Hello from the other side! Like the wizened, immortal Jess Kim, I am finally An Old Person, relatively speaking.

Work

As mentioned in my graduation entry, I work at Bluefin Labs, a startup of roughly 20 engineers and data scientists (although we are ~50 people in total) based in Kendall Square, just a few blocks from MIT. I’m the youngest employee and the only new grad they’ve ever hired, so when I found out they were going to have interns for the summer, I was all like, “yay! I will not be the least experienced person there!”

...all of the interns were Ph.D students. “Rachel, are you even old enough to go to a bar?” (“Of course! barely.”)

My first month-and-a-bit was spent building a custom charting package to analyze social media commentary relevant to brands and topics. Only two weeks in, we released the first iteration of the software as a tool to compare stats on some of the most popular Olympics topics (who the heck is this Ryan Lochte guy and why are his fans overwhelmingly female?).

A few weeks after that, at a company-wide all hands meeting, founder Deb Roy pulled up the app I made*, went to some detergent brand’s page, and demonstrated how a layman could target and optimize ad campaigns to save millions of dollars using our next-day data analysis, all in about two minutes. My lower jaw promptly unhinged itself from my skull and clattered to the floor in a heap of mandibular disarray. #obliviouscodemonkey
*I can't give you guys access to a live demo because it's proprietary...sorry :(

I first touched web development less than a year ago, and that project was the first time I’ve ever exercised it in an industry setting. MIT, thanks for beating me senseless with unintuitive C optimization hacks and unrealistically hard algorithmic brainteasers until learning common industry paradigms became utterly trivial.

Life

As a vehicle-less resident of the same hall in East Campus for all four years, including preorientation, and two summers of my undergraduatehood, I unintentionally limited my opportunities for landing in chummy situations with a wide variety of living groups. A lot of pset groups like to meet up in East Campus, because when it’s getting close to the 9am deadline and the pset drop boxes are two buildings over, you might as well work nearby to minimize the risk of passing out before ferrying the pset to the rendezvous point. People almost always came to me when it was time to work.

So, it’s a good idea to occasionally change up your living situation, even if you just do it for a summer, and meeting your new housemates’ friends. No regrets about staying on the same hall during the academic portions of the last four years, though. I love EC enough that I creepily/cruftily went back to help with rush, take tons of i3 footage, and make 5W’s rush posters.

What now that I'm no longer living in EC? Geographically, my new apartment is at the time-weighted average of every location I frequent in Cambridge! This might not actually be the most convenient location, had I not LEARNED HOW TO RIDE A BIKE THIS SUMMER. It took forty minutes. I should have done it the instant I set foot on campus four years ago. Live and learn (and wear a helmet).

Oh, and my housemates have kittens. So many kittens. They are as fearless as they are photogenic, which is heaven for my lens.

Can't forget this familiar face.

Play

A few things I made this summer now that I'm no longer scrabbling for graduation requirements:

Music videos!  argh there might be some weird desyncing nonsense going on
also don't ask why I thought it would be a good idea to shoot handheld with a manual focus portrait-length lens

Murals!

Bread! Three-bite baguettes are even more delicious than regular ones.

A personal website! Its Google pagerank is nonexistent because I quickly threw it together yesterday morning, but I bet you can find it yourself if you are sufficiently creepy.

I'm one of those weirdos who actually misses the interesting pset problems and mind-shattering all-nighters of MIT, but I have to admit that working only nine hours a day and having the other fifteen hours completely free for fun and (gasp) sleep is a refreshing change of pace. You’ll hear this a lot from alums, particularly grad students. (Don’t worry, most of us make it.)

The night before graduation, I was about to turn in for a good night's sleep so that I could wake up early the next day to figure out how to pack for the event under my regalia. But a fateful gchat with Chris '09, cofounder of Lingt and inventor of the iDoor, which I lived behind one summer and used to let my cat in and out when I was away, tumbled all these plans, only to build loftier ones in their place. As we reminisced over our shared ambitions of livestreaming graduation from our hats, I realized I didn't have to reminisce just yet, and pranced off to a machine shop in the A.M. after finding out about Justin.TV's livestreaming app, which sadly did not exist during Chris's graduation.

Lesson 1: Unless you've strategically exploited the UROP system for machine shop access (I did this freshman year), none of the good shops are available after midnight. My dreams of a sleek, servo-mounted, milled phone dock with an integrated charging cable were shattered.

Eventually, I did find a barely functional, rickety drill press with a broken table in the EC basement. It puttered so slowly that I had to really simplify the rig, which ended up consisting of a bit of duct tape, two elastic hair ties, and a few pathetic scroungings from the emptied-out machine shops: a scrap of discarded 1x1 steel angle, two screws, and five hex nuts, whose flat sides I used to constrain the phone on my mortarboard's y-axis. Also, about fifteen bobby pins to keep the dang thing on my head.

I spent the rest of the night getting the various paraphernelia I was going to smuggle into graduation in order (my real camera, spare batteries, memory cards, beach balls), and did some tests to check battery drain and streaming quality. Video drains my phone battery like crazy, thus the solar charger, which actually had to be screened by three different people when I went to check in for graduation.

Staff: What's that?
Me: It's a solar charger.
Staff: What does it do?
Me: ...er, I'm sorry, what do you mean by that?
Staff: Like, what does it do.
Me: ...it collects solar energy, and uses it to charge things.
Staff: I'll have to check with my supervisor. Because, you know, 9/11.
Me: Did you actually just say that.

The setup was surprisingly sturdy and usable; I was able to reliably holster or unholster my phone one-handed in about five seconds even in my bleary-eyed state. Occam's Razor FTW. This was empirically tested many, many times over the course of graduation, as the livestream connection died repeatedly thanks to the 4000 or so phones clogging 3G and wifi, and I had to use my phone for phone things as well. I resorted to normal video for most of the key moments (at least until my battery died), which I have posted below. If you have ever met me, you will know that I am extremely short; that worked out well for this video as my height + hat height + phone height = normal person height.

As you may have noticed, MIT graduations are known for their weird mortarboards, which are usually related to the mortarboard-wearer's major in some way.

Below is a shot of Susan Hockfield staring with barely restrained awe at Norataur (photo cred: Noel Morales), whom you may otherwise know as Nora, previously featured in my post "How Wrestling With Snapping Turtles Can Get You Into MIT".

At the EECS post-graduation reception, some MITERS showed up with tiny go-karts, because why not.

Not long after graduation, I flew off for vacation and am currently writing this post from Paris. After I get back, I'll be starting as a software developer at Bluefin Labs, an ex-Media Lab project that turned into a Cambridge-based startup and now serves up TV analytics using a really interesting combination of machine vision, natural language processing, and social data.

Thank you to everyone who made the last four years amazing! It's been real.

http://www.justin.tv/rhotic/videos

ignore test videos and my potty mouth. may be off periodically to conserve battery

9:24am network connection is poor will try again when we start the procession

chris edit: working on embedding the official stream, which does not have an official embed option 

chris edit 2: your precious tables are no match for my iframes!!!! 

Chris Peterson once said, "rfong is a good photographer, and in order to do that you have to be really creepy." (Um...thanks?) It is that Machiavellian attitude which capacitates this blog and this miniature visual ode to my favorite MIT band, Rolltreppe.

I've been living under a rock for the last four years thanks to course 6, and didn't find out about these guys until I went to saxophonist Dylan's Emerson Scholar recital. Dylan, with whom I did FAP (Freshman Arts Program) almost four years ago, is about to graduate with a course 6 degree, numerous musical accolades, and a penchant for dual-wielding saxophones.

Rolltreppe describes itself as a "live funk and electro swing combo group". Its repertoire ranges from jazz standards:

To funky arrangements of other classic songs (here is a subset of the group at Dylan's Emerson recital):

To crazy original compositions (here they are winning MIT's battle of the bands):

To various combinations of the above mashed into each other:

They are all (obviously) engineers as well. MIT is a breeding ground for unfairly multitalented folks.

Try to catch them next time you're around MIT! They recruited Peter'15 (keys, composition) when he was a prefrosh because he was just that good, but since CPW has come and gone, you can settle for meeting them at orientation. Stay classy!

The weather sobered up just in time for CPW, and we celebrated the sunny warmth with a spring picnic. It was a day made for frivolity. I procrastinated long enough to contribute mint-lime-honey-rolled strawberries and sweet potato fries, which I've been wanting to make since I read this MIT alum's article about how he backward engineered McDonald's fry-making process (the part where he explains his thoughts leading up to using vinegar to slow the breakdown of pectin in the potatoes is pretty cool).

As the afternoon waned, we sauntered off into the grass with our guitars. Meanwhile, I caught the perfect lighting and discovered that everyone I know is absurdly photogenic.

SEE YOU ON CAMPUS TOMORROW!!!

This Monday and Tuesday, undergrad volunteers banded together in a roomful of Institvte phones to individually congratulate and chat with each of the freshly admitted candidates for the class of 2016. We all stayed longer than we'd planned; my hallmate and I swore we would only stop in for a few calls, but ended up making hundreds of calls for over four hours despite our bleeding GPAs and unfinished psets. It was a little like gambling; only one in seven or eight of you guys picked up (shame!), so we'd have losing streaks for a while, give up hope, suddenly get a real, live, excited prefrosh and have a great 45 minute conversation, and ride on a high of vicarious prefrosh cheer through the next few voicemails in a vicious cycle.

The telethon is a fun tradition that I think brings a really nice personal touch / warm fuzzy feeling to the seemingly heartless process of admissions. When I invited Stephan'13 to come volunteer at the EA telethon last year, his face fell and he plaintively said, "Anyone can go? I thought the people who called us were, like, special or something." Ironic, then, that he is insanely clever and hardworking, like, oh, I don't know, most people who make it through this place.

My calls only made it through to a handful of people, but you seemed really cool! Thanks for your time, bros and girl-bros. With Campus Preview Weekend and enrollment decisions approaching, I'd like to share some relevant FAQ's I was asked while telethoning, in hopes that they'll be useful for some of the prefrosh we didn't manage to reach.

I am trying to decide between MIT and ____. Their campus preview weekends coincide. What should I do?

I know a lot of people who had this problem as prefrosh, and while I'm not going to say "omg we are totally the best thing ever so you should just forget about those other hussies", because you are the best judge of which school is best for you, I'm pretty sure that MIT's campus preview weekend is (a) the most fun (b) the most revealing about its culture (c) the most differentiated from a normal campus tour. Most campus preview weekends don't differ drastically from a tour besides the scale; you will likely see several more organized student events, talks, and dorms than you would by visiting on any other weekend.

CPW is an intense compression of an entire undergrad experience at MIT, minus all the hard work, into three days. Events literally go around the clock; there are never less than five or six events going on at a time, and usually many more, with the exception of five or six hour breaks for sleep in the wee hours of the morning. The entire campus bands together in a concentrated burst of effort to do everything that lies at the intersection of fun and possible, everything they normally do during the year for fun but smushed together at an impossible density. A cappella groups run around serenading you all over campus; East Campus and Random Hall bust out the dewars and make you liquid nitrogen ice cream; every living group has a barbecue at least once a day; every student organization and club shows off demos / breakdances / unicycles / juggles / flies hovercrafts / blows things up at a giant activities fair. You'll glowstick, play underground capture the flag, maybe even play glow-in-the-dark capture the flag. You may walk through kiddie pools filled with non-Newtonian fluid. You'll meet people you will stay friends with throughout college, even if you decide not go to MIT. You'll talk to tens of metric tons of us. You may even meet a professor you want to do research with. (When I was a prefrosh, I pulled a super lame hack with some other prefrosh I met on the internet.)

You'll almost certainly overeat. Remember that there will be food at almost every event, and save room for a few flavors of liquid nitrogen ice cream.

More laid-back events involve teaching increasingly obscure math late into the A.M. until all attendees leave or fall asleep, the inevitable "MORE FOOD THAN YOUR BODY HAS ROOM FOR", talks by faculty members, open houses with every department, program, and organization on campus, hair dyeing (good luck explaining that to your parents), and several thousand bouncy balls being thrown from a Senior Haus balcony into the courtyard.

via flickr

It's a little more stressful for us, because we have a lot of logistics to take care of to produce this giant, mostly student-driven welcome to you, on top of normal schoolwork, which we don't get a break on. But we don't really need sleep any more, so whatever.

tl;dr CPW is not just a glorified campus tour; skipping it and stopping through the next weekend will still be informative, but you will find out much more about your future undergraduate community at MIT CPW than you would at any other preview weekend.

still tl;dr come to CPW you will not regret it

None of my following FAQ answers will be as exciting as this one. Ever. Sorry.

