MIT staff blogger Chris Peterson SM '13

Be a Blogger 2019! by Chris Peterson SM '13

It’s summer in Cambridge, which means three things:

  1. I’ve suddenly become a Plant Dad ™ and am growing tomatoes in my office window
  2. The good people of Boston Spinjam are meeting on Mondays on Killian Court right outside my office for some spinspiration
  3. It’s time for those of you who might want to be bloggers to share your thoughts with the world!



What does it mean to be an admissions blogger?

The best representatives of MIT students are MIT students.

Admissions officers can write about holistic admissions authentically, but we can’t write about what it’s like to live in Conner 2, or plan stuff for REX, or UROP, or decide how to pick your classes, or a really cool new thing you learned today in class, and so forth. MIT works by giving people high standards and great autonomy; the blogs are a specific example of this general case. The mission of the blogs is to allow our bloggers to communicate what being a student at MIT is like. You should interpret this mandate expansively.

In the main, we are looking for bloggers with good judgment who can write clearly and regularly to help communicate to their readers something about what it’s like to be an MIT student through their own experience. We expect you to blog at least once every two weeks and create other kinds of content as the mood strikes. We may ask you to help advise creative projects in the office and serve as a shibboleth for student culture. We pay you for this. It’s a pretty good gig to be honest.

Your application will be read by a small committee including some admissions officers who work on the blogs + the senior bloggers. This application itself was designed mostly by student bloggers to help ask and answer the kinds of questions that might be useful for identifying their kin. Please note that *only* current MIT students may apply to be bloggers (i.e. no prospective students or students at other colleges).

If this sounds like something you might like to do, then head on over to Slideroom and fill out the blogger application, due July 31. If anything isn’t clear, let me know in the comments or via email!