MyMIT Application Tracking

This is a good time for you to check up on the status of your application components. The Application Tracking will show what materials we have processed for you. We should have the following: Application Part 1, Application Part 2, Secondary School Report and Transcript, Evaluation A (math or science teacher), Evaluation B (humanities teacher), Testing Requirements (except November scores, which we expect to receive shortly), and, if applicable, Interview Report.

What happens if the tracking system is missing something?

First, do not worry. We do not assign blame on why we don't have it, we just know that we have not processed it. We will not look at your application unfavorably because it is missing an application component at this time. We will wait a while longer before having it evaluated to give you time to send along another copy. Your complete application will be considered for Early Action.

If the tracking system on MyMIT indicates that we are still missing parts of your application, fax your materials to 617-258-8304 as soon as possible, but no later than this Monday, November 23rd. Please allow 48 hours to process your documents. Thank you for your patience.

If we are missing an evaluation, the teacher may fax a copy to us. If they need another copy of the evaluation form, you can get a PDF from the tracking system.

If you had an interview more than two weeks ago and we haven't yet processed it, you should fill out the Conducted Interview form on the MyMIT Application Tracking Detail page. We will follow up with your Educational Counselor.

If we have not processed standardized test scores that that you had the testing agency send us, then you may fax us a copy of an official score report. We will follow up with the testing agency. If we are missing your TOEFL scores, make sure the name on your application is exactly the same as it is on your TOEFL registration. If it is not, please send us an email with your TOEFL registration name.

I know that the Midyear Report box is sitting there, unchecked. Don't worry about this unless you are deferred from EA to RA. This form will not be made available until well after EA decisions are released. And on that note...

...we have not yet determined on what date we will release EA decisions. It will likely be sometime in mid-December, but you should wait for an official announcement from our office. We have not yet determined when the announcement will be made; it usually is about a week before decisions are released.

Bottom line: do not stress if we are missing pieces. It happens every year for reasons usually beyond your control. No worries.

A lot of people who use iTunes.

What happens when you have a lot of people using iTunes on the same WiFi network? Shared libraries!

So many music choices!

That is all. Time to study for my test.

Because: the first question on my Special Relativity test required me to add (and subtract!) numbers with 5 significant figures, and the professor did not manage to include a free copy of Matlab on the formula sheet. No kidding. I opened the test book, glanced at the first page, and felt my face melt into a puddle of inconsolable horror at the sight of more Arabic numerals than I've seen since the SAT II's, which was like 29483 years ago. Unable to bear it any longer, I turned the page, and went on, shuddering in a rising tide of despair. With the precious rind of spare time remaining after I finished the next three problems, I took out my extra pen and whittled an abacus out of the armrest of my chair, with which I hoped to compute the difference between .02932 and .39328.

A wise person once said that arithmetic is like arthritis: it cripples your dreams and contains the letters a, r, t, h, and two i's*. Or is it three? I can't add, remember?

*Cross-curriculum insight of the day: Homophones are the limit of consonance as consonance approaches infinity. Someday, I plan to teach a literature class that has a math prerequisite.

It wasn't until 6:30 pm that I discovered that I had scored 40 points higher on the exam than predicted. (Or was it 50? I can't subtract either.) I'm like the Dow Jones of test grades these days. Also, I'd like to thank the proud sponsors of Sesame Street for their generous contribution to my math education. Never will I forget that seven always comes after Big Bird.

Additional thanks goes to the Physics department library and the irreproachable views of Killian Court glowingly spread outside each window, watching over the study desks like guardians of sanity. Waves and vibrations, sunsets refracting through Windex'ed glass panes, provided the counterpoint to a dry, overbaked textbook with too many pictures. By pictures, I mean “diagrams.” By “diagram,” I mean “a sine wave with an arrow pointing at it.”

It's now 1:46 AM, and I've exceeded bedtime by a couple of hours. To first order, I'm sleeping as I type this. (Definition of MIT, #129: The ability to Taylor expand your states of consciousness around an equilibrium point, usually to convince yourself that you've slept recently.)

On one such cold day, Swetha '13, Carin '13, Divya B. '13, Jeanne '13 (all of whom you might have heard about before), and I decided to spontaneously take a trip to Harvard Square. We used the tunnels to make our way to Kendall, the closest T-stop.

The following was born of that endeavor (video-editing credit goes to Carin '13). Note that in real life, we are not quite so eccentric as we seem in this video :) Enjoy!

If you've been reading the blogs a long time, you may have noticed a few trends. Every year, each blogger gets two freebie posts; for fall and spring semester, you can write about your schedule. Easy, over, done. However, the nature of MIT lends itself to one more blogger freebie. In four years of reading the blogs, I don't remember ever seeing it advertised as such, but that's what it is. It's not a freebie in the sense that it requires little effort or thought to write about, but in the sense that MIT gives you the topic with little effort on your part.

Yep, I'm talking about failure.

Marcela has already written about 18.022; I'd like to elaborate a little on my experiences in that class.

The first test was altogether not that bad for me. However, it seemed that way at first. I walked out of it with a horrible sinking feeling, not wanting to talk to anybody. I thought it was fairly likely that I'd failed the test, even though I'd studied hard; near the end I took the time to figure out that I had barely completed 65 out of 100 points. I had been able to confidently complete at least some of that material, guaranteeing that I would receive points. I suppose that's better than nothing, right? Either way, I walked out of Walker Memorial (one of the common exam-taking-areas) completely crestfallen. After a little walking around, I ran into a friend, a senior, who asked me what was wrong; I told him I thought I'd failed my first test, and he somehow refrained from smacking me (which I would've deserved; I was being ridiculous about the entire ordeal). Failing tests isn't all that bad, around here, and completing 65% of the material isn't all that bad either. However, even though people had said that to me, I hadn't quite come to accept it, so I felt horrible. He cheered me up a little before I moved on in my mindless wandering.