Can I do research freshman year? Like, real research, I don't want to sit around cleaning test tubes all day. I want to run my own project, and also have a pony.

You can have all of that except the pony. For reasons unfathomable to me, MIT is stellar at undergrad research. Many, many freshmen do real research as early as their first semester. My next-door neighbor, Martin'15, started working in the Drennan Lab fall semester -- he uses X-ray crystallography to analyze enzyme structures. You can work here in exchange for U.S. dollars or class credits, or you can work abroad. Several of my close friends have done research in Spain via the MISTI program, which extends to twelve other countries. There's also a program called D-Lab that's geared toward developing countries. Someone could write a hefty treatise on this, but the short answer is: yes, you can do research here without prior experience. The tough part will be finding time.

Can I continue pursuing the arts at MIT to <insert your own> degree of seriousness?

In my personal opinion, the MIT admissions process, brutal though it may be, does a great job picking people that are not just good at science but proficient in many areas. People who are good at doing things are not characterized by their ability to nerdily rattle off Science Facts, after all, but by their creativity, love of learning, and work ethic. I'm sure you already know this. What I'm getting at is that you will likely be able to find a variety of student groups with different commitment levels that suit your needs while you are simultaneously doing Science Things, because more MIT folks than you would expect are really artsy. The usual deluge of examples courtesy of the availability heuristic: my hallmate started doing professional graphic design at age 15 and is currently CTO at a startup even though he's only a sophomore now, my boyfriend is both a full-time web developer and a short film composer, and once I went to a Boston Pops concert and this girl who was in one of my compsci classes at the time unexpectedly hopped up on the stage and performed a Mendelssohn concerto with them.

MIT has a lot of interesting humanities professors: examples include Junot Diaz (see jkim's take on his writing class), Martin Marks, who teaches film music history and composition and serves as the curator for the National Film Preservation Foundation, and Mark Harvey, who is a mild-mannered lecturer by day and a crazy trumpet-playing jazz orchestra leader by night, crazy in only the best of ways, although I still hope he doesn't read this.

MIT's humanities programs are good, but obviously can't compete with real art colleges. Fortunately, you can cross-register at Harvard, Wellesley, MassArt, or SMFA without paying extra tuition. The surrounding area is also home to Berklee College of Music, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. So, if you venture off campus, you can find lots of non-MIT organizations too.

What will dorm life be like? I don't know where I'll fit in! Ahh!

Your dorm-placement schedule looks like this:

• some time this summer: You receive the i3 (Interactive Introduction to the Institvte) videos, which are produced by students in each dorm. Alternatively, you realize immediately after you finish reading this blog post that all of the previous ones are on Youtube, and you marvel at East Campus's roller coaster for a while before being completely confused by Bexley's video.
• before matriculation: First dorm lottery.
• orientation: Set up shop in your temp dorm. Every living group throws a billion events so you can get a better sense of dorm / living group cultures. You enter the readjustment lottery, or you decide you made the right initial decision and squat.
• after orientation: If you were in the readjustment lottery, you move.
• after readjustment: You move around within your dorm; each floor/section has a distinct culture as well.

So don't worry about that just yet -- you'll have a few months after enrolling to figure it all out.

MIT sounds great and all, but what if it's too difficult? I'm just a plain 'ol high school senior.

So were most of us, once. Don't worry, you didn't get admitted on accident. MIT is undeniably very difficult, but freshmen are given the boon of Pass/No Record for a semester, in order to help ease the pressure as they acclimate to the disturbingly rigorous coursework. It'll help to remember that the work is made difficult in order to help you learn more, not because the professors are evil extradimensional creatures who feed upon human suffering.

There are also many resources such as office hours, tutors (MIT pays students to tutor other students), structured study groups, and structured freshman programs such as Concourse and ESG. You will also end up organically forming study groups with all of the freshmen in your living group. Basically, if you try to do everything on your own one hour before it's due like you did in high school because high school classes were trivial for you, you will fail miserably, and if you reach out for help, life will be much easier. You will probably still get 20% on your first chem exam and finish the semester with your first C or two, boo hoo, but no one will ever see it and you'll do just fine in the grand scheme of things.

I elaborate upon freshman academics in graphic detail in this post; you will have plenty of time to figure that out if you do choose MIT.

I want to go to MIT for grad school; will going there for undergrad hurt my chances?

Even if you end up with the same major that you originally planned, your experiences over the next four or so years will make you a radically different person with different priorities. Grad programs' desirability and strengths vary wildly depending on the specific research interests and emotional baggage you leave undergrad with. So it's a terrible idea to have your 17-year-old self make decisions for your 21-year-old self. Not to mention that if you're good enough to get into MIT grad school, well...that's pretty damn good.

The overall feeling I'm painting here, especially with CPW and all, may seem excessively optimistic and idealistic. Nothing is perfect, obviously; tuition is horrendously expensive, the winters are cold, and there will be conflicts and bad classes and quarter-life crises. I think I made the optimal decision in coming here, though, and hopefully all our ramblings can help you figure out if this place is right for you.

That is all for now, folks. Feel free to ask more questions in the comments! (Trolls: I know where you live, please refrain.)

Weird and/or neat things I saw around campus this week, brought to you through the unsatisfying yet convenient medium of cell phone pictures:

As I was leaving East Campus for class, a squirrel with a full, lustrous, white beard waddled across my path and stared me down for a full minute. Either the ounce of fluff in its jaws was somehow dulling its survival instincts, or it was wondering if I was made of the same material. I didn't stick around to find out.

Upon reaching said class, our teacher entrusted us to level set and record using a massive set of equipment.

While walking home from the student center, I saw a strange glow emanating from Lobby 7, as if the bridge of Khazad-dûm had been bathed in the flames of a purple Balrog. It was actually just a hack.

As previously mentioned, I'm doing my thesis with the Media Lab, an extraordinarily spacious and light-filled building constructed using the maximum percentage of glass that the city of Cambridge could legally allow.

1. the lobby, overtaken by an art installation
2. open common space spanning 3rd to 5th floors, containing a wooden dinosaur model and a TV made up of 16 other TVs
3. Opera of the Future group; the enormous hanging chandelier is actually an instrument
4. the satirically named kitchenette outside my lab

My defeated thesis proposal about to be turned in.

Reese what are you doing that is not how cat feet work

That's better.

I'm in a cooking group on my hall dedicated to meat. I also think I have a food addiction; I just want to eat multiple meals every day. Here are some snaps of this week's foodstuff preparation.

Sometimes, MIT isn't all as terrible as they say.

In the hassle of getting my life and graduation requirements together, I almost forgot to take advantage of my (last :'/) biannual free post: what am I doing this semester?

MIT has many urban horror stories about students struggling to graduate on time for the dumbest possible reasons: taking all of their GIRs second semester senior year because they didn't spread them out, realizing they forgot about the swim requirement a day before graduation, or belatedly discovering that one humanities class didn't count toward the requirement they thought it did. One alum I worked for told me that he convinced the EECS department to let him take his GIRs during his MEng, because he spent all of his undergrad years taking fancy high-level classes. Sometimes, students just punish themselves intentionally by taking eight classes a semester so they can graduate in two years, or get nonexistent triple majors, or...for fun. (There's no credit limit for freshmen with sophomore standing or upperclassmen; the only bound is your sanity.)

Here's the anticlimax: I am not one of those people. (Unless something has gone horribly wrong.) My courseload:

6.851: (Grad) Advanced Data Structures, taught by Erik Demaine, who became an MIT professor at age 20. He frequently cites his own papers in lecture, and we have optional, weekly open problem solving sessions, which is kind of intimidating. I say that a lot. I mean, other professors have (jokingly?) put open problems as extra credit on problem sets, so it's nice that ours are just completely for fun.

This class is my official substitution for 6.006, which I need to complete my major, so the downer is that I can't drop it when catastrophe strikes. It's been fun so far, though. Seemingly half the CS/math majors I know are in this class, including a '14 down my line of succession from my high school robotics club, and an ex-IOI freshman on my hall. Small world!

21M.380: Recording Techniques and Audio Production is one of those very cool, random, ultra-pragmatic classes that pops up at MIT every once in a while. The assignments so far have consisted of close, detailed listening to songs of our choice, and analyses on how they were mixed. The lectures are refreshingly less theoretical than the average MIT class; instead of generalized, abstracted equations, the lecturer shows us interesting psychoacoustics trivia and heuristics that are useful to know off the top of your head when doing audio production; for example:

• a bass drum's frequency is usually around 60Hz, so its wavelength is about 18 feet long
• human ears start perceiving time offsets as reverberation after 20-30ms, and it takes sound about 0.89ms to travel a foot, so do the math before recording in big rooms
• since the ability to understand human vocalizations was obviously beneficial when we developed speech, human ears are heavily biased toward frequencies representative of human speech and will in fact perceive them as significantly louder than frequencies outside that range

I keep getting distracted by curiosity about various physics-based/biological/statistical generalizations of what we learn. Mostly, the teacher gives us demos (listening and generating lots of noises and signals in different contexts, through filters, et cetera) and enough theory to internalize them.

Incidentally, this class completes my four-subject humanities concentration in music.

6.UAP: THESIS.

Every engineering major has a thesis, although most use a heavy-duty lab class in lieu of an independent project / research paper; Course VI is one of the few with an open-ended thesis project. I'm doing some sentiment analysis with the Media Lab's Digital Intuition group, which does a lot of neat natural language processing that I didn't really know was possible, using a project called ConceptNet that they've open-sourced and collaborated on with universities in several countries. It has a basic web interface and an API that lets you access a massive semantic graph (hypergraph, rather) about words and concepts in several languages. Since everything's open-source, you can go play with it if you're curious.

non-credit

At only 30 units, I'm light-loading this semester, which means I get a tuition discount! The classes listed above are all I need to graduate, so I'm casually following along (without enrolling) in MAS.S60: Practical Natural Language Processing, incidentally taught by my thesis advisor. In junior fall, I took a similar but more rigorous and theory-heavy class, 6.864: (Grad) Advanced Natural Language Processing. I'm poking through the MAS.S60 material because it has coding labs in lieu of enormous mathy problem sets, and while 6.864 was fun, I didn't get to actually implement code until the final project.

I'm also taking an introductory animation workshop through the Student Art Association, which organizes extracurricular art classes that serve as practical alternatives to the tempting logistical nightmare of crossregistering at and commuting to MassArt. Today, we jumped right in and started making cyclic hand-drawn animations.

is this not enough for you

I have five sessions of job interviews in the next two weeks. Three of them span half a day. No comment.

In case it wasn't obvious, the underlined text in this post contains useful alt-text.

This IAP, Cambridge defied its cold-weather stereotype yet again by not only refusing to snow for more than a few days, but by having unreasonably beautiful, balmy days straight through most of January. They almost made me want to wake up and go outside.

In a manner not dissimilar to that of this video's protagonist, I actually did.

Last Monday, I and other early risers traveled as far as the lawless borders of West Campus to check out Techfair, MIT's annual student-run technology expo. It features and is sponsored by tons of tech companies -- over 60 this year -- but also shows off and helps fund student projects.

a day at the fair

I was welcomed to Techfair by various collections of informative novelty balloons, and Voltage Coffee's owner, Lucy, who made me a ridiculously delicious chili-cinnamon hot chocolate.

At one booth down the first row, a few students had seen fit to revive the traditional Olympic sport of DDR Tetris. Beside them, representatives from Lytro were demoing their new product, a camera with a sensor that captures much more light information than normal cameras, which just calculate a color for each pixel and leave it at that. Its most heavily marketed capability is the ability to "refocus" pictures after they are taken -- or rather, I guess, to generate 2D projections simulating the effects of a particular focal length, using the massive data from an image capture. Since all that awesome vector information is captured, they also have the capabilities to generate parallax shifts and 3D representations of captured scenes, which they're still working on the software for.

