crossovers in socal by Victor D. '27
MIT Students Visit Caltech and UCLA
I’m always thrilled to have visitors, people to show around, to share a place familiar to me, to rediscover and see new things in those places. This past weekend, I’ve traveled hundreds of miles in the LA area to introduce my friend Peyton to parts of my world.
Peyton is one of my friends from Putz, my living community in East Campus, and this summer he’s interning at JPL (the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) doing research on newly formed stars. He had been crashing at Caltech in Blacker Hovse (a Caltech undergraduate dorm) the past few weeks with a friend of a friend, Blake, a mechanical engineering frosh at Caltech living in Blacker Hovse, who met several MIT students through the annual (unofficial) MIT-Caltech exchange.
Stepping onto the Blacker courtyard at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), I was pleasantly surprised by the Sport Death (the motto and icon of the now defunct MIT dorm Senior House) banner looming over the courtyard with a black wooden platform covered in construction materials and equipment. I hadn’t expected to see such a prominent symbol of MIT dorm culture at Caltech on the West Coast. To someone familiar with MIT, the South Houses (there are 4 South Houses including Blacker) may be best described as Caltech’s parallel to the “East Side” of MIT, with highly active dorm cultures that put on large scale events and lead build projects.
Apparently, I had just missed the campus-wide Interhouse Party Blacker threw, with the main attraction being a massive enclosed pyramid featuring a sound system with 14 subwoofers. Just weeks prior, Blake conscripted MIT students from Tetazoo (another East Campus Hall) on the Caltech-MIT exchange to help construct the pyramid. The build culture reminds me a lot of East Campus’ build projects, especially at the beginning of the year when we build a fort for the East Side Party, and the famous rollercoaster.
Wandering the halls of Blacker with our guide Blake, it struck me as reminiscent of Random Hall at MIT, particularly because of the abundance of murals bedecking the walls and the labyrinthine layout of the dormitory, sometimes requiring a descent in order to reascend back into a different section of the same building. Allegedly, the architect of Blacker believed in gremlins who in lore cannot go up stairs and turn right, so the circuitous design of the building reflects that superstition.
After jamming to various Blues and Bossa tunes, Blake on double bass, Peyton and I on two separate pianos, we walked over to the adjoined Ricketts House (another one of Caltech’s South Houses) for their open mic night event, which was so fun and whimsical and impressive and entirely absurd all at once. As we watched the student groups, Peyton and I remarked how it reminded us of the student bands and their performances at East Campus. Off the top of my head, last year we had Fred Fest, Steer Roast, and Emo Prom (two student bands, Concepts of a Band and Putz Up! performed in Blacklight Lounge on a hall called 41West in East Campus), all events where East Campus bands featured prominently.
Blake’s fellow Moles (the demonym for Blacker House residents) had a bit where they all dressed as Pitbull and Kesha and sang Timber. I really enjoyed how culturally vibrant their living communities are and it’s really inspiring to see such a close analog to East Campus exist and thrive independently on the other side of the country. Well, mostly independently; as I’ve mentioned, there are exchanges between us :).
After the final song and mosh pit at 2:10 AM, Blake graciously offered to let me stay the night in his room despite having just met me. For a night, his tiny single (smaller than any dorm room I’ve seen at MIT) was a triple.
The following morning, Peyton and I said bye to Blake as he headed out to lab and we headed off to my high school friend Dylan’s apartment in Westwood near UCLA. There, I introduced Peyton to Dylan, a junior in electrical engineering, and my other friend Paxton, a junior in mechanical engineering. Together, we cooked and ate a scrumptious vegan meal including brown rice, daal, aromatic salad, fried okra, jamaica, and berry smoothies. We realized we dilly-dallied a bit too much however and rushed out of the house to drive to Hollywood to see a film at the Chinese Theater called La Hija Condor (The Condor Daughter).
Dylan is ethnically Bolivian and has taken several courses in Kichwa, the predominant Amerindian language of the Andes from Ecuador to Peru to Bolivia, and he had the opportunity to meet the director prior to the screening! I’m so glad he invited us; the film was strikingly gorgeous; genuinely not a single lazy shot throughout. As stunning as our mountain landscapes are in Southern California, they cannot come close to the austere, towering grandeur of the Andes.
The film follows a midwife and her apprentice in a rural alpine community outside Cochabamba (where both the director and Dylan’s family are from) as they manage the pressures of modernization and urbanization. After, we even met Dylan’s Kichwa professor who was really ecstatic that we were curious about Andean culture and stories.