Eventually, I decided to stop moping and do something about it. I had been considering dropping 18.022 for weeks, and taking 18.02 -- a less challenging multivariable calculus course, the one that most freshmen take. I had been struggling since the beginning in 18.022, and everything seemed impossible; still, I wasn't sure if that was how it should be, and I wasn't sure how to make a decision to drop the class. I wandered over to the professor's office -- Professor Kemp -- and talked with him about it for a few minutes. He was busy, but he told me not to worry so much; he had made the test too long, and very few people had finished. Since I was thinking about dropping the class, he offered to schedule a meeting with me later in the week to discuss it.

After that, I cheered up a good deal, and distracted myself for a few hours. I had an evening class, but I skipped it to make myself some comfort food; a steak and mashed potato dinner later, I was feeling worlds better. Finally, the grades came online. I was shocked: 65. Having barely completed that many points, I was more surprised than disappointed with my score. Soon after, I received an e-mail from Professor Kemp (also a great lecturer, with the unfortunate ability to write faster on a chalkboard than I can on paper) telling me that my grade was (slightly, as it turned out) above the class average, and that looking at both that and my pset grades, I probably had a B in the class. I was amazed; I almost immediately stopped thinking about dropping the class, and realized that I had to adjust my standards from what they'd been in high school.

However, that was the last test; all in all, it went fairly well, and is certainly not a story about failure. I did learn a lesson or two from it, but it is not the story of this blogpost.

The story of this blogpost can be summarized in a slightly-trimmed-to-500x23 screenshot:

...Err, yes.

And, just to be clear: on the first exam, the average was a 60, so a 65 was a decent grade. Two hours after I saw the above results online, Professor Kemp sent an e-mail to the class, containing the following:

The average on Exam 2 was 70%, with a standard deviation of 18%. Passing was 50%. If you would like to speak to me about anything grade-related, please e-mail me to make an appointment, and I'll be happy to meet you sometime this week. Onward we go! Cheers, Prof. Kemp.

This places me squarely in the "failing" category; the average is almost twice my score, and I am close to two standard deviations below the mean. Some statistics (say, a normal model) would say that this places me in the 2.9th percentile for this exam. In a class of.... 100? Wonderful.

Hey, at least I get a blog post out of it, right?

I'm still not really sure what to think of failure, at MIT. Despite all my studying, my test average is now a 50.5 in that class, something that would've slaughtered me in high school; although I was not an A student, and not at the top of my class, (if memory serves) I don't think I got a grade lower than a 70 on any test or quiz until my senior year. And this test was different than the last one; there was no panic-y rushing through the exam, looking for problems I could solve. This time, I sat there (much more painfully) for an hour and watched myself be completely unable to do the problems. 10 of my points came from the 10-point bonus question. This exam was not too long at all; that gave me a good 40 minutes of uncomfortable thought, exploring the same mathematical dead-ends over and over again. Can I still pass the class? Hopefully. I still usually feel like I can follow along, at least, in lectures, and I can kind-of do the psets (one of which I will be attacking as soon as I finish this post; they're due Monday mornings, ugh). However, I may take Professor Kemp up on that meeting offer, now (I didn't, after the first exam, because I did much better than I'd expected after walking out of Walker), and I'll see where things go from then.

Now I know, and I really know -- I don't just hear people say it -- that failure is something you'll have to get used to at MIT. The fact that this wasn't as crushing to me as my above-average performance on the first exam says that, at least a little, it's something I'm learning to deal with (gasp, ending in a preposition; I wonder if a tacky parenthetical fixes that? meh).

However, my crazy exam week didn't end there. I'm taking both 18.022 and 8.012; the extra digit indicates they're "harder" versions of the standard freshman classes, Calc 2 and Physics 1, respectively. I would say that 18.022 and 8.012 are definitely my hardest classes. On Tuesday morning, I walked to physics lecture for the first time in weeks. We had a test coming up on Thursday, and so I thought I'd go to the lecture before the test to make sure I had been roughly keeping pace with the class. On the way into building 6, I joked with Christie and Paul, two other freshmen, that I hoped we could still recognize people in the class; it'd been a long time since any of us had sat through a lecture.

With nothing but a laptop under my arm and the clothes I was wearing, I walk into the physics room.

Christie: "why does everybody have papers on their desks?"

....oh, dang.

I took my 8.012 exam completely cold, not having been to lecture in (two) weeks, and not having studied at all. I had little idea what the exam would even cover, and yet I walked in there and took it as if I'd prepared all weekend; at that point, there's no use in panicking. I asked Professor Zwierlein (another *awesome* lecturer; my (fairly recent) lack of attendance has had only to do with the 9AM time slot for the class) if I might borrow a pencil, and he looked at me like I was absolutely mad.

An hour and half later, I walked out of that room and promptly burst into laughter. When asked how I thought I'd done, I said "between a 0 and a 90"; it felt like I had played some kind-of paper-based form of Russian roulette.

That night, I received the following e-mail:

Results for the second midterm exam are online - please click on the "Gradebook" link in the left menu panel on the 8.012 homepage.

Statistics for the exam scores are as follows:

mean: 71
standard deviation: 20

There were two perfect scores (100+10 bonus).

And the following results (out of 100 points, even though it says 110):

....w00t.

So, you can't win them all. But you can at least win a few :)

Now, that 18.022 pset.

Till next time,
-Cam

Oh, P.S.: I may have sprained or broken my foot yesterday; I have an x-ray tomorrow morning. Either way, blog posts may be about things closer to my dorm room, for the next few weeks.

...Oh, and I'm pumped to go to 8.012 lectures again, because I think we're starting to study gyroscopes -- score.

