Musings on Colorful Balls (CPW Guest Blog!) by Chris S. '11

from Ramya ’14!

You might think that CPW stands for Campus Preview Weekend, but you’re wrong.

CPW really means “4 days of Pure aWesomeness.” (The C didn’t want to join the little acronym party, because its still hanging around campus. It’ll probably never detach itself from the Pure aWesomeness that is MIT…As I would do right now if I had the chance to – high school seems rather, um, boring in comparison [understatement alert])

Before I write about my experience at CPW, I have a disclaimer to make: There is only one picture on this post. I usually only read blogs if they have pictures on them. _{This tendency results from my inability to focus on large chunks of text unless said chunks of text are arranged into some sort of visually appealing shape, like a circle or better yet, a hexagon (do you know what I mean? Appealing text chunks should be called textagons!!).}

So anyways, I kind-of sort-of dropped my camera down the stairwell at New House 3 on Saturday. The good news is that this mishap didn’t affect the camera at all – it still works perfectly, and no pictures were erased. So what could possibly be the bad news? Well, the bad news is that throughout the entire weekend at CPW, I took all of, like, fifteen pictures. Yup, kind of pathetic; cue the well-founded exclamations of “WHAT?!??!!?” and “wow, just wow…”

I guess I was more focused on being there “in the present” than viewing MIT from behind a lens (that’s my excuse). Basically I wanted to get the most fun out of my stay per unit time. Hey, from what I’ve heard, there’s always orientation, right?

Because of my inability to take pictures, this post will only have one picture, selected from the 14 possible ones I could have picked (one was blurry):

As a substitute for all of the other million pictures I could have taken, I’ll use this one picture to describe the majority of my CPW experience. Yes, one picture to describe the awesomeness that was CPW.

I can soooo do this – read on.

Each one of those balls represents a new person I met, or a single colorful facet of the prism that is the CPW experience. Well, that explains my smiling face. The slightly frazzled hair and right hand reluctant to make contact with the balls represents how much I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff going on – Because CPW was full of wonderful things, from liquid nitrogen ice cream (thanks Random Hall!) to UROP tours (GAMBIT RAWKS) to free bubble tea (thanks ATS!) to tie-dyeing (thanks McCormick!) to delicious brunch (thanks Next House!) to a spiffy hack at the Media Lab (way too cool!) to the “Meet the Bloggers” event (Hello Yan!!! I ended up not dyeing my hair…) to many more events that I wish I had attended.

There was simply not enough time, just as there was simply not enough time to say hello to each of the colored balls in Simmon’s (ex-)meditation room (I found this pretty silver one, and kind of wanted to keep it as a pet).

Sure, I don’t think CPW was an accurate representation of life at MIT, just the same way that the one picture of me marinating in colored balls wasn’t an accurate representation of my CPW (I only went in there once, I swear). It’s just one picture, just one snapshot. CPW gave me a snapshot (and taste! read: FREE FOOD) of the culture at MIT, in all its unfettered glory (after all, I didn’t see any of those infamous psets the entire time).

During CPW, I met amazing, accomplished, and talented people from all around the country and the world. I made new friends. I tried new things. I had more fun than I thought was possible in four days. And throughout it all I came to realize that, “hey, I really like MIT, I feel like I belong. The people here are not intimidating. They are easy to approach and know how to have a good time. It’s worth it.” I finally realized that getting into MIT was for real, and not an accident. I didn’t want to leave.

Also during CPW I realized that when I come to MIT this fall I need to bring a pair of heavy duty galoshes. Having rain-soaked sponges for shoes is not very comfortable.

CPW was incredible, exhilarating, and exhausting. I can’t wait until fall.

Ramya out.

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