I Am Prettylatebuthere’sanIAPpost by Angie F. '28
on MIT's independent activities period (ft. friends!!)
if you’ve hung around the blogs these past few weeks, chances are you’ve heard of IAP, or Independent Activities Period, MIT’s January term in which students can do, well, whatever they want: take classes, do research, go home, go abroad, train, work, come to campus and chill, come to campus and NOT chill… for every friend i have whose IAP itinerary somewhat lined up with mine, i have countless more who spent the month on their own little sidequests, our paths mainly crossing for dinner in a dorm lounge or nights spent laughing on the floor of someone’s room. rather than just writing about what my IAP looked like, i thought the best way to share what MIT’s month of “choose your own adventure” mode looks like would be to bring some friends onto the blog to talk about all their different experiences! so, without further ado, please welcome…
Sarah S. (’28)
sarah and i on our way to a wallows concert back in august!
hello blog!!! my name is sarah and i am a freshman from las vegas, nevada (and before you ask, no, i don’t have an intrinsic talent for gambling…) i am currently planning on being a course 701 biology on the pre-med track, as well as UROPing02 undergraduate research opportunity program, which is often used as a verb in the laub lab studying bacterial immune systems and competing with the track and field team as a pole vaulter! i am also preparing for spokes 2025, a summer program where 8 mit students bike from washington, d.c. to san francisco, ca and do learning festivals for students in rural, underserved communities along the way!
to reminisce for a quick second, i remember reading the blog for the 1st time in ap chem the spring of my junior year of high school. i had just received an email from MIT’s pole vault coach about potentially looking into the program—wanting to study biology and pursue medicine, MIT NEVER struck me as a possible school.
“well, when a school like THAT emails you, you have to at least look into it, right?”
the first place i looked was the blog, and the rest was history. a HUGEE shoutout to angie for featuring me in a guest post so i can go full circle and share my own story! anyways, i’m here to talk about IAP! i used my first IAP to rest from 1st semester, explore boston, get ready to UROP, and train for track season! today, i’m going to focus on the track part.
week 1: return to campus, suffolk ice breaker @ new balance
after flying in on sunday, the team got right back to practice on wednesday. our 1st meet was that weekend, so we had no time to waste. i honestly can’t remember much from the days leading up to the meet…but some of the pole vaulters did make a minecraft server. the 1st meet was at the new balance track, which is a super fancy track facility across the bridge in boston. since i had never competed in a real college meet before, i honestly was just looking to have fun. i ended up jumping 8’ 8.25 (the conversion is weird since college track uses meters…not very american), which is a little under a foot under my high school PR, so not bad!
week 2: uri invitational and guys cook
this week’s competition was 2 hours away at the university of rhode island: before this, i had never been to rhode island, so that was pretty cool. it was also fun to go to a meet farther away and travel with the team: unfortunately though, because this was a “D1” meet (at least it was being hosted by a D1 team), the opening height was pretty high for me, and i “no-heighted” (did not clear a single bar). it was still fun to cheer on my fellow vaulters, though, and only gave me motivation for next week…
i didn’t get any pictures from one of the pole vault squad’s most fun annual traditions, “guys/girls cook” dinner (with this week being guys cook), but they made tacos. yum! i did, however, get pics of heavy snow that came down that night, and the snowman we made on killian court because of it.
week 3: media day!!! + riverhawk invitational @ new balance and girls cook
MEDIA DAY!!! i’ve literally been looking forward to this day for months. i think for this one i’m just going to let the pictures speak for themselves.
the team was back at new balance later this weekend: i tagged along to both meets, but unfortunately i got a concussion earlier that week, so i couldn’t compete :( the team was looking good! on the way back to the bus, though, one of the pole bags was accidentally carried the wrong way, or the cap wasn’t taped on good enough, or something like that, because the whole bag of poles spilled down the stairs…rip.
the next day was girls cook! we made pasta with vodka sauce and italian sausage, garlic bread, cesar salad, and i made some banana bread, too. 10/10.
week 4: harvard invite
last meet of IAP :(( like last week, this was a split gender meet, so guys went on friday, with girls on saturday. after the men competed, the squad went to el jefe’s in harvard square for some bomb mexican food. saturday competition was GREAT: i finally cleared 9’ for the 1st time in college, but after that i had to get on larger poles that i had ever been on before (there are a number of reasons for this, but in short it’s good if you are getting on bigger/longer poles). i had to go up in length (12’ to 13’), and different length poles bend differently and…yeah i didn’t clear anymore bars, but i was happy that i was performing so well that i had to get out bigger poles, so yay!
for fun, i’ve included some other fun pics from the week, too.
and that was part of my IAP! i’ve already talked a lot so i’m going to hand the microphone (i mean the blog) back to angie: THANK YOU AGAIN ANGIE!!!
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YAY THANK YOU SARAH! next up is…
Christine O. (’28)
christine and i met during interphase (which i have a whole other post about), here’s her and another one of our interphase friends indulging in some fine literature
Over IAP I took a lot of different classes. I mainly participated in Momentum and Web Lab, which are some of many IAP classes in which students work on a project they later showcase in a final competition.
