SHE CAMPUS ON MY PREVIEW TIL I WEEKEND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! by Angie F. '28

My Campus Preview Weekend (MIT’s admitted students weekend, also known as CPW) was a whirlwind of constant adventure. What I wouldn’t have guessed was that the first CPW I’d spend as an actual student would be pretty much the same: after all, flowers were finally starting to bloom en masse in Cambridge, and the prefrosh excitement around me was so palpable it was hard not to forget that I had psets for a couple of days. Here’s some of what I got up to!

Name \(2^n\) Women: Dorm culture is quite important at MIT: you can choose how much you do or don’t participate in it, but it’ll always be there if you want your social life to be centralized where you live, as many do. As a result, every dorm hosts their own CPW events to give incoming students a taste of their unique brand of MIT living. My dorm for next semester (and probably all the ones that follow it) East Campus (EC), is currently closed for renovations, but we still had an incredibly large and vibrant selection of events. This was one of them, and my friend Brianna and I got to co-run it. Our original goal for the event was to see which prefrosh could name the most women: participants would be given 30 seconds to list off as many women as they could. Those who fell below a certain threshold would have to eat a sardine (a punishment inspired by our good friend Ben, who loves sardines and making other people eat them), but anyone who managed to rise to the occasion and name a sufficient number of women would be rewarded with Insomnia cookies. However, we both had a 6.1200⁠01 6.1200: Math for Computer Science midterm that ended at the event start time, so when I got there after an extra slow defeated walk through the tunnels (6.1200 is arguably the class I’m worst at), it became clear to me that our friends who we’d asked to help us get the event started had had different ideas. We ended up working together to write down the names of as many distinct women as we could on the classroom’s massive blackboards, reaching a whooping \(2^9\) (coincidentally as many dumplings as we made at \(2^n\) dumplings over IAP). Admittedly, the event ended up being comprised of more excited upperclassmen than prefrosh, but it lifted me out of my post-midterm slump as I was reminded of one of my favorite parts of the EC community: its ability to turn any ridiculous idea into a bright and big reality, to commit to even the stupidest bit. 

2^9 women

Meet the Bloggers: This was so much fun! All the bloggers got together to hang out with prospective students and answer questions about blogging and MIT life. I remember wanting to attend this event so badly during my CPW but getting caught up in something else, so I’m glad I got to see what it was like from the other side. My main motivation to apply to write for the blog was to help show prospective students that MIT could be a place for them, too, and meeting some of these people in real life made me very, very happy. I talked to TALL BOY AND SHORT GIRL (I told you guys to keep an eye out on the blogs) and ate some really good pie of the meat and non-meat variety. What more could you ask for?

Underwater Battlebots: I helped run this event for Arcturus, MIT’s autonomous robotics team! While I unfortunately had to leave this iteration of Underwater Battlebots early to help with another event, I’d led the event in full for Splash, a program that allows MIT students to run a class on whatever they want for middle and high schoolers, and can therefore still write about it: kids divide into teams and receive a SeaPerch kit, which gives them everything they need to run an underwater remotely-operated vehicle. After an hour of building, they compete in a bracket-style Battlebots competition in the test tank at Sea Grant, the lab that Arcturus does most of their work in. Each team has two minutes to push rubber ducks and floating rings into their endzone, keep floating lily pads out, and pop the balloons in the other team’s endzone; additionally, catching a toy fish that swims through the pool gives you ten points (all other objects have absolute point values less than or equal to three). At the end, the points from the objects in each endzone are tallied up, and the winning team continues on in the bracket. It’s a whole lot of fun, and a great introduction to ocean engineering. I currently run outreach for Arcturus, but have had so much fun with it that I’ll most likely be joining the autonomy subteam this coming fall :) I’d encourage any prefrosh interested in building cool stuff to check them out! 

(Additionally, I feel compelled to mention that East Campus is arguably the most build-y living group on campus, since I’ve been talking about them all blog post but haven’t had an opportunity to share this essential [and, in my opinion, very cool] part of the dorm’s culture. For example, here’s an old EC build one of my hallmates found yesterday: an elaborate dorm room automation system featuring a security system, a touch screen command center [keep in mind that this was way before iPads were a thing], automatic blind and door controls, and… a party mode? We also build a fort and a rollercoaster for all of campus to enjoy every year before the start of fall semester. Whether you’re looking for hands to help you build anything you can think of or ears to listen to you talk about it, you’ll find no shortage of them in East Campus.)

at the entrance of sea grant!

the test tank all ready for the competition!

a sea perch in battle

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CryoFAC: When I remember my CPW, I think about long days spent running back and forth through campus and across the bridge, the sunrise peeking through my blinds as I got ready for bed, a million gazillion introductions, too much free food and boba to count, lock-picking, the occasional sunny moment on Killian ( CPW weather machine was out of order for my year⁠02 Boston weather is known to be... not great. This year, however, it cleared up during CPW, which felt unfair to all the unsuspecting prefrosh who were being led to believe that Boston was always 70 degrees and sunny in the spring. Whenever this happens, everyone on campus blames the very real CPW weather machine )… and, of course, liquid nitrogen ice cream on Kresge lawn. What I didn’t know back then was that the event that filled me with the prefrosh giddiness I’d get every time I was faced with something that seemed so quintessentially MIT was CryoFAC, which has been run by East Campus for 23 years and counting, which meant that I’d eventually help run it myself. We prepared the batter beforehand (I made two batches of butter pecan, and 32 batches of vanilla!), then prepared the ice cream on the spot for prefrosh by pouring liquid nitrogen into the batter-filled bowl and mixing as quickly as possible. One of the most important parts of CryoFAC has nothing to do with the ice cream at all: every year, East Campus chooses a freshman⁠03 My EC floor, Putz, mainly handles CryoFAC, so this year's two freshmen were some of my good friends, which made it extra fun to watch them run around in the box to be Box Boy, who runs around in a box trying to bring people to the event. We also had some very talented friends DJing, which made it very easy to lock in on mixing ice cream for two straight hours on two straight days.