The Hobby Shop is a fun machine shop open to all members of the MIT community. Here, some of its acolytes show off their musical gadgetry: a translucent acrylic violin, an electric ukulele shaped like a tiny electric guitar, an electric guitar shaped like a normal-sized electric guitar, and several intricately hand-carved traditional instruments.

You all know what this is.

Not far from the Hobby Shop booth, MITERS, best described as People Who Make Stuff, and oft-mentioned on these blogs in posts about Charles Guan, was crackling with crazy creations. Their Jacob's Ladder was festooned with the second-largest capacitors I've ever touched.

Also present: an 8-foot tall Wimshurst generator, and enough quadrotors to down an elephant.

Swag, lots of swag. If my collection of free knockoff Ray-Bans continues to see the same growth it did over Techfair, I should be able to sculpt a pair of giant novelty sunglasses big enough to fill this venue from the melted-down materials within a year. In stark contrast to my terrible jokes, Twitter had some beautiful notebooks, jobs, and data to flaunt.

Couldn't help but stop and admire the suave graphic presentation of Palantir's printed blurbs about Serious Things In Life, a.k.a. jobs.

The student exhibitors had a few...novelty methods of transportation. Bullet was by far the most active; I saw at least five people test-driving it over the course of the day.

hackathon

The weekend before the big event, Techfair held an inter-school hackathon sponsored by Facebook, who shuttled in undergrad hackers from Brown and Harvard.

At intervals, they ordered food with enthusiastically generous margins for error. The schedule for the night/morning went something like this:

• 8PM: Chinese food
• 1AM: pizza
• 7AM: bagels
• 12PM: Cosi's
• 2PM: presentations, prizes, eternal glory

Understandably, the room turned into this very quickly:

sideshow attractions

Techfair is accompanied by a host of other events, including company tech talks, a startup panel, and a company banquet. The tech talks, which spanned an entire Saturday, addressed topics such as commercial developments in speech recognition software and controlling neurons with light. The latter sounds like an overexaggeration out of a Cracked article about world domination, but in all seriousness, an MIT Media Lab professor is currently using this technique to research the inner workings of cognition and treatments for brain disorders such as epilepsy and Parkinson's.

While we're at it, let's not forget the afterparty Techfair held on the top floor of the Media Lab. Yes, the one with the riverfront balcony and floor-to-ceiling glass windows.

It was insanely cool to see everyone's efforts come together for Techfair, from the sleeplessness of the weekend hackathon and its thirty boxes of pizza, to all the demos and prototypes that companies from tiny startups to Microsoft had brought in, to the Tesla coil that suddenly started throwing lightning bolts from the MITERS booth in the middle of the afternoon. Stay exciting forever, guys.

Techfair will be looking for applicants for its planning board in the fall. If you want to be part of the team that makes it all happen, keep an eye out!

Thanks to Lytro for this interactive photo. Click to refocus!

I like being around people who can creatively keep themselves entertained. This can be an unproductive quality while alone; I have a terrible tendency to sit fascinated for hours by the refraction of light through pens with hexagonal cross-sections at various angles, the physical properties granted by the structure of a shoestring's weave, internal discussions on particularly weird or ironic evolutionary imperatives, or by producing really awkward writing. When these kinds of people pool together, though, it's like a positive feedback loop that generates entertainment.

While I don't personally observe Valentine's Day, enough humorous sentiment pointed in its general direction managed to leak into my late evening tonight that I thought I'd share. Coherency is left as an exercise to the reader.

Around midnight, my hallmate's lady-friend presented him with an enormous bouquet of delicious homemade bacon roses, which we all had entirely too much fun with.

A Facebook friend shared the most amazing faux valentines I've ever seen. Political incorrectness is comedically inspiring.

We happened to have a spare copy of Twilight lying around. Since it held no value to us other than that of the dried wood pulp from which it had once been flattened, we naturally decided to indulge in a little Twilight bashing.

All in all, we extracted far more utility from that book than we would ever have gotten from reading it. It didn't stop at Twilight sledgehammer golf, either; frustrated by the book's softness and high air resistance, which prevented it from flying satisfyingly, we quickly evolved the game into Twilight soccer and then Twilight sledgehammer-bat baseball. It inevitably tore in half, relegating us to the simple luxuries of book-jousting, book-skating, book-football, book-bocce, and book-scooter-curling. Finally, Paul'13, who grew up in a traveling circus, started balancing the sledgehammer on his bare toes while standing on one foot, and we all stopped to stare in horror.

And then, psets, which we really should have been doing all along. Happy February 15th!

As the blogs are quick to harp upon, MIT thrives over the month of IAP, particularly in the context of its coding/robotics competitions. There are lots of other things going on, but as far as structured activities go, I'm usually only concerned with some subset of these activities, all of which are numbered very inconsistently with respect to the usual scheme and to each other:

• Maslab - Mobile Autonomous Systems Laboratory
• 6.270 - Autonomous Robot Design Competition
• 6.370 - Battlecode, a.k.a. Write Your Own A.I. For A Game Of Heavily Bytecode-Limited Starcraft
• 6.470 - Web Programming Competition
• 6.570 - Mobile App Competition
• 6.S912 - Pokerbots

Hordes of students fanatically devote their relaxing, month-long vacations to these vicious battles, which are typically organized by winners from previous years and are built around new themes every year, so that you can't recycle old strategies. Most of the finals are run cage-deathmatch style, minus the cage and death parts. 6.470 finals are pretty boring in that sense, because the winners have already been determined and the teams just give presentations about their sites, but the robot matches are obviously physical, and the Battlecode organizers write a nice game display so that everyone can see units dramatically exploding on the map during the live commentaries by the finalists. Extra incentives include Free Stuff (paradoxically, we will do more to get a free T-shirt than we will for the amount of cash it took to buy the T-shirt) and recruiters itching for coders to give jobs to.

I've spent the past two IAPs doing internships for software companies, which was fun but kind of hectic. So this IAP, I decided to uphold my hall's glorious tradition of overpopulating these competitions by teaming up with hallmates Stephan '13 and Mark '13. Last year, one of our freshmen, Kamran '14, won 6.470 with something he made in three days, and was deemed too good to participate ever again. The year before that, a group of our then-freshmen ('13) teamed up for 6.270 and won a bunch of computers and ukuleles as their second place prize, sparking mini-revolutions in both dorm automation and twangy covers of indie songs, while Dan '10 went ahead and won 6.470. The year before that, a mostly-freshman team consisting of me and a bunch of other ex-USACOers faced off in the the Battlecode finals against Dan, and were subsequently destroyed. This is not particularly surprising, since he was a Battlecode finalist for four years, while simultaneously landing in the top four in 6.470 both years he competed, and his biceps were each roughly as large around as our scrawny nerd bodies at the time.

I am too tired to keep spinning the backstory, so I'll cut to the chase: if correlation implied causation, then living on my hall would make you pretty good at web development.

On a similar note, if P = NP...well, let's not get into that. What I actually want to ramble about is our site, Asler. Our friend Gustavo sold us on the idea of making an American Sign Language learning site, and we were pretty intrigued by the idea of making an ASL reverse lookup -- it's apparently a common problem to remember sign motions but forget the corresponding meaning when you start learning. We had to scrap a bunch of early ideas involving machine vision and webcam capture due to the time constraints of IAP, but Stephan, who was born under a lucky star, pushed a rudimentary but perfectly working reverse lookup to our code repository half an hour before the deadline. We have a lot of other cool features working, too, and we think Asler has a lot of potential to grow and self-moderate on its own thanks to a Reddit/StackOverflow-inspired system of user generated content and karma/reputation tracking.

So if you want to learn American Sign Language, or want to play the ridiculously addictive ASL alphabet learning game that Mark built, or know someone who is already fluent and wants to help us kickstart an online ASL community, check it out! I won't make any money if you do; in fact, the Amazon S3 bucket we're using to store videos charges directly to my debit card, so I'll definitely lose money, but we'd like to see people try this thing out even though there are still a lot of rough edges and functionality to add. At least the high-pressure part is over. No more nights where we actually decide it would be a good idea to work with sunglasses on because we've been staring at our glaring screens for too long.

tl;dr: 

• IAP competitions are really fun exercise for your Course VI-y muscles
• check out Asler!

How and what would I write in the utter absence of the ever-present presence of our preexisting expectations of admissions blogs, unburdened of the literary coherency associated with the formal duties of a prefrosh psychopomp? The answer is about to be served implicitly atop an egocentric slice of my life on a lazy IAP Saturday.

12:40 PM

Nature precipitates relentlessly upon Cambridgians' freezing bodies, the confetti to its gleeful schadenfreude. As I exit a building, a discretized gradient of snowfall upon stairs illustrates a simple probability distribution.

12:50 PM

I brave the snow down 3rd Street, a hotbed of the eco-friendly hipsteria that visibly permeates Cambridge, and hike to Voltage Coffee, whose abilities satisfy the rare intersection of (a) producing coffee good enough that I will actually trade money for the transient pleasure of drinking it, and (b) assembling a vegetarian sandwich savory enough to sate my carnivorous appetite.

1:00 PM

I've gained entrance to the club, and can dispense with these hipster pretenses. Shedding argyle sweater vest, false muttonchops, and sustainably-harvested calabash smoking pipe, I roll up my mental coding sleeves, pull up a terminal, and rake impatiently at the disorganized heap of code and configurations that aspire to 6.470 fame. Adjacent are two disillusioned 20-somethings echoing the mantra, "I know what I want, but not how to get there." For them, I weep frozen tears of vicarious unfulfillment into my delicious sandwich. But for myself and my fearless 6.470 teammates, I foresee only the sweet, sleepless taste of victory.

1:55 PM

I bundle up and continue along my irreversible temporal journey. It is as cold, as they say, as though we were in hell, and a sports team facing proverbially bad odds had won some international competition or other.

2:05 PM

It is the second day of Bad Ideas, the weekend that East Campus devotes annually to bad ideas. Events in swing: grilling in the snow, and chaining together electrical appliances and powerstrips until something blows out.

But much badder, more exciting ideas are scheduled for the remainder of the day: playing chess with pieces made out of chocolate (with the addendum that you must eat captured pieces), testing your capacity for deceit while hooked up to a polygraph, human dog sledding, eating as many tacos as possible and/or watching others "slowly hate themselves as they finish off their stack of tacos", and running up and down the tallest building in Cambridge as many times as possible in four hours. An alumnus of my hall is actually the record holder for the Green Building Run, having completed forty-eight circuits one adrenaline-pumped year. Surprisingly, it's among the least of his inhuman characteristics.

2:06 PM

I stumble inside. Several pounds of snow instantly melt off my shoulders and run down my laptop bag. East Campus is notable for its architectural similarities to a brick oven, and while this turns it into a miserable, sweat-filled sauna during the summer, it is arguably the ultimate winter haven. Having individually controllable thermostats in each room doesn't hurt, either.

2:15 PM

Drafting this blog post. Reese supports me in presence if not in spirit, like an unwieldy pet rock.

3:00 PM

email, email, email

3:50 PM

Zealous 6.470 teammate and infamous motorized unicyclist Stephan '13 joins the party, his enthusiasm tempered only by Ruby on Rails's unwillingness to install properly on his computer.

4:00 PM

It turns out using NTFS partitions messes with file permissions in a way that prevents Rails from doing what we want it to do. Stephan decides to reformat his hard drive and reinstall both of his operating systems. We are very sad for the next two hours.

4:15 PM

• Comparing camera lenses
• Working on thesis proposal

♫ one of these things is tougher than the others ♫

5:45 PM

Tiffany '12 is sick. I eschew the trappings of hardcoreness and brew her a flowery, hot pink tea.

5:55 PM

Work is briefly interrupted for a DISNEY SINGALONG

the next twelve hours

I will spare you the hideously uneventful details of working collaboratively on Ruby on Rails between three different operating systems. For the most part, we alternately cursed, wrangled with our configuration files, and made food. I marinated slowly in my own impotence, but at least I was toasty and well-fed.

Here's hoping your snow days are more eventful than mine, readers. Stay warm and be cool.

My friend Stephan’13 exploded into Internet fame over the holidays after he built a motorized, self-balancing unicycle that a slew of tech aggregators instantly pounced on and reblogged. His own blog (incidentally, a good read for the amateur type theorist or functional programming geek) does a pretty thorough job technically documenting the project, but you guys probably want to hear more about the man behind on the machine.

