for Campus Preview Weekend (sign up now!), I’ve been working with our fantastic Alumni to put together admitted student gatherings to welcome you. Beginning Saturday, MIT alumni from around the world will host parties in their hometowns for students admitted to the Class of 2016. If there's one in your area, you should check it out -- it's a great opportunity to meet some potential future classmates, as well as MIT students and alumni. You’re parents are also welcome and encouraged to attend.

Here are a few highlighted events this coming week; see your MyMIT account for the locations and times of these events, and for a list of all of the events.

Saturday
Stop by Fairfield, CT, the headquarters of engineering giant GE and spend a bit of the afternoon in the home of a wonderful MIT Alum.

Sunday
Enjoy a sunny Sunday afternoon at the home of an MIT Alum in Phoenix. 

Tuesday
Enjoy one of two meetings held in the greater DC Metro Area at the home of a Baltimore alum, the first gathering will be Saturday (March 24) in Fairfax County, VA.

Wednesday
Join the MIT Club of Seattle and local Educational Counselors for a fun celebration.

Thursday
Swinging through the Big Apple? Stop by one of our biggest Admitted Student Meetings on the East Coast.

Friday
Head near Iowa State University in Ames and hear about life in Boston from an MIT Alum and MIT ’15 Parent. 

Mingle with the enthusiastic alumni of the Volunteer State in Oak Ridge, TN.

Saturday
Meet up with other Hong Kong admits at one of our international gatherings.

Sunday
Gather with all the MIT locals from Massachusetts at the home of an MIT Alum and parent of an MIT Sophomore.

Be sure to check the listing on your MyMIT account for the most up to date information and RSVP if requested. 

There is a whole MIT community that cannot wait to meet you. Congratulations and welcome!
-Katie

"Well, I was thinking more like April or May when it's nice out again," I answered while reaching for my coffee cup near my slippered foot on the coffee table. And then I remembered the bulletin boards in the Infinite Corridor.

I can't seem to make it to my office in the morning without stopping a half a dozen times along the way to see what's going on around campus.  The other day I read a flyer about a media lab talk with the new director and I had to email Chris, who was in the middle of committee still. Hey, they are having this talk tomorrow night thought you might be interested - free food. 

I commute three hours a day to my job at MIT and I get home when it's dark and late with barely enough time to put something together for dinner for the teenagers who live in my basement (mine).  And at this time of year especially, I'm usually back on the computer again for a little while at night. You'd think the last place I'd want to be on a weekend is roaming the infinite, but March just happens to be hopping with great things going on.   Come to think of it, I'd rather be at the Cape in May so a March Kendall Square weekend might actually be perfect.

And here's how it could play out.

Saturday Morning:  A jog along the Charles River and breakfast at Clover. Then an afternoon at the List Gallery to see the two current exhibits. 

It's Women's History Month in March and the Women and Gender Studies program at MIT is sponsoring a really great film series all month with films I'd love to see, like this one.  

Dinner at  Hungry Mother.  Only the best restaurant ever in Kendall Square.  And  to top it all off,  a performance in Kresge of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint.  I can hear my partner groaning now.  Electric Counterpoint?    Although Pat Metheny does it best.  Yep, she's groaning again.

The arts are alive and well at MIT. Come visit.  I'll see you in March!

MIT: Live the Puzzle from MIT Admissions on Vimeo.

When we re-launched our new site last summer with a new design and streamlined navigation, we also made room for video to be featured right on the homepage. Its part of our overall communication strategy to showcase a constantly changing mix of videos -- from old classics dug up from the admissions vault like MIT the Movie and vintage television news footage of one of MIT’s most famous hacks of all time, to music videos like the one we featured of MIT’s amazing acapella group the Logarhythms and student made videos from the Freshman Arts Program.

But its also part of our plan to create some promotional videos of our own to show today’s MIT, in all its living, breathing color.

We’ve already heard from many in early focus group testing who told us they loved the video, and we also heard from some who said, “Yeah, but how come you are not showing the real MIT? You know, the science and research and engineering MIT? We want more of that super cool movable wall and we want to see more robots in the Media Lab." And to that I say, of course, that’s MIT alright, and we plan to show you more of that in the coming months, so stay tuned.

