what is and isn’t me (rush, part 1) by Caleb M. '27

Day 0: The Wind-Up

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before—“when I first came to [insert college here], I didn’t think frat/sorority life was for me.” At this point in the blog, I would be stopping myself, because this is a refrain I’ve heard many times from many people at many different times in my life and especially throughout my MIT journey. And, to be honest, it’s a message that I completely identify with. When I first came to MIT, I really didn’t think frat life was for me. And there is a loooong list of reasons for that, which we can go into some other time, or perhaps in two paragraphs.⁠01 Caleb here from after finishing this one... we go into it in two paragraphs  

For now, however, the important thing to note is that for the past two years, I have had little to no interest in joining a frat here at MIT. It was a conviction I kind of came into MIT knowing, especially after growing up in Texas, where the concept of a fraternity (especially at a state school) meant something vastly, vastly different than it seems to mean for the most part up here in the North, or at least at MIT. And, for two comfortable years, I rarely had to question this conviction. There were moments every now and then, sure, when I saw my friends who were in frats enjoying the rush process, or pledging, or being a brother, and in that there were also moments when I raised an eyebrow at how easily I’d written off being a brother of a frat or felt like maybe I was missing out on something. 

Nothing really substantially changed, however, until around Sophomore Spring, when my friend Noah R. ’27 completed the pledge process and became a brother of Theta Chi. I’d talked a lot to Noah about the whole concept of rushing, and he’d felt similar to me when first coming to MIT—he didn’t think rushing was for him. To us, it felt like frats represented parts of life and “guyhood” that we didn’t really think represented us or qualified our experiences prior to college. That is, of course, until Noah actually went through the rushing process and realized that maybe he’d written it off a bit too easily.

And if Noah can write something off too easily, who says I can’t?

I have always been a person who has felt very set in his convictions and beliefs. If I think something to be true, especially something about how we lead our lives, I can be very stubborn in that view and am hard to realign. It’s a fact of who I am and how I was raised to stand by my beliefs; the things I think to be true about life, and especially the things I think to be true about myself, I hold very close to my chest and stand on very squarely. And one of these beliefs was that frats are kind of intrinsically evil, and I would never fit into one because I had no interest in aligning myself with them.

But as more guys I knew to be wonderful people began rushing, I started to question the latter piece of this belief: that I would never fit into a frat. What exactly made me think that? Was it actually a conclusion I came to on my own, or was it just a carryover from how I felt about the “guys spaces” that I observed in, cue ominous music… high school?

Okay, peek into my life for you all here so that this blog actually makes sense. High school is a weird time for everybody, and while there was much about my pre-collegiate experience I look back on fondly, there are also parts of it that I cannot help but try and look away from. This is especially true of a wonderful little word that you might know called exclusion. While I was surrounded by people who cared about me deeply and communities that always made my days brighter, there was one group of people who I did not take particularly kindly to, and that was “The Guys”—the 20-some-odd boys in my grade who were your standard, run-of-the-mill, generally-malicious and rather-immature group of 16-year-olds. In a tale that takes us all the way back to 3rd grade and continues for nearly a decade thereafter, The Guys and I existed for the most part in parallel—our paths rarely crossed, and sometimes it felt like we were mutually exclusive: if someone chose one of us they were necessarily un-choosing the other. They left me out of their things, and that sucked, and I dealt with it. Most often, I was perfectly comfortable with not being a part of their group because I knew that I didn’t want to be one of them: the things that they said and the way that they acted made daily life difficult for a lot of people, and oftentimes it seemed as if their primary source of entertainment was joy at the expense of the other people in our class, especially the other guys that weren’t “in” with them, such as yours truly. But I have to admit—this story spans from me being seven to me being seventeen. There’s always a part of a person who longs to fit into the places that they were left out of. Nonetheless, I kept my worldview at the forefront of my actions and was confident in our mutual rejection as the years passed. 

After leaving high school, I felt very firm in my conviction that I was not like them. And, coming to college, I was immediately faced with another world of “groups of guys who appear to be built on exclusion and are likely more morally reprehensible than they present to be when behind closed doors:” fraternities. Thus, I immediately wrote the entire thing off as misaligned with my worldview and perspectives and went about my days feeling no regrets about not even thinking about going to “Kresge Kickoff” that first week of the semester. Wasn’t even a blip on my radar. I went about my days perfectly happy about not being in a frat, and I had no particular reason to imagine that choosing to be in one would make my life any better. I spent two years forging my own communities everywhere I went throughout campus, from my dorm to the radio station to the random people I met in the first days of the semester—communities that I was and continue to be very proud to be able to claim as my own.

I, however, am also very firm in my conviction about seizing every moment and every opportunity that opens its doors to me. Life, after all, is short. And so, as this past summer came and went, I spent a lot of time thinking about the fact that I was halfway through my MIT journey and there were so many parts of college life that I still hadn’t pursued in full—and one of these was rushing. 

But who cares? I’ve always known that rushing just… wasn’t me. It didn’t fit into my world, into who I was, into how I saw myself or how other people saw me. Because…

Well, why? What made it so “not me?” If I’d never explored the space, gave rush a try, even started the process—what had me so convinced that being a part of a frat was so antithetical to the very person that I was? Had being rejected by spaces that I deemed analogous in an entirely different phase of my life convinced me that I was incapable of fitting into those spaces, even when the opportunity was open to me? Who am I letting tell me who I am and who I’m not?

And, if I’ve let things from my past define the way I’ve walked through life for so long after and dictate not just what I’m doing but the very person I believe myself to be, how do I know “who I’m not?”

If you can’t tell, this was a very revelatory train of thought for me to have this summer. I realized that I’d let the notion of me that someone had built years ago carry into how I socialized myself here at MIT. I picked up that view, internalized it, and then started handing it to completely new people who had no preconceived notion of me, thus perpetuating an idea of myself that was built on a painful period of exclusion and that I actively rejected—someone who couldn’t fit into a space like a frat. And that realization made my head spin, because there should only be one person dictating who I am and who I’m not—Sue Sylvester.

There were so many things, even beyond rush/guys’ spaces/frats, that I hadn’t explored at MIT yet. Some things I’d written off, some things I’d just let slip by, some things I actively avoided. I seemed to have this sense of what I wasn’t that kept me from exploring a huge slice of the rare opportunities available to me not just at MIT specifically but in college in general—but now, it seems, I became extremely unsure of that sense of what I wasn’t and, by extension, what I was. I never want to be someone to let what other people think of me hold me back from trying everything and pursuing the moment—and I realized that I, too, had become one of those “other people.” And I decided that I wanted to push back on all of them—myself included.

In the summer preceding each of my years at MIT, I’ve come up with a kind of “theme” or mantra for the year to guide me in the various steps of my journey and remind me of the values I want to keep close to my heart in the current phase of my adventure. Freshman year was when I came up with “life is short,” my biggest reminder to live in every moment I had because, well. Life is short. That one has kind of stuck around as my entire guiding principle and life philosophy. Sophomore year I had “walk in forbidden places”⁠02 short form for “Walk in the places they have called forbidden; let no man and no law tell you where you can and cannot go.” to push me to see the world differently and push the limits of what I can do, both quite literally (laying down in the middle of Mass Ave. at 3 in the morning) and less so (most saliently, in the context of partying—a place I had called forbidden until I chose to walk in it).

In the two weeks I had of summer after returning from a MISTI⁠03 MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives, MIT's study/intern abroad program in Spain and before returning to campus to be an Orientation Captain, I spent a lot of time contemplating everything that I’ve penned in these last few paragraphs: who I believe myself to be, who I’ve allowed myself to be, and who I could be if only I would be brave enough to find out. Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? There’s no way I’m going to know who I really am, who I could really be, if I don’t at least give myself the chance to stretch into that version of myself. I needed to remind myself to be brave here, in diving into the unknown who I may-or-may-not-be. I needed to remind myself that nothing—and nobody—could tell me who I was going to be except myself. I needed to remind myself that I could try anything, be anyone—even the things I had told myself that I wasn’t.

And with that, on a warm Texan summer afternoon, it coalesced—crystallizing like the ice in my kitchen freezer and taking root in the deepest corners of my mind: the theme of my third year of college… 

“You are everything you think you are not.”

It stayed at the forefront of my conscience for the weeks that followed. As I got onto the plane back to campus—you are everything you think you are not.

On stage in my first days as an Orientation Captain—you are everything you think you are not.

And, perhaps most pressingly…

Day 1: The Kickoff

…as I walked onto the lawn that warm August Saturday, finding my way to the front of the tent to take my first steps into the Interfraternity Council’s Fall Rush 2025 Kresge Kickoff—

I am everything I think I am not.