Normally, I like to write rags-to-riches posts in which students struggle through weeks of continuous all-nighters to emerge baggy-eyed but victorious on the turf of knowledge, or begin life as blindly wandering, major-less frosh and rise over four years of undergraduatehood to become masters of their domains. Stephan, on the other hand, has indubitably been an EECS badass since his graduation from the womb. When he Facebook friended me as a prefrosh, mistaking me for another 2013, I was ready to cruelly reject him as I do all strange Facebook friend requests, but he seemed nice and had some thought-provoking statuses about compilers, so I let him live.

Then, I rushed him during orientation and found out that he had written a rendering engine -- three years before I took my first computer graphics class here. Currently, he’s building his own functional programming language (because the myriad others didn’t completely satisfy his ideal vision, of course), working part-time for two startups, and UROPing with CSAIL to help develop a high-performance scientific computing language.

And of course, there's his unicycle, which he now uses to travel to work and all around campus. The frame is welded from scrap he found in his ex-UROP lab. One painstaking session of hand-soldering SMDs (really teeny-tiny electronic components), an electric scooter motor, a gyro and accelerometer, and some kinematics equations later, he had a jittery but working unicycle, which he iterated into the glorious conveyance you see today.

The Discovery Channel brought a camera crew out to Stata to interview him today! I stuck around because I was configuring a web server and didn't feel like moving, and in passively routing people around the filming area to the elevators, I unintentionally and for a few brief seconds impeded the ambulatory progress of David Karger, resident god of algorithms.

Alas, such is life at MIT -- all of us caught up in such dense torrents of nerditude that we can't help but collide with luminous points of prolific brilliance everywhere we turn on our homemade electric unicycles.

So much has happened academically in the last month! A while ago, I coded a ray caster for 6.837, the computer graphics class that has been sporadically ruining my social life every two weeks. Each lab takes roughly ten to fifteen hours to finish. When we emerge from our cyclic periods of total isolation, we are often pasty and atrophied, our voices hoarse from underuse, our hands trembling with carpal tunnel, our freshly sprouted beards disheveled with sorrow. Also, when you build your own ray caster from scratch, it's not...that great.

But I digress. I actually wrote the bulk of this post a month ago, so in the interim, I've also built a ray tracer.

A ray caster, if you care, is one of the most basic conceptual layers of a non-real-time graphics engine. In real life, photons bounce off of objects and the ones that make it into our eyes are the ones that comprise the image we end up seeing, but if you modeled rendering that way, you'd waste a lot of computation because most photons wouldn't end up making it into your 'camera'. To save computation, you cast 'light rays' in reverse, from your 'camera', and see what objects they hit. And by 'bounce' and 'light rays', I actually mean 'arcane-looking linear algebra'.

A ray tracer, on the other hand, builds upon a ray caster, but traces rays recursively so that you can detect things like shadows and reflections. The high-level gist of it is pretty simple; on a low level, we had to build in tons of individual components like image anti-aliasing, refraction and reflection, and behaviors for different types of light sources, cameras, and objects. There was also a lot of C++ compiler wankery to deal with, because we built it almost from scratch.

After collapsing, exhausted, at the end of the long gauntlet of coding, I rendered squashed and textured spheres and triangular meshes of all configurations and sizes, illuminating them with glaring, primary-colored lights, reaping the meager rewards of my labor with a mixture of childlike joy and awe. Then I remembered my laptop had programs on it with actual, beautiful graphics engines that took organized legions of real people tens of thousands of hours to build, and bitterly logged out of the Athena machine I'd tied my existence to for the entire day, cursing under my breath.

6.170 (web development) has been progressing much more enjoyably. The last time I was hunched over an assignment, a mechE, in passing, expressed his empathy for my suffering. "No, no," I said, "it's actually really fun." Confusion ensued. "They throw like three new web frameworks at us every lab and we have to learn them and build apps with them." Confusion persisted. "I fail to understand your masochism," quoth he. But dude, that's the best part of CS labs -- when you use a new framework or paradigm, it goes in your mental toolkit and stays there (hopefully), and when you're done, you usually end up with code that you can keep and play with forever. (Blog post forthcoming about the totally awesome and useful final project my 6.170 partners and I glued together over two sleepless days.)

And after countless hours of projects and final projects and papers and final papers, in a bizarrely anticlimactic denouement (I'm aware of the redundancies), I had the two easiest finals I've ever taken at MIT. Almost as if to alleviate my workaholic guilt, Reese, with that special touch that only a cat's intuition can provide, made a crumpled nest of my most important notes while I was cramming and insisted on sunning himself atop them no matter how many times I relocated him to an extremely comfortable pillow.

On a much more impressive note, CONGRATS QIAOCHU on your last (undergraduate) final ever!

It seems like we were FPOPing just yesterday, but Qiaochu is graduating a semester before me, with a far higher GPA on harder classes. And he's way cooler. When he first told me he was going into the final for the last and most basic of math major requirements Sadoway-style, I was both excited and terrified for him. My imagination ran amok and overflowed onto my digital paper:

But I heard of the legend of that last final through the frosh grapevine on my hall, so it must have gone as planned. You turned out alright, man. You turned out alright.

At the culmination of this penultimate semester, I'm looking forward to tons of sleep and a crazy IAP. Freshly minted prefrosh: keep chugging away, you don't have far to go. Hope to see you at MIT soon!

During a pset party last night, one of my hallmates called her own major, biology, 'useless'. Shocked, I asked her to elaborate. She felt that the impact an individual biologist could make was negligible because biological systems are so fine-tuned that biologists can only push research forward a little bit at a time in one tiny, specific system. But she loves biology.

I agree; using that metric, biology is useless. (Obviously, that's a terrible metric for uselessness.) But the same is true, to varying degrees, in every career field, with the obvious exception of the five or ten hotshots per generation whose names make it into the history books. (We probably aren't them.) A software developer can make a code push that impacts millions of strangers. A biologist can publish a paper that affects twenty colleagues' work. (I'm completely making these numbers up.) Whatever. This measure of usefulness, while it may give you a warm fuzzy feeling whenever you push or publish something, is terribly valueless to you if you aren't also enjoying your work.

Look. If you're smart (you probably are if you want to apply to MIT), you're good at things, and that gives you a really beautiful opportunity: you can have a job that you love. And getting paid any reasonable amount to do what you love is basically like not working at all. Guys. This is awesome.

But wait. Is it selfish?

Maybe I'm not allowed to tell stories about Qiaochu any more since he's a blogger now, but he's worried a couple of times that focusing on math is selfish when the stuff that he studies is so pure that it only has theoretical applications, or at least will take decades to trickle down into applied math. However, Qiaochu is not only ridiculously good at math, but if I somehow managed to cut him off from Math Overflow, he would probably singlemindedly fight me to the death until he got it back, which brings me back to the question in the last paragraph.

In a mentally demanding job, loving your job is really, really conducive to doing it very well. It's pretty tough to convince your brain to do difficult things that it doesn't want to do. This means that doing something without a massive impact (but hopefully a not completely nonexistent amount of usefulness, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to monetize it anyways) that you love will probably produce a better output, compared to the average person working in that field, than doing something with a large impact that you don't love. You know what I mean?

What I did there was not very scientific -- just some very messy rationalization. But you can absolutely take my word for my first point, even though it seems so obvious that I shouldn't need to say it: having a career that you love is awesome. If you love it so much that you would do it for free, then you've hit the jackpot.

Speaking of the latter, I went rampaging on another mural marathon yesterday. If software development ever somehow fell through, I would have no objection to becoming a starving artist instead. (I mean, I'd object to the "starving" part, but I'd probably be able to figure out a way around that.)

freehand cover of Deep Sea Tentacle by Missmonster

After that, I coded for the rest of the night (morning?). I was, in fact, sitting around not getting paid and doing two of my favorite things, and I felt like the luckiest person in the world, because one of those things is my career. And I kind of doubt I'd be where I currently am (nonliterally) if I hadn't met the people I've met at MIT. What if I'd gone to another college with an equally good computer science program? I've made a lot of connections and found tons of opportunities through living in the Cambridge/Boston area, too -- it's hard not to when such a small, dense place is home to hundreds of tech startups and fifty other colleges or whatever the statistic is nowadays.

Advertising MIT to you on its own admissions site? I wouldn't dare. And I think I've been abusing this word. But honestly, being here and knowing people who love their work is pure awesome.

Hey all! It's been a while. I've had a busy last month:

0. I said this post had nothing to do with Portal, but that's sort of like stating, "I am not going to think about elephants while writing this post" before writing this post. Anyhoo, that reminded me that I finally got around to playing Braid, which is sort of like Portal in that it involves solving puzzles using a novel game mechanic, although IMHO, Braid is way more beautiful and mind-bending. Even without considering the weird metaphorical plot, it's a true inspiration for my secret pipe dream of becoming an indie game developer. It's short, and totally worth playing even (especially?) if you consider most games a waste of time.

1. Everything I said in my last post was misinformed, because when I wrote it, I was relaxed about having just tested negative for strep. One and a half weeks later, still coughing up my lungs in a mucosal haze of academic slackery, and shivering despite the toasty warm weather, I woke up from a 20-hour nap and realized that I might not have a harmless cold after all. So I went back to MIT Medical and it turned out I had pneumonia. Woo! Thankfully, S^3 saved the day yet again and told my classes to push back a few project deadlines for me, and antibiotics had me walking around again without falling over after a few days.

2. I am old and need to get a real person job. I'm getting flown out to NYC soon for a full day of being wined, dined, and grilled about algorithms by a software company I interviewed with recently, and many of my weekends this semester are probably going to follow a similar trend. After three years, I have finally learned to relax during software interviews, and hanging out with a bunch of coders is always fun, but having one's precious weekend time eaten by travel still sucks. Especially when all of one's massive programming labs are due at the beginning of the week.

3. I painted a bunch of murals. Actually, the time expended on these was negligible compared to most of the other items on this list, but this is an admissions blog, so I always feel obligated to combat the (mostly) untrue coder stereotype of unwashed nerds who can only use the left sides of their brains.

4. I've been getting up to speed with web development and better coding practices. On Friday night, I set up and learned a bunch of course-6-y things, like this meta-language that is way simpler to use and more readable and robust than HTML, and it automatically closes tags for you, amongst many more important perks, when you compile it to HTML.

5. I've been to some awesome jazz concerts. My jazz professor brought his avant-garde jazz orchestra to MIT's Killian Hall to play some of his new pieces, and last week, I went to the legendary Scullers Jazz Club (which just so happens to be in Boston) to see Hiromi, who delivered pretty much the most amazing musical experience I've ever had.

6. I think I might have accidentally become a tea/coffee connoisseur. I was on my favorite online tea community (I know, right?) the other day, writing a review of how exquisitely the unexpected cocoa notes complemented the robust full-bodied roastiness of my favorite black tea, and also drinking this smoky drip brew I just made that has a really intense, fruity, natural sweetness, and realized that there is very little difference between a connoisseur and an addict who is also a snob. when did this happen what have i become

7. Taking embarrassing pictures of cats napping without waking them up. It happens sometimes.

I just threw in the last two items because I thought they might be funny. But seriously, interviewing for jobs takes time! Landing a full-time software job usually involves a couple of short technical interviews and one all-day extravaganza where you meet the engineers and probably go through a few more interviews. Just getting a software internship usually takes three hour-long interviews. Don't forget all the interviews take place somewhere between 9am and 5pm in the company's time zone, which is really awkward for people who wake up late and then go to class the rest of the day. Multiply that by maybe three to five for all the companies you're interviewing for at the same time, and your calendar starts looking crazy.

This whole rush of self-indulgent activity is probably a side effect of being a senior for the second time. Last time I was a senior, I spent most of my non-robot-building time loafing around and figuring I would start doing cool projects again after I got to the magical wonderland of MIT, instead of honing interesting skill sets, exercising, and switching from Qwerty to Dvorak, which my tendons have regretted ever since. This time around, I've realized that the increase in responsibilities one takes on when transitioning from college to the real world is probably going to hit me harder than transitioning from high school to college. So, you know, I want to bask in the luxury of free weekdays and coding things that aren't for work while I still can.