But for this video, it was our goal to give prospective students a feel for our campus and what it looks like,  full of awesome buildings-- some majestic and some kinda weird-- and plenty of open green spaces. And we wanted everyone to know that, yes, we really do have sports here at MIT and a lot of students take part in them at a very high level. But mostly we wanted it to tell a story of what our community really loves about being at MIT.

So we hired some professionals to help us out and like so many things here at MIT, the admissions communications team collaborated with students and faculty and the film crew to capture the diverse, fun, and friendly student population. 

What is says to us is that while we are every bit a science and engineering school, we’re also a whole lot more than that too – and we’re pretty jazzed about that.

So what does it say to you? I’d love to hear more.
 

And I especially love all the year in review lists.

Because this was my first year in the Admissions office at MIT, I thought I would post 10 highlights of my year in review. And what an awesome year it was!

1. This is a view of  the Charles River during the Fast Light Festival and it also happens to be my nightly walk over the Charles River to my commuter train at Ruggles. Need I say more?

2. The 150th exhibit and all the year-long festivities. The exhibit is only up until December 31 but you can still check it out online. 

3. Bhangra dancing.  It’s everywhere at MIT… at CPW, in our upcoming videos, in lobby 7… and it's pretty great.

4. The List Visual Art Center and all the public art on campus. I’m looking forward to the next exhibit in February of the work of New York-based artist Cheyney Thompson.

5. Blogs and more blogs. I love the new look of our admission website with the hand drawn avatars. And here are a few of my favorite blog posts of the year. Elizabeth singing, Chris doing his Chris thing as only Chris can do and Lydia’s words of wisdom.

6. The Ivy Plus Conference with my colleagues. Here we are stopping for lunch on the way in Mystic, Connecticut.

7. Fireworks from Killian Court.

8. CPW and eating liquid nitrogen ice cream with Kirsten

9. The Rainbow Lounge.

10. Committee. Long days, hard work, and plenty of laughs. Baby Monkey was sent in someone’s application for fun and it became a theme song for the winter (at least in my head it did.) Warning! The crazy song is addictive.

Happy Holidays to all and best wishes for the New Year.
 

It’s a magnificent lobby all on its own, but even better for the kind of things that happen in this lobby every week. 

I’ve walked through in the morning and smiled at the many, many tourists with cameras taking pictures in front of the seal. I’ve stopped to watch the practice sessions of more than one student dance troupe late at night.  I’ve heard the chancellor speak, seen the president dance, witnessed a hack, listened to a group of students jamming with guitars, passed by the MIT marching band, and gawked at a huge constructed green bug-like thing on stilts during CPW.

Almost anything goes in this open, inclusive, majestic lobby. And today at 5:30, I’m going to find reasons to miss my train home and linger in the lobby just so I can hear the Ascoli Ensemble, MIT's latest artist group in residence performing a free community concert of medieval music.

Gotta love Lobby 7
 
 

This morning at breakfast, I gave my son (the high school junior) some advice for how to quickly finish his art notebook cover project, which was already late on day two of school.

“Hey, instead of doing another elaborate drawing like the one you were up all night doing, why not make a quick collage? You can use existing images from magazines and your old posters and cut them out and arrange them in some pattern and just see what happens.

“Just see what happens, Mom? I have a plan for this cover.”

Blank stares at the table. The 18-yr-old started snorting over his scrambled eggs and talking in some silly accent and they both began goofing on collages.

“Ok, whatever, I was just trying to help.”

Because I have teenagers at home, I realize this makes me an “authority/ parent-type figure” and maybe not someone you want giving you advice. My 18-yr-old just nods at me while I continue talking after he is finished railing about how I don’t understand him and this is usually my cue to calmly stop myself from being such a mom and work on leaving the room.

But I actually do understand him.

I still remember being a college student and feeling like my life had to follow one track and be focused and accomplished, one class logically building on to the next, one project leading to the next one. The truth is, life rarely ever works like that. I’m thankful now that I went to an art school and spent most of my time in film theory classes because I was forced to consider what I was going to make of my life every semester. I had to keep thinking about what extra skill or experience to add to this five-year “collage” I was making as an undergraduate working towards a BFA. Looking back, that’s a nice metaphor for what I was doing. But at the time, I felt exactly like Jenny X did worrying about “ falling behind.”

Jenny says something very wise in her post when she talks about her internship in China and how “it's never too late to be in charge of what you want to do. And that on the flip side of fearing "falling behind" is being constrained by the pressure of following a well-planned path that may or may not still be what you want.”

Well said, Jenny. And true.

I think the greatest challenge for current MIT students and anyone considering coming to MIT is to be flexible while still managing to get things done and maintain the high standards you all have for yourselves. There is so much to do here, so much to get involved in, and so many paths to try. But you won’t know where one is going to lead until you give yourself the opportunity to change your mind, and be led in a new direction.

Matt wrote a post about taking a gap year and Gabe wrote very eloquently this summer on the life changing aspects of hiking for a semester and getting in tune with his authentic self. And while these options are definitely worth thinking about, I challenge all of you to consider your time in college more as a work of art than as a focused linear roadmap. You all have brilliant minds. You are going to do big important things. You just may not do them all according to how you imagined they would unfold and that’s ok. Remember, we ask you in the application essays to tell us how you handled a situation in which things did not go according to plan. We do this for a good reason. In all my years as a mom, as an artist, as a communications professional, as a homeowner, as a student (over and over again it seems)… things very rarely go according to plan.

And when this happens to you, head over to the LIST gallery and take a look at some of the artwork on display and be inspired or travel off campus with some friends and go into Boston to try something you’ve never done before. And if none of those things end up working to help you gain some new perspective, then get down on the floor with a bunch of magazines and start cutting and arranging and make a collage.

Just see what happens.
 

His film is actually about a topic I know a little something about as a queer mom who has questioned my sexual identity in the not too distant past. And it’s also, at the same time, about something I really know very little about too, because I have never questioned my gender. His film “Other” is about a very important topic for a lot of teens at his school. It is about gender and how kids are choosing to identify. It’s about challenging stereotypes. It’s about education. And mostly it’s about diversity. (And as soon as he gets it back online again, I’ll link it here.)

And speaking of diversity, there are a few things I think are worth repeating about MIT. Things that make it such a great place to work and be a student.

1. MIT is very diverse -with no majority ethnicity for one- and the Institute really believes in a person’s freedom of self-expression. Anyone who is taking part in REX right now can probably feel it. 

2. And MIT has a non-discrimination policy that is worth taking a look at it. Here’s the statement.

But I think one of the best things about MIT is that we are not part of the common application, which means we get to consider changes and additions to questions we include on our application completely independent of all the other common app schools and their particular needs. Right now, a small liberal arts college in Illinois is paving the way for what will soon be something for more Admissions offices to consider. Way to go Elmhurst!

I think it’s about time that there are questions about sexual identity and gender identity on college applications and it’s my personal hope that MIT won’t be far behind in including these as well. I echo the sentiments of a commenter on the Elmhurst article who writes:

“The question doesn't give them an advantage over other students, nor would it disqualify them from anything. It is what it appears to be: an optional self-identifier. No smoke or mirrors, no secret agenda, no harm. 

The application is in a section that states that Elmhurst College is committed to diversity and that if people choose to self-identify with any of a number of questions, they would like to help connect students with resources on campus…
“ 

And when it comes to resources on campus, MIT has the rainbow lounge, where I will be this week welcoming members of the freshman class at a couple of orientation events. And MIT also has this really wonderful website that is full of educational resources about transgender issues. Check it out.

This a wonderful institution in so many ways and no matter how you choose to identify,  just remember:  

You are welcome here.

But like all things at MIT, what really impresses me is the way MIT understands how a wonderful art exhibit can illuminate and demystify the most mysterious and frightening of diseases. The gallery on the first floor of this brand new center is definitely worth a visit. It was established to connect the community in Kendall Square and beyond with the work of the Koch Institute and it is free and open to the public from 9am to 5pm weekdays. Not everything in the exhibit is a work of art per se, however, and actually the most striking part of the exhibit is a series of images. These are real images not rendered by an artist, but are instead a row of large colorful backlit images of cells and blood vessels, both directly and indirectly relating to cancer, in all their beautiful and horrifying magnification.