"My advice to a high school student interested in science as a career would be to forget all the stuff they tell you in the textbooks about the answers. My advice to a high school sophomore or junior considering a career in science would be to close the science textbook for a minute and forget all the answers that their texts purport to be telling them.

What you should steep yourself in is the ignorance, in what we don't know.

What is fascinating about science is to define the questions.

When we teach science in the high schools we try to teach people all the answers. Well, that's the answers to old dusty questions.

What we should be teaching people is how to ask good new questions. It is a tremendous art to ask good questions. To look at a situation and see that there is something going on and articulate clearly what is it that you want to know about that. To be willing to risk and to explore.

I'm sorry in a way that we don't capture it in the high school textbooks, high school curriculum, because we have to impart knowledge. But in fact it is ignorance that drives us. If we had knowledge about everything there would be no point in going into science.

And so what we have to do is convey our tremendous excitement about our ignorance, the wonderful potential of ignorance, and then we have to teach people how it is that you take raw ignorance and turn it into processed ignorance, and processed ignorance, well-defined ignorance, well-asked questions that we don't know the answer to, that's the root of experiment. It is processed ignorance, carefully constructed ignorance, and apply it to the situations.

I think kids interested in science should look around the world and start asking questions. And don't worry so much about all the facts that are in the books. Ask questions."

- Professor Eric Lander, Professor of 7.012 (Introductory Biology), Director of the Broad Institute, Co-Chair of Obama's President's Council on Science and Technology.

-----

So every semester, iHouse (my dorm, for those who are just tuning in ;) I really should do this more often, since I've been writing on this for so long that I assume you all know everything about me....OR DO YOU?!?! *runs away and hides* =/) does a "Project Presentations Dinner" where dormmates who did international development projects abroad during the summer or IAP can come back and present to the rest of the dorm (and to the faculty and other staff advisers that oversee iHouse) what we did. We also currently have a strong working relationship with the Spurs-Humphrey Fellows Program, so the Fellows were invited to join us for dinner as well.

If you're curious, you can hear from Helen '12, Sophia '10, Kathy '10, Mary '11, and Kayla '12 about the projects they did in Uganda, India, Cameroon, and the Philippines!

And I will stop writing here, because I realize that I have a tendency to fit way too much text in one entry. :)

ANDDD I wanted to include this picture of Tiantian and Marisa. Haha our froshies are so cute. :)

+1000 points to the person who can guess what they were for Halloween. :D

!

P.S-- Sorry for the video quality, I've been trying to fiddle with a few of the camera/editing software settings!

So I found my friends Tuesday and asked, "Have any plans for tomorrow?"

Their responses were like this:

"Tomorrow's my chance to STUDY!"
"I have some major catching up to do!"
"AHHHHH evil physics test on Thursday!"
"I am locking myself in my room and never coming out!"

Somehow I found about three people that said they could do SOMETHING today. So I made a nice schedule:

I would wake up at 9:30ish, watch the fourth episode of My Girl (one of the best asian dramas out there, w00t!) with my big Jessica (a girl from my sorority) at 10, get to the Terrascope room at 12 and stay there until 2 or 3 to work on our final plan for lowering carbon levels in the atmosphere with carbon sequestration and by lowering countries' CO2 emissions levels, go to the physics review session from 3-5 for my own physics test on Thursday, and then find my friends to watch the Prestige and DDR. And then call it a night.

So what REALLY happened:

I ended up watching 2.5 episodes of My Girl with my friends until 1ish, then stayed up until 3:30 AM studying for physics. Luckily I texted my friend and told her I might not be able to watch the drama at 10.

So I woke up at 10 AM, turned off the alarm, woke up at 12:30, went to the bathroom and saw my left eye glaring at me in all its bloodshot glory.

I am pretty sure that I don't have pink eye because I've had a red eye a million times before for allergies or from overuse (ahem... maybe staying up till 3:30 like EVERY NIGHT), but there's always a first time, so I'm heading over to medical after I finish this post. And maybe after I study a bit more for physics. Because I didn't feel comfortable going into the Terrascope room or to the physics review session - there would be 30-80 people there that could get "infected" or scared at least...

So now it's 3:30 and I'm trying to get down and finish this annoying mass transfer problem and then go on to the rest of physics. No DDR or movies I suppose...

But I found something SOOO much cooler that I can do while I work in my room! XD It's called - OWL CITY!!! I have Fireflies and Saltwater Room on repeat right now... XD

So, if you'd read my last post, you may be asking: What's your life been like since that nearly-failed 18.022 test?

We had ANOTHER test, but this time I scored right on average (70)! And last time I checked (two days ago by email), I was passing the class with a B-! And since freshman year is pass/no record, I was in paradise. Some of my friends are still struggling though and didn't crack that test =( Hopefully we'll all make it through!

In other school news, I've been getting more involved in Terrascope. We're supposed to work like 6 hours outside of class a week... so since the deadline for our project is coming up soon, from now on I'm spending an extra 6+ hours a week on Terrascope =P

I also have to plan what I'm doing during IAP and the summer. I would LOOOVE to do something with Outward Bound or another group, hiking/mountaineering somewhere... but everything I've found is too expensive so far... so I'm going to look for a class/UROP/internship for IAP and an internship/program for the summer. Some people already have applied to internships and programs... I'm one of those students who doesn't work efficiently and... therefore...hasn't... X____X

Also, I've been trying to balance my life more outside of classes. For starters, I joined a sorority (*gasp!*) and we just had initiation yesterday (*DOUBLE GASP!*). We also had relevations - this is where we get paired to our "big" as in "big sister" (sophomore or junior from the sorority) whom we bond with for the 2-3 years we have together at MIT, and beyond! So yeah, my "big" Jessica and I have been watching Asian dramas! =) Yay bonding XD

I've been trying to spend more time with friends, not just in the sorority (I really should go to more of their events). I went to Salem for Halloween with friends from MIT and one high school friend that goes to Brandeis. There were so many costumes! And we went to an Italian place which had wonderful pumpkin ice cream. Unfortunately I don't have pictures from there, but I did get one of this evil flower my friend found in some hidden lair...