I think there might be some kind of moral lesson you prefrosh could relate to in that paragraph.

Jeff: you mean
da BAAAAD way?
lyk, gurl you so bad
me: no.
Jeff: oh.
so you're diseased.

Being sick at MIT is no fun. Along with the obvious drawbacks of being sick, it's impossible to catch up during the semester once you fall behind, so just don't do it. Ever. Really. Keep yourself healthy.

Take this advice from a hypocrite. At the end of freshman year, I somehow managed to come down with a strain of the flu that left me unable to do much more than mumble incoherently, sleep, and chug liters of water -- for the entirety of finals week. S^3, which is really such an incredible resource that I'm always surprised we even have it, helped me move one of my finals to the end of the summer. It was no fun to look forward to, but I passed.

But I've had the incredible good fortune this time to get sick not only at the beginning of the semester, but at the most convenient possible time. Parents, I know you're thinking, "Are you crazy? There's no good time to get sick!" But there really is. Allow me to explain.

Immediately after turning in my 6.170 pset on Sunday night (who decides to set due dates on Sunday night??), I started coughing and feeling woozy, and fell asleep for about 14 hours. Upon waking, I began to sacrificially prepare myself for a massive MATLAB lab and a massiver algorithms pset. Then, I remembered that computer graphics only has a lab due every other week, and that it was not this week, and checked my email to find that the due date for the algorithms pset, by a ridiculous stroke of luck, had been moved from Wednesday to Friday.

So all I really have to do this week is nurse myself back to a coherent enough state to finish my algorithms pset by Friday. Also, I have to listen to some blues for jazz history. Which, let's be honest, I probably would have done anyways, class or no class. Now, you understand what I mean by convenience; this is the best sick week ever only vacuously, by truth of it being the least terrible sick week ever.

Tonight, I made myself a big pot of soup, and a tiny pot of tea.

Multivitamins and cough drops, courtesy of my mom and GRT, respectively.

MANDATORY CUDDLE TIME WITH REESE

And sleep. Good night!

A couple of weeks ago, it was too warm and humid to sleep, so I wandered down to one of MIT's many perpetually air-conditioned Athena clusters for my daily dose of midnight Haskell practice.

Instead, I bumped into Jeffrey'13 leading a cluster of frosh from his FPOP. As is wont to happen with frosh, questions were asked, and as is wont to happen with bloggers, blogs were...blogged to.

Frosh: Are you excited to be a senior? Will you miss MIT after graduating?
Me: Well, I'll miss MIT. I don't want to do a thesis...also, I'm not ready to be a real person right now.

I'll probably be ready to be a real person in a year. Many other nerds seem to have bridged the transition with a reasonably low rate of psychotic breakdown. But temporarily being a real person this summer -- living in an apartment instead of East Campus (I've spent all my previous summers interning around Cambridge), working over 40 hours a week, commuting and having to constantly travel around and make plans with people instead of retreating into the comfort of a thriving campus community, where everyone I know lives no more than half a densely populated mile away -- made me miss the ease of college life. It's a wonderful luxury to drop the pretenses once in a while, and revel in the fact that yes, you only have one class on Fridays, and you're going to spend the rest of the day doing anything you want, and your friends will probably accidentally bake you cupcakes and bump into you on your way to your favorite hipster coffee shop.

For the idly curious, a tentative overview (half of these classes will probably change by tomorrow) of my hard-hitting semester, which, seven days after the beginning of the semester, is beginning to bear down on me with all the grace of a steamroller (Mom, I'm joking, really):

6.170 - "Software Studio"

This incarnation of the infamous software lab, recently resurrected from the dead, is, I think, MIT's (or maybe just Daniel Jackson's) attempt to teach us actual industry skills. Modern software engineering is a messy world, with way too many languages, frameworks, and paradigms for any sane person to keep track of. In Jackson's own words: "There's always the temptation, when teaching a computer science class, to use a really nice language that isn't full of warts...but on the upside, me not doing that will make it easier for you to get jobs."

6.854 - Advanced Algorithms

Me: Haitao, didn't you already cover like half of this material in 851?
Haitao'12: Well, I've taken all the other algorithms classes, so, you know...might as well.
Prof. Karger: Hi everyone! The first pset is due on Wednesday. I've heard that my problem sets are hard, but...they're just so fun.
Jeff'12, who has been in practically all of my classes since freshman year: Why do we keep doing this thing where we get really excited about disgustingly hard classes for no reason?
Me: But it'll be so fun
Jeff: ...yeah, true

Moral: MIT students are all masochists.

Prof. Karger, on planar point location: "It helps if you think of two dimensions as one dimension plus another dimension. Deep, huh? [pause for audience laughter] But how can it be deep, we're only in two dimensions. [pause again for laughter] Anyways..."

Moral: MIT professors are bizarrely lovable.

21M.226 - Jazz

Another semester of Prof. Harvey's vast repository of jazz knowledge and uncannily deadpan jokes. "That's why jazz is considered an art form, because it sells so little, just kidding."

6.837 - Computer Graphics

Apparently this involves writing rendering algorithms in C++? I'm scared.

Then again, there's no way this can be as hard as junior fall.

Right?

If you weren't aware, REX (Residence EXploration) is going to be in full swing soon, and for East Campus, that means lots and lots of stuff in the courtyard, which temporarily becomes a sprawling playground of 2x4s. (We'll see how it weathers Hurricane Irene -- we survived the tail end of a hurricane last year unscathed, but it was much weaker.)

For the record, the current weather is gorgeous.

This year, it's all a bit less glorious, because the city of Cambridge decreed, for the first time, that EC had to get a licensed structural engineer to sign off all of its construction plans in order to obtain Cambridge building permits. Which probably would have been trivial, given the sheer quantity of engineers who have graduated from MIT, if EC had been notified about this more than two days before rush, despite the fact that rush chairs had been planning and working with MIT's environmental health and safety department over a month in advance, as they do every year.

So some very quick workarounds had to be made. There is still a structure that rolls and coasts, although it's just a cart racing track, not a roller coaster. The outdoor lounge is only one story tall instead of two. The traditional merry-go-round is bigger and more solid than last year's.

 

There is a see-saw that goes, like, ten feet in the air and has seat belts that I suspect are from actual cars.

 
via

This whole construction permit situation is all very ironic and sad, given that East Campus is arguably the organization in Cambridge most qualified to safely construct a roller coaster in less than a week, and that no one has mentioned anything about permits in the last decade or so we've been doing it. But it can't be helped. At least the modified construction projects are coming together nicely now, and you can be damn sure there's going to be an epic roller coaster next year.

Oh, and this.

If there's one thing I am utterly terrible at, it is prioritizing. My top priorities of the moment keep getting supplanted as more and more pressing Ideas Of The Now pop into my head. Today, the pecking order ascended from the somewhat ambitious "Find a UROP to turn into a thesis!" to "Keep learning Haskell!" As I paged through windows at an excruciatingly slow pace in my browser to do just that, I was seized by the sudden necessity to "Write a browser quicksearch tool to make online utilities more efficient to use!" which rapidly degraded into "But I need to set up a server somewhere first for it to run on!" But since I didn't want to run a server off my laptop, and MIT's virtual machine service is down for maintenance, I regressed to "Organize rush logistics that probably should have been sorted out last week!" I actually managed to complete this. Which leaves me with at least four pressing tasks, and the burning question of what to do for a thesis.

This is the reason, if you were unlucky enough to see my room last year, that my walls were papered entirely in post-it notes. Moving away for the summer gave me a chance to start anew, with wide-eyed dreams of exclusively electronic planning, but I already have one big one pinned right in front of my workstation just in case I forget trivialities or forget to check Google Tasks, as I am wont to do: "Feed Kristina's cat until Thursday, and don't forget she lives in Jordan's room."

In a heroic effort to atone, I spent a whole morning powering through little tasks ("DON'T FORGET TO EAT BREAKFAST", "archive old emails", "organize closet") and making an authoritative list of pre-Reg-Day priorities, which I promptly tacked above my monitor so that I probably couldn't miss it.

Then, because Facebook fed me three solid meals a day five days a week for twelve weeks and I didn't get to touch a kitchen this summer, I ran headlong into the warm, humid embrace of the Fifth West kitchen. I simmered a giant beef stew with potatoes and onions and grains and then shredded cilantro and cheddar on top and the cheese melted all over the starchiness of the potatoes and it was wonderful. I husked and roasted ears of corn with tons of pepper and chili. I made dough for two giant loaves of peasant bread and set it aside to rise for tomorrow. I smashed an avocado into guacamole with a lime and a pinch of salt and ate it all. I baked tiny, terrible pies filled with nutella and bananas and strawberries with my neighbor Ale. I brewed deliciously, punchily strong espresso syrup, rendering Kahlua obsolete in my pantry, and drank it cold on the rocks like a gentleman despite lacking milk or cream to test it on.

And then, because I am a terrible blogger who has been accustomed to carrying an iPhone for the last twelve weeks and is now extremely full, I forgot to take a single picture of my mouthwatering reunion with food.

Tomorrow morning, I'll tackle numero uno on my conspicuously block-lettered list of priorities, for reals: "Find a UROP to turn into a thesis."

Until then, home sweet MIT.

Though I usually try to avoid being serious on the blogs, I've always felt truly honored to be an MIT admissions blogger, and by 'always' I mean 'since I became an admissions blogger'. To this day, I maintain that both the freshman admissions and blogger selection committees plucked me from the masses purely for comic relief.

But what drives us bloggers and our tireless devotion to describing, in unnecessarily sordid detail, the microwaved ramen we ate last night while trying to finish slews of problem sets, and how, through an unnecessarily labyrinthine analogy, the caked MSG coating every mouthful of cheap sustenance reminded us of the importance of balancing work and fun because fun is the seasoning of life but needs to complement the substance of our life experiences, or something equally contrived yet somehow ambiguously true? What fuels our persistent struggle to uncover the truth and beauty behind depriving ourselves of sleep to slog through our scientifically rigorous work, for the sole purpose of clearing away enough free time to do more science? Is it vanity? Is it masochism? Is it all an elaborate conspiracy, and have our thumbnail pictures recently been replaced with cartoons due to copyright infringement because we are, in fact, fake people made up by MIT?

A lot of bloggers are fresh with the residual excitement of being prefrosh. They remember how intriguing that little glimpse into MIT through the blogs was, or how curious they were about the Institvte. That's still true for me, although I wasn't hired until I was a bitter, jaded junior, when I'd completely forgotten that the blogs existed and only happened to see the 2010 blogger application because it was posted around the same time as an entry Yan shared on Facebook that I clicked on while bored.

But this is what I get out of blogging.

Within the Secret Blogger Handbook, issued to all baby bloggers upon their inception, there is a lone yet chillingly effective guideline to blogging propriety: "Imagine you are writing a letter to your grandmother. And not your cool grandmother who has purple hair and a Harley, but rather your lovable but easily shocked grandmother who loves you very much and always bakes cookies for you but who only rents PG movies and thinks MTV is disgraceful."

This, combined with the underlying knowledge that I am writing to tens of thousands of prospective applicants, their parents, and potentially anyone who knows how to use a search engine, particularly future employers, obviously means that I have to impose some kind of standard upon myself. I can no longer rely on 'your mom' jokes to distract from a lackluster turn of phrase, or to propel a drowning post inherently doomed by a lack of substance. I can't be boring. It's started to carry over into real life, too.

But sometimes, I've just about had it with the Institvte. It's been a long three days. I don't really care how space optimization in C memory allocation works any more. I just want to go to sleep for 36 hours and then wake up and microwave some leftovers and spend the rest of the day in a bathrobe with my cat on my lap, reading weird postmodern literature.

Stumbling toward the nearest couch, I am about to do just this, when someone runs down the hallway with an exciting idea. It is something as straightforward as doing algorithms homework outside instead of hunched over a table, or riding on someone's shoulders while wrapped in a Snuggie so that we look like an unwieldy, pregnant, fleece-coated giant, or learning Haskell, which is one of the most intimidating programming languages that has actual practical uses.

Or it's something as completely ridiculous as scripting a comedic mockumentary about two Asian-nerds-turned-rappers soul-searching through the streets of NYC and complaining about their first world problems, and then getting someone who works at Media Lab to break us into the lobby in the middle of the night so we can film it.