These images change yearly through another “MIT-like” process, an open competition to recognize extraordinary visuals that are produced through life sciences research.  Any MIT students, faculty, staff, or affiliates may submit images. MIT community members at the Broad Institute and the Whitehead Institute are also eligible, as are MIT collaborators at other Universities, hospitals, and private companies. You’ve got until October 1 to submit your images.

And with that, I’ll leave you with a little vintage James Taylor.

I don’t know about you, but I love to be reading a few books at the same time, especially in summer. Here are my picks:

In Defense of Food 
by Michael Pollan

This is a quick read and I read it one day after complaining on facebook to a friend that I wasn’t able to lose any weight. I think he was sick of my whining, because he shot back a link to this book title and said, “Hey, this helped me. I didn’t fully get the weight loss thing until I learned how to eat.” Hmm, it is a good book. But I’m still eating cupcakes that I find left out for the taking on a table in lobby 10.

Emperor of all Maladies
by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Ok, so I JUST bought this book after a very inspiring talk by Professor Neri Oxman in MIT’s media lab. A bunch of us Admission Counselors had the pleasure of listening to her talk about her lab and her research. She said something like, “This book should be required reading of all MIT students.” Prospective students take note! I went right out and bought it, and then I read the prologue when I was stopped in traffic on the Mass Pike. (I don’t recommend this) But I do recommend the book so far. It is totally engrossing from page one.

Just Kids
by Patti Smith

My partner and I have already read half of this out loud to each other while lounging under an umbrella on the beach. Janyce is a huge Patti Smith fan and I’m a big Robert Mapplethorpe fan. It’s a great read. Totally transports you to NYC in the late 60s. Awesome. 

A Widowers Tale
by Julia Glass

I’m savoring this like I do with all of her novels. Yes,  its really ok to read a novel once in awhile!

So what books are in your beach bag? I’d love to know. Happy Summer!
 

Her post went something like this:

“Congratulations nerds" Really Mr. Franco? The technical awards go to engineers and scientists that make most of these actors and actresses look good. And they amaze us with their visual feats. Not to mention their inventions can be applied to medicine and other areas...nerds? “

Because I work at MIT and I have come to love the word nerd, I was quick to post a reply that said something about nerd pride and it being a badge of honor to be called a nerd in my book. But the ensuing string of comments didn’t agree with me at all. Her own middle school-aged son thought it was mean for someone at the Oscars to be using that term on television. And yet, we here at MIT do it all the time. She posted back that it was an insulting term, and she cited Wikipedia as agreeing with her.

I was surprised. I thought that the word nerd had gone through somewhat of a transformation lately, with the likes of journalists such as LZ Granderson, a CNN contributor, proclaiming that he is raising his own son to be a nerd.

And Ann Hoevel trying to sort out the various definitions of the words geek and nerd in this CNN feature article.

But Jessica Bruder, writing in the New York Times in a recent Sunday book review is suggesting that maybe us 40- somethings might be doing our kids a disservice when we brag about our own geekiness and nerdiness in hindsight. Maybe in the general public, in the normal high school environment, the word nerd hasn’t caught on as a cool term at all.

All these questions remind me of a time when I was coming out as gay in my 30s, when I was a suburban mom of two who was recently separated from the man I had been married to for 9 years, the father of my kids, and I was cleaning the house on a warm summer day. The windows were open and I was watching my grade school boys in the front yard playing with all the neighborhood kids. This pack of boys liked to tease the youngest one in the crowd- my youngest-and this day was no different than many. I could see them all on the patch of lawn across the street with their baseball mits in hand, and their scooters tossed on their sides in the driveway, and I heard my youngest son pull away from the crowd, throw his baseball mitt across the yard and yell really loudly.

"I am not a lesbian!"

I wiped the instant smile off my face and sprang into action. “Boys!" I yelled out the window. "I want to see all of you here right this minute.”

When I had them all assembled in a semi circle around my front steps, me standing in the doorway with my dustrag in my hand, and my youngest son wiping tears away from his eyes and scowling behind me, I said.