Driving back to UCLA wasn’t nearly as harrowing as the drive there—Sunset Boulevard is a genuine wonder of traffic engineering, forcing the bus to sit in stop-and-go rush hour traffic and with drivers taking its serpentine curves at ungodly speeds. Out of the many things I do not miss about sprawling Los Angeles living in Cambridge is sitting for hours in stop-and-go traffic.
As we walked around Westwood in the twilight, Peyton and I were in awe at just how many Waymos and delivery robots overwhelm their streets and sidewalks. Waymo is trying to get Boston and Massachusetts to allow autonomous vehicles though, so perhaps their eggshell white vehicles will soon grace our streets. After being juked out by aggressive delivery robots, we began our ascent onto UCLA campus, which is located on the foothills of the Hollywood Hills in Westwood.
Peyton commented about how, after around 30 minutes of walking through the sprawling campus, we must’ve traversed the equivalent of 4 or 5 Caltechs. Blake told us how MIT feels large to a Caltech student. ‘If our nanoscience building is this big, then yours is THAT big,’ he said gesticulating with his hands. But UCLA? It’s genuinely enormous, both the campus itself and its monstrous buildings (Caltech is about 4 x 1 blocks, MIT is 1 mile long and a couple thousand feet deep. UCLA might as well be an entire gargantuan city). Though UCLA and Caltech are both far prettier campuses than MIT—Caltech is like a quaint enchanted garden and UCLA a national forest. MIT does have a nice view of the river and Boston skyline, and its own red brick, brutalist charm I suppose…
On Sunday, I dragged Peyton to my hometown, which we immediately left because that’s the best thing to do in Camarillo. My dad took us hiking on the Sycamore Canyon Trail which ascends into the coastal Santa Monica Mountains, ending with spectacular views of the glistening sea twinkling under the sun, surfers bobbing in the whitewater and parasols dotting the sandbar and roaring cars and motorcycles barreling down the Pacific Coast Highway sometimes mere feet from the crashing surf. Abutting the trail are an assortment of chaparral bushes, cacti, and flowers. The hills a patchwork mosaic of brown shrubbery, bursting in lilac coastal lavender, and butter tidytips, bushes of the same species clustered together. The mountains are just so stunning, especially how dramatically they rise from the sea.
We descended from the trail summit and drove to the border with LA County to watch the surfers up close in the wake. I took many pictures of the small animals I noticed prowling the shore, coasting the skies, and scurrying in the bushes. The sea is serrated by the wind and its diamond highlights are in constant motion as the sun never seems to catch the same spot of the water twice. The surface sparkles and sizzles with brilliant white highlights like the sparkles rising from a campfire set against the backdrop of a completely navy blue almost black, starless night.
Exhausted from the pounding afternoon sun, Peyton and I slept for almost an hour before driving to pick up my friend Dylan (whom you met earlier) and Eyouel, a rising senior and astrophysics major at UC Berkeley. I’ve wanted Peyton and Eyouel to meet because they are both space kids studying physics. We drove through the agricultural fields adorned with row crops such as strawberry and lettuce and cabbage whose coverings glistened, gilded in the impending dusk, the sun’s oranges and yellows and pinks swallowing the day-blue sky through its descent, so bulbous and gentle grazing the border of the horizon.
Parking at Point Mugu Beach, we waddled along the rough sand and watched as the sun turned a cherry red as it passed behind a cloud on the horizon, stroking the waves orange, becoming trapezoidal on its corners as the edges softened before disappearing entirely. The sand crunched beneath my feet as we walked back along the shore and spotted several seals coasting and diving along the beach in the waves. We concluded the night by meeting my parents at a taco stand set up beside the railway tracks on the path to Somis, a small agricultural community in my county.
gorgeous
Dropping off Eyouel and Dylan, my and Peyton’s night still had a long way to go. I’d agreed to drive Peyton back to Pasadena and help him move his stuff to a temporary place in Altadena, just 10 minutes north by car from Pasadena. So at 10:00 PM we set off from my house for an hour-long drive back to Caltech, listening to Sonic, Pokemon, and the Princess Mononoke Soundtrack. Peyton and I agreed we don’t miss much about driving, except for listening to music while doing it.
After recovering Peyton’s stuff from Blake’s room in Blacker, I drove Peyton to his new abode in Altadena, then returned to Blacker at Caltech to stay with Blake one last time. He brought me to their on-campus cafe open until 2:00 AM and we shared a surprisingly fire cheese quesadilla with a side of jalapenos. By the time I woke up the next morning, Blake was already gone and I drove back home.
Surely more crossover episodes are in order!