CPW Update – Featuring Tim the Beaver as Miley Cyrus by Rachel D. '16

I am sitting in the coolest little corner of our courtyard I’ve ever seen wearing shorts and a tank top.  The temperature is well into the sixties, and the music is blasting from the EC speakers sending a beacon out to prefrosh, welcoming them to our home.

This is CPW. I already wrote a pre-CPW post, and this is my CPW update, informing you all about how incredible this experience is, and how grateful I am to live in a place this awesome.

I woke up early this morning, 8am, for EMS drills, and although I was tired, I don’t regret a second of it.  I love learning more about how I can help people, and I’ve had so many great ideas about how to spread our help across campus. More on that some other time, it’s CPW!

CPW has included so many different events, from tree swinging to cat petting to shanti-town building and more!  Here are some pictures of our adventures!

And as promised, there was a Tim hack!!  Tim the beaver got to play the role of Miley Cyrus this weekend, on a wrecking ball!

The prefrosh were very excited, but Galileo was not impressed, as usual.

In other news, like I mentioned in my last post, the theme for East Campus’ CPW this year is “The Great Depression.” On Thursday we celebrated the Roaring Twenties with food and rich things, and then on Friday the prefrosh smashed a sign labeled “Stock Market” with sledge hammers.  After that, they built a giant box fort from the ruins of the stock market crash. It was beautiful. I am sitting inside of it right now! I hope we can keep it.

When I was not occupying the fort, Fuzzy W. ’14 was Trader Jack, handing out candy and other goodies to prefrosh and upperclassmen who answered his unusual questions correctly.

As usual, the grills were fired up and ready to hand hundreds of prefrosh and MIT students burgers, as well as dye their hair!

Every Friday at 5pm, East Campus has a tradition called Friday Afternoon Club, or FAC. Each week, a new hall is responsible for providing some sort of food substance for our dorm, and serving it in the dormitory lounge, Talbot.  Each year during CPW, Putz, or second west, is responsible for doing the infamous “CryoFAC,” where they make liquid nitrogen ice cream for us and all the preforsh. It was awesome!

While this was all happening, our campus was infiltrated by the enemy! Caltech students appeared on campus in a crowd – and we greeted them with ice cream and happiness!  They were sponsored by Caltech alumni to fly out here during our CPW to pull a very creative hack – they set up stations around campus and handed out mugs that normally looked like plain MIT mugs, but when heated they said “Caltech – the Hotter Institute of Technology.” We were very impressed by this, and I personally gave them a tour of East Campus! They loved our culture and cats, and hopefully next year we can go visit them during their prefrosh weekend and mess with them in a similar way! It was really fun hanging out with them, and they even gave me a mug as a thank you for giving them a tour! Thanks Caltech!

Caltech even got to go cruft smashing!

Our freshmen even created some fun CPW events for everyone on the fly, such as tube races/battles/funtime.

Meanwhile, inside talbot…

At the end of the night, some of my friends and I ventured over the Spring Greater Boston Invitational Songfest, where all of MIT’s awesome a cappella groups sang their hearts out! It was incredible and hilarious and so much fun to watch! 10-250 was filled to the brim with prefrosh, parents, and excited MIT students!  Here are some of my blurry pictures of the event. BUT! Fun fact! I’m buying a real-person camera soon, so no more blurry phone pictures! Hopefully by my next blog post, all my pictures will be beautiful, instead of only the ones containing cats!

After a cappela, I walked home among the crazy prefrosh, excited for a night full of excitement, and of course, the Meet the Bloggers event! The event went lovely – the room was filled with bloggers, Petey, pie, coconut water, and lots of excited prefrosh! I even got a really cool Blogger shirt with my avatar on it! It was a little strange at first, but we quickly went into conversations about CPW, life at MIT, dorm culture, and more!  I even gave a bunch of them some tasty tangerines at the end!

CPW is awesome. Everything is awesome right now at MIT, even if we have tons of work next week and this past week.  Seeing excited prefrosh brings all us students extreme joy and excitement about this awesome place we live and study in.  We hack, we punt, we tool – we live, we breathe, we MIT. And sharing this with prefrosh is so amazing, it really is hard to put into words.

Each night, my prefrosh, Molly, and I have passed out, exhausted from the day but excited about the future and happy about where we are and where we will be.

As usual, here is a picture of Galileo to end this post with. He is also extremely exhausted from all the excited prefrosh who have come to visit him!

This is East Campus, this is MIT. This undescribable feeling is home :)