"Which one of you knows what the word lesbian means?"

The crowd of wide-eyed fearful faces stared back at me silent. My oldest son finally piped up and proudly said to the rest. "It means a woman who loves another woman."

"Exactly. I said back. That’s exactly right. So why are you calling Aidan a lesbian?"

Silence.

"If you want to call Aidan stupid, then call him stupid. But don’t call him a lesbian because that’s not what the word means. Ok? Now who wants popsicles?”

They didn’t know what to do with that word, it had never entered their world at all in our quiet, tree- lined suburban town until recently. And I suspected, not in a very clear light when it did. It seemed to them fair game to use it as a pejorative. I had to laugh because I had no real use for the word either. It didn’t fit me at all. I was relieved when several years later I discovered that intellectuals at Harvard and Berkeley had reclaimed the word Queer and I chose that for my own for a short time, even writing my masters thesis on the performance aspects of gender and reading Margaret Fuller’s contributions to the romantic canon as decidedly “queer.”

“But mom," my now older boys would implore, “isn’t that a bad word? Why do you want to use that word?" And my college art school friends would scoff “Oh cut it out, you are so NOT queer.”

So what’s in a name anyway? Are we making too much of the word nerd? Not enough at all? Maybe it is time for proud MIT nerds to reclaim the word and update wikipedia with a full and modern definition?

Because the young "nerds" I know are math and science whizzes, they find joy in solving puzzles, take part in trivia sparring, and spend their summers solving calculus problems. But many of these same so-called geeky kids also jump on their bikes and ride all over Cambridge, they are expert athletes, find time for art exhibits, and chill with their friends in bars in Boston.

They are all over MIT and they are nothing short of awesome.

It’s because writing is hard.

Some of you brilliant prospective MIT students know exactly what I mean. Writing well often means “being in the flow” and if you are not there, it’s kind of like plodding uphill knee-deep in mud on a hot humid day. Who wants to do that?

When I do an info session for prospective students, I like to mention that there is a writing requirement here at MIT. To some of you, I know, that is not good news. But hopefully most of you already know how valuable it can be to learn to write and express yourself this way. My son has a pile of graduation thank you notes to write and I already know why he isn’t getting to them. He isn’t sure how to start. I have the same feeling when I look at my personal blog and realize it’s been months now without a new post. Where to begin again?

But here is some advice for those of you worried about writing, or worried about writing your application essays this fall, or worried about writing a paper in college. (Yes, you will have to write at MIT even if you are a math and physics lover and were hoping to never experience that particular agony of the blank page ever again.) I have some good news.

Writing is magic. Take a look at what one member of the MIT faculty, Nick Montfort, has done by merging his interests in puzzles and computer games with poetry.

Think you don’t have a single idea, nothing to say? Just start writing. The process of writing is what creates the ideas. Sure, it’s ok to start with a few in your head and see what happens to them as you begin. But if you start with a blank mind, just the act of writing anything will get them to come.

In my writing group we do an exercise when we all first assemble together. Before the socializing and advice sharing gets underway, we write. We put pen to paper the old fashioned way for 15 minutes. We might get a subject prompt, a first line of inspiration, or the suggestion of setting or theme, but the one rule is to create something with a beginning, a middle, and an end before the 15 minutes is up.

True, sometimes you don’t create a masterpiece you wish to read aloud, but most of the time you are amazed to see that you have a written a story, an essay, or a finished poem. Most of the time, it’s actually something you can be proud of too, and in 15 minutes, really. It happens all the time.

“Come on, we’re driving in to Cambridge tonight to MIT.”
“We are?! Why is that?”
“Because MIT is having a party and I’m ready to celebrate right now.”

And what a party it was!

On my first week on the job, I attended the opening party for the big 150th celebration, which would take place for the next six months and culminate in a final celebration for all of MIT (and all of Cambridge practically) on Killian Court. It was colder than it should have been in June, but that didn’t stop all the fun. In true MIT grandeur and style, the nearly empty lawn at 8pm studded with glowing cocktail tables and large light sticks began to magically fill with people.

The band began to play, and the black tie waitstaff began to fill the bars and the tables full of treats, while rows and rows of people clamored about trying to take pictures of the half-ton cake replica of MIT’s campus.