Look! Witness the evil! (My friend almost flew to the other side of that train while holding that flower. I am serious.)

I also have a good friend in McCormick whom I work with on 18.022 when we don't get distracted by watching movies, playing with Photobooth, or doing weird things to hair (like mine...)

I was working on an 18.022 pset while she (aka "The Master of Design") did THIS to my hair...

Master of Design: "CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW!"

And... this is us deciding to play with Photobooth on a Sunday morning...

You said TEST?

In terms of clubs outside of school -

I joined LTI - the Leadership Training Institute's Expansion team. I'm going to try to help with the logistics of LTI-Brazil and LTI-China however I can with my limited experience (and time X_X), but I'm also trying to see if we can bring this awesome program (to train high school students to lead their own community service projects!) to Puerto Rico! Gotta work on my spanish skillz X_____X

In addition, I've been trying to get more involved in environmental stuff outside of Terrascope. For instance, I'm helping Biodiesel @ MIT with their Biodiesel @ Brazil project (we're writing the proposal now... gotta work on this!).

I've also joined the Organizing Team for MIT's Sustainability Summit, taking place the Friday of Earth Day week (I believe) in April 2010. Almost everyone organizing this event is from Sloan (MIT's graduate school of management) except for me, another college freshman, and a Ph.D. candidate. It's pretty awesome. We had a social last night and they took us out to dinner XD They also had some great ideas about good "green" careers. I'll elaborate on an upcoming post about going "green!"

One last thing on that environmental note: I defied time by biking all the way to Northeastern University for the Boston Vegetarian Festival two Sundays ago. Sooo much food, sooo much info... it was amazing. Beyonnnd amazing. I only wish I had more pictures... I had like a brownie, samples of raw food bars, cous cous, hummus, asian food, etc., etc.

I'm also trying to get back into Sport Tae Kwon Do, but I wanted to take a look at the variety of martial arts MIT has to offer as well. I really need to get back into shape, that's one of my goals, haven't been exercising much at all... treadmills work wonders, it would be a dream to run/swim/do weight training/one of these at least four days a week... XDD

Ohhhh, and on THAT note... I should try to stay healthy. Got to start cooking healthy foods (there's oatmeal and stuff to make lentil burgers sitting in my room...). And I need to force myself to sleep at 12-1. At least 80% of the time if possible.

And I need to go to medical and get this eye checked out.

And then study for physics. And then do chem.

So there's one chapter of my quest to find a balance at MIT.

So maybe life will be balanced in the next chapter! In two? Or in 20 chapters! Or 100! Or... IS there a balance? We'll see!

This semester, 8.07 (Electricity and Magnetism II) takes the proverbial cake for hopscotching around my criteria for likable classes. The first ten weeks or so straddled a slender line between geekishly fun and downright scary. On one hand, it's hard to complain about a class where the professor spends 5 minutes playing the Electrostatic Video Game in the middle of his lecture slides* and then inexplicably flings his USB drive into the door using a makeshift rubber-band slingshot. (I believe he was attempting to demonstrate something about tension in field lines, but the lesson was sadly overshadowed by the fact that his USB drive looked pretty expensive.)

*All seven people in attendance during this lecture burst into applause as the Positive Charge bounced off a wall, hovered in a precarious moment of unstable equilibrium, and slowly rolled into the target. It was the most breathtaking thing I'd ever experienced, but only because I don't have asthma.

On the other hand, the class this year was taught backwards, starting with the gnarliest subject in the entirety of 8.07: dipole radiation. Have you ever seen a dipole radiate? The thing spews out enough math to educate a third-world village.

<<<<{{((^))}}>>>>

(This is what happens when I stop taking photos. It's supposed to be a graphical representation of an oscillating dipole, alright? As I always say, MIT admissions values tolerance.)

On the third hand, there was a warm and cherished moment in 8.07 when the curriculum abruptly leaped from relativistic dipole radiation to Coulomb's Law. Did you know that I'm probably one of the few people in human history who learned the Liénard–Wiechert formulation of potentials for a moving point charge before learning electrostatics? By the way, the problem set for that particular week was far more bipolar than dipolar: one question was along the lines of, “Find the force on a line charge in a uniform electric field, but use the Maxwell Stress Tensor and do a spherical integral over infinity only after converting your basis vectors into Cartesian. Also, while you're solving easy problems using the hardest method imaginable, carve a turkey using toothpicks, but only after you convert your toothpicks into a small wooden flotilla.” The next question was like, “Find the magnetic field due to a current-carrying wire. HINT: Use Ampere's Law!!!11 HINT #2: The circumference of a circle is 2*r*pi.”

“What about your other physics classes?” you ask. Well, let me prelude my good-humored kvetchfest by remarking that I have nothing to complain about and that it took quite a few yardsticks of imagination to come up with the following criticisms. It's also worth mentioning mention that I'm only 35-50%* serious here: please keep in mind that all of the following are, at worst, only as mildly painful as getting punched in the kneecaps by someone wearing mittens. If you want to understand the true heartstabbing pain of MIT, you can also keep in mind that I will be repaying tuition loans for the next ten years. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go chug a bottle of aspirin.

(*Even outside of the esteemed blogging profession, I'm around 55% serious at best. By “at best,” I of course mean, “at funerals.”)

