Hi everyone! Apologies for being gone. I have a lot of blogs backlogged right now and I’m trying to rush through them. Here’s what my house is doing this IAP and a quick recap of our winter break!

Winter Break

Mariia and Raymond

My roommates Mariia and Raymond have been working on a side project where they want to create an auto turret with a nerf gun that detects faces. Raymond CADed the parts up and they used Emma’s 3D printer to print out all the parts.

It’s been pretty cool to see their project evolve.

Emma

Emma spent winter break at home with her family! She also had some really pretty photoshoots on her Instagram and did a lot of work for rocket team (Rocket team blogpost incoming).

Cami

I went home to go see my family and my dog but returned before break ended to spend New Year’s with Raymond and Mariia and some other friends who were quarantining in Boston like our BU friends Joe and Louis and MIT student Jacky (who was previously featured in CJ’s blog).

IAP Plans

Raymond, Aiden, and Mohamad

Raymond’s childhood friend, Mohamad, flew in to quarantine and stay here with us for break to work with Aiden and Raymond on Battlecode, an AI real-time strategy competition where you code your own bot to compete against other teams’ bots in a game designed by the Battlecode team. They’ve been working incredibly hard at this project and have been doing really well in scrimmages.⁠01 Practice matches against other teams' bots to pace yourself and see how well your bot is doing They practically work day and night on this, from when they awaken (usually like…1pm) to when they sleep (usually 3 or 4am) and it’s been really cool watching them develop.

Honestly just making the bots work is pretty difficult and they have a really organized codebase. I won’t expose any of their strategy, but it’s been fun evaluating scrimm matches with them, suggesting strategic tips, and watching how their ELO drops and climbs over time.

Mariia

Mariia broke her leg the day of her last final last semester so she’s been stuck at home, hence why she picked up that cool project with Raymond. She’s been working on a lot of ~ secret things ~ for IAP, but additionally, she is working on improving 2.678, electronics for mechanical systems, a class she took last semester and will be TA’ing this spring. She hated electronics before this class, but after, she was completely enamoured with it and now loves electronics. She said the professor, Steve Banzaert, was the best professor she’s ever had, so she’s extremely excited to work on this.

Emma

Emma is currently working at the Rocket Team house in California, working with other rocket team members on whatever projects they’re working on (once again, rocket team blogpost coming soon).

Cami

I have been…busy. I am still blogging, doing panels for MIT Admissions, and managing the @mitadmissions Instagram. I am also a program assistant for the Career Advising and Professional Development offices for their Infinite Career series. This IAP, I added another job on top of that and am back at my old UROP, but under a different lab. Last IAP and Spring, I worked for the MIT Education Arcade under the CLEVR team where we were studying the effects and impacts of VR on education. This semester, we are working on simulating classrooms to help pre-service teachers become more accustomed to facilitating argumentative discussions among their students to encourage critical thinking. It’s been super great and I really love working under my old UROP advisor again!

I am also fortunate enough to have gotten positions for cool winter programs at some companies. I just recently finished up doing Jane Street Insight, where I learned Ocaml and a bit more about trading. This week, I start a brief program with D.E. Shaw in their Discovery fellowship this week and I’m really excited!

In addition to this, I am also taking 6.148: weblab, a web development competition where MIT undergraduates work in teams of up to 3 and create dynamic websites according to a theme. This year’s theme is “tag yourself.” I’m working with Chelsea ’23 and Vik ’22 and we’re not really hoping to win the competition, we just want to learn how to make pretty websites :^)

More blogs coming soon. Sorry for the lull. Happy January!

I also livestream every Saturday (with some exceptions) at 7 PM EST on the @mitadmissions Instagram. Feel free to drop in.