With my glow stick on my head and a cupcake in my hand (I was lucky to know where to stand to grab an early part of the river of cupcakes that surrounded the mammoth cake) I marveled at the Prudential Building across the river all lit up with the words MIT 150.

I marveled at the large screen toast to MIT by alumni in space, and then I marveled at an awesome fireworks display over the river (ok, I really only caught some of it as I was running to my car)

Because after a night of celebrating the great new job I have and the seriously “unlike any other” place that is MIT, we still had to get back home to the much smaller party that was waiting for us the next morning to do some more celebrating.

Life is sweet, huh?

Clary Clish, director of the Metabolite Profiling Initiative at the Broad Institute here at MIT might tell me I’m on the right track.

Clish and other researchers have been working since 2008 in the rapidly growing field of metabolomics. Although there are a lot of cool things about this research he and others are doing (and you can read more about the whole project here) I was most interested to read about the way that exercise changes our metabolic makeup. As if I need any more reasons to exercise!

I actually stumbled across this interesting research while sitting on my couch flipping through my Harvard Alumni magazine. But just like everything at MIT, The Broad Institute is collaborative and includes more than 150 faculty and more than 1,500 scientists from across MIT, Harvard and the Harvard-affiliated hospitals working together to solve the most critical problems in biomedicine.

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Pretty impressive place. And also pretty great if you want to do research as an undergraduate at MIT. From as early as your second semester at MIT, you can choose to take part in real cutting-edge research through UROP -- the Institute's ground-breaking Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. And you can do it at the Broad, or in any academic department, interdisciplinary lab, or center at MIT.

By the time they graduate, almost 85 percent of MIT students will have collaborated on research. Chew on that! Well ok, you can, but from the looks of the research, I need to do a less chewing and a lot more moving.

String?

Looking up, I made my way past large equipment and a police officer directing the flow of lunchtime walkers as a young woman on a crane directed workmen on the ground while pointing out how to precisely assemble her public art sculpture.

String Tunnel by Yuna Kim, Kelly Shaw, and Travis Williams, all graduate students in Architecture, is located at the Dreyfus Building bridge (Building 18) and is just one of more than 20 public art installations all part of the culminating event of the FAST Festival. On the evening of May 7th, the Charles River waterfront and MIT”s campus will glow with sculpture that incorporates light created specifically by MIT students and faculty. How cool is this?

But even more impressive to me about MIT”s commitment to art is that there are 91 pieces of public art on campus. I feel like I”m back in art school taking an art history course when I pass by Calder”s Big Sail on the lawn of McDermott Court, or the reclining Henry Moore in Killian Court. There is a Frank Stella room-size installation in Building 7 on the 3rd floor that blurs the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture, and an Anish Kapoor in the Stata Center. Geez, the Stata Center itself is a Frank Gehry work of art.

And tonight the MIT List Center will dedicate a newly commissioned Percent-for-Art project called Through Layers and Leaves (Closer and Closer) by Scottish sculptor Martin Boyce.

“The entire work, at approximately 10 feet tall and 95 feet in length, operates in the interstice between art, architecture, and design, between the space of a public sculpture and the privacy of looking.’

Next time you are walking around campus, be sure to look around at all of MIT”s Public Art offerings. Best viewed with a clover food truck sandwich in hand, of course.

I was engrossed listening to Ms. Turkle as she described the need for all of us in this technological age to occasionally turn off our phones and unplug our Ipods at key moments in the day to fully engage in what she described as “sacred space.’

But what was so interesting about her message was that she wasn”t saying our personal use of technology is a bad thing, and she wasn”t saying that we can”t fully use and enjoy our electronic devices, but instead she was wondering how we might use these tools in better ways in the future. The message was: how can we even begin to ask the questions and reflect on our use of technology, if we never give ourselves enough time away from work, from checking our email, answering our phones, and listening to our music, to just think? We might think up something wonderful.

And it seemed to me that this sentiment was not all that different from something I heard Dr Neri Oxman say during the Featured Speakers panel on Friday of CPW. Her message to the audience of MIT admitted students was that they were not just here to solve “particular problems’ but to develop a new vision for the act of problem solving itself. In my mind, the possibility of “developing a new vision’ in this way could be severely hampered if one is constantly in the act of doing, of solving, of working, and of being busy.

