CPW will not be perfect by Allison E. '27

At my CPW three years ago, I experienced many things, including but not limited to:

• crying multiple times
• suffering violent diarrhea and learning that I was lactose intolerant
• feeling simultaneously overwhelmed and underwhelmed
• accidentally committing social faux pas
• being terrified that I was already falling behind

And then, I chose MIT anyway. And it was ok.

CPW, or Campus Preview Weekend, is the glorious period when newly admitted prefrosh come to visit MIT (elsewhere called Admit Student Days or something similar). It’s a weekend of mythic proportions–3.14 days filled with student-run events, and one of MIT’s most iconic undergrad experiences. It’s a weekend that’s supposed to help you choose whether or not to enroll here. It’s also one of the most overwhelming experiences you’ll ever have.

How overwhelming, you may ask? At my CPW in 2023, between 4:00 pm and 4:30 pm on Wednesday, there were around 70 events taking place simultaneously. Over the course of the full three days, there were 669 individual events–and for reference, our entire undergrad population is only about 4,500.

Many, many, many blogs have written about CPW, and as an overexcited prefrosh I probably read at least fifteen of them in the weeks (and maybe years…) leading up. One of my closest friends from high school had gone to CPW the year before, and he would not shut up about how cool it was for a solid week (not that 11th grade MIT-obsessed Allison wasn’t a willing listener). As the beginning of my own CPW approached, I remember the 2027 AdMITs discord absolutely roiling with excitement. When Petey “leaked” a puzzle-ified version of the CPW schedule (courtesy of the MIT Puzzle Club), there were immediately 50 people actively typing, 25 messages per minute, a Google spreadsheet with 7 tabs, and a very laggy voice channel discussion. 

Anyways, this is all to say that there is a LOT of hype around CPW, and as someone whose brain had already been half-digested by the MIT Admissions blog monster, I arrived on campus with very high expectations.

Unfortunately, I also arrived with a metric ton of travel-exhaustion, and only managed to survive the first day of events on pure adrenaline. The subsequent days felt slightly more in-control, but I still spent most of CPW in a mild but continuous state of panic. Don’t get me wrong–CPW was incredibly fun, and I think it’s one of the coolest things MIT does. As much as I imagined, however, it’s also not a magical weekend in nerd heaven where everything is perfect and every emotion is joyous. In fact, the real-life imperfection of my CPW experience was a bit of a slap in the face for me, after having dreamed about going to MIT for years. If I had known a few things before going into CPW, however, I think it would’ve helped moderate some of my (rather ludicrous) fantasies about MIT. Therefore, I have decided that this is a great opportunity for me to complain on the internet! Here’s some of the imperfect parts of my CPW experience:

1) TIME IS A LIE, SCHEDULES ARE FAKE, PREPARE FOR CHAOS

In the week before CPW, I made a list of interesting events to help scaffold my days, and dumped them into my Google Calendar for convenience. The list may have had at least five events happening at any given time, but it was a decent jumping off point, and I figured I could just listen to the whims of my inner voice.

Alas, a second, much louder voice was doing its level best to drown out the whims and incessantly remind me to optimize optimize optimize every second of CPW.

But hey, lists of events are perfect for optimization! I could pre-plan a schedule strategically designed to check all my boxes: 1) visit every dorm, 2) do at least 15 deranged activities, 3) explore several interesting clubs, 4) eat at least two meals and one boba per day, and 5) talk to as many different people as possible. Schedules and planning are perfect for this, right?

ABSOLUTELY NOT. As I very quickly learned, at CPW, time is like oobleck–rigid one second, fluid the next, and impossible to properly shove into a container. Not all CPW events start on the dot, many run longer than expected, and if you want free food, you often have to either get lucky or show up in a very specific but unspecified time window. This is nobody’s fault, of course, because it’s nearly impossible to plan events for an unknown number of prefrosh (could be 5, could be 50), and if something is fun, everybody wants to keep it going.

This bendy version of time, however, is extremely incompatible with Allison’s time optimization obsession. Which made me sad. And vaguely stressed. The optimization voice wouldn’t shut up, and I spent a lot of CPW anxious that I was missing out on experiencing cool things or meeting cool people (I am truly the master of FOMO). At one point, after missing the start of one event, getting lost on the way to the other, and failing to acquire food several times in a row⁠01 food is in fact EXTREMELY easy to acquire at CPW–you get a number of free dining hall swipes–but I was just too stubborn to ‘waste my time’ eating in a dining hall rather than at an event , I just gave up. I sat down on the concrete outside the Stud, hid my face behind my hair, pulled out a massive bag of Goldfish, and ate the entire thing while crying. I felt better afterwords, but that feeling of “you’re doing this wrong” never fully went away.

Given this firsthand experience, I can attest to the fact that utility optimization is a TERRIBLE way to go about CPW. Don’t try it! It’s not fun! If you’re anything like me, it’s extremely difficult to ignore this urge, but just remember: you cannot win CPW. Trying to do so will only make it actively worse. 

2) SOME EVENTS ARE BAD

I’m not going to sugarcoat it–some of the CPW events I went to were bad. In some cases, they were just run by a singular overworked, sleep deprived student valiantly but unsuccessfully trying to rally other overworked, sleep deprived students to cook 759 pancakes at 10 in the morning. In most cases, I didn’t like an event because just wasn’t the right fit for me. Sometimes the activity wasn’t up my alley (too zen? too chaotic? too physical? too scary?), and sometimes I just found myself inexplicably incapable of conversing with the people there. 

