despite getting to campus over two weeks ago, my classes only started today. ??? what was i doing for all this time ???⁠01 this is something i ask myself, too

there’s a bunch of things – resident exploration (REX), floor rush, frat rush – that all seem to mix into each other, but at least for the first four days i have a nice clean answer:

i was doing my fpop!

what’s an fpop?

glad you asked! fpop (pronounced eff-pop)⁠02 unless you ask my friend eddy ‘30, who used to say eff pee oh pee and thereby ragebaited all surrounding mit students stands for “freshman pre-orientation program”.

…but what does that mean? is a question a lot of people have asked (namely, my parents). 

i think my brain is rotted

i am going to take a somewhat circuitous route to try to explain. here’s my vague understanding of how all of this pre-school school stuff came to be

1. the base case is that kids come to school and immediately start class
2. mit (and other colleges) realized that this is a Lot to expect of freshmen, who are probably not used to being on campus or to being away from home or to like. cooking and doing laundry
3. yay! orientation! to orientate⁠03 don’t spellcheck me i know the kids!
4. hey, wait… what if we wanted to PRE-orient the kids? that way they can get around orientation better!
5. this seems like a great time to insert an Educational Opportunity⁠04 even though they are superficially academic, an fpop is mostly an excuse to get to know people a bit earlier. after an upperclassman told me this, this is the only reason i signed up

to get to the point, an fpop generally is themed around one of the courses (fancy mit word for majors) at mit. some of the ones my friends did include deaps (discover earth and planetary sciences, which took a daytrip to new hampshire), dns (discover nuclear science, which made my friend consider switching her major from physics), and discover physics (who got forced to go to an art museum because of rain). 

the one i did was called dc1, which stands for discover course 1. unfortunately the average mit prefrosh⁠05 what mit calls first-years before convocation has no clue what course 1 is, so i always had to postface by saying “…which is civil and environmental engineering” (cee). usually after i said that people’s stares of abject confusion would clear into stares of slightly hopeful confusion.

why i chose dc1

one mandatory question that you will inevitably be asked approximately five hundred billion times is “what course are you thinking of studying?” indeed, i was asked this by possibly every prefrosh and upperclassman involved in my fpop. it was always kind of awkward because my response to “are you thinking of studying course 1?” was always “uhh probably not i’m thinking 20 (bioengineering) or maybe 7 (biology)”, and then people would be like “…so why are you here” 

my answer to this is a mix of the following factors, in descending order:

1. what i want to do with biology is find applications in environment/climate/sustainability, so i thought civil and environmental engineering would be a cool other perspective on this
2. this fpop was free⁠06 fpops are generally quite affordable - base fee is $30 a day for housing, but you get like free meals so i feel like it pays for itself. some of the other ones did have some small fees tho
3. it’s small (only 15 kids, compared to discover physics which was like 30) which i thought was better and less overwhelming
4. they promised trips around cambridge

during the (very chill) application process, i had to write a few essays justifying why i was interested in dc1,⁠07 among a few others - dc1 was my first choice, but i also put down discover urban planning and some other ones and why they should choose me and whatnot. luckily i ended up with my first choice! yippee!

day one: move-in + barbecue

one perk of doing an fpop is that you get to move in a few days early. my move-in date was august 25th, compared to all non-fpoppers, who moved in on august 29th. this is not a super big difference but i think it makes it calmer which was somewhat nice. 

i spent most of the 25th moving in. my mom came to boston (yay!) so she helped me move all my bags from the hotel we were staying in to my room. east campus has a weird system where the room we initially stay in (in mit lingo, where we’re “temped”) is highly unlikely to be our permanent room, so i was told to try to unpack as little as possible – which, of course, sounds great! i was also really sleepy because i had stayed up till 3am the night before…solving sudoku… so basically i did some basic unpacking and then immediately took a two hour nap. 

at some point during my nap, my friend eddy ’30 knocked on my door to deliver…

A LARGE SHARK

BIG SHARK (pillow for scale)

this guy has lived on my bed for the past two weeks. he takes up a third of the available space on my bed. he makes it vaguely inconvenient to sleep on my bed. BUT I LOVE HIM (name is undecided but some names floating around include stockfish and crouton). eternal thanks to eddy for dragging this adorable guy across the country to his new home C:

after i woke up from my nap i basically ran around the campus meeting up with friends. or i guess before that i went to the stud⁠08 stratton student center to eat some leftover pizza with my mom, where i also ran into SO MANY PEOPLE, and then i ran around campus to see friends. first i went to burton-conner (usually just called bc) to meet my friend scarlet ‘30 and kind of awkwardly watch as she unpacked her suitcase. a bit later, she and i went to new house to try to jumpscare our friend freddy ‘30!! freddy is not french but is now french due to living in french house, one of the 9 halls in new house. 