It was especially gratifying to me to turn on this radio program in my car and have this sunny spot of time to myself to reflect, because I had just made the decision to drive back home only to head into Boston again a few hours later for a play at the Cutler Majestic Theater. The original plan was for me to stay at work all day and for my teens to meet me back at the theater for 7pm. It was a good logistical plan in my head, given all the driving back and forth that I had just done over four days. But now on Sunday, after getting to a stopping point on a project at noon, I decided what I needed most was to shut off the computer and to make time for the “sacred space’ of the car ride with my kids before the play.

Turned out to be a brilliant move for me (ok lets forget about the gas tank for a minute) but my teens hadn”t seen me for four days in a row and I knew that they would have things to tell me about their life. I knew they would want to connect with me before the play and an hour drive in close confinement would mean we”d actually have a great conversation.

Wonderful, surprising, and transformative things can happen during these moments of being present in a space where you can relax and talk and just be with others that you care about. For me, this was the inside of my Toyota packed with my kids and family on yet my 10th trip on the Mass Pike in a matter of days.

And while I was driving, I was also reminded of another one of my favorite moments from CPW in the Rainbow Lounge the morning before, where I relaxed in a comfortable, cheerful space with others from the LGBT community and ate pancakes and bacon, listening to Bob Marley playing in the background. I had a conversation with two parents that morning who told me how at home their daughter felt here at MIT and the lounge was just one of the many reasons.

At a time when other universities are replacing their dedicated LGBT groups in favor of a larger more impersonal Office of Diversity and still others leave the LGBT organizing solely up to students alone, MIT has a great space to hang out in, or join others for a community dinner on a Tuesday night. And it is staffed by paid employees, volunteers, and a faculty support staff. It”s a real “sacred space’ in every sense of the word.

Nobody had to convince me. I spent most of the hour-long presentation unwrapping the foil from the Hershey”s chocolate kisses in the bowl on the folding table near my seat and popping them into my mouth as I listened. In my son”s case, I already knew that a curriculum filled with theater, drawing, and jazz would help him to focus on the academics that he doesn”t feel much affinity for otherwise. It was a “no brainer’ to me that if he could get accepted in this program, then of course, he should do it.

And then I started to think about the kids I get to know through their applications and their blog posts, and who I see every day passing me in a rush down the infinite corridor during the daytime hours of my job in the admissions office. How important is a humanities focus for these brilliant mathematical and scientific young minds smart enough to get into MIT for their college years?

I”ve always been a strong proponent of the arts and humanities, and even more so when the humanities converge with science and technology. I still have my dog-eared copy of Godel Escher Bach in my bookcase at home, right next to Marvin Minsky”s Society of Mind and Edward O Wilson”s Consilience, three of my very favorite books of all time for how they take broad ideas in the arts and humanities and expertly weave them with very specific scientific, mathematical, or biological principles. They do what all good books and art of this type should do. They bring the heady, technical, and scientific axioms and formulas to full, breathing, pulsating life.

And so when I first heard about a learning community option for a student”s freshman year called Concourse, I couldn”t help but get a little jazzed about it. Basically, the approach in this program is to allow students to understand the origins of modern science by exploring the literary and philosophical foundations through ancient and contemporary writers. I love the way they describe the rationale on the website:

Science and its powerful offspring, modern technology, have generated extraordinary benefits for mankind, but these benefits are not without complications. Astonishing advances in physics, medicine and energy have also produced devastating weapons and the specter of environmental destruction. Concourse aims to prepare the top scientists, engineers, scholars, innovators, and entrepreneurs of tomorrow to address these questions thoughtfully by studying the books of thinkers who have sought a comprehensive understanding of human life and the proper ordering of human goods.

Indeed!

Another one of the many perks of my job is that I can get up from my desk to stretch and travel down the infinite corridor in search of a diet Dr Pepper, and on my way I can look up to see all sorts of announcements and events flashing across the big screen high above the entryway to lobby 10.

