The Halls are Alive by Allison E. '27

Let’s face it, MIT’s campus is not known for being the most gorgeous of all college campuses. I personally like the mix of ultra-modern glass and steel, traditional marble, and cracked windows covered with peeling paint (it feels both exciting and homey!), but objectively speaking, campus is not beautiful.

The hallways inside these buildings can be even less aesthetically appealing–I think MIT has a vendetta against ceilings (if you look up, there’s always some array of pipes, wires, gratings above), and the walls are covered with an eclectic mishmash of posters. Again, it’s not beautiful. But I would argue that it’s something better: lived in. The hallways of MIT are alive.

From well before 9:00 am to well past 9:00 pm, the academic side of campus is filled with the tense energy of students shuffling between exams, and the awe of passing tourists, and the laughter of friends walking three-aside. But they’re also alive with various displays of creativity and mischief. These are some of my favorites from the past year:

Impromptu Concerts

There’s a piano sitting in one of the most trafficked thoroughfares on campus, just outside of 26-100⁠01 MIT’s biggest?????? lecture hall . People are constantly playing music on it (pop songs, classical pieces, etc.), but my favorite instance was a particular rendition of “All of Me,” by John Legend. I was sitting on a nearby couch, eating my lunch when it started out–just one person playing the piano. And then someone joined in singing, and then another, and another, with an audience growing in the hallway. Everyone disbanded as soon as the song ended, but it was awesome :D

The 26-100 piano!

Juggling in Lobby 10

Many a night I’ve returned from a 7:00 pm class or a late club meeting, and walking through Lobby 10⁠02 An official “big fancy place” along the Infinite, which is MIT’s long and main(ish) hallway I find three or four people just… juggling! They’ve got colorful props, much whimsy, and seriously impressive skills. I think they do this pretty regularly, and it always makes me smile.

Lobby 10, albeit without jugglers :(

Free Listening

There’s this person who will occasionally sit on the steps of Lobby 7⁠03 MIT’s main entrance to the academic part of campus with a sign that says “Free Listening.” I’ve never actually gone up to them before, but sometimes I’ll see someone else talking, and they’re just nodding along. Pretty cool.

Spot the Robot Dog 

MIT’s Stata Center is a building with… many quirks… Some are annoying, some are interesting, but one of the coolest is seeing an unnervingly life-like robot dog(?) occasionally roaming the halls. Meet Spot, the Boston Dynamics robot that jumpscared me while I was waiting for my next class to start! It looked completely unsupervised at first, as if it was just going for a casual stroll through the halls 😆

Spot spotted in Stata!

Free Polaroids

I was walking to class one day, and standing along the side of the hallway was someone with a polaroid camera. They called out, offering to take a free photo for me! Unfortunately I was a bit late, and couldn’t stop, but that was so wholesome.

Mysterious Boxes

This year, April Fool’s was the first day after spring break, and we returned to campus to find those yellow question mark boxes from Mario scattered all around the hallways. They were kind of everywhere, and were filled with various prizes? treasures? mysteries? inside! A few of the boxes I saw just had playing cards, but I also saw some more interesting items–a poll on PSet submission preferences, instructions on how to shower, and my personal favorite: unlabelled sheet music at the 26-100 piano that, upon sight reading in my head, turned out to be a Rickroll⁠04 imagine sight reading it on the piano instead 🫣 .

Box found near the Course 16 lounge!

Box found outside a random room?

According to this survey 6 people prefer handwriting psets, 25 prefer iPad psets, and 4 prefer to LaTeX them. And one person disdains the LaTeX folks with "bruh"...

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Conga Line !!!

Picture this: It’s the day of the MIT Science Olympiad Tournament, and hour 13(ish) of helping run the competition. There are fifty some-odd organizers packed into a room, trying to make sure that 16,000+ pages of exams have been fairly graded. It’s chaotic. Things are running behind schedule. We’re waiting frantically for more papers to come in. I leave to use the bathroom and for a blessed moment of quiet.

And then, as I’m walking back, I see thirty, maybe forty people forming a MASSIVE conga line down the middle of the hallway. To this day I have no idea who this group was (they weren’t tournament competitors) or why they had gathered⁠05 if you somehow know, please tell me I’m so curious LOL . But I was dead tired, and screw it, this was really funny, so I joined the back of the conga line. In a couple yards, the hallway widened into the spacious Lobby 10, and two by two the line started forming a human tunnel⁠06 like the kind your parents make when you finish a children’s rec league soccer game . I was the last in the line, so they ushered me, cheering, through the center of the tunnel. The next-to-last person followed right behind me, until the entire tunnel had unraveled itself.

And then… everyone just dispersed? I don’t know where they went 😭. But anyways, I returned to checking over Science Olympiad tests with a bit more energy :)