The vast majority of CPW events are objectively great, and you’ll hopefully enjoy most of them! Just know that you will also probably have one bad experience that sticks in your brain for the rest of time–though hopefully not as bad as the (incredibly delicious) liquid nitrogen ice cream event that ended with me discovering that, if you try hard enough, I apparently am lactose intolerant. (seriously though, that ice cream was RICH)

I worried about these particular events (not the ice cream, mostly the less enjoyable ones) a lot. If I didn’t like those events’ activities or the people there mean, did that MIT wasn’t a good fit for me? Short answer, after having been here for almost three years? Absolutely not. CPW is a very specific and mostly fantastical slice of what MIT is like, and you often just need to have the time to find your people. MIT is such a diverse place⁠02 Sure, MIT is a nerd school, but seriously–I never could’ve imagined how incredibly massive and high-dimensional the space of nerds is , which means that there’s often something for everyone. Conversely that also means that, for everyone, there’s often something (or many things) that are not for you. People usually tell stories about their favorite parts of CPW–nobody wants to talk about that one event that sucked. But everyone has been to events that suck, and that’s ok! There’s 600 of them for a reason.

3) PEOPLE ARE SCARY

I used to be very bad at talking to people (and still am not great at it), so talking to new people nonstop for three days straight was both incredibly terrifying and immensely draining. Some people are built for this level of social output, and some people (me) are not–I really should have taken a few breaks to just sit and stare at a wall. Unfortunately, as previously discussed, the little optimization demon inside my head WILL NOT SHUT UP, and so instead I kept going and going and going until I had completely dissolved into a sad little puddle of exhaustion. AKA I ended up crying (again) (multiple times). As it turns out, knowing your limits and actually listening to them is important!

4) AM I BEHIND???

Speaking of talking with people, I noticed very quickly that there were many groups of people at CPW who had all apparently managed to Make Friends in about two hours, and were joyously skipping from event to event in large clumps. I, on the other hand… did not go to any event “with” another person. I had gotten names, hometowns, prospective majors, and plenty of funny stories from high school or exciting future plans, but I hadn’t made anything close to a “friend”. Seeing all those large groups around me, it felt like the “race”⁠03 it is not a race, I am just dumb and cannot discard absurd notions of competition to make friends in college had begun without me even realizing it, and I was already leagues behind.

At one point on the last day, I ended up near one of these large groups chatting in a Simmons lounge. I’d been telling myself all day that I should try to get to know some of the folks in groups, since they might be a slightly different subset of people–maybe a more extroverted one, or maybe a more community-motivated one. So, I kicked my butt into action and walked over to ask if I could join them. They said yes, of course, but quickly turned back to their conversation. They didn’t shift to make room for me to sit, and nobody even glanced at me to ask the standard “Oh what’s your name? Where are you from?” questions when someone new joins a circle. I was a bit sad at the (lack of) reaction. It was a big step out of my comfort zone to go up to a group like that, and I had expected everyone at CPW to be eager to meet new people.

Still, I stayed to listen to a minute or two of their conversation, trying to orient myself. People were dropping names and places and past experiences as common knowledge, and I was completely and utterly. It felt like they were a group of upperclassmen with years of shared history, not a bunch of prefrosh that had met one or two days ago.

And as it turns out, that was correct! It took me a couple more minutes to realize, but I had just walked up to a group of close summer camp friends and blithely invited myself into their conversation. I was absolutely mortified, and immediately ran away.

It was only after this when I realized that most of the groups of people I’d seen all knew each other before CPW. They went to summer camps together, or did research programs together, or interacted at science competitions, or even just… met in the teeming underbelly of the high school STEM nerd ecosystem (most notably, Discord).

It was nice to know that the group I’d met wasn’t just some vaguely rude group of prefrosh who didn’t think I was interesting enough to meet–they were a bunch of friends who’d literally lived together for several months, and only had a couple days to see each other before scattering across the country again. It made sense that they were so insular.

More importantly, it was also a relief to know that I was not, in fact, falling behind. Some people just come to MIT with a massive head start! It might look like there are so many of these people, but there really aren’t–most of us didn’t arrive at MIT with a built-in friend group, and that’s perfectly ok.

5) CPW is not perfect. And it doesn’t have to be

My CPW was not the magical experience I had read about on the blogs, nor was it the singularly exhilarating adventure my friend had described to me. In reality, I came out of CPW with the first misgivings I’d ever had about going to MIT. Was it the right fit for me? Would I connect with the people? Why was I so uneasy the entire time?

These are all extremely valid questions to ask coming out of CPW–after all, figuring out if MIT is a good fit for you is the whole point. If you don’t enjoy CPW or the people you meet there, I’m definitely not here to tell you that all your worries and misgivings are misplaced. 

In my case, though, I went into CPW with impossible expectations of both MIT and myself. I thought that anything less than euphoria meant that MIT wasn’t for me, and I ended up doing a lot of unnecessary worrying afterwards. CPW is a great experience! Take advantage of it, enjoy it, and explore. But don’t expect it to be perfect. And don’t expect yourself to be either.