On one day a couple weeks ago, I saw a message on that board for a briefing on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Stressed by hearing the constant reporting of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan on my radio every morning as the alarm went off at 5am, this was another “no brainer’ to me. Of course I would go to this briefing and gain more perspective. I work at MIT! And I was there in my seat in 10-250 in that afternoon to hear exactly what, at the start of the panel discussion, the panelists cautioned they would NOT be addressing. No comments or questions regarding the broader philosophical concerns about nuclear power. This was a technical briefing.

Plenty of people packed the audience with pen and paper in hand eager to learn the specifics of how a nuclear reactor worked and what exactly was damaged in the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. There is, of course, merit and need for news briefings and specific technical information. Just as there is equal merit for one to, as Rhodes scholar Heather Wilson says, “think across disciplines or reflect on difficult questions about what matters and why.’

MIT students are so very lucky. They have choices. Really great choices. The Concourse program for freshman is not only a chance for integrated study in the science and humanities, but also a way for students to transition from high school to life at MIT by being part of a smaller community for a year.

Here”s what one student from the Class of 2014 had to say:

“For me, the single greatest aspect of concourse is the phenomenal personal attention. You never feel anonymous or overlooked amongst hundreds of your peers, and help is always close at hand. Belonging to such a tight-knit group has made a huge difference in helping me adjust to the rigors of MIT. “ Marcel Williams


If you've been admitted to MIT and would like to find out more, please contact Paula Cogliano, Program Administrator. You can reach her by checking out the contact us page on the website.

I”ll cut to the chase.

On April 30th, from 11am – 4pm, MIT will be offering 160 different FREE activities as part of its day long Open House (also the kick-off event to the Cambridge Science Festival)

What kind of free things you ask? How about a puzzle hunt at the MIT Museum written specially for MIT”s 150th anniversary by members of the National Puzzlers' League

Or an exhibit of cameras that look around a corner, and a “glasses free’ 3D display at the Media Lab, or a bunch of physics demonstrations. I also hear there will be blimp racing somewhere? Oh, and glass blowing! I caught a glimpse of artists in action on one of my first days wandering around the basement corridors of the infinite. Check out Peter Houk”s beautiful glass creations.

There isn”t much left I can get my teenagers to do with me on a Saturday anymore. My soon to be 18-yr-old will be on the am airwaves with his teen radio show at 9:30 am. And after that,

I”ll be chillin, mom.

But I”m dragging my skateboarding, gauge-wearing, artsy younger teen to the Glass lab for sure.

A day of science? Seriously, mom?

“No, not just Science. Only a day at one of the coolest institutions in the world, with your very cool mom, how about that huh?’...

“Please?’

“Oh come on, I”ll also buy you a burrito.’

Ok.

Hmmm. So maybe Chris has it right after all. It is all about the free food.

**So if you think you may be going too, be sure to register with us. I”ll see you there.

The 150 exhibition was equally dazzling, showcasing 150 of MIT”s best inventions, events, people, surprises and hacks through the years (and if you haven”t seen it yet and find yourself in Cambridge before it all comes down in December 2011- definitely go!)

One of my favorite artists, Christopher Janney, is just one of several whose work is profiled in the “artistic MIT’ portion of the exhibit.

And then on my second month on the job, I had the real pleasure to listen to Tod Machover animatedly describe the FAST Arts Festival just another of many pieces to this impressive celebration going on around campus all Winter into Spring. I made a mental note to check it out.

I was in the thick of reading applications as February whizzed by and my partner reminded me that we hadn”t been out on a date – or even out of pajamas – all winter long it seemed.

“Looks like we will need to wait till summer to go see some art,’ she said looking over her laptop screen to me on the other side of the couch typing away on mine.

“Not so fast,’ I said back, “How about a daylong pilgrimage to MIT to see three lectures/demonstrations about radical research on music and language, and vision and neuroscience? And then I”ll take you to dinner to that restaurant we”ve been meaning to try and we”ll finish it all off with a concert to hear the Language of Music by the Lontano Ensemble in the Kresge Auditorium. And it”s all free!’

Wow. This is why this MIT is such a great place to be.

I”m looking forward to this Saturday at the FAST festival. Maybe I”ll see you there.