Every year, Momentum students work with a different partner organization and divide into teams to tackle different facets of a real-world issue. This year, our partner was MIT’s Lincoln Lab (which we were able to tour during the first week of the class) and our challenge was wildfires. My team’s contribution was basically just a system of sensors that would be brought out into the field to monitor factors like humidity levels, temperature, and volatile organic compounds concentration that could put areas at a higher risk for wildfires; in the event that something looked off, they’d send a signal to whoever was monitoring the area.
As for Web Lab, it aims to teach the fundamentals of web development to students across all class years. Students form teams and use what they’ve learned in class to build their own website based on the year’s theme (this year’s was “Branching Out”), and the class culminates in a competition in which participating teams can win up to $5,000! I spent a lot of IAP working on my website.
We had lectures for the first two weeks of Momentum and Web Lab. I also sat in on lectures for BattleCode, another competition-based CS class in which teams write code for an autonomous player in a real-time strategy game. I decided not to compete this year, but it was really interesting seeing what was going on over there. Additionally, all three of those classes had a lot of guest speakers: one of the ones from BattleCode was a partner at Y Combinator, which was really cool. I also sat in on algorithms03 Algorithmic Problem Solving, or 6.S088, an IAP-only course that aims to cover material not taught in the fall and spring algo classes and some SIPB04 Student Information Processing Board, MIT's first computing club</span> mini-lectures: I went to a “Building with AI” one and that was pretty cool: I got to build a project using Windsurf for the first time.
Finally, I took a quantum computing course! I lowkey did not understand what was going on because it had a lot of linear algebra, which I haven’t taken yet, but the parts that I did understand were really cool and inspired me to look into quantum computing a little more. Now, I think it’s something that I might want to pursue later with my degree. I’m also going to participate in iQuHack, MIT’s quantum computing hackathon.
I played in the snow a lot, which is really nice because I am from Texas so obviously it doesn’t really snow that often. I got to play in the snow with my favorite, Angie Fortnite05 hey that's me! :> ; build a lot of snowmen; and ice skate! I also went sledding down a hill in Alewife. It was really fun, but I completely tumbled over myself and hit my head.
Outside of campus, I went to the Museum of Fine Arts which was also pretty fun. My favorite part is the jewelry section. And I went to Matcha Café, which is probably my favorite matcha place ever
I was not on a meal plan at all and I also wasn’t really going out and buying food, so I was mostly eating in my classes06 Lots of the larger IAP classes provide some meals for their students, which is really nice but luckily, I live in Juniper and the girls there are so sweet and good at cooking, so I got to eat a lot of really nice food. Also, my dad sent me a case of new teas around the same time one of my friends brought some tea from China, so we had a cute little tea party with that!
Finally, I also got back to my science olympiad roots! I did science olympiad in high school, and this IAP I got to volunteer at the MIT Science Olympiad. Being on the other side of all the events was a really nice experience. I’m also volunteering at the Harvard venture capital conference which is pretty interesting because I don’t really know anything about VC yet.
So yeah, I think that was my whole IAP! Pretty busy, but I had a lot of fun.
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thank you Christine :)! as for me, IAP was prime time for hard resetting my brain after a semester of a routine that, while far more exciting than all the ones i’d previously held, was a routine nonetheless. i think MIT is, like any other place, what you make of it. so, when work piles up, i always make a conscious effort to see the place i spent so much of high school dreaming about past the repetition and mountain of psets; the days where i do this successfully are often just as good as, if not better than, the ones i spend on instantly satisfying activities where i don’t have to think too hard to feel grateful. but i’m far from perfect, and the change of pace IAP brought made me aware of so many little things about myself, bad habits i’d carried over from high school and destructive patterns i’d constantly fall into, that slipped through the cracks during the hours and days of fall semester i spent just going through the motions. some of my goals from IAP went unaccomplished, and lots of my most meticulous plans ended up falling completely flat. but i grew and learned about myself in ways that i now see had gone ignored for way too long.
largely thanks to everything i took away from IAP, spring semester is pretty great. i don’t have many words to describe how it feels to live surrounded by friends, to spend my days learning about whatever i want, to be overwhelmed by opportunities to make a real impact on the world around me everywhere i step. even on my worst days, i feel a little tug on my heart when i walk past a snow angel on Kresge or see the overflowing bulletin boards in the infinite or catch peeks of the river from my window that reminds me that there’s still no place i’d rather be than here. and the days that follow these dark periods are usually extra bright to compensate: it always reminds me of when, on my third day of what had previously been an extremely cloudy and gray CPW07 campus preview weekend, an event in which admitted students are invited to spend a fun weekend on campus! , i walked out of my host’s building only to be bathed in sunlight, my first of many brushes with Boston’s funny way of saying sorry.
i’m grateful for MIT, and i’m grateful for everyone who chooses to share this experience with me through this blog. i’ll leave you all with some pictures from my IAP :)
- biology back to text ↑
- undergraduate research opportunity program, which is often used as a verb back to text ↑
- Algorithmic Problem Solving, or 6.S088, an IAP-only course that aims to cover material not taught in the fall and spring algo classes back to text ↑
- Student Information Processing Board, MIT's first computing club back to text ↑
- hey that's me! :> back to text ↑
- Lots of the larger IAP classes provide some meals for their students, which is really nice back to text ↑
- campus preview weekend, an event in which admitted students are invited to spend a fun weekend on campus! back to text ↑