places at mit by Joonho K. '20

MIT’s campus can be pretty daunting for someone first visiting. All the buildings are numbered, and at first glance, the ordering of the numbers seems unintuitive. Buildings 3 and 4 should be next to each other, right? Nope, they’re not. If you took a student-guided tour here, a common building route sequence would be 7, 5, 1, 3, 4, 2, 14. If you’re not an MIT student, you might be very confused at this point. But if you’ve spent enough time here, you’d know exactly what that route looks like. In addition, you’d know that the tour probably crossed Killian Court between 3 and 4. This is one of the small things I love about MIT: its building conventions, along with the other numbered conventions like class/course numbers, are confusing at first, but makes talking with other MIT students and the MIT experience unique.

I’ve finally decided to get out my DSLR that has been sitting largely in its tote bag on my shelf because I wanted to share my favorite places at MIT with you. Whether it be fairly common study spaces and lush greens, or less-worn nooks and places you might not usually travel on a daily basis, I want to cover as much as I can. I want to do this for two reasons: One, I want to show you that, despite our building numbers seemingly not making sense or our campus aesthetics being pretty quirky, MIT can be beautiful. :)

Two… I told someone the other day that I’m still discovering new things about MIT, even coming up on one year being here, and I appreicate and like that. MIT has become just a place to me over the past semester/several months: even though it is a great place to be, it’s lost its magic and wonder that I’d once held when I first came here. I read my very first blog post on MITAdmissions earlier today, and smiled when I read this paragraph:

“Building numbers weave in and out like needle and thread (7, 3, 10, 4, 8, 16, 26…), and staircases everywhere make me feel like a first year at Hogwarts. Everything seems and sounds so shiny and new, to the point where I couldn’t possibly see the magic of this place going away for me. This is the place I’ve dreamed of for most of my life, and deep inside I find a rare form of happiness that I’ve been waiting to feel for a very long time.”

MIT is no longer shiny nor magical nor new, but sometimes I take a walk either with my friends or on my own and stumble across new places. I like this feeling of still being able to find new places and be pleasantly surprised.

So without further ado… I’d like to show you around! :)

where i’m living this summer: sigep, 518 beacon st. i live on the ‘second floor’

beacon street (lydia k.’s beacon hill blog post is one of my favorites)

the harvard bridge: it has an unusual unit of measurement called the smoot

kresge auditorium’s roof is its own support

some pictures of kresge oval

a road leading to maseeh hall

student center

i’ve spent a lot of my time this summer in the 5th floor reading room of the student center

an LSC board filled with flyers of past showings

simmons hall

i don’t know what to call this place between the oval and baker house, but it’s wonderful

a DUSP lounge on the second floor (building 9)

building 36, 8th floor café

stata from the outside

stata from the inside

stata’s fourth floor commons, outside

stata’s fourth floor commons, inside

building 46, the cognitive science building, is wonderful

building 46 has a gorgeous reading pavillion with a view of stata and interior palm trees :)

bonus picture of the blogger group chat: