A Couple of Firsts by Erick P. '17
With a picture game
I noticed something great about the MIT Admissions blogs as the days have gone on. Everyone’s so passionate about their posts, and all of us do a great job of describing life at MIT. They’re all creatively written and well-thought out, and they tie together all the different aspects of MIT. Then I noticed something that I had missed in my post. Pictures! I need more pictures. But of what? I know, I’ll show pictures of some of a few of my “firsts” here at MIT (There’s many more, but this is just a few.) But instead of just throwing them at you, I’m going to show you zoomed-in pictures and let you guess.
Picture #1
Wrong Answer: Stuff that I paid for.
Right Answer: Stuff that I got for free at the Career Fair!
Yes! My first Career Fair!. All of my favorite companies in one gymnasium. It was like having every celebrity you love from every movie you’ve ever seen all congregated in one location. Google, Apple, Yahoo, Dropbox, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Google, Adobe, Bose, Cisco, eBay, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Codecademy, Evernote, Google, Gameloft, Groupon, Hulu, IBM, Intel, Google, JPMorgan, NASA, NVIDIA, Pandora, Samsung, SanDisk, Snapchat, Sony, Texas Instruments, Google, Tumblr, Twitter, Yelp, and Google! (I spent a lot of time at the Google table.) All of these big-name companies that are revolutionizing the world had come for the sole purpose of recruiting me! Well, not quite. They didn’t want me. They wanted the upper classmen. I was just the guy who was keeping them from talking to the guy they wanted to hire. But who cares! I met all of them, got a sense of what they’re like, and I got so much free stuff that I won’t need to buy shirts for another year.
If you want to read more about what the Career Fair was like, check out Allan’s blog post:
https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/fanboying-at-the-career-fair
Picture #2
Wrong Answer: HackMIT
Right Answer: Outside of HackMIT because I wasn’t allowed inside.
I was so excited for HackMIT. I found out about it back in August and wanted to sign up ever since. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to participate in it this year because of other events, but nonetheless I found the time to make the trek over to Kresge to get a peek inside. However, it seemed as though many other MIT kids had the same idea to “sneak” inside and take a peek. They tightened up security outside of HackMIT and now they wouldn’t let any MIT students in that weren’t participating in HackMIT. Bummer. I asked and the guy said the best he could let me do was take a picture standing at the entrance of the tent. Now that I think of it, if I made it clearer that I was an MIT blogger hungry for pictures, they might’ve let me in. I think I’m going to print myself a laminated badge that says “Official MIT Blogger” and wear it around my neck along with a reporter’s hat. Oh well, on to the next hackathon.
Picture #3
Wrong Answer: The Alchemist not dressed as a character from a legendary AMC show
Right Answer: The Alchemist dressed as Walter White, the main character from the legendary AMC show Breaking Bad.
Finally, seeing my first big MIT hack just there in plain sight! That means someone was here in the middle of the night. Someone must’ve thought “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to turn The Alchemist into Walter White?” Someone must’ve taken the time to make the flasks, the beard, the sunglasses, and the hat. And there’s also bags of fake meth behind both flasks. I saw this hack and I thought “Yep, this is what MIT is all about. Taking things that no one else would ever think of and pulling them into reality.” Even seemingly trivial things like dressing up a statue in honor of the ending of a TV show. It’s the little things that count.
These are just some examples of the cool things I’ve seen at MIT so far. It’s crazy to think that all these cool things are now part of my everyday life. They say that too much of a good thing isn’t so good but at MIT there’s just so much variety that the good things keep on coming.