Often, when faced with this dilemma, I think briefly of you, and of Chris's frequent email reminders to the bloggers to post more often. I possibly microsleep while standing for half a second, and have a brief, vertigo-inducing dream about carrots baking cakes in the interim. And then I decide that today will be a day worth blogging about, even if I don't end up blogging about it.

Literally every time you ask an MIT student how their week was, they'll say, "Crazy," and the next week, the circles under their eyes will be even darker and they'll say, "Crazier." So I figure, if MIT is going to be crazy, it had better be crazy in a good way.

You don't have to keep an high-traffic online log of your MIT experience to motivate its awesomeness, but having one subconsciously reminds me, whenever I'm feeling down, that an experience worth blogging about is not often one to regret. So welcome, baby bloggers. I hope you enjoy the world's greatest part-time job. And welcome, prefrosh. I hope the next four years are everything you dreamed of and much more. 

Once, a man whom we can only assume must have been truly desperate responded to a Craigslist personal ad which bore only a single coy statement, "Call for a good time." He showed up at the requested meeting place, and was whisked off for a day of exhilarating, platonic adventure, culminating in skydiving. Needless to say, he had a good time.

This story has grown near and dear to my heart in my lifelong quest to become the ultimate altruistic troll, but I bring it to you for a half-reasonable reason: this weekend reminded me of it.

Several weekends ago, I was having dinner with some '08s who are now full-time techies in San Francisco, and one of them casually remarked, "Oh, I saw Mitra the other day..."

Allegedly, I frothed at the mouth and rasped, "Mitra?? THE Mitra?" (Mitra, for those of you who don't know, was the original admissions blogger, and predates Ben, who predates Chris, who pretends to be old. I witnessed her last year of blogging the year I started thinking about applying to MIT. (Sorry, Mitra.))

So after stalking cross-referencing the alumni directory with Facebook, I shot off an email to Mitra and Sam with the subject, "this is not a craigslist proposition," just to be clear.

Mitra's response: "I don't know about you, Sam, but I am quite disappointed this is not a craigslist proposition. Those are the best."

Sam's response: "Hey Rachel! Thanks for the totally non-creepy intro!"

Oh dear.

And so we met up for coffee. In the true spirit of SF, our less-than-loud conversation was quietly tolerated by plaid-clad hipsters wincing at us over their Macbooks with saintly martyrdom. One hipster actually retreated into a corner of the coffee shop after we sat down. By the door, the shop's token eccentric was matter-of-factly spinning a hank of wool wrapped around his arm onto a wooden spindle.

Mitra: So did you email us just because we were in the area, or because we were your favorite bloggers?
Me: The first reason...
Mitra: Oh.
Me: ..and also the second.
Mitra: TAKE THAT, MOLLIE

Apparently, when Sam searched his email to find our meetup plans, he stumbled upon another email from me...as a prefrosh.

Sam: I think I owe you a postcard from a few years ago.
Me: Huh? OH GOD.
Sam: Yeah, I put up a letter addressed to stalkers in my public folder, and you found it.
Mitra: Actually, after he put it up we timed how long people took to find it. Our friend found it in less than a week.

But alas, my stalker cred has diminished over the years. I didn't even know, for example, that Sam's initials are S.A.M.

We also talked about Real People Things, like bad puns, and Ok Cupid shenanigans, and how gap years rock, and how each cover of Oprah is better than the previous one and this month's cover was so good that they'll just have to terminate the magazine now because they can never, ever top it.

(Actually, I think Sam is just obsessed with Oprah.)

Also, how being as networked as possible on LinkedIn is a good thing, although it can lead to some awkward situations, like when the MIT alum CTO of some hot new startup asks you how you know someone they found you through and you're like, "Uhh, I think I met them at a Burton 1 party last year. Oh, we've networked at a few tech-related social functions." Which indirectly leads me to our conveniently meta-referential parting words:

Mitra: Whenever you have a blogger meetup, I feel like you're obligated to blog about it.
Me: Definitely! But how can I construe it as compelling and relevant?
Mitra: Maybe it can be about the strength of the alumni network, or something.
Me: Nah, that would be kind of preachy. LET'S TAKE AN EXCITING PICTURE INSTEAD!
Sam: YEAH!

In lieu of the strength of alumni networks (and I already implied it, so you get it for free anyways), here is the theme of my weekend: coffee shops. Rather, shops that serve coffee. To be fair, every shop in SF seems to have a dual specialty in coffee. Bookstore-coffee-shop combos are pretty common, as are coffee-shop-creperies. The most unexpected combination I've seen so far was an espresso bar that also rented videos. It's not like someone just decided one day, "Oh, maybe we should also rent videos, so people can browse them while they drink their espresso, even though they can't watch them while drinking their espresso," or vice versa. No, someone clearly thought this through.

For some reason, every coffee-shop-that-is-also-actually-another-kind-of-shop in San Francisco is also an art gallery.

For dinner, my roommate Tiffany'12 and I went to a coffee-shop-diner-art-gallery that also served dinner, but it was too late for dinner, so they were only serving breakfast, but they were also out of breakfast food. We were like, "Do you have pasta?" "Do you have sandwiches?" "Do you have eggs?" "Okay, do you have food?" and finally went next door, where we had...breakfast. For dinner. At a coffee shop that was also a diner and an art gallery and served Middle Eastern food. I swear their matching illustrated chalkboard menus even had the same handwriting as each others', as well as the coffee-shop-creperie-art-gallery near my apartment.

Later, I gave my leftovers to a hobo kitten named Macaroni, whom we had encountered earlier on the way to dinner.

I give entirely too much credit to coffee shops, though. The MIT network really is a fantastic thing to be a part of. While scrounging for housing at the beginning of the summer, I crashed with an '08 I met through an alum of my floor, and I actually ended up taking over a '10's lease when he decided to move out for the summer. On the Facebook employee shuttle, I happened to sit next to an '03 in HR who noticed me posting a blog entry to this very site and wanted me to write for the Facebook engineering blog.

Also, Dropbox employees keep giving me free storage. Try getting a punchcard for that, suckers.

MIT has a lot of resources that could have made my freshman year a lot easier that I just didn't find out about until much later. I've been thinking about blogging a guide to something complicated, like the HASS system, for a while, but after querying the 2015s, I discovered, to my horror, that the HASS-D lottery ended yesterday. Also, that HASS-D's aren't even mandatory for you anymore and I have no idea what's going on with the 2015 HASS requirements. So, uh, whoops. By way of apology, I'll do my best to actually bring you useful information applicable to the remainder of your prefroshly days, for once in my brief but glorious professional blogging career.

How can I...

...get sophomore standing?

The freshman class website is often frustratingly vague on this topic. Fortunately, the actual requirements are outlined here. In order to qualify, you will need to have completed (read: passed) the following by the end of first semester:

• one CI-H/HW
• at least half of the science GIRs
• acquired a total of 96 credits, or the equivalent of eight normal classes (this is the only time when all that general AP credit is actually useful, unless you want to graduate in two years for some reason)

...balance extracurriculars and schoolwork?

As is only inevitable, all of the bloggers have already composed pages and pages on this topic during their darkest hell weeks at MIT. In lieu of resummarizing the endless cycle of agony and achievement that psets inspire, I've painstakingly scoured the archives to produce a strew of incisively insightful oldies for your perusal.

stories from hell
Chris realizing 'dammit, psets are actually hard'
Yan on metaphors for energy
Me on my best (work-related) all-nighter ever
Paul on how 8.012 is really hard

hell survival guides
Jess on getting through the rough patches
Chris on time management
Sam on how MIT's difficulty is a highly accurate caricature of itself
Lulu on surviving MIT

optimizing your stay in hell
Sam looking back at undergrad
Keri on getting the most out of your four years
Keri on how having too many extracurriculars is totally awesome

via People Sleeping In Libraries

...figure out what to do freshman year?

Mollie on freshman advising
Chris's guide to the GIR's: 'don't take 8.012 just because you hate TEAL!' I was guilty of this, but had a great/hellish time anyways.

...figure out what to do with my life?

Okay, that's a tough one. But we've also written a lot about figuring out how to choose a major.
Lulu on Course 8 and choosing a major
Anna on picking out her sweet joint degree
Melis on -- oh wait she basically already wrote this entry haha recursion

...change all of my classes?

We have a magical phenomenon called Reg Day, where you're required to physically go to your advisor and sign off on the classes you'll be taking for the semester, or change them as necessary. Hopefully, this meeting involves you actually asking for some advice, since, you know, that's what advisors are for. The beautiful thing about this is that, since the meeting is mandatory anyways, you might as well prereg for one random class by the deadline, take the whole summer to figure out your courseload, then waltz in on Reg Day and change everything. Most upperclassmen have adopted this strategy.

For the first week of classes, you're allowed to add classes as long as your advisor signs off on them.

For the month after that (up to Add Date), you have to get both the instructor's signature and your advisor's, which takes a surprising amount of effort.

...find study buddies?

Your living group, or classes, or clubs, or really anywhere...but if you want a little something extra, and you missed the application deadline for Concourse, ESG is a really great program. You can also sign up for Seminar XL, a structured study group program, at any point during the semester.

What classes should I take?

I really want to take this cool HASS first semester, but this other HASS gives me both CI-H and distribution credit, so I might as well kill as many birds as possible with one stone, right?

I and many others have discovered and re-discovered over the long years at MIT that taking classes just to maximize requirement multitasking is totally not worth it. You have to take eight HASSes anyways, it's not like you're going to run out of opportunities to take free-for-all electives.

Pick out whatever sounds the most interesting in theory, then install your certs and head over to the student course evaluations to make sure the class is actually interesting in practice. Seriously. Do whatever you want. And get used to it.

I want to double major in 6 and 2 and double minor in 14 and 8 and do research with this CSAIL robotics group and I've picked out the five clubs and three varsity sports I'm going to join. How should I optimize my courseload to get a headstart?

I actually know a couple of upperclassmen who handle this with ease, but the vast majority of freshmen who come in with this mindset change their plans or even their interests completely after a semester or two here. Also, establishing social groups and networking during your first year will be vital to the rest of your time here. So relax a bit. Don't overconstrain yourself. Be open to different possibilities, and use your first semester to explore MIT.

A word to the wise: investing a lot of time in a hobby or interest will often be far more rewarding than trying to juggle a double in the related major.

photo by Juan Carlo, via VenturaCountyStar

X sounds more fun than Y, but Y sounds easier and I want to get an A.

Good news: grad schools couldn't care less about your nontechnical GPA. No, really! Not only does no one care, but if half of all your grades are B's, you're still extremely competitive. GPA-wise, at least. Research and references are where it's at.

Also, it's really, really tough to get a C in a HASS class. Trust me, you'd probably have to at least skip half your assignments and a midterm and then never follow up when your professor nicely asks you if you'd like to make them up any time before the end of the semester.

Oh, and one more key thing. PASS/NO RECORD.

I'd like to try taking a class to get a taste of a certain major, but I'm not sure if I'm ready for it.

PASS/NO RECORD

I want to take this interesting class that I don't formally have the prerequisites for.

Go look at the curriculum (shortcut: http://course.mit.edu/[course number]) and honestly ask yourself if you think you can handle it. It's really not interesting taking a class if you lack the foundations. Cryptography, for example, sounds quite romantic (and it totally is), but if you don't get the piles of number theory that make up the daily grind of the class, the insights will be lost on you.

Useful links

Student Course Evaluations
Course 6 Evaluations

Course catalog
Degree requirements (mysteriously titled 'course catalog')
Overview of undergrad academics

Now go forth, and conquer!

Hundreds of Facebookers united behind one banner and under several signs last Sunday, coming out to downtown San Francisco to support the annual Pride Parade! We weren't the only techies out there this weekend -- on the bus there, I ran into a flock of Google interns wearing this super adorable shirt:

But for the most part, our view of the rest of the parade was shadowed by the giant rainbow poop being towed along on the Whole Foods float.

Much, much later, we got a closer look and realized it was actually a cupcake.

Practically all of the interns managed to roll out of bed early enough for the parade, which when you think about it is really impressive. I mean, I don't even bother registering for classes that start before 11AM.

