MIT blogger CJ Q. '23

i walk through campus and say stuff by CJ Q. '23

i cannot vlog to save my life

Behold. I attempted to vlog.

I was bored and the weather outside was nice, so I thought I would go around MIT and take a video of myself staying stuff I guess. I’m surprised there aren’t more of these kinds of videos floating around online; I thought there’d be more.

So one of my jobs is being a tour guide for the admissions office. We go through training, which means reading some documents, shadowing two people give tours, and giving a practice tour of our own. And then we become a full-fledged tour guide, and we can give regular tours once a week, or we can just pick up tours as they become available. A tour typically lasts around 75 to 90 minutes, and it pays pretty well.

I haven’t actually given an admissions tour in a long time. I ended up forgetting a lot of details, like a bunch of percentages, who designed Stata (Frank Gehry, yes, I know, I’m sorry). I also just flat out said wrong things. If you turn on captions for the video, and choose English (United States), you’ll see the corrections.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I used so many filler words—I think like 5% of what I said was just the word “like”. Like, that was like, pretty bad, you know. I also am not used to vlogging, or taking videos of myself, or talking to a camera, or finding good angles, or getting decent lighting. So all of the technical aspects are pretty bad.

And when I tried to import everything into Premiere to edit, my laptop just up and crashed. Thankfully, the only editing I needed to do was clipping and concatenating videos, which ffmpeg could do just fine. Weirdly enough it refused to concatenate the first video, which is why it’s separated from the rest.

Anyway, here it is. It’s over 40 minutes long, and I won’t take offense if you skip around or watch it in twice speed (or just not watch it at all). Timestamps, corrections, and comments appear after the break:

  • 00:45 The Student Center
  • 02:30 Kresge Auditorium
  • 03:34 The MIT Chapel
  • 04:33 Athletics and the PE requirement
  • 06:53 Housing
  • 09:48 Building numbers, course numbers, class numbers
  • 11:33 The Infinite Corridor
  • 12:58 Classes and GIRs
  • 16:34 Killian Court
  • 17:42 Hacking
  • 20:50 Public art
  • 23:45 Humanities
  • 27:01 The first-year experience
  • 28:59 The Green Building
  • 30:53 UROPs
  • 32:31 East Campus
  • 34:07 Walker Memorial
  • 35:03 North Court and Kendall Square
  • 36:11 Stata
  • 39:28 MISTI
  • 40:27 After graduation

Here are some corrections:

  • 01:27 There are in fact 578 student groups listed on Engage.
  • 02:40 Kresge’s roof used to just be supported on the three points it hit the ground, but now it’s also supported by the walls.
  • 03:02 There’s Sycnopasian, The Logs, The Chorallaries, The Centrifugues, Cross Products, The Toons, The Muses, The Asymptones, Resonance, The Ohms. Maybe more.
  • 03:27 There isn’t another big theater group on campus, I think. Smaller ones include Next Act and the Vagina Monologues.
  • 04:06 Jewish groups often use the chapel too.
  • 04:50 32 Division 3 sports, plus club and intramural sports.
  • 06:34 Sailing, archery, pistol or rifle, and fencing; I forgot fencing.
  • 07:39 ≈70% of undergraduates live on-campus.
  • 07:46 ≈30% of undergraduates live off-campus.
  • 07:59 26 fraternities, 7 sororities, and 5 independent living groups.
  • 08:11 ≈35% of women are affiliated with a sorority.
  • 08:22 ≈25% of undergraduates live in an FSILG.
  • 21:20 The piece I was thinking of is called Five-Piece Cube with Strange Hole.
  • 22:40 Bars of Color Within Squares is in Building 6C, not 6B.
  • 29:07 The tallest building among completed buildings in Cambridge. Site 4, when complete, will be taller.
  • 30:23 The actual name is La Grande Voile.
  • 32:15 >90% have done a UROP by graduation, ≈60% participate in a UROP every year.
  • 35:20 It’s Building 76.
  • 36:11 Frank Gehry. Yes, his name is Frank Gehry. I have no idea how I forgot that name, since I literally remembered it as soon as I finished filming that segment.

Alright, that’s it. I know it’s a lot of information just dumped on you, so if you have any questions about anything at all, drop them in the comments!