all in all good times. 

the first required meeting of the day was a fpop barbecue at 5, where we would all get into our fpop groups for the first time and meet our mentors and whatnot.⁠09 i may have showed up late because i was picking something up from a friend in bc… i honestly don’t remember very much about this except that we had to wait a long time for food and that i tried to remember people’s names, but it was pretty hard… even with only ~15 other names to learn…

i almost definitely hung out with friends after the barbecue but i have no clue who, or what we did, so uhh idk 💀 let’s timeskip to the next day!

day two: egg drop and starting the project

we started off day two with an 8:30 pancake breakfast (yay!) in building 1, which is at the very edge of the “main group” of buildings. i’m not sure if i showed up to this breakfast on time – my assumption is that i probably didn’t because i was still “jet lagged” (my favorite excuse for not going to sleep at a reasonable time). but eventually i did go to breakfast and i did eat pancakes and i started to get to know my fellow fpoppers! i think on this day they had ran out of normal-height chairs at one of the tables so i sat on a tall chair instead, like a giraffe in a pack of horses. 

from 9:15 we had an introduction to the fpop program and to our academic staff. we went through the room and introduced ourselves (again, i’m glad that we were in a small fpop – i imagine that in a larger one introductions either took forever or just did not happen in the same depth). we also got divided into our group project (more on this later) groups based on the tried and true method of assign everyone a number. 

from 10:30 to 12, in our newly assigned groups, we had a scavenger hunt of campus! we used some weird app that made us take pictures of ourselves at 8 different locations, including the banana lounge, the course 1 academic office, the parsons building (where all the course 1 laboratories are located), the tunnels under some of the eastern buildings,⁠10 i really like mit’s tunnels. maybe i will write a blog post about them later the walker memorial, and some other sites. while we walked around, i got to know my teammates from maryland, washington state, and indonesia, who were interested in studying courses as varied as 18 (math) and 10 (chemical engineering). approximately an hour after we started, we returned to our homebase and found that we had finished third. (later on when i wasn’t really paying attention, someone told our team that we won something, but i couldn’t make out what that something specifically was. but by process of elimination i think it might’ve been this scavenger hunt?)

from 12 we had a big lunch with civil and environmental engineering professor tal cohen and her lab. this was pretty cool because her lab does like all sorts of stuff – you would expect that perhaps a cee lab would do mainly mechanical/structural type things, and this lab did have some projects in this realm (for example, i think there was someone working on car crash impacts) but there were also people in the lab doing wet-lab experiments on mice hearts (or possibly brains… my memory really isn’t good huh), which piqued my interest because I LIKE biology!! among the six different projects or so that we were introduced to, the professor explained that the unifying theme is the idea of mechanics; more broadly, i understood that the civil and environmental engineering department is more expansive than i had previously thought.⁠11 indeed, a professor recommended that i look at the mcrose lab in the cee department because professor mcrose does work in microbial ecology, which is one thing i’m interested in! perhaps updates on this to come

also, this lunch had winston in attendance. winston is the course 1 emotional support dog. he is a silly little pug and he is adorable. there was time in the lunch to ask questions to all the phd students, but i spent all of my time talking to winston. he is soooooo cute i think he can be found in the c1 academic office on wednesdays? i should try to find him again

look at him he is so cute

after lunch, we went downstairs to the building 1 basement, into a room with a bunch of hydraulic presses. if you’ve ever seen youtube videos where people crush random stuff with a big metal machine, it’s like that – but the ones in this basement are like REALLY BIG, to where the units of force that our instructor steve rudolph used to describe them was in terms of elephants (or maybe thousands of elephants??? actually that sounds ridiculous). we looked at how engineered defects in metal cylinders can cause consistent patterns of deformation, and later we cracked an egg to see how the peak force resisted changed based on the end that it was cracked at.⁠12 if you want to know, get a hydraulic press yourself! or look it up, i guess

this thing lives in my backpack now i should probably take it out

now, building off this eggcellent information, we moved on to our first hands-on module of the week! in elementary school science demonstration-style, our task was to make a thing that could protect an egg from cracking after being dropped from the second floor of lobby 7. our materials were limited to toothpicks, 6 popsicle sticks, and a roll of twine (also hot glue for adhesive purposes). not only were we competing (friendly-ly) against one another, we were also fighting a team with ALL grad students and also a few teams with like elementary school kids. so you know, a variety of strong opposition