Overall, this might have been my favorite event. I spent my CPW walking around campus bewildered: I’d gone to visit for HMMT before, but this was my first time feeling the real MIT, the rhythm pulsing through the heart of the campus, the first whiffs of the patterns I’d eventually know like the back of my hand. Every time I met a group of upperclassmen friends who freely offered up solid advice and told us about their hopes and dreams with laser sharp clarity, peeked into a lecture hall and saw a professor writing what might as well have been gibberish on the board, blinked through dozens of events that would’ve been the most exciting things I’d done all month at home but were just one of countless crazy beautiful adventures here, all I’d feel was this longing to enter the world I’d been swept into. As small a part of my CPW as it was, the liquid nitrogen ice cream stayed in my mind because of this: MIT seemed like this impossible place where anything could happen, and the fact that such a silly, awesome thing that had definitely just once been a few students’ late night idea was so real and right in front of my face was proof of that. Being on the other side of the table in my bright orange jumpsuit reminded me of how magical this place was to me during that weekend in my senior year of high school, and how I’d finally carved a place out in that magic for myself.

cryofac!!

oontz oontz oontz

even dogs like cryofac

me with pria + box boy ben

unfortunately ben could not be box boy on cryofac day two because his dorm floor (Burton Third) was letting prefrosh tape him to a pole

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Stay Woke Rave: Finally, my CPW ended with East Campus’ STAY WOKE RAVE! As the automatic party mode might have given away, lots of people in East Campus love DJing and dancing all night long. I myself am no exception (I’m taking a class to learn how to DJ next semester!). My friends Dylan, James, and Niko each DJed a set while the rest of us danced. At the few parties I went to in high school, no one really danced, and this was disappointingly true for some of the ones I attended at college too. Which makes sense, I guess: lots of my friends who I’d talked to about it were too nervous about “doing it wrong” to try it even if they’d wanted to. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was not the case at East Campus, not just for dancing but for everything else: it’s easy for me to feel welcome to try new things and do badly at them around my EC friends. Being in this kind of environment mean that it wasn’t uncommon for me to dance with just one or two friends and have an amazing time, so being in such a comparatively large crowd with such good music was exhilarating…. 

…maybe a little too exhilarating, actually. During Niko’s set, I felt my foot land awkwardly on the ground and fell. My friends helped me get to a bench outside, where I realized that I’d twisted my ankle. I ended up covered in sweat and holding a soda bottle to my swollen foot as my other one tapped impatiently on the ground: I wasn’t very convinced I’d twisted it too hard and was pretty miffed about being off the dance floor for the rest of the night. My friends had come out to sit with me, but I’d fairly quickly sent them back to the party since I didn’t want them to miss out on my behalf, leaving me all alone. Eventually, I heard footsteps and looked up to see my friend Will. We locked eyes and he didn’t say a word, just pushed a cart he’d rolled out from the party room over at me. A smile broke out across my face. 

I hoisted myself onto the cart and laughed my way back to the room, where I was able to keep dancing with my friends as I got rolled around. Soon, Niko’s set came to an end and the lights came back on, giving everyone a full view of my ankle. As the last partygoers gaped in shock, I finally admitted to myself that okay, maybe I had twisted it a little. I couldn’t put any weight on it, but thankfully, someone found a wheelbarrow in the corner of the room, and I was carted all the way to my friends’ suite in Burton Conner, which I decided would be a safer place to stay than my single in case I still couldn’t walk when I woke up. But I was sure I’d be able to sleep it off. The next day came around and I had not, in fact, slept it off. I half-Ubered half-hopped to MIT Health (after rejecting my friends’ many offers for help getting there #woops) and they told me it was probably fractured, but the x-ray revealed that it was only badly sprained! Woohoo! That evening, I crutched over to Baker dining and was welcomed with a round of applause from my East Campus friends, who deemed me “EC’s strongest soldier.” If you see me hobbling around campus in one of those big boots and an EC shirt, just know that I have no regrets.

got too silly

One of my favorite memories from the two weekends I spent at MIT for Sin LiMITe⁠04 Another on campus event for Latino admitted students! and CPW was sitting in a booth at Cambridge Pizza (which would eventually become my most frequented late night food spot, a favorite place to wrap up evenings of adventures with friends) in an overly fancy dress with some upperclassmen, rapt as they gave me advice and I hung onto their every word. Looking from the outside in (and even from the inside in sometimes), MIT can seem like a scary place, but I’ve always been able to hold onto the sense of comfort that night gave me. There have been people looking out for me from the beginning, so how could it not all turn out okay? I’m glad to have been able to play so many roles during CPW and be a first MIT memory for so many people, especially since I look back on mine so fondly. To every prefrosh I did and did not meet: the best is yet to come.

:)