My name is Chris Peterson, though most people at MIT call me Petey. As Director of Communications + Special Projects at MIT Admissions (and Student Financial Services), I work on a bunch of stuff in our office, including the blogs you're reading right now. Sometimes, I teach courses in CMS/W, from which I earned my grad rat in 2013.
While MIT attracts people from all over the world, I'm a fairly local guy: I was born a few towns north of Cambridge, and for a good while had the accent to prove it (now it mostly comes out during Bruins games). But I'd never been to MIT, or even known anyone to attend here, before I showed up for my interview to be an admissions counselor for web communications. I was a senior in college. I'd applied to 63 jobs and only MIT had called me back. I got lost, first parking, then along the Infinite. But Matt decided to hire me anyway. And MIT has been my home ever since.
In my life I've attended or worked at public schools and private schools; schools in cities and schools in the sticks; schools with sterling international reputations for brilliance and schools with sterling international reputations for rioting. But I've never been anywhere quite like MIT. The character of the campus community is truly unique - supported by a robust intelligence and animated by a thrumming trickster spirit. Where else can you get up from your desk, walk past Woodie Flowers' office to cross the street for the best burrito in Boston helpfully irradiated by the local nuclear reactor? Where else can you leave your exhausting research at the Laboratory for Chocolate Science and run to catch your friends for a round of underwater hockey, a game which combines the thrilling rush of hypoxia with the club rave psychedelia of swallowing dissolved lead? It's an awesome place to work, an incredible place to live, and I'm ecstatic to be a part of it.
I spend a lot of time geeking out about various things, eating hamburgers, and occasionally escaping Boston for the New Hampshire woods where I feel most at home. I’m allergic to cats and cat macros. I like bouldering, Archer, and helping students.