Some thoughtful HR people had procured stickers and stamps for us to spam irreverently. We proceeded to arrange them in every possible tasteful configuration, and then some. Tons of bystanders came up to us and were like, "OMG, I was just on Facebook!" which, despite getting old quickly, was pretty cool.

As for the rest, I'll let pictures speak in place of my usual verbosity.

Facebook is somewhat infamous on the college software developer scene for its 'hackathons'. What exactly is a hackathon?

"At Facebook, we believe that every engineer has a great idea within them. We had a Hackathon last week, and it was a chance for each engineer to surface this idea and spend a night cranking away on it."

In other words, organized, unpaid overtime in which developers stay up all night to work on projects outside of their usual work just because they feel like it. And then go to work the next morning. Yes, this is totally awesome. It reminds me of MIT. It also makes a lot of sense because it's far easier to code something interesting in one nonstop 20-hour spurt than in 40 hours of punctuated work time. You'll understand what I mean if you ever become course 6.

In the spirit of hacking, the office is bedecked with a variety of posters inscribed with witticisms like the following:

This summer, the interns have been running unofficial hackathons on Thursdays. 'Summer' is only five weeks old for me, but the least fresh interns have been here for over two months. One unwavering constant about software internships is that interns from the University of Waterloo, whose academic program alternates four-month periods of school with four-month co-ops, always start working a few weeks before everyone else and initialize the intern culture. Us late bloomers, still bleary-eyed from finals, end up grafting ourselves onto their social branches. It's sort of like a retrograde exchange program, where they use their extra month of expertise to guide us through pitfalls when we inevitably break the code, and we exchange small cultural hilarities ("What's wrong with American university schedules, eh?" "No, what's wrong with Canadian schedules?").

Another weird quirk about software culture is that people usually meet on IRC (chat) before IRL (in real life), so their Unix names nontrivially affect the names they'll be known by. Many interns end up with their last names permanently attached to their first names for this reason. A few lucky ones have unusual enough names that they can blend their real identities with their Unix ones. (Looking at you, Yuzhi and Fravic. Carlos: WTF?)

So, back to hackathons. A lot of relatively high-profile Facebook features have apparently been birthed from hackathons -- video wall posts, and the 'like' button, to name a couple of things you probably have difficulty imagining your online life without.

Many hacks are internal, which is probably utterly uninteresting to you but useful for me -- for example, an IRC bot that broadcasts shuttle schedules, lunch menus, and graphs activity in the interns' channel, or a script that texts your phone once your machine is done running a job. Last week, a few of us hacked on tags so that they would support employees' unix names, although I'm not sure if this is going to fly with upper management. However, since we've just been having unofficial hackathons so far, Thursday nights will often devolve in the following manner for the less inspired among us.

After being nearly trampled in the mass of hundreds of engineers and interns champing at nonexistent bits and Chinese takeout, ready to hack singlemindedly toward the frugal reward of a warm fuzzy feeling of accomplishment and a free T-shirt at 5AM, we retreated to the war rooms and delved into the massive codebase mutating before us.

Then, someone burst into the room telling us to come play with Zuck's puppy. No, that is not a euphemism.

After generally giggling like idiots at Beast's persistent attempts to break the codebase by cuddling with one engineer's keyboard, we re-retreated to our retreat. While one of my friends apparently pushed out 5000 lines of code that will add something useful to your profile in the near future, I experimented with an incredibly cool feature that you may find out about in several months, only to discover at 5AM that my development sandbox had ingloriously broken. Crushed, I sank into the oblivion of free T-shirts and sweet sleep, awakening five hours later with an full beard and a splitting headache to the tireless clacking of keys and another day in software engineering heaven on earth.

Okay, hold up. I have a really good excuse for not blogging in ages. Two excuses, actually. Yes, I took my last final over a week ago, and yes, I only had one, and yes, it was for an intro class since I’m one of those people who does course 6 in no order whatsoever. Taking course 6 in no order whatsoever isn't all fun and games, though -- I spent the two weeks before finals simultaneously doing 3 final projects.

First excuse: I NEED HOUSING. My sworn roommate flew out here last night, and I’ve sent 150+ emails and made 20+ calls related to housing, because I decided not to take company housing for some reason. When I landed last weekend, I booked Sunday solid with the few subletters and landlords who had returned my frantic correspondence, ran all around town visiting them, and ended up with a really awesome prospect...that isn’t sure when we can move in.

Where am I, anyways?

Second excuse: I started working for Facebook last week! This is marginally more exciting than any outsider might imagine, but in a nerdier way. I walked into a giant warehouse last Monday morning to find rows and rows of laptops accompanied by nametags and setup instructions sitting in front of rows and rows of chairs. We (the interns) were then asked to log into Facebook. Afterward, we spent most of our lunch break doing this:

Okay, they didn’t actually pay us to goof around the whole day -- mostly, we were going through an introduction to the company, its mission, and its policies. Here's my favorite quote from the sexual harassment seminar:

“You love your job, you love your work, you love your team...but then you start loving your boss.”

After talking about ethics and values and statistics for a while, we got to the part we’d been waiting for: setting up code repositories on our development servers! You know I’d normally illustrate this with a picture of a cluster of alternately gleeful and despairing interns, all wearing taped glasses and argyle sweaters and hunched over computer terminals reconfigured to look like the Matrix. But pictures of interesting things on computer screens make for terrible pictures. I imagine most of my pictures for the rest of the summer will be of people eating or hitting each other with balloon animals or passed out over their laptops on a couch after a hackathon.

Again, we don't get paid to do nothing all day. I walked into the bathroom the other day and, to my simultaneous horror and amusement, was greeted with a basket filled to the top with new toothbrushes and travel-sized toothpaste tubes, so I’m pretty sure there will be some long coding nights ahead.

For those of you who may have noticed that my pictures have suddenly experienced a drastic drop in quality: Facebook gave me an iPhone, which has a large enough portability advantage over my DSLR that it's hard not to use it constantly. Ah, modern technology.

EDIT: We found housing!!!!!!!!!11cos(0) In true rfong style, I celebrated by buying a 14oz teapot.

Just kidding. In even truer rfong style, I prematurely bought the teapot yesterday.

With enrollment deadlines imminent, you can always use an extra perspective to help you make sense of the decision that, though it won't make or break your life, will shape your next four years. How different can two universities really be?

This time, that extra perspective is not mine, but that of Qiaochu, a critically acclaimed math blogger (yes, blogs can be serious), an MIT junior (majoring in math, of course), and a participant this year in the Cambridge-MIT Exchange program. Possibly due to his mathematical maturity, he often gives off the dignified vibes of a tweedy, octagenarian professor on paper, but in real life, he's a fun-loving guy with an amazing falsetto.

If you've been craving some general, all-purpose advice on learning math on your own, or been wondering whether MIT's academic style is flexible enough to suit your diverse academic needs (spoiler: it is, unless you aren't looking for flexibility), then you're in luck. If you just want to see me caption photos of people as though they were lolcats, you're also in luck. Read on.

What's Cambridge like after two years of MIT?

It is strange to walk into a building and find out that it's twice as old as the United States. If I could massively overgeneralize for a moment, I would say that the biggest difference between the culture at Cambridge and the culture at MIT is that the former has a greater respect for tradition and history, whereas the latter is more concerned with innovation and the future. Certainly it isn't a bad thing to have respect for tradition; it's a different perspective, and that's what I was looking for when I decided to do this program.

What about the academics? Did you find that you benefited from the different learning style?

For me, Cambridge had two major draws academically. The first is that homework isn't graded; everything depends on the final (the Tripos) at the end of the year, so unlike at MIT, there isn't a constant pressure to work on psets. I thought it would be nice to get away from that for a year. This isn't to say that I didn't do my work at Cambridge, but it meant I could focus on learning instead of performing, which has been great. On the other hand, the final becomes much more important, and I've been told that studying for it is an intense experience that will lead to a deeper understanding of the material.

The second is that instead of recitations, Cambridge has a system of 'supervisions' where students, together with one or two partners, meet with a supervisor to discuss the homework on a regular basis. I'm a big fan of the supervision system; as someone who has trouble going to others for help, it was nice to basically be forced to go to office hours. If I didn't have trouble with the homework, I could discuss other topics with my supervisor, and I've gotten a lot out of doing this.

The Cambridge system isn't for everybody, of course. Some people need MIT's constant pressure to do psets or else they won't do any work. The MIT system is also geared towards independence, which a lot of people (including myself) value: you need to ask for help, research opportunities, etc. yourself.

Why did you decide to come to MIT?

I applied to four schools: MIT, Harvard, Princeton, and Brown. I was accepted to the first three and deferred from Brown. Literally everybody that I talked to about the decision assumed that I would choose MIT, but I was uncomfortable just agreeing with them: I wanted to make sure I was choosing MIT for the right reasons, not just because it seemed like the obvious thing to do.

I couldn't decide based on academics; I knew that MIT, Harvard, and Princeton would all give me a world-class education, so that wasn't relevant. For me, the most important factor was culture. Where would I make the most interesting friends? Where would I learn the most outside the classroom? Where would I get a complete undergraduate experience I would look back on most fondly in 20 years?

The answer was MIT by a landslide. It helped that I already had an idea of what being at MIT would be like. The previous summer, I participated in the Research Science Institute at MIT, which was in many ways a mini-MIT experience. The people I met there were (and still are) some of the most brilliant and interesting people I'd ever met, and we had an enormous amount of fun that summer. I knew that many of them were going to MIT, so I had a good idea what to expect from the people there, and going to CPW confirmed my suspicions completely.

MIT people are amazing. An annoying number of them have started tech companies. One of my friends is currently a project manager at Microsoft and has also been composing music and playing jazz piano for years. Another, who almost finished his physics major after freshman year, is taking time off from classes to do full-time research in string theory. People here are passionate about what they do and world-class at doing it, and that passion saturates MIT culture. I couldn't ask for anything more from my college experience.

Can you tell us about your research interests and how you discovered them?

Mathematics is enormous. Really. It is really, really enormous, and even a full undergraduate mathematics experience at MIT won't prepare you for how enormous mathematics really is. Anyone who really wants to get some kind of perspective on what's out there should start by reading the Princeton Companion to Mathematics; otherwise, your options will be limited to what you've heard about.

My own mathematical interests change all the time as I hear about more interesting things, so I don't want to name anything in particular. But as long as I'm giving advice to math kids: read math blogs. Start with Terence Tao's blog and go through his blogroll to find interesting things. I can't overemphasize how important this was to my own mathematical development. Reading math blogs written by professional mathematicians exposes you to insights you might not have heard of otherwise until graduate school, if ever. It's one of many unique resources available in the modern era for learning mathematics.

How did you pursue these interests in high school?

After my high school calculus teacher turned me on to competition mathematics, I spent a lot of time posting on the Art of Problem Solving forum. I picked up a lot of interesting mathematics there and also got a lot of practice writing proofs. After attending the Program in Mathematics for Young Scientists (PROMYS) in 2006, where I really fell in love with mathematics, I started my math blog, Annoying Precision, which I later moved to WordPress. They say the best way to learn something is to teach it, and for me the easiest way to teach people something is to blog about it. It is really surprising what you learn when you try to do this: for example, sometimes there's a step in a proof I have trouble motivating, and thinking about how to motivate that step in a blog post leads to insights I would never have had otherwise.

In 2007, as I mentioned above, I attended the Research Science Institute, where I wrote a mathematics research paper under the direction of my mentor, Ryan Reich. I can't claim that this paper was in any way important or interesting (editor's note: it was pretty interesting), but it was a great learning experience for me: it exposed me to a lot of interesting material along the way, some of which I'm only beginning to learn about properly now.

What do you love about math, and how did you initially get interested in it?

source: XKCD #263

von Neumann once said that "if people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." The real world is enormously messy. Economics is hard. Politics is hard. Psychology is hard. Any given thing that someone says on any of these subjects could be universally accepted now and laughed at 50 years later. There are so many cognitive biases affecting our ability to effectively tell what's going on in any of these fields that I try (and occasionally fail) not to have opinions about them at all.

But mathematics is different. A mathematical proof is one of the easiest way to trump your cognitive biases: either it proves that you're right or it proves that you're wrong. Mathematics is, if nothing else, excellent training in thinking rationally about other subjects: miraculously, it also happens to be enormously useful in understanding (certain aspects of) the world. What's not to love?