-8.03 (Vibrations and Waves) is a perfectly reasonable class until you realize that it's full of propaganda, just like television (whose existence is due to none other than VIBRATIONS AND WAVES. Coincidence? I think not). According to 8.03, vibrations and waves created light, made the world in six days, rested on Sunday, and then invented evolution, thereby ensuring that thousands of unsuspecting children would continue to buy Pokemon cards (the most expensive of which contain reflective holograms, whose properties are due to none other than VIBRATIONS AND WAVES. Coincidence? I think not.). The first one may actually be true, but I refuse to accept the premise that waves are mankind's only remaining hope for salvation. I mean, otherwise, Barack Obama wouldn't have won the Nobel Peace Prize, right?.

No OCW am I, but here's my stab at summarizing the 8.03 course material:
-A wave on a spring is a wave.
-A wave on a rope is a wave.
-A wave in a pipe is a wave.
-A wave on a transmission line is a wave.
-A wave in vacuum is a wave.
-A wave is also called a vibration sometimes.

Did I tell you the name of this class, by the way?

-8.033 (Relativity): I will heartlessly say that 8.033 makes electricity and magnetism look like clumsy squash players stumbling around in a ballroom full of elegant, waltzing kinematics, firstly because I hate playing/eating squash and secondly because I think this is some sort of metaphor or whatever. In the first half of the course, each lovely transformation and kinematics equation was tastefully attired in immaculate thought experiments before its initiation into the polite society of established physics. Yet as soon as E&M clodhopped into the room, dripping with murky math and shod in raggedy logic, the exalted sophistication of relativity spiraled down the metaphorical toilet of terrible curriculum design. You could hear the flush as soon as we started transforming Coulomb's Law in like 32939 different scenarios of relative motion between source charge and test charge. Introducing E&M by applying the force transformation laws to Coulomb was like smearing dirt over the brilliant connections between E&M and Special Relativity. Why not link the fields to the intrinsic properties of space and time, and then deduce how they must look to an observer moving at relativistic speeds, such as Lance Armstrong? To be fair, we probably discussed this in recitation for about 20 minutes.

Lance Armstrong, that is.

(Just kidding. I can assure you that we learn more about cyclic permutations than cyclist permutations in 8.033 recitation.)

Also, the flavortext (yes, flavortext) on the Problem Sets is about as straightforward as the nonexistent Star Trek episode written by Richard Nixon. Example:

Buckethead and Ry Cooder, two guitar masters who are completely unrelated and look
nothing at all alike, meet at Antone's, the famous blues club in Austin. Ry is scheduled to play
the first one-hour set, with Buckethead immediately to follow.
To while away the time, Buckethead hops in his motorized chicken coop and drives west at con-
stant acceleration a = (5=3) £ 106 m=s2 for precisely 30 minutes (as measured by his dashboard
clock) - at which point he slams on the breaks, stopping the coop almost instantly, turns around,
and drives back, again at constant acceleration a. After precisely one hour on his clock he arrives
back at Antone's, slams on the breaks again, and walks in for his set smack on time. Importantly,
all along his trip, Buckethead maintained a perfect soulful C on his monster Jackson King V.
Meanwhile, back at Antone's, Ry plays an awesome set, closing with his classic version of Woodie
Guthrie's \Vigilante Man" (as recorded on \Into the Purple Valley"). As the song ends, perfectly
on time, he holds out the last note, keeping it ringing until Buckethead walks back in at the end
of his trip.

Note: some details about the real world you should neglect in solving this problem:
² The earth is round. Let's treat it as flat and infnite { buckethead's coop always stays in
contact with the ground.
² Since a is roughly 20,000 g, the acceleration would crush any human inside the coop. Don't
worry, Buckethead is not human.
² To stop the coop on a dime would require absurdly wonderful breaks. Yes, it's an awesome
chicken coop.

Dare I venture any further comment? You know that something's awry with your problem set when the hardest part of the question is figuring out that it's a question.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that physics can be crushing, but there's nothing to worry about. Buckethead is not human.

Let's take the last question first. No, you're not in trouble if your materials haven't yet shown up on the tracking system. We're still processing lots and lots of materials, many of which were postmarked before the deadline. So why, then, does it take so long?

Well, think about everything that needs to happen:

1. The document arrives at MIT Mail Services (in Building WW15 -- Way West 15).
   
2. Mail Services sorts the mail and brings it by the bucketload to the Admissions Records Office.
   
3. Noah and team open the envelopes. We have a special envelope opening machine that is pretty awesome; non-standard size/material envelopes (DHL, FedEx, etc.) get opened by hand.
   
4. Documents are taken out of the envelope, given an official MIT Office of Admissions date stamping, and sorted into different piles depending on what sort of document it is (this is why documents that were sent in the same envelope may not go into the tracking system at the same time).
   
5. In parallel to this, electronic test score records are sent to us by the testing agencies. These will be directly uploaded into your file in plenty of time to be seen by the full admissions committee in December.
6. Documents are then entered into the computer system, one at a time, by the great records office team, including Diane. Some additional data entry required for Secondary School Reports. The day after the document is entered into the system, it will show up in the online tracking system. But the fun doesn't stop there...
   
7. Next, the documents are put into alphabetical order so that they can be filed into your admissions folder. We have 15,000+ applications in a small space, so the filing can get a little crowded!
   
8. When your folder is complete -- all of the documents have arrive, been entered, and been filed -- a cover sheet will be printed.
   
9. The Records Office staff take the folder and cover sheet and make sure that all of the filing has been done correctly, that all of the documents therein are yours, that it is ready to be evaluated by the admissions officers.
   
10. Then, finally, Sofia takes the folders on the trip upstairs to the admissions officers. When we get them, the folders are all set to go -- it looks so easy! But we know that it took lots of hard work by the records office staff to get it that way.
    
