I have never been trick-or-treating, (until now) by Nicole Cooper

Confession: I had never been trick-or-treating. 

Not once. Not as a kid, not as a teenager, not even ironically in college.
When I tell people that, they look at me shocked, jaw to the floor like a scream mask.

In my hometown, the houses were so far apart you could yell “trick or treat” into the night and it’d just echo back at you. The idea of going door-to-door didn’t make much sense when “the next door” was half a mile down a gravel road. So every Halloween, my “route” consisted of exactly one stop: my grandma’s house, a quarter mile away.

We’d shuffle down the dirt driveway in our costumes, usually something my mother sewed for us planned with our winter coats. We would knock on her door and she would pretend to be all surprised for trick-or-treaters and she’d hand each of us a full-size chocolate bar. The good stuff. Then we’d drive to the school Halloween carnival, pin the nose on the jack-o-lantern and call it a night. That was Halloween. That was trick-or-treating.


Fast forward to this year, Boston.

I decided it was finally time to experience the real thing – but I guess I was the one handing out the candy. 

I dressed up as a black cat (classic, low effort, timeless) and joined my friends to hand out candy. I bought three huge bags, feeling very prepared. By 6:45 PM, I was completely out. Turns out Boston kids operate with MIT-level efficiency when candy is involved.

The sidewalks were pure chaos — a blur of dinosaurs, princesses, superheroes, and the family dressed like the MBTA. Parents clutched coffee cups, someone down the block was blasting Thriller, and at one point I saw a very COOL, but rare DeLorean.

What surprised me most wasn’t the chaos. It was how familiar it felt.

I saw so many of the same things I remembered from home like the same orange plastic pumpkin buckets, the same inflatable ghosts and spider webs tangled in the bushes. The same classic costumes: Spiderman, cows, pumpkins. (Truly, there’s always one kid dressed as a pumpkin. Tradition demands it.)

For a moment, I realized maybe I hadn’t missed out as much as I thought. The setting was different (actually outside not in my school gym) but the spirit of it was the same. Kids laughing.  Fun costumes. Some kids crying at the sight of a skeleton costume.  Smoke machines making the light spooky and the moon off in the distance crisp as could be.

That’s the funny thing about growing up rural: you don’t really know you’re missing something until you see it up close. When you live where houses are miles apart, the idea of walking door-to-door in costume feels imaginary. You just make your own version of things.
Watching Boston’s Halloween unfold reminded me that even across all that distance, across cornfields and city streets, people still find the same ways to celebrate. To gather, to laugh, to make fun out of the cold.

That’s something I think about a lot in admissions: how geography shapes experience, but also how it connects us. At MIT, we read applications from every kind of place — from kids who can optimize a candy route through twenty-seven houses to those whose “neighborhood” was three families and a field (and probably the most confusing corn mazes out there). The stories aren’t better or worse; they’re just different. But sometimes, those differences rhyme, and we need both stories present in classrooms to thrive.