WELCOME BACK GUYS TODAY WE ARE GOING TO BE GOING THROUGH MY DORMSPAM HAUL! OVER THE PAST TWO WEEKS I’VE BOUGHT A LOT OF FUN STUFF SO MAKE SURE TO READ TILL THE END!

yeah i do not really have any platform where i watch shortform video so i don’t really know how hauls usually go. but i thought this was a fitting format for what i want to talk about

every fall, mit students’ inboxes start to fill: first with a trickle of announcements (“come to caving club’s first meeting this tuesday”), which then becomes a deluge (“interested in sloan business club?” “chess club has boba 5:30pm friday!” “want to help plan mit science olympiad?”). it’s almost magical. how is it that all of these messages find their way to my email, ready for me to peruse during chem class?⁠01 don't tell the prof

dormspam!

dormspam is a campus-wide mailing list⁠02 well, more precisely, mailing lists - there’s one for each dorm used as a sort of universal message board. anyone can send letters about anything: besides club announcements, i’ve seen dormspams asking me if i want to buy ed sheeran tickets (not really), soliciting me to participate in some medical survey, announcing a lost glasses chain, reminding people from one of 8 states (including california!) to vote, and advertising a “senior sale”. this is a wonderfully diverse array of messages; today, i want to focus on the last genre – THE SALES!

for context, i lean pretty anti-consumerist. this is mostly from an environmental standpoint⁠03 also i keep getting a bunch of clothes for free – i think most people buy more stuff than they actually need, and i especially think cheap clothes are just not worth it. but dormspam gives me the thrill of buying cheap stuff without the guilt! which is great and also which is why i get a slightly concerning burst of energy whenever i see a new “sale!” slide its way into my outlook. 

what i bought

i’ll go in chronological order for all of my purchases.

1. bike helmet ($3)

mit (and cambridge/boston in general) has a reasonably high number of people who rely on bikes to get around, especially among those who have a low tolerance for walking. i personally do not own a bike but want to have the option of being able to bike – for example, if i want to take a bluebike.⁠04 a short term bike rental with bike racks all around boston (UPDATE after i wrote this part of the blog i did in fact spend a day bluebiking around! i went to allston to get lunch, then to harvard, then back to mit)

see the lamp too! also the print i borrowed from the list art center! also the big shark! ignore my messy desk!

you’ll see tons of people riding around campus without a helmet. why, you might ask, did you go out of your way to walk to an off-campus apartment to pay a stranger three dollars to wear a strange hat on your head? 

the reason is because evan, a fellow tetazoan, got hit by a car this summer while biking, breaking his leg⁠05 this has not stopped from him from running after people like a lopsided mannequin and cutting up his face. according to him:

helmets are the only reason you see me caned up instead coma-d up. Cars in Cambridge are crazy

so yes, psa: wear a helmet while you bike! your friends and family will thank you.

2. two lamps ($5) 

immediately after moving into my temporary room, i realized the necessity of smaller lights. each room only has one light on the ceiling, and the light switch is located at the door, which makes it annoying if you want to lay in bed with light to relax but then you have to get up and turn the light off before you can actually sleep. 

i initially considered buying a lamp from mujirushi or something before fpops,⁠06 read more here! <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/my-first-week-of-classes-at-mit/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/my-first-week-of-classes-at-mit/</a> but the only option they had was like $75, and i did not think this was worth it. it turns out that this was a good decision because i was able to purchase these two lamps for $5! 

when i picked them up from the food delivery desk in east campus, i immediately realized that they were like significantly larger than i expected them to be – like maybe twice the length scale? their blinds are a little dirty, as advertised, and the lightbulbs seem to be incandescent⁠07 which is kinda crazy - i don’t know if i have ever seen incandescent bulbs in the wild lol instead of led or fluorescent, but they function very well and i think two lamps for $5 is a much better deal than $75 for one. yippee!

he longs to escape

3. 100 feet of rope ($0.50)

i mostly bought this for the funnies. this was on the same sale as the one where i bought the lamps, which was somewhat unique in that it was run as an auction instead of having a list of set prices. one of the items was listed as ~100 feet of rope (“I dont know how much exactly, its a lot though”) and i saw it and was like I MUST PURCHASE THIS

so i bought it for 50 cents. yeah uhh not sure what i am going to do with my approximate one hundred feet of black rope but surely i must eventually be able to find a use for it right??

