Slinging π’s by Nicholas R. '29

The other day I was walking to Next House. I was by myself, headphones on, in the middle of a downpour—completely soaked yet steadfast in my journey to eat the best dining-hall chicken tenders and fries on campus.⁠01 I love Next Dining. It's objectively the best MIT dining hall, which isn't a very high bar but still. I was hungry. Food was on my mind.

On my way past the tennis courts I was seized by a string of memories. First, it was of pizza. Then, naturally, it was of when I first stepped foot on MIT’s campus, over four years ago…

It’s freshly summer, and I’m a soon-to-be sophomore in high school. It’s my second summer working at a local pizza restaurant called Pizza Barbone. I started as a dishwasher, but this summer I’ve been promoted to pizza-maker. In addition to the restaurant itself, Barbone has mobile pizza-oven trucks and offers catering across Cape Cod and, occasionally, the Greater Boston area.

I’m on my very first catering event, admittedly a bit nervous as I ride shotgun in the truck with my boss, Jason. After over an hour of driving, we’re just now entering the city; we make our way through the Boston traffic and are soon rolling down Memorial Drive, past Maseeh and other less castle-like dorms. We park the truck in front of a fraternity⁠02 I think it was DKE or maybe KS and are greeted by our clients: a group of college-aged guys, presumably students in the frat. We begin setting up our workspace and preparing the pizzas. Given that I’m still early on in my pizza-making journey, Jason guides me through the process of stretching the dough and topping it. I feel the dough awkwardly sag and slip through my fingers—I didn’t yet have the proper technique⁠03 Let the dough drape over your knuckles, slowly move your fists apart in a circular motion, and let gravity do most of the work! to prevent it from tearing or stretching too thin. After forming some questionably-shaped pies,⁠04 Slang for pizzas I start topping while Jason feeds the glowing brick oven some wood chips. Once the fire is going, the pizzas get fed to the oven, and the dough rises and bubbles, forming a beautiful Neopolitan crust.

I watch the freshly-cooked pizzas be carried inside the building, which has slowly been filling up with guests during our prep. I hear standard fare from a college-party playlist⁠05 Quintessential frat songs like 'Clarity,' 'No Hands,' 'Doses & Mimosas,' etc. blasting through speakers, competing with the cheerful shouts and chatter from the people inside. In that moment I feel as if I’m staring at an exhibition: this is what college looks like, just as I have seen in the movies. I look behind me. There’s people walking by, one is repping an MIT hoodie. There’s some other figures on the court, playing tennis. The sun tries peeking through the overcast.

That’s about where the memory ended, just as I was clouded with thoughts of chicken tenders and fries.

I hadn’t thought about that moment in a long time. It’s strange and maybe poetic to think about how I was staring at my future, in a way. That was really the first time I remember thinking about college, or what I would do beyond high school, in a serious way. It still felt so far away. I still had at least a few more summers to work at Barbone, after all. And that restaurant job was very formative for me: I learned many cliché yet important things about myself and working with others in a professional setting. Four years later, I’m here and I still have much to learn. The more you see, the less you know.

Anyways, I want to end this meandering blog with a small piece of unsolicited advice. To current or prospective applicants: don’t shy away from talking about high school jobs in your college applications. If it was formative to yourself as a person, then I’d argue it’s worthy of mentioning—whether it is particularly glamorous or not, academic or not. I remember feeling hesitant about including my “silly” summer job on my applications. I thought it might be better to include something that was academic-leaning, but I realized there was nothing that I could’ve replaced it with that felt as personally significant as slinging pies.

(This post’s social image is courtesy of @pizzabarbone on Instagram)