11. Admissions Officers get locked in a dungeon and cannot come out until all of the applications have been read.

The lesson here is, there are a lot of things that need to happen before an application is ready for review. It takes a lot of time to do all of these steps -- think of how many documents there are!

We're still processing thousands of documents, and I hope you can understand why. Please be patient. If the tracking system isn't showing a document yet, relax and wait another week or so -- if we don't have it at that point, I'll post another entry with the office fax number so you can have any missing materials sent to us. And if we have processed some materials that were sent together, but not all of them, please wait -- odds are, we have all the documents, they're just in different processing piles.

At this point, we're only reading complete applications, and we won't start admitting anyone until all of the applications have been read. So don't worry.

It's in these aloof conversations that I really appreciate one of the more unsung parts of MIT:

People here are very clever.

You see, let's be honest here for a second. There are plenty of very respectable universities that you can go to for your education. It's not like MIT teaches some secret form of Math that no one else knows about. Heck you can even kill yourself with homework if you really want to try and emulate what it's like to be here (as a sidenote, I recently learned that going for 35 hours without sleeping makes your thoughts indistinguishable from someone with a severe mental disorder in an MRI. This makes me want to wear a tactical vest and be very nice to everyone on campus).

But what really sets MIT apart from other institutions is the incredibly stimulating thinktank nature of people around here. Thinking is a hobby for many people around here, and for the hard stuff, they're really good at it. The more trivial things, like "Does orange plaid match with a floral green print?" or "Should I wash my hair this week?" seem to stump some people, but given that they could make a supercomputer using nothing but soda cans, hairspray, 3 rubber bands, and Karmic Koala; it's definitely forgivable.

You needn't click further than the Notable Alumni page to see a good number of people who's accomplishments I'd venture to say started off as the sort of humble ideas that populate the dialogue of students around here.

But it doesn't even have to be serious stuff. People here drop pumpkins off buildings for fun, and turn grocery carts into high speed go-karts for no other reason than because they can. It's a sort of art really, engineering as expression. It's no surprise then to see this creativity transfer to problem solving, seeing people win grants and contests is a such a regular occurence that it's not until I'm away from campus that it really sinks in how cool that is.

That's nothing short of exhilarating to me, to know that the people eating lunch at Subway next to me are future Nobel Laureates (scientific ones nonetheless. You know, the ones that are hard to get), engineers of advances in space travel, and doctors who will cure cancer. The guy getting his bagel from LaVerdes could be a MacArthur fellow, whose annoyance with the local price discrepancy (read: gouging) spurs him to invent a bagel tree that solves world hunger. Who knows what paradigm shifting idea is starting right now in someone's room or the coffee table in lobby 7. This is a place of dreamers, thinkers, and creators. The impossible's dying breath is "you know what would be cool?" because with it comes the beginning of ingenuity so profound that it makes the all the hours spent reading, tooling, and being awake well worth it.

Enjoy!

Always Moving Forward
by Professor Patrick Henry Winston ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’70

I went to the last football game of the season last night. I went because it wasn’t just any last football game, it was DeRon Brown’s last football game. I was drawn to it as if it were the last solar eclipse of the century.

Now priorities are such that our football team is a true Division III team, and the players play for the love of the game. So when one of our players reaches DeRon’s level—rushing for 170 yards per game, attracting national attention—I just have to go see him play.

I had taught DeRon Artificial Intelligence in 6.034 when he was a junior. As soon as I saw him, I went to the web for a look at the MIT football roster, and as I expected, there he was, along with the emerging story of his amazing record. DeRon showed up regularly in class, looked interested, and did well.

So, I had to go, and I dragged my daugther, Sarah, also a senior, along on the trip to Endicott College. We quickly spotted DeRon’s mom, Kim, and dad, Chris. Kim wore a jacket with a big number 20, her son’s number; Chris looked just like his son. They had driven seven hours or so from their home in the small town of Galax, Virginia.

Alas, DeRon got a mild concussion early in the game, so it wasn’t a night for his usual spectacular performance. But he was fun to watch anyway. He looked fast even when he was just standing still on the sidelines.

After the game, I ran into David Nackoul, a standout lineman who graduated with a course VI degree a year ago. I asked him why DeRon was so good. He explained that DeRon is unlike other backs who, when they get in trouble, run sideways, run backwards, or start stutter stepping. “When DeRon makes a cut,” he said, “he always keeps moving forward.”

What a motto that would make! Always moving forward. I must find someone who can translate that into Latin for me.

At MIT, running back Brown discovers a formula for success
By Kelly Whiteside, USA TODAY

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — MIT is a school defined by numbers. Everything, from the buildings to the names of courses, is numbered.

Even one of the marching band's football cheers is a number. The members shout out the digits of pi. As in the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. But they don't stop at 3.14. This is MIT, after all. They go the distance, as in 3.14159265358979323846 and so on.

So perhaps it's fitting that MIT is home to the leading rusher in Division III: senior running back DeRon Brown, who is putting up big numbers again.

Playing for the struggling Engineers (1-7, not such a great number), Brown is averaging 170 yards a game and has run for 1,360 yards and 10 touchdowns.

It might come as a surprise that a running back from the nation's premier science and technology school is leading the division in rushing. Actually, it's probably a surprise to many that MIT has a football team. But Brown's season isn't some statistical fluke. Last year he was second in Division III with a 181.6 average and a school-record 1,816 yards along with 22 TDs.

"I keep up with it, but Mike knows my stats better than I do," says Brown, a computer science and engineering major. Wide receiver Mike Fitzgerald is Brown's best friend and a math major. Ask Fitzgerald about Brown's numbers, and he produces an Excel spreadsheet. Brown, a 5-8, 185-pound team captain, has rushed for more than 100 yards in 17 of his last 18 games and is responsible for 58% of the team's total offense this season.