yeah idk what i can do with this

4. winter boots ($8)

clothes are a bit harder to buy on dormspam because sizing is very hit or miss. also i feel like on average the people who sell clothes on dormspam tend to lean fem? which does not align with how i typically like to dress. but in this case it works out!

these boots are a womens’ 9, which corresponds to a mens’ 7.5, which i immediately recognized as being my shoe size and therefore quite a good investment. being from la, i did not really own a pair of winter shoes (what do you mean there is FROZEN WATER on the roads ??) and i am very glad that i can get a pair for under ten dollars instead of like a hundred or whatever shoes cost. i think these boots are a smidge smaller than i would prefer but it should be fine? hopefully

very solid

these i had to pick up from burton-conner⁠08 a dorm on the west side of campus this was a nice excuse to visit friends! :D also a good way to get myself to walk outside instead of rotting⁠09 east campus has a very nice location; it also just happens to be a 10+ minute walk to almost all other dorms on campus

5. winter jacket ($35)

WOAH you might think. that is rather pricey compared to the other objects on this list! THIRTY FIVE whole dollars? on dormspam?

well, i am actually wearing this jacket right now as i write this⁠10 laying down on a beanbag in the banana lounge and i still think this was a worthwhile purchase. it’s in a nice brown that i like, it is quite warm, and it fits me almost perfectly. luckily i was able to try on for size before i bought it – i did this in the lobby of graduate junction, one of the grad dorms, where i verified that it fit and then sent away 35 dollars of my hard earned cash. it’s quite warm and makes me feel very cool. good purchase!

alejandro sniped me WTF

it’s already starting to be pretty cold here,⁠11 at least by los angeles standards especially at night, so i’m glad i have more clothing options. yeah considering this jacket retails for i think around a hundred dollars i am very happy with this. 

6. eyeliner ($5)

this was definitely the most frivolous purchase on this list – someone was selling a bunch of their random crap for under ten dollars, and this was being sold as an unused eyeliner pencil for five dollars. i debated whether it was worth it but eventually decided to get it. 

i did zero makeup in high school and have been doing near zero makeup here, but i bought this because i want to have the option to express myself more dramatically on special occasions. not sure. maybe halloween? maybe reawakening?⁠12 a party hosted every year by florey, the fifth floor of the east parallel of east campus lots of exciting possibilities. 

it is remarkably waterproof. how do they do that?

so that concludes the haul part of this post! as you can see i have derived a lot of enjoyment from buying random stuff. the joys of consumption : ) now we transition to what i think these dormspam sales represent about what i like about mit:

dormspam is about trust

when we, as mit students, subscribe to dormspam, we do it because we trust our peers. we trust that the messages we get were sent by someone who believes that the words they write merit the collective hours of time that we, the mit community, spend reading their words. 

this trust is enforced in part by the norms of dormspam.⁠13 normspam? senders must tag their email “bcc’ed to dorms” or risk wider castigation; senders must, too, broadcast their underwear color as a promise of their vulnerability⁠14 context: <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/an_explanation/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/an_explanation/</a>

this trust, too, is what allows my boundless consumption to flourish. it is my trust that after i send five dollars and fifty cents to someone named max, that this faceless person will leave two surprisingly-large lamps and a long tangle of black rope on the food delivery table in east campus. it is my trust that after walking twenty-five minutes all the way across campus to grad junction, a dorm filled with twenty-five year old REAL ADULTS, an email address becomes a person passing on the warmth of her jacket to an ingénu from her city. mit’s culture of trust keeps items out of the trash and keeps me out of debt. 

i guess the metaphor is that these items that i buy represent institutional knowledge, like the wisdom that these upperclassmen have reaped over their years here. for my part, i trust the institutional knowledge. for theirs, they trust the idea that institutional knowledge is something that should exist, and that should continue, and they do their part to propagate this.

