Above MIT by Piper '13

Ahoy, prospective students and parents* – and, well, anyone else who frequents these blogs!

* The word “prospective” doesn’t distribute to parents here. I mean, I guess there are prospective parents on the blogs, but really, don’t plan out your child’s future that far in advance, dude. Wait until they at least hit preschool first. Or, better yet, high school! ^^;

I’m Piper, an MIT student and College Confidential bum turned Admissions blogger. If you want to read a little bit about me, you can check out my bio here. If you want to find out a little more about me, feel free to ask me questions! Otherwise, stay tuned. I have plenty of adventures and exciting things to show you.

Starting now.

As my first blogging act, I would like to show you a completely new way to look at MIT. Literally. The likelihood of you seeing MIT quite like this is somewhat small.

But Piper, you might ask, how can you possibly show me a new view of MIT?

I call it a Cessna 172 flying machine.

I come from a long line of pilots, you see. My father was a pilot, and… yeah, that’s where it ends. And now I’m a pilot too.

So when last Family Weekend rolled around and my parents came to visit, I had a thought. Man, wouldn’t it be cool to see MIT from the sky? I found the somewhat-nearby Hanscom Field, and convinced my father that this was totally a good idea and we could totally convince BOS’s air traffic control to let us take a close look at MIT.

And somehow, it worked.

I feel like takeoff is a good place to start with a disclaimer: my father was in control of the plane while I was snapping these photos. Rest assured that I was not several thousand feet in the air staring through a camera when I should’ve been looking out the window or at my instruments.

This was the first major landmark I recognized once I was in the air. This is Walden Pond.

Almost there!

Here you can see a good portion of west campus. The tall building on the near side of the river is MacGregor. On the other side of the field, you can see the sponge that is Simmons. The identities of the rest of the buildings are left as an exercise to the reader.

Welcome to main campus! From here, you can see Killian Court, the Big Dome and the Little Dome. Just across the river, you can see the Prudential Center and the John Hancock Building. Finally, there’s the beautiful Charles River itself – with some sailboats sprinkled on top.

Really a view of a huge chunk of campus, but let’s focus on the east side. The tall building (near side of the river) with the little white ball on top is the Green Building. Just to its left, you’ll notice two parallel buildings – they make up East Campus, the wonderfully strange dorm I’ll be having an awesome summer in.

And finally, on the upper part of this picture, I thought I’d just show you how close Logan Airport is. The air traffic control there was amazingly competent and friendly in our interaction with them, so I thought I’d include a little shout-out on how just cool they are.

And with that, I bring my sky tour of the Institvte to an end. Seeing my home-away-from-home in a completely new way, familiar territory through an unfamiliar flight path, was just a spectacular sight.

As summer approaches, perhaps I’ll see it again soon :)