"Week in and week out, teams put eight, nine, 10 guys in the box. But once he finds a little crack, he's busting for a long run," first-year coach Chad Martinovich says.

As Brown enters the final game of his career Saturday against Endicott College in Beverly, Mass., it's significant that he has run for huge numbers on a one-win team behind a new no-huddle offense and a line that lost two starters to injuries.

Beyond his ability, what also makes Brown, and his team, unique is the school where they juggle four-hour labs with two-hour practices, a place where there's no tug-of-war between football and academics. Schoolwork wins every time.

"He's not a Division I player saying, 'I need to get a job in the NFL.' He's a computer programmer who's saying, 'I need to get a job at Google,' " Fitzgerald says.

It's academic

Located along a stretch of the Charles River across from downtown Boston, MIT is not your typical football program, even by Division III standards. Surrounded by buildings designed by architectural masters such as I.M. Pei sits quaint Henry G. Steinbrenner '27 Stadium. Yes, that Steinbrenner. In Boston. George's father won a national title in the hurdles before competing in the 1928 Olympics. And yes, there's a number in the official name.

The bleachers hold 1,600, but usually a smattering of fans fills the seats on game day. The school mascot, a fierce-looking beaver, is painted on the field. Why a beaver? Because a beaver is nature's engineer, noted for remarkable mechanical skills and great industry.

At MIT, there are 33 varsity sports, the most in Division III, and football is certainly not the big dog. The school was nationally ranked in 12 sports last year. Football practice is every day between 5 and 7 p.m., a sacrosanct time on campus in which no classes or labs are scheduled, giving students a much-needed sanctioned recess. In the New England Football Conference, which is a combined 2-10 this decade in the Division III playoffs, road games are a bus ride away, so there's no overnight travel. The head coach teaches physical education classes, and the assistants are part time. The Engineers make do with 56 players on their roster.

"Here the coaches know it's academics first," says Brown (the school boasts it is the all-time D-III leader with 156 academic All-Americans). "We're football players from 5 to 7 Monday through Friday, and we play football games on Saturdays. Academics has to be your No. 1 goal here. If it's just football, you're going to fall behind."

At Michigan, the season began with a debate about the balance between sports and academics amid allegations the time football players spent on their sport greatly exceeded the NCAA's 20-hour limit. In an NCAA survey released in 2008, major-college players said they spent an average of 44.8 hours a week on football compared with a little less than 40 hours on academics. At MIT, football players clock under 20 hours a week on their sport and most every other waking hour on academics.

"I have former players who are fighter pilots, doctors, CEOs, and they all say how everything is easier after MIT. It prepares you for whatever you want to do," says former football coach Dwight Smith, the patriarch of the program. MIT had fielded a team from 1881 to 1901 before undergraduates voted to abolish the sport. Smith revived the program, building it from a club sport to varsity in 1988 before retiring last season.

Pride of Galax, Va.

Brown ended up at MIT by recruiting himself. In public high school in Galax, Va., he knew he wanted to be a computer engineer, so he figured he might as well go to the best engineering school.

"Once I found out they had a football team, it was a win-win situation," he says.

Class salutatorian, he applied to MIT and then sent Smith his high school tapes. Brown was also recruited by several Ivy League schools, which play a higher division of football, but his dream was MIT.

He'll be the first college grad in his family. His father, Chris, is a police sergeant, and his mother, Kim, a grant-writing consultant.

"I was a country boy coming here," Brown says. "Galax is a small town (pop: 6,837) where everyone knows everyone."

Located in southwestern Virginia, in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Galax is best known for the Old Fiddler's Convention it has hosted annually since 1935. The town's slogan: "The Best Pick in Virginia."

When he made his decision to attend MIT, his major concern wasn't about the academic workload. "When I first decided to come here, I was kind of scared," he says. "I was like, wow, there's going to be a lot of nerds there."

In truth, he found plenty of classmates just like his extroverted self. Still, the perception exists. "People will find out where I go and say, 'Deep down you're just a nerd.' Can't I be a smart athlete? With normal social skills? But I feel like other teams see us as nerds."

Nerd or not, there is revenge. It comes after graduation.

"Athletes often do very well because they have to learn how to manage their time, and DeRon is a perfect example," says Patrick Henry Winston, an artificial intelligence and computer science professor who taught Brown last year. "I see him as a successful kid. He was always engaged, just an extraordinarily well-rounded kid who you like to have in class because you know he's interested, intense, team-oriented and extremely likable."

Brown is getting ready for life after MIT. He has interviewed at Google, Microsoft and Amazon and is also interested in working for a start-up, perhaps designing mobile applications. But Fitzgerald has other plans for him.

His math major friend who wants to be the general manager of a sports team some day —Boston Celtics, are you listening? — thinks Brown deserves an invite to an NFL training camp.

On Fitzgerald's spreadsheet, Brown's stats and the conference rankings of the rushing defenses he's faced from the last two seasons are broken down. Fitzgerald's point: Brown's yards a carry have improved as the Engineers have faced better rushing defenses in the second half of both seasons. This is impressive because, as Fitzgerald says, "We're taking more and more of an academic pounding as the semester progresses, but the kid continues to produce and improve."

Last year Fitzgerald worked as an intern with the Celtics and helped with the team's draft analysis. The Celtics had one pick, 58th overall, and Fitzgerald had his mind set on Tennessee-Martin guard Lester Hudson, based on his statistical analysis. The Celtics drafted Hudson.

"When they called Lester Hudson's name, it was as though I was getting drafted," Fitzgerald says.

He has the same feeling about Brown. And the numbers to prove it.