As for how I got interested in mathematics, I'll be blunt: I was good at it, so I liked it and wanted to do more of it, and the more I did it the more interesting it became.

What other things do you do for fun?

Besides math? I play guitar and piano, and I also sing. Sometimes I cover pop songs, and sometimes I do showtunes. I love karaoke, and periodically my friends and I will watch and sing along to a musical movie (Rent, most Disney, etc.). My fraternity house has a fantastic pool table, so I get a lot of opportunities to play when I'm around, and I've been getting pretty good.

Looking back, what advice would you give to the young'uns?

Make a point of exposing yourself to as many opportunities as you can. It's impossible to predict which one of them will end up changing your life, so stay proactive, stay open-minded, and don't be afraid to change your plans to fit the circumstances.

For example, until recently I was planning on working as a counselor at PROMYS this summer. But thanks to all the time I spend on the Q&A site math.stackexchange.com, StackExchange offered me an applied math internship in New York which I've decided to take instead. Applied math and New York are both out of my comfort zone, but I decided that the opportunity to explore a new (to me) part of mathematics, as well as an opportunity to meet a different kind of smart, interesting person from the kind I usually meet, was well worth it.

Most of the benefit you'll derive from your college experience is not what you'll learn in your classes (much of which you can find on OCW for free), but the connections and opportunities that a full college experience will make available to you. Maybe you'll find a professor to do some research with. Maybe you'll win an entrepreneurship competition and get funding for your startup. Maybe an alumnus of your fraternity or sorority will offer you a job when you graduate. Or maybe something much weirder and more interesting will happen to you.

Whatever your goals in life, fulfilling those goals is as much a matter of opportunity as of talent, so make sure opportunity's on your side so you can focus on cultivating your talents.

Qiaochu's math blog, Annoying Precision, is too intensely mathy for me to make sense of, but check it out if you feel up to stretching your brain.

I'm long overdue for a blog update. To dispel your mental image of me as a faceless recluse, I haven't been posting because of a drought of excitement. Actually, there's been too much excitement for me to find the time to blog. Here's a quick summary of my last two-and-a-bit weeks to prove it.

CPW

I spent most of CPW punting psets in order to gorge myself on free food, wander around campus terrifying prefrosh, and brew gallons of bubble tea for my caffeine event (note: never hold a confusingly named event on the fifth floor).

I only wish I'd had more time to spend at my first Meet The Bloggers, which was a pretty fun, low-key event. Apologies to Rohan'15 for this gem of a conversation I'm about to share:

Rohan: You're pretty chill! I was expecting you to be...more...well...
me: NERDY AND AWKWARD??? Is that it?
Rohan: ...I didn't want to say it, but yes.

Although I am arguably nerdy and awkward, MIT students are generally not the variety of nerd that seems to stick in society's collective subconscious.

CPW, while certainly not farfetched, is a heavily time-compressed exaggeration of MIT. We don't stay up until 4am speaking in rapid-fire Math-ese or building wall-climbing robots every night, only some nights.

If you think that's weird, every once in a while, my (course 12) GRT will burst excitedly into the kitchen to talk about rock striations.

The daily grind

About a year ago, in a flash of inspiration, my neighbor Ale bought a secondhand trumpet. For months, my ears were barraged with brassy wails reminiscent of a dying porpoise. Now, he's good enough that he's more comfortable using the trumpet than the piano to help him compose for jazz class.

Now, ever since I was a wee Asian nailed to a piano bench, I'd wished I could play the violin. This sentiment persisted through college, although I always thought, eh, I'll never have time or eh, I'll do it later. Then Stephan started learning the viola under Julia's tutelage, and also got a piano, and Harry and Sam came into possession of ukuleles, and Ale found a tenor saxophone on Ebay, so Angela decided to get an accordion, and everyone else felt comfortable enough to dust off their high school instruments again, and I felt comfortable enough to have the following revelation:

I pictured myself, 30 years old and alone in a dingy apartment, clad in a bathrobe, surrounded by takeout dinners and bills, with coding as my only hobby other than breathing, mumbling, "Eh, I'll do it later."

So I dumped the remainder of my IAP paycheck into a violin and an alto sax. At first, I was terrible, but now I am merely bad. On the other hand, life is good.

Except for the part where I need to start three final projects. Woe.

I turned 21

Finally.

and the arts

In addition to being the time when the semester really grinds down on us, this is also the time when student groups begin to unveil the performances they've been working on all semester.

Last Saturday, I hit up Grains Of Rice, an annual AAA (Asian American Association) event where tons of Asians from MIT, BU, Harvard, etc, and a professional guest group get together and perform. Grains Of Rice showcases many traditional varieties of entertainment, like taiko drumming, lion dancing, Chinese yoyoing, and cultural dances, but fellow course 6-ers Andrew'12 and Jeff'12 broke the mold and opened with a rap about Asian-American stereotypes. I don't have a recording of it, but I just so happen to have filmed a music video for them which you can view and share with all your friends (hint, hint) below!

Warning: may be extremely offensive to Asians; may be extremely unamusing to non-Asians.

This year's guest was Kaba Modern, whom you may know from America's Best Dance Crew, but I missed out because I had to run off to Resonance's epic 10th anniversary concert.

Okay, there was some quality a cappella, too.

Fortunately for a cappella lovers, there are a few more concerts left in the year. This semester, the Chorallaries decided to observe MIT's 150th anniversary on their spring concert posters by costuming themselves in styles from different decades, and I got to shoot for them! It turns out they're as skillful at modeling as they are at keeping four-part harmonies. So if you happened to see a group of barefoot, tie-dyed tree huggers sprawling in front of 77 Mass Ave, or a few dashing gentlemen holding stiff Napoleonesque poses for a daguerreotype, that was just us. MIT hasn't invented time machines yet.

(^ click to see the rest of our photoshoot!)

Because I hate to end a post without a vague sense of coherency, let me leave you with a general observation: MIT is home to some insanely fun and well-rounded people.

via squishable.com

And mixing all those people together on the same campus is the perfect recipe for a pretty lively college experience. Where else are you going to make music videos with your complexity theory pset partners while gawking tourists are herded by?

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while -- I've been hosed with the deluge of tests, homework, and projects that inevitably follows CPW. To temporarily satiate your craving for reading about MIT while watching half of my face contemplatively sip coffee at you from my blog header, my tooling buddy Tiffany, a Course I junior with a terrifyingly robust sense of work ethic and a phenomenally operatic R&B singing voice, has graciously offered to temper my usual Course VI nerditude by writing about her involvement in international development @ MIT. Enjoy!

In the grind of the semester, it's easy to forget that there exists an entire world outside of the college campus (hello Boston!). Yet, one of the most rewarding things about MIT is being able to apply the concepts you learn within the classroom to real-time projects that have a significant impact on communities around the world. This past year, I have been serving as project manager for the Engineers Without Borders-MIT Chapter. Engineers Without Borders is a non-profit organization that partners with communities in developing countries to improve their quality of life. One of our projects, for which I am team lead, is Showergy.

Showergy's premise is this: Imagine not being able to take a shower after a long day's work. Now picture that every day. Hundreds of millions of people in the developing world lack access to water and facilities where they can cleanse themselves. Even where there is water, many, especially women, avoid going to communal showers in fear of attack or harassment going there and coming back.

To help combat this fear, Showergy delivers all that is needed for the shower experience right to the user's doorstep - literally. Our cost-effective and easily installable shower system units will be implemented on almost every single plot as part of a franchise business model in conjunction with latrines. This design and model will ensure that community members do not have to walk more than a stone's throw away. Our system also involves an innovative drainage and water reuse that prevents further contamination of critical water sources. By providing the means to basic hygiene, Showergy helps reduce the probability for disease and ensures a safe, reliable place for women, children, and senior citizens to wash themselves.

Throughout the past few months, our team has designed a basic prototype of our individual shower system unit in MIT's famous D-Lab. The “D” in D-Lab stands for “Development through Dialogue, Design, & Dissemination”; its goal is to assist students in improving the quality of life in low-income households through development of low-cost technologies. It is extremely common for students taking courses in D-Lab to travel over IAP or sometime during the year to implement the technologies that they've developed.

Anyways, you can actually step into the unit, look up at the showerhead, and take a shower! What does this mean for term life? It's actually a lot of fun. We get to spray each other with water while prototyping our pump mechanism.

...and be obnoxiously loud when using hammers.

Currently, our project is entered into the IDEAS/Global Challenge competition, an annual contest sponsored by the Public Service Center that encourages students to develop or innovate a product –it can be anything!-- that will assist developing communities in tackling some of the largest global problems, like disease, sanitation, and water shortage. The projects don't need to be fancy or complicated – in fact, the best solutions to problems of these scale often are and need to be simple. There is an enormous variety of projects that are entered into the competition. The sheer amount of creativity and innovation going on here is through the roof! You can view all the teams here. Since the competition is ongoing, you can vote for five teams that you like the best if you register for an account (insert shameless plug for Showergy).

To reiterate, there are incredible resources at MIT if you are interested in international development. Other resources include the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepeneurship, the Sloan Global Entrepreneurship Center, and the MIT International Development Initiative. If you are worried that your choice of major might affect how you can pursue international development, rest assured that no matter what you major in, you can probably apply it in a creative and significant way.

Even as a junior, close to the end of my third year here, I am astounded by how easily ideas can happen here and actually become a reality, with some hard work, the right connection, and of course, a bit of luck. So now, I leave you with a question: What are the “big” problems that interest you and how do you envision tackling them?

Several of my friends have gotten to travel to places like Nicaragua and Cambodia while involved with D-Lab projects. Sounds pretty fun!

Feel free to email Tiffany at tifa(at)mit.edu or get in touch with her team if you have questions!

ARE YOU PUMPED FOR CPW? Who wouldn't be excited about 72 solid hours of free food? I'm excited. So much so that I'm running two East Campus events. Guess what they are based on this picture of my bookshelf.

Since I somehow forgot to submit the event on the left on time, it's not on the official schedule, so I'm just going to tiptoe over the bounds of propriety a bit and plug it here. The other event is running on Friday and Saturday afternoon.

Thursday, 7:30pm-8:30pm
Talbot Lounge (East Campus)
Come swap algs with the pros, or just enjoy the company of other Rubik's Cube aficionados. Beginners are also welcome.

Shameless self-promotion aside, get excited about CPW! There are far too many events for a single person to attend without the aid of a time machine, so to jump on the blogger bandwagon, here are a few suggestions to help you squeeze the juiciest combination of fun and information out of your CPW:

Make friends. You'll stay in touch with many of them even if you don't end up enrolling here. Plus, it's a lot more fun to roam freely through events and around campus with a group.

Plan ahead, but also plan to be flexible. As previously stated: too many events.

Ask questions. CPW is orchestrated by distilling and compacting all the fun parts of a year at MIT into three days. Thusly, five minutes at CPW will leave you far more informed about campus culture than the rest of your college preview weekends combined, but if you want to know more about mind-melting curricula or research gigs, try attending a class or a lab tour. Or better yet, talk to current students.

Lick a famous professor's office door! Ha ha just kidding that's incredibly creepy (not to mention unhygienic). You can just talk to them instead if they're not busy. While their brains may be intimidating, their presences are almost suspiciously laid back. My friend reverently claims that she once left a cupcake in a bio lounge, and later witnessed Eric Lander (a great lecturer, and sort of the patron saint of genomics), mistaking it for free food and subsequently consuming it. I can only hope for such an encounter, although to be fair, I do have Ron Rivest's signature somewhere...on a drop form. And only because he used to be my academic advisor. At least I wasn't dropping his class.

Know this: average MIT frat ≠ average college frat. Approximately half of all male MIT undergraduates join a fraternity. Just think about that statistic for a minute, and then replace your recurring nightmare of being forced to swim the Charles clad in only a beer keg with one in which you are compelled to eat far too much free food freshly grilled by students who are probably thinking about math instead of the acrid smell of smoke.

Spend some unstructured time. Also, don't be afraid to hang out with current students. Just don't start talking to us about APs. That's a deal-breaker.

Don't forget to grab some liquid nitrogen ice cream. It's impossibly delicious. (But don't grab the liquid nitrogen, that'll hurt.)