Take Me Back to Tech (Guest Entry) by Bryan

by Donald Guy

Oh I wish that I were back again at Tech..

Well, we all heard the Chorollaries’ beautiful renditions of the Engineers Drinking Song, but there is another traditional MIT song (this one in the Logs standard repertoire) that (at least in bits) more accurately expresses a lot of prefrosh’s current feelings.

This is quite seriously how I am feeling at the moment. Like a lot of prefrosh, I am dealing with a lot of senioritis (yes, there is a wikipedia article on it) and I’m ready to head back to the ‘tvte. Though I have some great friends here at home (many whom I will miss dearly), I feel like I have friend’s at (and soon to be at) MIT who I already miss.

Since this is ostensibly a CPW entry, I guess I should talk about my CPW. Overall, my CPW was pretty tame. Keep in mind this is saying tame for CPW – this is a lot like saying west campus people are normal (they are, for MIT).

In any case, for a trip to my new favorite place, the beginning was less than glorious. It can be summed up well in one picture

yea -_- Due to nice fog, my plane to Boston never touched down, so I went to Boston from Virgina Beach… by way of Atlanta. While displacment is a vector, time is a scalar, so I caught the shuttle

and arrived on campus a lot latter than intended (noonish rather than nineish).

Over the weekend, the rest of my schedule has been covered by a lot of the other entrants:

• I was, at times, in the chat group with Omar (in the picture of the cameras, mine is the orange camera phone)
• I was there for Chris’s head injury
• I went to the CSAIL presentation, 6.02 class, and EECS open house, Ball Drop and many other things where Karen could be found. (In general, her longer blog here closely follows my CPW experience (especially thursday, friday), though somehow I never actually met her)
• I went to see Roadkill Buffet like Joey C.
• Like lots of people, I was there for the Icebreakers, festival, Meet the Bloggers etc.
• Though I didn’t play Underground CTF, I did play BC’s CTF on Thursday night

So, I won’t bore you with too much redundant recounting. Quickly here are some pictures/videos I have to add (in roughly chronological order):

the housing/dining info session

The real beauty of CPW

4th East (Slugfest)’s Iron Curtain music visulization project

The poor orientation hosts who were in charge of running “ice breakers” on the chat group (and the one poor guy in the group who wasn’t a chat person)

The obligatory picture from the roof of Baker (before the party)

A nearly empty infinite corridor at 2am on Thursday (Random Standard Time)

Our hard-hatted tour group at the new grad dorm where the so-called Phoenix/W1 Incubator group will live for two years. Will U, Kimberly S ‘12 and I were the only prefrosh to go on the tour of the dorm. It was a really nice (albeit under construction) facility and really will afford the people who go for it great opportunities to jump-start the culture of the former-Ashdown house. That said, I’m not sure if I can handle living one place 2 years (WAAY off campus) and another 2 years some place else, both new. For those of you who are adventurous, its definitely worth looking into.

6.02 Lecture on Variable Length Encoding. Very interesting and I actually understood it and learned a lot.

Some (anti-)VI propaganda handed out at the EECS open house. (Note: free shirts that Omar didn’t get!)

The sounds (and almost sights) of the Ball Drop

Snively + Me + Colbert’s “my ______ friend” pose = AMAZING PICTURE! (if only camera didn’t ruin it)

Random Hall’s flying cow. You can hear part of a Random Hall tour in the background

As even these few meager pictures show, I had an awesome time at CPW. Keep in mind also that during some of the most awesome times, I was too busy (or forbidden hint) to be taking pictures.

For example, during the GBIS A cappella concert, I was literally too awed by the awesome groups (several of which I’d love to be a part of), to snap a picture. During the Roadkill Buffet performance (which I forewent Battle of the Bands for), I was much too busy laughing. By far the funniest moment to me, although it may not translate well to text, was during a game in which they had to interject phrases the audience wrote before the show into a scene,

Actor 1: *pulls phrase from pocket* GERANIUM URANIUM!

Actor 2: Yea, I remember man. Thats what we called you in high school. Everyone was afraid of the Geranium Uranium. I remember they called me *pulls phrase* Lions and Tigers and Bears Oh My!

Actor 1: yep, we used to call you LTBOM for short

.. I laughed to the point of tears (I think you had to be there).

Overall, however, I find myself wanting more. Not more from CPW, but more from MIT – I need more of MIT… soon.

This is partially my fault. I enrolled before CPW, so I wasn’t running to make sure it was all for me and I feel like I left some things undone. I never saw Simmons nor Senior Haus; I hung out with the chat group a lot and, in doing so, didn’t meet that many completely new people (though I actually probably am now best friends with some of the chat people I knew least before the weekend), and I feel like I probably slept too late.

The larger cause of this yearning, however, lies squarely in the nature of CPW. CPW was MIT in super-condensed form and, as much as we tried, one simply couldn’t experience it all. This isn’t really a problem, but it does have a serious side effect: MIT Addiction. I want to go back ASAP. I realize that real MIT life involves a lot of tooling, but I’m ready to face that for the rest of it (plus I actually love learning, so maybe psets won’t always be torture) (one can hope).

I feel ready to learn, ready to tool, ready to punt, ready to hack (if the occasion arises).

And yet orientation is 4 months and 3 days away.

Being the smart one I am (I got into MIT!), I know that there is still a LOT of fun to enjoy here in my senior year. I will continue to keep that in mind, but like a lot of prefrosh, I find myself singing “Take Me Back to Tech”.

So hoorah for technology, ‘ology, ‘ology oh.

^__^

Until August,

~Donald Guy ‘12