****

Leading rushers by division in NCAA football

Division              Player, school      Carries     Yards a game

Football Bowl Subdivision   Ryan Mathews, Fresno State   179  164.5

Championship Subdivision (FCS) Pat Paschall, North Dakota State 164 141.0

Division II             Joique Bell, Wayne State (Mich.)    307    201.0

Division III              DeRon Brown, MIT              260    170.0

Source: NCAA

This trek was made more memorable by the following episode:

(Jeanne and I spot a group of girls clustered together, gossiping happily, oblivious to our presence)

Me: *Wonder, disbelief, further laughter*

These soundbites are so normal here at MIT. Biology, Harry Potter, derivatives, and vectors all merge themselves into casual conversations. What results is random but hugely entertaining discussion, during which I often wish my capacity to remember clever comments were more refined.

Pictures make MIT's sporadic wit much more memorable:

The above sight met my eyes this past Tuesday night, as I walked in my physics classroom for a late-night review session. Somehow, I paid more attention to this than I did to polar coordinates and dot products; the pure unexpectedness of seeing moment of inertia linked to the Yankees tickled my sense of humor to no end. I believe my love for MIT, slightly ragged due to the endless wear of psets and midterms, was renewed the second I saw this picture.

In chem class on Wednesday, this reborn enthusiasm was solidified with the sight of the following experiment, embedded here with permission from Professor Schrock:

I'm so glad I go to school here.

On Sunday, 25 October, the cadets of MIT's Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps (AFROTC) Detachment 365, including myself, traveled over to Hanscom Air Force Base (about a 30 minute drive) for the fall semester's FLX, or Field Leadership Exercise. Over the past five weeks, we had been learning skills to help us in this exercise. From low crawling to how to challenge intruders, we had to know it all so that the FLX could test our leadership and problem-solving abilities.

But first, let me start with a little background. The question I get asked most often about AFROTC is "but what do you do every week?" Cadets in Det 365 have 1-2 hours of class every week, where we learn about the Air Force and its history, customs, and practices. Every year the focus shifts a little bit, focusing first towards Field Training between sophomore and junior year, and after that towards working and living as an Air Force officer. As a freshman, I'm in AS.100, and right now we're learning about team building. It's fairly low-key, but it covers topics we'll need to be comfortable with in future years.

On Tuesdays from 3:10-5:10 pm (or 1510-1710 hrs, as we like to say), we have Leadership Lab, or LLAB, which is where we really get to practice our skills. LLAB is run by the juniors, seniors, and fifth-years, and is designed to teach the freshmen and sophomores useful skills and to let the upperclassmen get practice leading a group. So far we've had a couple mini-field exercises (out on Briggs Field, if you see people in camouflage carrying fake rifles, that's us) as well as teaching us marching and ceremonial customs.

To top off all that excitement, two mornings and one afternoon a week we have required physical training, or PT, to keep us strong and looking sweet in our uniforms.

So anyways, back to this Sunday's FLX. After learning these skills (and having to read a 23-page document teaching us more skills), it was time to test them out. We drove (transited, in military speak) to Hanscom AFB where we met up with the AFROTC detachment from UMass Lowell. Hanscom already had a simulated forward operating base set up, much like a base that would be set up during wartime, complete with gates, tents, and a command center. The freshman and sophomore cadets were split up into teams and assigned various specialties, from Medical to Security Forces. Obviously, we didn't have to know every skill in those areas, but we were expected to make use of the ones we had been taught in order to complete our missions. After about 25 minutes, we rotated stations so that we could get a chance at everything.

The command "Begin exercise. Begin exercise." came over the loudspeaker, and we were ready to go. The upperclassmen, as well as the cadre (active duty officers that run the ROTC programs) acted as "shadows" to evaluate and assist us. Some cadets also role played by acting as members of the press, civilian contractors, injured people, or protesters, and thus forced us to make decisions about how to appropriately handle each situation.

For example, when I was on the Medical team, there was a simulated base attack, and some of the cadets were "injured" at various locations around the base. We only had two stretchers, which needed to be carried by four people, and so we had to split up into teams and make sure that every injured person was accounted for and "treated" according to their injuries. Sometimes we would be indecisive or get something wrong, and that's when an upperclass shadow would step in to give us advice on what to do. We kept getting calls on our one radio about people we needed to go pick up, so on top of having a lot of responsibility, we only had one source of communication between us and the command center. We had to collaborate and constantly assess our surroundings to make sure we could do the best job possible.

It's situations like this that are common to many of our leadership exercises, and it's definitely helpful to be able to practice handling stressful situations in a controlled environment before we confront them in the real world. So, even though it was pretty stressful at times, and at the end of the day I was exhausted, I can honestly say that I enjoyed it.

Air Force ROTC will test you by putting you in situations you probably could have avoided in any other case, but overcoming these challenges has been tremendously motivating to me and many of my fellow cadets. The general theory behind these challenges, big and small, from field exercises to making sure your uniform is perfect, is that if we can handle these things we can handle our jobs as future military leaders. It certainly hasn't been easy, especially on top of adjusting to the intensity of regular MIT, but by the end of my four years here I am 100% sure I will be ready for a career in the Air Force.

BUT I had to share a particular incident with you today as I was walking back from working on psets. I walked by the LSC announcement board (LSC is a group that screens movies on campus) and one of the movies was called: "Sin No Mbre". Puzzled, I stared at it:

"Sin No Mbre"

Now I don't speak more than a large burrito worth of spanish, but here's what I thought.

Sin No Mbre = Sin Nombre---> Sin ("number*")----->O/H---->OH--->Two components in liquid rocket fuel--->EXPLOSIVE action.

I can almost guarantee you that's not the logic the advertising commitee went with, but effective nonetheless. I want to see this movie now.

*Nombre is actually "name", numero is number, but whatever I felt like I'd solved the Da Vinci Code before it was so easy Tom Hanks could do it.