Room E51-151, Please??? by Bryan

I was already pumped about MIT going into CPW, so I mainly went to absorb as much as I could, with a goal (just for fun) of finding another prefrosh from Kansas.

I’m one of those people who function best when I have an idea of what my day’s schedule looks like…and if you’ve seen the encyclopedia of an events list that we all got for CPW, you know that didn’t work out.

The Icebreaker and CPW Festival were some of the few things that I actually attended after finding it in the book, noting its location, and successfully finding said location.

MIT Logarythms

Nitrogen Icecream!!!

Afterwards I just wandered around and did everything spur-of-the-moment. Thursday night, rather than walk to a building across the river in search of a Boston frat, in the dark nd in miserable weather, I did homework. Yep. My host Jennifer (a Kansan!), left, Melis the blogger, right, Rachel, middle, Jennifer’s roommate Karlen, not pictured, and many others were poring over their psets

in a Baker House lounge. I thought, hey, might as well get that AP Lit & Comp homework out of the way before I get too tired to function. So, these Course 2 (MechE) majors made a spot for me and my disdainful poetry homework (How are “broken walls and burning towers” in line x related to the myth at hand, and in which line did Agamemnon’s significance come into play?) and for the next five hours or so we talked about MIT professors, TAs, dorms, dining, and random stuff. We also did work. Drained by the calculations, which to me just looked like hieroglyphics + lots of arrows, Mario decided to order pizza. He used no phone–just logged onto his computer, went to a handy-dandy website, ordered, paid online, and voila, pizza at your door half an hour later. The other prefrosh in our room, Lyla, came back after a mighty good time in 3 or 4 different (how did she DO that??? It was soooo cold, and imagine reading a campus map in the dark.) places. When Lyla and I went to bed, the MIT students were still working on their psets.

This same spontaneous schedule filled my next two days, with a few exceptions. I’d see something interesting in the schedule book, try to find it, and get distracted by something along the way. It’s fine by me, because I heard an amaaazing Emerson Fellow’s senior recital for flute, bumped into a steel drum performance in front of the student center,

found out about a sale at the MIT Press near Kendall Square, met a bunch of wonderful and accepting students of the Korean Students’ Association, followed Alan Touring the Tourbot,

and popped into random people’s dorms all for being at an unintended place at the right time. I did successfully navigate myself to a Parliamentary debate demo round, Beaver and the Geek (modeled after Beauty and the Geek. Don’t pretend you didn’t at least watch a few minutes out of curiosity!),

…fashion (?) show…

Meet-the-Bloggers (they really like comments, as I found out. Not the “first post!” kind, but real ones. Gasp! Substantive comments exist?), and Senator Ted Kennedy’s lecture. I even spoke to a real live Caltech student. I didn’t realize that the bizarre Tech issue was Caltech’s work since even the CPW schedule book had promised a “special issue.” If I had known at the time that this guy was from Caltech and they had hacked the MIT “Tech” …well, humph…

Sunday rolled around and it was time to leave. My good friend Kyle ’10 came down from that red-bricked school up in Cambridge to take me to see Boston. Except that the rain was so bad even the Red Sox game was cancelled. Logically, we ran around Boston Commons and had lunch before getting back to catch the shuttle service to the airport.

CPW has passed in a flurry of running around, splashing in puddles, meeting students & prefrosh, sharing name, home state, and interested courses/majors every time you met someone, AND!!! I found a fellow prefrosh Kansan on the flight back to Kansas of all places! I had an awesome time at CPW because MIT just plain rocks.

I leave you with a few items to consider:

If anyone asks, someone wearing black named Jack is taking you to Baker House.

Midwest Airlines really is the Best Care in the Air because they give you chocolate-chip cookies baked in-flight.

Come to MIT!

Senior Haus bouncy ball drop–6000 of them pelting us poor prefrosh below. I snapped this photo before they actually got to where I was standing.