dormspam is dying… but we can save it 

up until two years ago, dormspam was opt-out: all mit first-years would be immediately enrolled, removed only if they both really didn’t want to be on it and also got over the activation energy hump to intentionally get themselves off the list⁠15 mit students are quite lazy sometimes… for example one of my friends said he didn’t eat till 4pm because he was too lazy to go to a dining hall and get food (i mean to be fair he was sick)

but in september 2024 this changed. now dormspam is opt-in, and the heft of inertia is against us. now, before freshmen can get access to the vast trove of information that is dormspam, they first have to open a few tabs, clicking around and typing, setting up a filter so that everything goes neatly in its own folder;⁠16 unless you dormspam wrong, in which case you will get flamed but this can only happen given that our freshman already knows of dormspam’s existence and understands its significance. a high bar! so many times have i told a friend “oh yeah i bought this off dormspam” only to hear “oh i didn’t know dormspam had sales i’m not on it yet”

lacking new blood, dormspam is at risk. dormspam only lives so long as people animate it – with their club announcements, their autumn sales, their flame wars. if fewer and fewer freshmen join dormspam every year, it’s not far-fetched to imagine a future fully dormspam-less. people will speak in the past tense about: “wow, i was scrolling through the archives and look at this funny random survey i found!” like latin, dormspam will calcify. 

this would be a tragedy!

i know this, but i’ve only been here a month. ultimately i just do not have enough experience to express just how sad this would be, so here are some words from other people

in the words of petey, our well-aged Blog Dad:

Dormspam is a unique form of campus-wide communication that I haven’t really seen anything else like at any other school

more emphatically, the borrowed words of fellow blogger allison ‘28:

I think, as much as MIT seems like a monolith of Nerd from the outside, the undergrad experience here can be a somewhat fragmented landscape. Between our different majors and different living groups and different student orgs, a lot of our lives orbit completely disjoint sets of experiences. 

It’s one of the best things about MIT, that you can find your niche and your people and do amazing things with them. But it also means at a school with thousands of undergrads, it’s difficult to have shared experiences.

Dormspam is the one thing that crosses most of those lines.

We all see the bicycle sale flame wars, or the 5W toilet picture, or the random number survey. It’s something you can bring up that many people across MIT will know about. We share the experience of being inundated with 200 senior sales in the last week of classes. 

THE COMMUNAL THOUGHT CLOUD OF THE MIT STUDENT BODY MUST LIVE ON. What else would we use for our entertainment? For sustaining our free food needs? For selling our unwanted belongings and sharing our advice and coordinating massive campus-wide projects?

so what can we do?

well, if you happen to be a mit freshman, MAKE SURE YOU ARE ON DORMSPAM. i promise it’s easy and it is SO worth it. go to https://sites.mit.edu/how-to-dormspam/unsubscribe/; this website has a list of dormspam mailing lists for all dorms! just click the link next to the list that matches your dorm! for example if you live in simmons you would click this link:

it’s called that because simmons looks like a sponge (look it up!)

this website also contains very useful information about filtering dormspam so that your main inbox doesn’t get clogged. 

if you are already on dormspam: GET YOUR FRIENDS ON DORMSPAM GET EVERY SINGLE OTHER FROSH YOU KNOW ON DORMSPAM THEY (AND I) WILL THANK YOU. also, learn to send dormspams! find something that you actually think is worth sending to all of mit, and then send a message as described here: https://sites.mit.edu/how-to-dormspam/send/ (i actually haven’t done this yet so maybe i can’t say anything)

if you are older than a mit freshman: the above instructions still hold but less emphatically. actually i guess if you are an upperclassman MAKE SURE YOUR FROSH ARE ON DORMSPAM

if you are younger than a mit freshman: unfortunately the joys of dormspam sales are not yet for you. but they await you in the wide, beckoning future. so if you do end up here, keep dormspam in your mind. and if you find yourself in some evil world where dormspam has died, perhaps you (yes, you, dear reader) can be the one to resurrect it. 

the nature of material possession is to fade. i know my dormspam sale finds are not meant to last. but if nothing else, i hope the backbone behind dormspam lives forever, built off its foundation of trust and community.