This is just a tribute by Mollie B. '06

I AM SO ANGRY.

I just wrote an entire entry, and right before I hit publish, my browser window mysteriously reloaded and I lost the entire thing. This is just par for the course today. Argh. The last entry I wrote was a lot longer (and probably a lot funnier) than this, but it is now over an hour after I started the last one, and I am tired and grouchy. And very annoyed.

Shout out
To Tommy, who was one of the leads in Pickerington HS North’s Footloose this week. He rocked in the show (with some crazy solos), and even let a crusty old alum corner him backstage before he even had his makeup off and ramble about how things were at PHS theatre back in my day.

Brag
My beautiful curly-haired boyfriend won third place in both the single and dual moguls portions of Sunday River’s Bust ‘n’ Burn competition this weekend. You can see a sweet picture of him busting and burning here — can you see the MIT sticker on his helmet? Rocket scientist by week, champion skiier by weekend, that’s my Adam.

Events about which to get psyched
CPW is probably my third-favorite time of the year (after IAP and rush/orientation). [Don’t remember what else I put here.] Adam and I are getting a prefrosh (slash starter child), and we’re very excited. But even if you’re not our prefrosh, I hope you’ll come find me at the following events and say hi.
Thursday — Student Welcome in Rockwell Cage, 8:30-9:30 PM.
Friday — Tour of my UROP lab, meeting at Lobby 7, 1:00 PM; Athletics Fair in Rockwell Cage, 2:00-4:00 PM (bonus: I’ll be in a cheerleading uniform); Meet the Bloggers party in the Student Center, 8:30-10:00 PM.
Saturday — Giving tours of my dorm, 1:00-5:00 PM.

Graduate school
I have decided where I’m going to grad school! (Actually, I decided a long time ago. But I was sick of talking about grad school.) I’m heading to Harvard’s Biological and Biomedical Sciences program, which is administered by the medical school. I hopped on the CT2 bus last Friday to go buy a Harvard Medical t-shirt, just because I think it’s amusing that every premed in the world would give his or her right cerebral cortex to go to Harvard Med, and I’m not even premed.

But never fear (?), for I will still be living on the MIT campus next year — Adam and I are getting an efficiency apartment in one of the family residences on campus while he finishes his bachelors. He’s also going to do his masters at MIT, and I’ll be doing my PhD for at least the next five or six years, so we’ll be in the area for a while. Hooray!

So you’ll all have to come to our wedding, which I may or may not already have planned in its entirety, despite the small fact that Adam has not yet, in fact, proposed. Ahem.

Questions
1. People lamented the lack of a Chipotle. (And Christina — Chipotle is a burrito place that makes burritos filled with some sort of addictive substance.) The nearest one is in NYC, which I will note is accessible for the low, low price of $15 via the Fung Wah bus. As a consolation prize, there’s a Baja Fresh in Faneuil Hall and a Qdoba at the Prudential Center, which are certainly not Chipotle, but tide me over between trips to Ohio.

2. Pop vs. soda website. Also a story: When I came to MIT as a prefrosh, I didn’t realize “pop” was a regionalism. So some residents of the dorm I stayed in took me on a tour of the dorm, and by the time we finished, I was parched. There was a small fridge on the first floor with some cans in it, and I politely asked, “Is the pop in there for everybody, or just dorm residents?” Everybody started cracking up (ie look at this one, just fell off the turnip truck), and I had no idea why they were laughing. It was very alarming.

3. Rashed asked

I was just wondering if you were getting a master’s degree by the end of your undergrad studies and then planning to get a PhD. Or is it that your going directly from a bachelors to PhD?

Yup, I’m going directly from my bachelor’s to my PhD. That’s a pretty common track in science (where a master’s is neither necessary nor sufficient for research), but not so common in engineering (where you do need a master’s to enter a PhD program). Actually, the only way I’ll ever get a master’s is if I chicken out on my PhD — many PhD programs in the sciences offer a master’s only as a booby prize for students who quit two or three years into their PhDs.

4. stasterisk asked, “Did you have to take a GRE? And how was it?”
I did, in fact. I took both the GRE general test (which has math, verbal, and writing sections, just like the SAT) and the GRE biology subject test (which is similar to, although more difficult than, the SAT II in biology). I took the general test over the summer and the biology subject test in November.

I rocked the general test. Like a hurricane. My GRE general score > my SAT I score by 110 points, which I’m pretty sure is not supposed to be true — the graduate-school-going population is a lot tougher than the college-going population, and both tests are centered around 500 for each section. They’re changing the test somewhat in 2007, so the test you guys take won’t be exactly like the one I took, but the one I took was not that hard. The verbal section is a little harder than the SAT verbal, but the math is a lot easier.

I was more nervous about the subject test, since a) it was in the middle of a term when I was taking 60 units, b) it covered evolution and ecology and plants, none of which I’ve taken courses in at MIT, c) I had to decide which schools to send my score to without knowing the score, and d) I was not doing well on the practice tests I took. Luckily, the testing gods were smiling on me that day, and somehow I pulled off an 870 (/990), which was good enough for 97th percentile. Rockin’.