after taking a brief nap, we started construction. to be honest no one in our group was very confident about anything, so we spent the first half of our allotted 40 minutes just kind of doing stuff. my idea was to cover our egg in twine, then attach toothpicks radially outward to act as shock absorbers, so i started twining our egg – but halfway through we decided to build some sort of toothpick parallelopiped thing, which we then wrapped in a bunch of twine. (during the brief “explain your design” part we kind of just said “yeah we don’t know we just did whatever”)

then it was time to drop the egg! our egg broke :( but the grad students’ egg did not!⁠13 shocking i think everyone else’s may have? i’m not sure – i kind of got distracted by some friends in the discover physics fpop, who were also doing some sort of egg drop in the same location.

now, around 4pm, it was finally time to start our group project… which i was somewhat apprehensive about. like many people, i am not the hugest fan of group projects… but open mind! our group chose a problem on mit’s campus to tackle from the categories of energy, waste, transportation, or building design. after some discussion, we decided to focus on energy, with a team member proposing the idea of installing piezoelectric tiles on the tennis courts in order to generate the electricity needed to keep the lights on.⁠14 if you are reading this significantly far in the future, you may not remember the “japan is turning footsteps into electricity” meme on instagram - this was definitely something in our collective consciousness

we had some free time, so two of my group members and i decided to try to work out in the Z (short for the zesiger center, mit’s main recreation/sports center). unfortunately they said we needed physical id and wouldn’t let us in… boo! so instead we walked allllll the way to next house,⁠15 for context, next house is the undergrad residence hall that is the furthest away from main campus, at the very end of dorm row where jesslyn showed us her room. then we walked back to killian court,⁠16 the big grass field in front of mit’s iconic big dome where the rest of our fpop was playing mafia. i enjoyed pizza and the ambience of being outside

that was it for our scheduled second-day fpop activities :) 

day three: wind + more group project

i showed up like 10 minutes before breakfast ended (again… not the earliest of sleep times…) and then it was time for activities!

we first had 30 minutes of work time on our projects. here, we decided to do a hard pivot into a much less serious direction. as we joked around about various ridiculous ideas, we came to the idea of harnessing the power of living things to solve the energy crisis. more specifically, we saw a vision of a world where mit’s rodent problem (generally a scourge) became one of our strengths⁠17 think the matrix but with rats

this idea, because of its absolute whimsy and silliness, immediately made me much more enthusiastic about our project. unfortunately we were no able to work on it right then and there because we had more activities. BOOOO just kidding

our first speaker this day was jared berezin, the manager of cee’s version of the communication lab. i really care about science communication (especially through writing, which is one of the reasons i wanted to be a blogger in the first place!) so i think this is pretty awesome – it turns out that every engineering department has its own subdivision, which have grad students who are trained in conveying science better, who we as undergraduates can reach out to and get help from (whether it be making slides or writing papers or whatever). his presentation was quite well done and it made me want to get involved in the comm labs – i am not sure if they have many opportunities for undergraduates to contribute, but this is something to look into in the future. 

ironically, the presentation that followed was not uhhh particularly communicated quite well… but it was still cool! two grad students from the zardini group came in to present their work on game theory in transportation systems, and afterwards we played an interactive game where our various groups played the parts of different entities in the transportation sector (for example, rent-a-bike companies, public transit authorities, or autonomous vehicle companies.)⁠18 this last one was particularly relevant for me because i’d spent part of the summer in the bay area, where i was exposed to all sorts of self-driving vehicles to be honest i do not know what i took away from this activity, but you know that’s okay.

after a quick chipotle lunch where we had wayyy too many chips,⁠19 don’t worry i helped solve this problem : ) it was time for another module. first, two grad students from the howland lab presented about their work, which generally centers on the computational modeling of wind flow. one thing that they talked about was a diagram of something navier-stokes-related, which is a bit of fun foreshadowing given what has since transpired.⁠20 for context, about a week later openai released their proof of something navier-stokes, which led to a lot of discourse in the math community about the future of the field, etc then we made our own miniturbines out of foam and paper! this was actually quite fun. i am a big fan of scissors and glue and little hand crafts so i thought this was great.

spinni

we continued to work on our slides, researching and editing, and in our group’s case, going to metropolis.⁠21 a makerspace found in the basement of building 4 that is open to the entire mit community. all you need to do is a little training and then you can go during any open hours which is so cool! here, a kind mentor helped us slightly edit a treadmill model and print it using one of the many 3d printers that compose a makeshift wall in the space. 

TREADMILL!

the day ended as we had an fpop dinner while watching wall-e. this was my first time actually watching wall-e⁠22 i have “seen” a lot of pixar movies in the sense that i would watch short bursts of them without sound in the dentist. if this doesn’t count, i have not seen a lot of pixar movies. my friend charles '30 is trying to change this and it was quite striking for me. as a lot of my friends can attest, i think the first 10 minutes of wall-e is among the best examples of like environmental storytelling and body language that i have seen – i felt so much empathy towards this little robot guy living in a world of vastly different scale. i think it was super well done. i think the rest of the movie is like good but not nearly as good as the first ten minutes are, but it was fun!

to round off the day, i crossed the harvard bridge⁠23 this bridge leads right from mit campus across the charles river into boston with a few fpop friends to go to chicha san chen, a very fancy boba shop (like very very fancy) on the recommendation of one of our fpop mentors. i ended up not buying a drink that day because i was super full,⁠24 a few days ago i did get a drink from there and i have to say - probably not worth the ~ten dollars i spent on it but it was nice to walk across the bridge as the sun went down. i really like the charles river :)  

so pretty

day four: final presentations and ice cream!

on day four, i once again woke up just early enough to catch the end of breakfast. from 9:30 to 11:45, we finished and fine-tuned our presentation slides, talking over some of the transitions and doing a practice run in front of our mentor suhaila ‘28. finally at 12, it was time for our presentations!

in the audience was everyone in the fpop, alongside some of the grad students that had spoken to us earlier in the week and some New Fun grad students! yay. while eating my sandwich, my group watched as the other three groups presented their work. a brief recap:

• one group presented about an idea for a small electrical waste disposal facility to be located on mit’s campus, to reduce the need for offloading to outside facilities and to aid in the recovery of valuable metals. they made a 3d model out of cardboard for what the facility could look like
• another group presented an idea for making bus stops more friendly, both to people and the environment. they proposed curvy solar panels for the ceiling (to make rain fall off easier) and uhh something whose name i forgot, but basically amounts to water-absorbent green spaces on the curb. they had a live demonstration that i thought was awesome – they had a 3d model of a bus stop with sponges underneath, and demonstrated the ability of the sponges to absorb by dripping water over it
• the last group presented about green roofs! they proposed adding these to different mit dorms, exploring feasibility and cost. i thought it was very well done.

finally, it was our turn. in lieu of explaining our presentation, i think i will just insert the slideshow. have fun scrolling through (and guessing at what we said)!

it was not particularly stressful and i think the audience laughed more than i feared they would. especially since the other three presentations were quite serious, i think ours was a nice change of pace – it inspired a lot of funny questions that were, you know, natural extensions of the work we did. 

we had some free time until like 5, when we had a (free!) dinner from naco taco, a mexican restaurant nearby (maybe a 10 minute walk from lobby 7?) i spent 18 dollars of someone else’s money on a shrimp burrito, which i thought was passable but not particularly. value-worthy.⁠25 the last meal i had in la was tacos from a taco stand because i knew i would not have a chance to have as good mexican food once i came here, and i was right here, we smuggled around a card that all of us signed for our mentors thanking them for all their work. afterwards we went to toscanini’s⁠26 one of a couple good ice cream places nearby mit campus where i got mango sticky rice ice cream! highly recommend. 

that marked the end of my fpop experience :) it was a fun time!

what next? 

the next week and a half or so was a whirlwind: first we had resident exploration (like a repeat of cpw, where all the dorms run fun events and gives free food), then orientation, then floor rush (where i finally got to choose a floor on east campus to call home!), then frat rush (which i didn’t think i would do, but got reasonably invested in). now classes have started so i’m hoping that things seem to settle down a bit more. 

but to answer (or, i guess, ask) this question more thematically: how will my experience with the dc1 fpop weave into the rest of my time at mit? 

well, as i walk the halls of mit to get to 5.112 (my chem class) or 18.03 (differential equations), i see people from my fpop and wave to them. a lot of dc1 fpoppers are in terrascope, my first-year learning community centered on environment and sustainability, which has at its core a group project where we work to find solutions for an environmental problem.⁠27 this year, it’s water scarcity and heat waves in the navajo nation

i think terrascope is the spiritual successor to the dc1 fpop in my mind: both focus on group projects on environmental problems. i also think that i am not particularly good at group projects, or working on big, nebulous problems, or self-directing and organizing; i think this will make terrascope kind of frustrating for me, but also really good for my character growth. you’ll probably hear more from me about terrascope soon?

but i guess to end on topic: tl;dr my fpop was fun! i’m glad i did it C: