For spring break, the women's tennis team travelled to Southern California for 7 days, playing 4 matches and spending the rest of the time basking in the sunlight and stuffing our faces with food and snacks.
Elysa '17 made this wonderful video for MIT's DAPER (Department of Athletics, Physical Education, & Recreation) that nicely sums up our whirlwind week of tennis, friends, and bad tanlines:
We travel to California every two years, which is doubly as nice for me because my family lives in Orange County so I get to spend some time with them (and also pet my cats). This year, we rented out a huge house for all 16 of us to share, complete with a nice swimming pool, and even though we had to inflate a couple of air mattress to accommodate everyone, despite also already having to share beds, it was not so much cramped but cozy. The first few days our coaches Carol and Mason went out and bought us bags upon bags of food so that we could cook ourselves breakfast every morning and not starve to death*. There was also a nifty waffle maker that we may or may not have experimented with the second to last night we were there**. I don’t know what we would have done without our coaches; they were infinitely patient with us and extremely supportive through the whole trip, so thank you!
While in California, we played some teams that would have otherwise been geographically unfeasible to play: RPI, UChicago, Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, and Pomona-Pitzer. Our match against UChicago was a great win for us, as beating a higher-ranked team put us in a better position for NCAA qualification.
I think that spending seven whole days in the same house has brought the team closer together in a way that makes me smile a lot on the inside and the outside. The tennis team has always seemed like a second family to me and the more time I spend with each and every one of them, the more grateful I am for having the chance to get to know all these weird (in the best possible kind of way) and awesome people. I can't imagine being here at MIT without them.
*At no point in time were we in danger of starving to death. In fact we were almost buried under an avalanche of bagels (oh my goodness, so many bagels) and assorted breakfast items.
For the past four and a half years I’ve lived on an all-women’s floor called BMF (badass mother—s) in Random Hall. Most of our social and home-academic life happens round the clock in the kitchen, over food and homework and tea, and a few times a semester we bring two thirds of that activity to a summit in a co-cooking, potluck-style floor dinner.
Ready? Go.
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They say that the best way to get something important done is to do it while procrastinating on something far more important. I clean my room as a last resort to putting off psets, I buy groceries whenever I’m desperate to avoid blogging, and I blog whenever I should be studying.
At the moment, I’m supposed to be preparing for a 6.01 exam on circuits tomorrow, but instead - you guessed it - I’m going to blog. This is also a convenient excuse for not blogging since February - it’s not that I’ve been too busy, it’s that I haven’t been busy enough.
Last Monday, in MAS.S66 (also known as MAS.Magic), I performed a midterm project presentation. However, unlike most midterm presentations, which are usually reluctant PowerPoints or half-hearted reports, MAS.Magic’s midterm project was a magic trick. The assignment was to either invent a magic trick that incorporated technology or to present a technology in a magical way (or both). Kenny ‘17 choreographed an elaborate multi-screen storyboard narrative to talk about the history of computing. He was inspired by Marco Tempest's presentations on Nikola Tesla and Deception, which are stunning and well worth watching (Marco visited class in February to give a talk about the use of technology in magic). Colin ‘16 re-created the trick in the opening scene of Now You See Me, using some Javascript timing and image blur magic to force a particular card to stick in our minds while rifling through a virtual deck.
My performance (documented more extensively here) involved my smartphone magically detecting playing cards. I spent three hours with an Exacto knife and a gluestick manually inserting 52 NFC tags into each card in a standard deck, and wrote an unique ID to each one. Then I wrote an Android app to recognize and decipher a tag upon contact and display the image of the corresponding card. This meant that whenever one of the cards came within ~4 cm of the back of my phone, whether the card was face up, face down, in a box, or through my pocket, my phone would automatically (automagically?) display an image of that card.
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GIFs are underrated here. I should do this more often.
On Tuesday I had another midterm project presentation, this time in 21W.789 (Communicating with Mobile Technology). Then on Thursday I had an exam in 8.02 (Physics II E&M), and I woke up at noon on Friday to realize that I slept through my midterm exam in 18.06 (Linear Algebra) after staying up most of the night studying for it. Fortunately, Professor Strang was kind enough to let me take a makeup exam alongside people who had legitimate excuses.
Needless to say, I was quite relieved when Saturday finally arrived, so I vowed to ignore my looming stack of 6.01 work and to enjoy the beautiful weather with an excursion into Boston. Jenn ‘16 led our collection of freshman, but then got abducted as a volunteer for a dance group that was performing near Haymarket. Jenn was standing awkwardly in a short line of other volunteers, and then this happened:
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Haymarket hosts a farmer's market every Saturday, so we stocked up on fresh fruit, vegetables, and sometimes cheese.
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There was also some fish lying around, although I didn’t recognize any from my freshwater Minnesotan background, so I decided to stick with the fruit.
PREFROSH: Campus is pumped for CPW, possibly as much as you hopefully are. Numerous bloggers have already bestowed their wise advice, but I’ll just append one point of my own: talk to people. Never go to an event, eat food, and then just leave. You could to go Chipotle and have more social interaction (and maybe better food). And liquid nitrogen ice cream is chilled at -321 Fahrenheit, but it’s nowhere near as cool as the people who will be eating it with you.
At MIT, no community follows an algorithm, but each one is open to sharing and appreciating passions, regardless of major and background. The Institute has far exceeded my expectations for social involvement, and in the limited example of my hall, I will do my best to explain how.
On First East, many are fascinated by Aerospace Engineering (Course 16). Sometimes we sit together in a darkened lounge and watch shadows of Jupiter’s moons glide slowly along the planet’s surface. The quivering black dots on the screen look amazing, especially when peers provide context and passion. Discussions about NASA, JPL, SpaceX, and Mars One are so common and familiar, that it seems as if we are all part of the progress. When there is an upcoming shuttle launch, we will most certainly know.
Some adore Mathematics (Course 18). I’ve sat transfixed in random places in the hallway many times, absorbing impromptu lectures on algebra, number theory, and the analogy of field extensions to love and all relationships. The whiteboard by my door blooms with formulas and symbols, reminders of curious proofs completed overnight. Often I hear debates about Course 18 among students of different majors, in a lengthy exchange of experiences and ideas. Discovering algebraic groups with a friend at midnight before a biology pset is due may not sound like a good idea, but I love it.
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(hall clot with a variety of interests)
Most residents also want to learn more about Nuclear Science (Course 22). We’ve held storytimes in the lounge, during which we took turns reading books about the topic out loud. One such book was a compilation of stories about all aspects of nuclear risk, Command and Control by Eric Schlosser (review here). How fascinating it was to watch everyone unmoved, soaking in every word of the reader! And afterwards, when Boston shut down for Valentine’s Day, we watched a documentary for more on nuclear warfare and associated propaganda, Atomic Café.
Many hall members are engineers, and we love to stay updated on their projects. One day, we may get the backstory on the creation of an Electronic Musical Drum Trainer (UpBeat, a set of lighted attachments for guided drum learning - video here, brochure here, and 2.009 website with more awesome Course 2 projects here) from a Course 2 (Mechanical Engineering) major. Our neighbour from Course 6 (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science) returns home late every day because she is also the Mechanical Lead for MIT’s Solar Electric Vehicle Team (and a video featuring the vehicle can be found on the Google Science Fair front page). She tells us with a contagious excitement how awesome it is to build a solar car from scratch, and how we should definitely join the club.
Of no less importance are the less “formal” projects. Often the lounge ripples with sounds of locally synthesized electronic music, or live piano improvisations based on the songs of Dire Straits that mold into Dr. Horrible’s soundtrack, and somehow end with Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space.” Other times, unexpectedly heated debates can be heard from afar.
Some non-STEM discussions take us to Irish 18th century folk ballads, Columbus’ Day controversy, Tunisian development, U.S. policy, CourseRoad paths, MIT culture, recent events, or something else completely random and/or serious. We have mused about the best way to manufacture 3D-printable spray-on clothing (or discovered some impressive already existing 3D-printing technologies, like 3D-printable cheese, shown here, with a particularly captivating construction video of the Leaning Tower of Cheeza). We have been fascinated by performance art like this and have implemented it in less radical forms. We have watched Big Hero 6, and some noticed their old engineering textbooks in the cartoon’s background, while others dreamt to have the cat from the movie, but we all laughed and held our breaths at the same moments.
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Residents from all courses and years gather together for these occurrences. Sometimes we get rowdy. Other times, we study quietly, acknowledging the high level of “hosedness.” My collective memories of group experiences can overflow into dozens of posts, and whether I’ll get to writing them is unclear. I hope that I have at least marginally conveyed the passions fostered within the Institute in this post, and will return to the topic in more detail soon.
I welcome you to explore MIT and find your place!
Rushing to eat delectable strawberries & cream waffles with hall,
for now, farewell
On an extra-long Wednesday a week ago, when spring break has come and gone and the temperature's still in the thirties, and the wet gray concrete buildings as you walk from MIT Medical where you've just had blood drawn match the wet gray sky, you can think about the work you have to do, and it can all feel artless. But then you might look to your left, and see some glamorous woman in a beautiful coat leaving the List Visual Arts Center, and read the sign for an upcoming exhibition, and vow to one day soon get your art on again.
(Maybe when you graduate, the cynic in your head suggests.) Or maybe sooner.
I'm never short on inspiration here, only short on time. Sometimes the energy of inspiration is enough to make time. The rest I'm hoping I can store away for future use and unpack later (in some imaginary future wherein I have ample unstructured time in which to draw on unexpired inspiration). There are incredible artists here, among students and faculty. And there are incredible resources. Classes and grants and studios and teachers. There's the Arts Scholars Program. Every spring we go to New York City.
Arts at MIT is also hosting this spring's Hip-Hop Lecture Series. Young Guru was the first speaker. I don't remember everything he said, but I remember I was rapt. I remember that he spoke wisely and incisively. He talked about the music industry, about Jay-Z and lyrical honesty, about capitalism, about technology and his parents and the past and the future. You can read snippets here, and watch them here.
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From left: John B. '16, Young Guru, Ife B. '16,and me
John said the talk changed his life. It changed my weekend, for sure, and bits of it have rattled and echoed in my head ever since. I loved what Young Guru said about truth in storytelling, about the value of telling your own story, not someone else's, not the story you're supposed to tell. Ife asked what it was like working with Jay-Z. What set Jay-Z apart? "He always tells the truth," Young Guru said. "A lot of rappers lie. A lot of people lie. Jay-Z presents himself as he is." My notes say "Jay-Z brought existentialism to the drug dealer narrative... as he grows, his music grows... goes from big pimpin' to 'I can write a song about my baby being born.' & then guess what? Not everyone in the population is a drug dealer. So tell the story of where you come from."
I'm still doing that a little bit. I still write, and I still want to tell true stories, not just about myself and where I come from, but about the whole world as it appears to me. I am not taking a writing class, but I saw Ta-Nehisi Coates (who once taught writing as a guest professor here, and is now a good friend and mentor to me) recently and we talked about writing and how to make a living at it. I think I'm going to try.
*I actually took notes everywhere. I do that in museums to remember what I see and look things up later. I end up with hodge-podge lists of painters' names, works, and phrases that make me much less curious out of context, like "Roger II, Norman King of Sicily" and "Geographer Abu Abdallah Mohammed al-Sharif al-Idrisi, born in the Moroccan city of Ceuta on the straits of Gibraltar in 1100."
Campus Preview Weekend starts tomorrow, and for pika, my cooperative independent living group, that means:
Improv, meditation, DIY sushi, a jam session, and late-night smoothies on Thursday
Soapmaking, screen printing, hair dying, Italian dinner, forkapple*, shoeblade**, a tea party, and late-night crepe-making on Friday
Breakfast, board games, 23.001: Intro to Hippie Stereotypes, DIY clothing workshop, telephone pictionary*** and hot chocolate on Saturday
...and a healthy breakfast Sunday morning to finish off the weekend. If you're a prefrosh, come by! If you're not a prefrosh, come by! The schedule can be found here.
(Danny here—a friend of mine reached out yesterday and asked if I could help let prefrosh know about their efforts. Their guest post is what follows, sans attribution as per their request.)
Hi everyone! This guest post is brought to you by two trans MIT students, with quotes from our peers. We wanted to share a snippet of our experiences and reach out to others like us. Hopefully you learn something!
(For anyone who doesn't know, trans generally means that your identified gender does not match the one that was assigned to you at birth.)
So we know highschool can be really awful and lonely, and maybe you spent lots of time just trying to get through it. But now that you're going to college you're going to have more freedom and fewer social pressures. It's a great time to discover who you are and who you want to be. As it turns out, MIT and Boston are great places to do this!
"Right now I identify as a cisgender queer woman, but when I first started college I was much less sure of my gender and gender presentation. I found MIT to be an incredibly supportive and welcoming place to work out what I was comfortable with and how I wanted to express myself to the world. During undergrad and even into grad school here I have known numerous trans students who feel comfortable being out to their peers, which to me is indicative of a community I have never been a part of elsewhere."
There are many people who are welcoming at MIT, but not everyone is very knowledgeable. While they are supportive, they may not be the most effective allies. It can be tough to feel comfortable in communities where you feel like the main educator.
"Even MIT can be rough. Not everyone knows what transgender means, and sometimes you're dealing with so much stuff and there's so much work that you just don't want to explain it."
At times like these, it is really helpful to have a place to go, where you know people already have some level of understanding. MIT's Rainbow Lounge is great for that. There are a lot of events at the Rainbow Lounge, or you can even just drop by during the day and chat with the staff there (they're very friendly). The GLBT@MIT student group also holds events where you can get together.
"It took a while of poking around different places and experimenting with how much I opened up before I found a place where I'm comfortable. And now that I'm here, I can really feel how different it is being with people who 'get' you... It gives me time to focus on other things, like my own emotional health or homework or other hobbies. I feel like I can grow more as a person."
In an effort to make this trans community-searching easier, we've started up a Facebook group for the incoming 2019s, here:
You should join it! Use it to find new friends, new roommates, and for support whenever you need it.
You should also come by this CPW, to any of the Rainbow Lounge or GLBT@MIT events! In particular, on Saturday 5-6pm, GLBT@MIT will be having Gender Chat Teatime. Show up to talk about gender and meet new people, or just to have some tea before Saturday night craziness comes around.
Campus preview weekend (CPW) at MIT is just what it sounds like—a time for high school seniors to visit campus to see if MIT is really the place they want to spend their college years.
The “weekend” itself starts on a Thursday, already an indication that it wildly exaggerates all that is good about life as a student. For the visiting senior, there is no stress—no exams, no due dates, no daunting expectation of quality work or results. The definition of the MIT experience, however, is not complete without the acknowledgment that it is a place where you will most likely learn your limits, if you haven’t already. Pun not intended, but I'm gonna roll with it.
Once your “I just got into MIT!” high school senior self arrives to campus, you’re given a booklet with pages and pages of things to do from 8am to 1am, all jam-packed into about seventy-five hours. Nerdy, silly, sporty, food-offering, you name it, that type of activity is probably included.
During my own preview weekend, I went to an event where pre-frosh and MIT students alike were sprawled on the floor building something with a pile of Legos that seemed to reach my knees. Knowing no one, I joined an upperclassman who invited me to help her make a duct tape hat. Others took turns playing Mozart’s Turkish March and the Mario theme song on the piano in the middle of the room. Nearby, an upperclassman excitedly scribbled equations and drawings on a chalkboard, colorfully explaining physics concepts that I could only scrape the surface of grasping.
I soaked it all in and confirmed that MIT was for me. I was showered with labs, classes, ideas, opportunities, and lifestyles, and it was nothing short of inspiring. Sure, I knew it was “hard”, but it was clear that people here enjoyed working with each other, and even if it was hard, at least there were always interesting things to do and think about. This is the spirit of preview weekend. It’s the spirit of MIT.
But is it really a preview of what MIT will be like? I don’t think most pre-frosh actually believe that it’s going to be as fun and happy as that weekend, but now I realize that the students who could speak to the darker defining times were probably in their rooms behind closed doors, waiting for the weekend to be over.
Back in 2011, my host’s neighbor was an aerospace engineering major. Given my interest in the major I was curious to hear about what life was like for her, so we knocked on her door. I noticed that the few questions I asked were answered with such bluntness and lack of passion. Was it dishonesty? It looked as though a tornado had gone through her room, and it seemed as though she was just waiting for us to leave. When we left, my host mentioned that she had a lot of work due that week, and happily changed the subject—“You should go on a lab tour where I work!” I thought it was silly for her neighbor to be so despondent and cooped up; she was living so many people’s dream! Was it I who lacked objectivity or was it she?
Sometimes pre-frosh ask how hard MIT actually is. But what does the sentence “MIT is hard” even mean? It means that come October of the first semester, midnight quasi-philosophical discussions about the future might become pset parties of frustration. Lists of things to do become as long as the infinite corridor, but unlike during CPW, they come with a price tag of your time and an expectation for them to be completed with excellence. At the core of what makes MIT challenging is learning the delicate balance between taking advantage of everything it has to offer and time management, all while doing a good job.
It's possible and common to be so deep in piles of work that you will NOT be able to finish. (Example: I once made a 48-hour schedule of things I had to do and then realized I forgot to include time to sleep.) It means that even if you go to every recitation and lecture, you might still fail your exam, your interest in the material may vanish, and your mind will be so tired and full of the next thing you have to do and the last thing you haven’t done that it will likely become unable to think of happy things. You get an empty, sinking feeling in your stomach, and you wonder if you’ll be able to make it through the semester, let alone ever measure up to everyone else.
You won’t be alone. In a poll done in 2012, it was found that more than half of the student body surveyed believed they performed below average as compared to their peers. To bring back Lydia's Meltdown post, “There’s this feeling that no matter how hard you work, you can always be better, and as long as you can be better, you’re not good enough.”
But you’ll probably feel alone at some point. My junior year I became so exhausted from juggling things that I would be unable to get out of bed for hours, unable to make an emotional connection even with myself. When one of my good friends asked me how I was doing a few days before finals, I struggled to express the despair I was feeling. We were outside, and streams of tears rolled down my face in public.
“I know I have no reason to be unhappy, but I just AM,” I told her. Her response helped me, “Remember when I went to your room to cry last semester and said the same thing to you? You probably didn’t understand it then, but now you do,” she said.
It was funny how our situations had reversed. I finally understood that day. It didn’t really make me feel any different, though, and she told me to go to see someone at mental health.
I didn't. By the time a given class graduates, 35% of students will have gone to get mental health help. And that percentage doesn’t include those who, like me, lacked a “good reason.” Eventually the semester ended, I went home, slept like a normal person, re-connected with old friends and took life day by day. I started to feel like myself again. Sometimes you're so busy and concerned with your work that you lose sight of the REALLY obvious, REALLY simple things in life, like "take care of yourself". I look back on those days and feel tempted to laugh at myself. I shouldn't have put myself through that.
Lately, people on campus have been putting more effort into de-stigmatizing depression and mental health issues that may come as a result of the high expectations and high stress environment.
Just yesterday, a student sat outside 77 Mass Ave as part of a public art display:
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On the stand there was the following description:
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The display was the work of Jayne C. '16.
Last year, one of my peers who overcame depression came back to campus and started a happiness club. The club was responsible for purchasing and lining up smiley face balloons all along the infinite corridor as a way to express solidarity with regards to upcoming finals and encourage people to be proactive about their mental health.
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During a senior speech dinner for people from the Latino Cultural Center last year, some seniors gave advice. Senior after senior discussed the importance of reaching out to other people when the semester gets tough. A few of them that I particularly looked up to talked about how they overcame depression while they were here, and how no one should never hesitate to make an appointment with someone at mental health if they felt unhappy for a long time. I had a hard time imagining these seniors being depressed. Their confidence and boldness made me realize that until people start realizing that many people feel unhappy during their time here, and that people should talk about it, the problem will persist.
One of them talked about the alchemist statue in front of the Student Center. “It’s a hollow statue of a person made from numbers and symbols sitting with their knees to their chest. Do you realize that that’s the only piece of art that represents a human on campus? A hollow human. Everything else is geometric or abstract!” she said. “Remember that we’re not robots, and that everything will be okay. Where’s the humanity in the art on campus? Remember that the humanity on campus is in you.”
When I ask fellow students whether or not preview weekend is a lie and if they should change it at all to be more representative of the experience, the responses vary. “It’s not a whole truth, it’s a necessary lie, it’s showing only the parts of MIT that happen once in while, but the best ones.” Most people seem fine with the idea that CPW is not a complete preview of MIT. One student said, “They should know that it’s not going to be this awesome all the time. How else will they know that we’re not just about studying, and that we know how to have fun?”
Kristine '14, completely disagreed. “It’s not a lie at all!” She said. To her, CPW is a very good representation of what MIT is like. “Think about it: if you come here to do engineering or any other science it’s a very exciting environment. People say it’s a lot of work, but honestly, it’s their choice in the end.”
Perhaps she has a point. On the student side, every preview weekend has somewhat disgusted me. The morning of the last preview weekend, my groggy, fashionless self got on the shuttle to go to class, half-unpeeled banana in one hand and a project that had left me with about 2 hours of sleep in the other. Behind my seat raved the energetic voice of a pre-frosh, unmistakable. I didn’t have to look back at him to know that his eyes are gleaming with anticipation and wonder. “There are so many things to do, and everything’s so interesting! ” He explained to his host, looking at his CPW booklet. “No matter what you choose to do, it seems like you can’t go wrong.”
I blinked, noting the irony, memories of some late nights during my MIT experience that definitely went wrong flashing through my mind. I half-smirked in reaction to his perspective and at the idea that I was once just as excited and wide-eyed. Though I considered turning around and telling him he was wrong, I knew I didn’t need to. A different perspective leads to different valid points.
This CPW, I've been putting in more effort into meeting freshmen and telling them about life here. Even though it may not be an accurate preview of what life is like as a student, it sure gives you a reason for why it’s worth it to put so much work into something. Among other reasons, it’s for the chance to develop your strengths and discover all of your weaknesses.
What I believe drives the success behind MIT students in the real world is that to survive here, you become an expert at rolling up your sleeves and summoning your grit. Any kind of progress, scientific or not, is not easy and sometimes seems to be at a standstill no matter how much work you put into it. In the process, you learn about what your boundaries are mentally, physically, and emotionally. You will learn the exact number of hours of sleep you need. You will learn how to accept failure with a smile. That’s what MIT teaches you, and what preview weekend shows if you look hard enough.
After all, not every preview event goes perfectly as planned. Looking back at my CPW, when the upperclassman I had met realized that the duct tape hat fit neither of us, she was quick to amusedly say, “Oh that’s ok! If we make strips out of the brim, we can make it a purse instead!”
***
Now I'll be off to enjoy my last CPW. Take a look at these elotes from LUChA! :D
Our campus is swarming with high school students and free food. It's all very exciting. Everyone is very excited! Ahhh!
I'm excited too! In fact, this is also my first CPW ever. I did not attend as a prefrosh. But this is really fun as an MIT student, too~
I didn’t think I had been super committed to CPW activities, but I actually did get myself involved in things (hooray!). Today I went shopping for a CPW event tomorrow, and then I went to Meet the Bloggers, in which I met some of you, and we Bloggers also met each other--most of our interaction is on the interwebz rather than IRL. Tomorrow, I am going to be at the CPW Midway for Chinese Students Club, and our Noodle Extravaganza event afterward. Then, I’m going to Chocolate City for Ill Vibes, an open mic sort of event. The pre-frosh are all very exciting, and I enjoy being excited along with them.
It’s weird that only seven months ago, I was a pre-frosh too. Now I am a freshmen, soon to be rising sophomore. Technically speaking, I already am a sophomore...o__O
Yet, the density of my experiences these past seven months have been tremendous. I’ve learned so much--academically, about myself, about the world, about others.
In many ways, I have grown much at MIT--I thought I was top notch at failing, but I leveled up and got even better! (more on that later)
I wonder if I am a different person from who I was. I believe my core values remain the same--I am an optimist. I believe in the good of people. I believe every person has good in them, somewhere, and that many people have their side of the story yet to tell. It is for this reason that I try to be as tolerant and lenient with people as I possibly can.
What’s been most taxing this year actually might not have been academics--first off, academics is hard. LIKE REALLY HARD. I cannot stress this enough, because I don’t think freshman are ever told enough how hard it is. I came in hearing “yeah, no one gets an A here” but really it’s more like “most people get C’s here” and you know what that’s ok. It is ok. Many people have failed a class, or even multiple classes. And they are still amazing and very, very successful.
But actually what I was worried impacted me most negatively this year as a person were the social issues I experienced. A friend became romantically involved with someone and they got into a big fight. Without saying too much, we were all intertwined in our activities, such that I became exposed to abuse of power, petty arguments, rifts between people. As someone who believed strongly in the good in people, this was taxing. It’s hard, after all, to keep being tolerant, when you feel like others will not do the same for you or for each other. It probably all sounds very mild, the way I put it, but in actuality, it almost made me lose a little bit of my faith in human beings, and definitely made me reconsider where to put my friendship.
In addition to that, there was a lot of sorrow that occurred during our long winter. The fallen snow muted the tragedies that befell us, and on top of all of that, it seemed like our classes decided to push us to our limits all at once.
Coming out of all this, I wish to remain, in some core aspects, who I was and who I am, and I may have to fight myself to remain that way. I still want to believe in human beings. I believe the good in them is there. I believe in good--unconditionally.
All in all, this CPW has made me very reflective. Talking to all the prefrosh makes me very happy; I love enthusiasm and I want to maintain it. I hope for the best for every one of them.
The deadline to accept college admissions offers is only a week ahead, so I thought I would share some of the things I’ve learned about making decisions in life. Some of you probably received offers from several excellent universities and may still be deciding which university to attend. If this is you, I hope these words help decide.
A couple of weeks ago I had to decide what I would do over the summer. On one side, I had the option to work at a startup in Cambridge called GeoOrbital, and on the other side, I had the option to join a team of students from Harvard and MIT to go on a cross-country bike trip (Washington D.C. to San Francisco) and inspire high school students with hands-on technology projects along the way. Both of them were excellent opportunities, and there was no way of weighing which one would be better for me. On one hand, I had the job opportunity that I had always been looking for (a job in an entrepreneurial environment, a job in a consumer electronics company, a job where I would be working on electrical engineering related projects, etc.) On the other hand, I had the option of going on a challenging adventure, where I would have time to write, read, play music, be with myself, and be with a great group of friends.
I thought about these two opportunities for a few days, and one morning it became clear to me. As I was meditating early one day (I meditate every morning), thoughts about this impending decision invaded my mind. The rational side of my mind was trying to convince me that I should accept the job offer. After all, it was a great opportunity to develop skills in the field of electrical engineering and it would be a great experience to develop communication skills, teamwork skills, and other professional skills. However, something was making me doubt. My heart felt like I needed to go on the bike trip. It was a feeling that emerged from beneath the rational part of my brain. Therefore, I decided to join the team biking across the country. This gut feeling I described earlier is what we call intuition.
In his Commencement Speech at Stanford, Steve Jobs said, “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know who you truly want to become.” During these last years, I have finally begun to understand what these words mean. Life is unpredictable, and you will never be sure what is right for you. That is why you must learn to trust your intuition, which guides you toward what you truly want to be. In Steve Jobs’ biography, Walter Isaacson explains that Steve Jobs realized the power of intuition during his trip to India after dropping out of college. During his search for spiritual enlightenment, he realized that the masters of the east guided their life by intuition. They didn’t make plans, they simply followed their heart.
Therefore, if you are having trouble deciding what school to go to, I encourage you to try listening to your heart. Thoughts are constantly changing. One day you will be inclined to go to one school, and the next day you will be inclined to go to another. If you’re capable of letting your thoughts subside, you will be able to listen to your heart, and the decision will become clear.
Erick's thoughts: Lydia brought up a great point in the comments so I'll try clearing up some confusion. Does intuition have all the answers? Well, no. Intuition is just one of the many things we're equipped with. Intuition is when we immediately understand something without consciously thinking about it. We also have instinct, which is intuition built up from experience. We have our rational mind, weighing the pros and cons of each choice. We have peer pressure, pushing us towards a particular decision. Understand the roles they play and weigh them all when making a decision. You can be making a rational choice that maximizes your utility, but if that choice makes you feel sick to your stomach, then it's worth exploring why. Likewise it might "feel" right to drop everything and travel to India like Steve Jobs, take a moment to think if that's your best choice. The goal is to get your rational mind with your emotional mind working together to be happy with your choice.
And sometimes, unfortunately, you can't follow your heart and you have to go against it. I wanted really badly to do a SuperUROP next semester but I'm pushing it off until I have more Course 6 classes. Some of you may have to pick a college because it offers a better financial aid package than another. Intuition is great when you have two equally available opportunities but when it feels like the choice has been made for us, what we can change is how we look at the situation. Since intuition comes from the emotional side of our mind, then changing how we feel about something changes our intuition about it. Then you can get your emotional and rational mind in agreement.
"Let your intuition and your rational mind work together to come to a solution." Tweet This
Careful with Peer Pressure
Kudos to Jorge for choosing Spokes America, I can tell he'll get a lot more out of that than an internship. While I love internships, I feel like there is a lot of pressure on students to do some form of formalized job or else feel like they'll be "wasting" their summer. Last year I was so afraid of not having an internship for the summer that last minute, as soon as finals week ended, I applied for and got an internship working at Boston City Hall. This semester I squeezed two UROPs into my schedule because it felt like everyone else had already done a UROP and now had research under their belt. I loved my internship and both of my UROPs but, as I'm finishing up my second year, I now see how I didn't need to squeeze everything in as soon as possible. You get four years, there's plenty to do and plenty of time to do it. Who cares if your freshman neighbor had a high school internship at NASA and is now in another internship at Apple? Focus on you.
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Yesterday a high school junior from Arizona emailed me about how they got an internship for the summer but their friend didn't. Their friend is now worried because he won't have done any science competitions or worked in a lab by the time college application season rolls around. I can't speak for how effective these are on your application but I can say that it's definitely not the most important thing they look for, at least for MIT.
I did no science fairs, no research, and no internships before MIT. The two competitions I participated in (FBLA and SkillUSA), I did my senior spring AFTER I was accepted and I lost in both of them. Yup, I was just a dude who really liked computers. And I did everything I could to build on that passion. I chose to go to an out-of-town vocational school for computer repair classes. I worked in the technology department for my school during senior year. I spent a good part of my free time setting up home servers and linking my devices together in unique ways. I didn't learn coding or electronics until coming to MIT, but I knew all about computers and operating systems and networks. I didn't know it at the time, but everything I was doing was gearing me towards having a stronger application.
Was I valedictorian? No. Did I do research in a laboratory? No. Did I win science competitions? No. Then what did I have? A concentrated interest in a particular field and proof that I was consistently getting really good at it over time. And the ability to work hard for extended periods of time without any rewards in sight. If you have those two things and can articulate them all over your application, then you can beat out the kid with a string of unrelated internships.
Have you been able to use your intuition to make a difficult choice in the past? Has peer pressure made you make a decision you later regretted? Share your stories by:
You know what I thought I was good at after getting into MIT? You know what I thought was my shining glory, my thing to be proud of, the thing I would definitely do well at even at this really hard institution?
Failing.
It might sound a little weird, but I came here certain that if there was one thing I was prepared better than anyone to do, it was to fail. I could not say that I am particularly good at math, or exceptional at chemistry or biology, or a physics genius when compared to my classmates. In fact, the only thing in school I have ever been “naturally” good at is English.
Being good at failing means not being phased by it, and knowing how not to have a breakdown. It means being able to look at failure constructively, no matter how bad it is, picking out whatever there is to learn from the situation and moving on. After high school, I felt like I had this process down.
Although I was very excited and happy when I first came to campus here at the Institvte, I was also very emotional about leaving home, and the imposter syndrome began right away. Sometimes I think it might have even started before I got here. I heard a lot about people who tested out of a lot of our required courses and were already taking courses in their majors. I went to the student talks that we have at orientation, and one of the speakers asked, “How many of you thought high school was easy?” About two thirds of the auditorium raised their hands. I sat there and felt my stomach sink. Wait, really? High school was easy for all these people?
I quickly realized during first semester that actually, my high school was just pretty hard. I had 6 or 7 B’s on my transcript applying to MIT. I went to an ordinary public school, and they prepared me very well, and I am both grateful and proud. Most importantly, my high school taught me how to fail. All those B’s (okay, B’s are really not that bad, but high school me had thought so) taught me that failing has a process, like anything else. You get up. You move on with your life. You never take it personally. You separate yourself emotionally from your school and work achievements.
I talked to a lot of people whenever I was sad about my failures in high school, and I found out there are tons and tons of paths to success. People often go to community college or a junior college their first two years, for example, and do very well. In fact, I know a transfer student at MIT who did exactly that, and now he’s studying quantum mechanics.
One good success story is Edward Snowden. Regardless of your opinion of him, he is at least definitely one of the best in his field--that’s how he got his job in government, which was very prestigious. Yet, he never completed much higher education. I think he may hold some sort of Associates’ Degree, from a community college*.
So I became adept at failing, and failing repeatedly. Failure and suffering--it’s difficult to see these things as positive, but it changes your perspective on life when you do.**
All this is of course a lot easier said than done.
First semester at MIT was pretty great, because we were all on pass no record. I passed all my classes, and had fun learning and getting to know the place.
Then second semester came.
I thought I would be okay if I did badly. I thought I was not like the valedictorians and took-classes-at-their-nearest-college folks that were some of my classmates. I was never within the top ten or twenty in my high school. I am not used to being at the top nor do I think I have to be there. I could fail better than anyone--mostly because, I thought, I had already. Failure is nothing new to me, and, most importantly, if I failed, it would not cripple me--it just meant I needed to fix some odds and ends here and there, and then I would grow and become better.
But oooohhhhhhhh man. That first round of midterms. I have never done so horribly, so atrociously on any exam in my life. I got a beautiful 36% on my first 6.01 exam, that was fantabulous***.
Of course, it didn’t help that Everything In The World Was Happening during February and March. There were a lot of emotional things going on at MIT, and in my own personal life, and we had our flurry of midterms, and, in general, it was just a bad time. I started asking myself the “why was I admitted here?” question in a very bad way. Everyone was ready for spring break. Since I was feeling bad, I let myself be upset about Everything, which was Happening. I did some crying, and some ranting, and some generally being angry and cursing and IHTFP, and making jokes in bad taste.
Spring break felt more like a gasp for breath than a vacation. I spent time with my family, and I longboarded along the Platte River, and the weather was beautiful. Home was very good--I remembered especially all the various very successful people I knew there, who all found their paths in very different ways. They came from nothing, and still had pretty much nothing for a while. But they figured it out anyway.
I have lived and belonged in a very caring community in Denver all my life. I looked at all the little ones, who are where I was maybe a decade ago. They are still tender and dreaming big dreams, but for the moment, they’re happy to just run around and play.
I came back with a fiery analytical vigor. I planned on tearing this place apart to find out what I did wrong, and exactly what I needed to do to avoid the same mistakes. Most importantly, this did not break me--although I at times felt like it could. I am not yet bitter or distant. I still love MIT--although now I’ve realized it shows a lot of tough love, and like all institutions, it has several aspects that could be better. I was worried at one point that I would grow to hate it, like some people had actually said they had. But I do not.
(Part 2 coming next week!)
Footnotes:
*I very strongly believe in community college. Community colleges are amazing. They are a great example of affordable education that's honestly often very good quality. I think there are a lot of people who can do very well at community colleges. At places like that, if you have the right attitude, you could grow and learn just as much as at MIT. I really admire people who, instead of thinking negatively of their environment or "should've" and "could've", accomplish incredible things by working hard right where they are. You can say this or that school is better in this or that department or this or that way, but you can never say this person is better or smarter than any other. People will surprise you.
**In fact, there’s this cool TED talk about how seeing stress as good invokes a physical response in your body more like when you exercise or laugh rather than when you are facing terrible danger.
***I JUST FOUND OUT THIS ACTUALLY IS A WORD. Google it. Its realness takes away a bit of its charm... :(
The tradition began in the spring of 1929 when senior class president C. Brigham Allen brought together a member from each of the Classes of 1930, 1931, and 1932 to design a ring that the Institute Committee would approve as the Standard Technology Ring.
They couldn't decide whether to put the beaver or the Dome on the bezel of ring. The Committee looked to the original discussion over the mascot, calling upon the now-famous defense of the beaver by Lester Gardner, class of 1897.
We first thought of the kangaroo which, like Tech, goes forward in leaps and bounds. Then we considered the elephant. He is wise, patient, strong, hardworking, and, like all who graduate from Tech, has a good hide. But neither of these were American animals. We turned to Mr. Hornady's book on the animals of North America and instantly chose the beaver. The beaver not only typifies the Tech [student], but his habits are peculiarly our own. The beaver is noted for his engineering, mechanical skills, and industry. His habits are nocturnal. He does his best work in the dark.
With that in mind, along with the fact that many other schools had buildings similar to our Great Dome, the Committee ultimately decided to honor our hard-working and industrious mascot on the ring, allowing the class of 1930 to proudly wear the first-ever Standard Technology Ring, lovingly referred to as the Brass Rat.
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Since then, each class has appointed its own Ring Committee to uphold these time-honored traditions. The committee strives to design a ring that we, as students, can take pride in, and which will, upon graduation, unite us all as graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
--
Serving on the 2017 Ring Committee, I spent a lot of time closely inspecting and growing a deep love for the uniqueness of each of the different Brass Rats. One of my favorite MIT Admissions blog posts is Matt McGann's "A bevy of Beautiful brass Rat bezels", published in 2006. After a quick history of the Brass Rat, Matt catalogs all of the bezels from '01 to '08. An updated version was published in 2008 that added the '00, '09, '10 bezels. He then updated it again in 2009 with the addition of the '11 Brass Rat, but not since. I'm updating his list here with the additions of the '12-'17 bezels and older bezels going all the way back to the original Standard Technology Ring.
The Class of 2017 Brass Rat (the rat unveiled this year and the one for my class):
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The Class of 2016 Brass Rat:
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The Class of 2015 Brass Rat:
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*Photos are from the respective websites of the Ring Committees. Older Brass Rat photos are from webmuseum.mit.edu.
If you're an alumn and you have a Brass Rat that is missing a photo here, definitely send it to me, I'd love to add it and make this as complete a database as possible.
Which Brass Rat is your favorite?
Erick is an MIT blogger and sophomore studying Course 6-2 Comptuer Science and Electrical Engineering. You can find a full archive of Erick's posts on his website www.erickpinos.com.
This week was surreal, like turning pages in a book of moving pictures. Here are some headlines:
Thomas DeFrantz and the Dancing Body of the State
Thursday afternoon, Thomas DeFrantz, a former MIT professor and current professor of African-American Studies and Dance at Duke, gave a profound lecture to a rapt and engaged audience. He began with a walk across the front of the room demonstrating a "switch," a precise and confident shifting of weight and swaying of hips, and a beautiful sentence from his upcoming book on queer black social dance. He went on to discuss the "politically embodied concepts and dances originating in African-American communities that enjoy concentrated popularity outside those communities:" dances such as vogueing, J-setting, and hand dancing. He showed clips from the 1990 documentary Paris is Burning, of Madonna's popular simplification of vogueing, of Beyonce J-setting in the "Single Ladies" video and Miley's "unconfident and profoundly uncool" attempt to twerk, of Al Minns and Leon James dancing the Lindy Hop and other jazz dances of their time, of Michelle Obama as she "becomes herself more and more, it seems, and that self is actively engaged in black social dance." Cynthia O' '16 and I swooned in our seats and ate free shish kebabs afterwards while we talked to Tommy DeFrantz. I considered switching up my whole life plan and going for a Ph. D. literature, like the woman in the back of the room who asked good questions. There are so many new questions to ask.
Killer Mike on Race Relations
On Friday, Killer Mike of Run the Jewels faced a packed room. There were journalists, students, educators, locals. You can read about the event on Complex or Billboard. Below are the bits I scribbled down.
On race:
I'm qualified to be here because I am a black man in America, and that does not make me independent of America--I am as American as apple pie and slavery.
Solving racism has less to do with politics and more to do with--look around you--look to the left and the right like you in black church--your life, your circle of friends should look like this. They should not all look like you.
The problems are not outside of us, they are within us.
This needs to be something substantial. Not "look, we got Killer Mike at MIT. I'm not here to get you to buy a CD. I don't care if you come to my next show. If you're not interacting with and befriending people who don't look like you, you are not doing enough.
If we're willing to broaden our minds, the horizon is endless.
It's time we take ourselves off the teams we were born on.
I am an advocate for the people who are the most oppressed being the primary organizers of action against that oppression.
In response to a question asking what new technology he would have MIT students invent:
What technology puts people in the same room? What technology exists to get people in a circle? I believe in the power of human interaction. Too much of our communication now occurs between the cold crevices of keyboards and encourages people to be mean. You get fed rage from the time you wake up. If you're a liberal you get fed liberal rage. If you're conservative you get conservative rage. And then someone posts something online you don't like and you give it to them. But we don't pay attention to the real brutalities happening around us.
On Atlanta:
Atlanta worked.
Atlanta is the potential of the African-American in this country fulfilled. Atlanta taught me to unpack a lot of my racial thinking. When the only people around you to blame look like you, you have to think about the other variables, like class. A lot of what I was mistaking for racism was classism.
This shit is not just about race. It's about a class of people thinking they are entitled to something.
He talked about the importance of diversity and cultural exchange. "We should make sure the design team reflects the people who are wearing [products], buying them." He urged people to reach out, to think bravely, to take Louis Vuitton and Gucci to task for suing Dapper Dan out of business and then snatching up and peddling his innovations. He spoke from a place of knowledge, experience and compassion on community organizing and policing. He discussed Run the Jewels's new music video for the song "Close Your Eyes," which "represents the futile and exhausting existence of a purgatory-like law enforcement system. There is no neat solution at the end because there is no neat solution in the real world. However, there is an opportunity to dialogue and change the way communities are policed in this country."
Lupe Fiasco at MIT SpringFest
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We stood at the top of the stadium, high up against the back wall, where the spotlights shone out in thin beams of thick yellow. We were so close to the lights I was afraid every time they swiveled that my shadow would be cast over the whole crowd. We watched and danced and were wildly in love with Lupe.
Black Market
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The Cambridge Community Center is a six-minute ride from my house. There is a "regular roaming market" of artists and vendors selling old records, old clothes, crafts, zines, and more. There were lots of beautiful punks and hippies. I rubbed some free-sample shea butter on my hands and bought a literary and arts zine called Infinite Scroll, which contains poems, pictures, comics, essays, stories, and a beautiful collection of photographs of Marfa, Texas.
Dudley "The Center for High-Energy Metaphysics" Co-op comes to pika
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Harvard has a co-op, too. Yesterday I grated about ten pounds of cheese for macaroni and brewed rosewater lemonade with dried rose petals and lavender (above). They brought blueberry-pear pies. We sat on the front porch and talked about co-op things like consensus-based decion-making and collective grocery shopping.
I will start with a disclaimer--there are definitely things that can and will change at MIT. In fact, that’s what I love about the culture--when there’s something wrong, people are invited to fix it. That includes both robots and mental health. There’s been a lot of debate on campus as of late concerning how to best achieve a safe, caring, healthy environment while still maintaining our academic rigor. One thing I think definitely helps is just talking about it more. When a previous blogger--Anna H. ‘14--posted this blog post to the admitted 2018s Facebook page about Imposter Syndrome, I think everyone responded with relief and positivity. I know I did. That’s part of why I decided to write this two-part post.
That being said, I’ll assume for now that academics at MIT won’t change--indeed, it’s possible they won’t have to so long as the way we think about them changes--for the sake of argument.
Though I left my last post on a happy note, in actuality, the relief of spring break only lasted so long. The calm before the storm you might say. My second round of midterms was not much better and I began to get really concerned. My fiery analytical vigor also only lasted so long. I felt helpless. I didn’t understand. I thought I was doing everything I needed to, and yet my exams, tauntingly, did not reflect that. I worked twice as hard this semester and did half as well.
It was about this time that I scheduled some meetings with my professors--a move I’m pretty glad I took! Asking for help is something I learned to do well in high school. I talked to TAs and LAs, and received many different bits of advice. Probably most striking was when I walked into Professor Staffilani’s office, for 18.03 (Differential Equations). I was doing so badly, I was thinking about dropping her class. She asked me the scores I received on our recent exams and psets, and I told her. Then she said, “Oh you’re doing fine! I would not recommend dropping this class--those scores on psets are about what we look for, and your exams seem all right.”
“But...but I failed the last exam...” O__o
“Yes, but only by one point!” ^__^
Never in my life has a teacher told me I’m fine with a C in their class.
Back in high school, I was on the debate team, and I did Lincoln Douglas debate. Research was really fun--but I was a terrible debater. Not once did I ever make it to finals rounds. I never went undefeated (we only have three matches). I didn’t like debating as much as researching. Some of the debaters could be really mean, too, and were very haughty and pretentious, and I did not like them. I failed so badly, even my parents asked me why I continued, instead of doing speech events, which I was actually much better at. I did this for four years, after all.
Well, I improved in public speaking and arguing a lot.
It was ridiculous. In sixth and seventh grade, I had been extremely timid. I couldn’t even speak in front of a class of second graders. I was very shy. As I said, I was not confrontational--I’m still not, but I can now stand my ground on what I believe in, as opposed to “agreeing to disagree” all the time, and I no longer change my opinions based on whether some was able to win an argument with me or not. Now, none of my friends believe me when I tell them I used to be terrible at public speaking. I knew how much I was improving, and I knew that this improvement was worth much, much more than any speech ribbon I could have gotten.
I was tempered, like iron, through the environment of debate. I had failed so much--almost exclusively failed, in fact--that I am not even a little bit scared of public speaking. Speaking and presenting is totally different from debating, because when you’re debating you expect people to attack and slash to bits your argument in a way no polite or respectable person in real life actually would. You could ask me to present to Obama and I would not stutter.
I realized how much I’d improved when I went to MOSTEC, an MIT summer program I attended my junior year. All our project groups had to present, and I was the very last person to speak. I concluded the neuroscience group’s presentation, and afterward my classmates and instructors told me I should give TED talks. I had come so far from where I once had been. I had so much more confidence, which I had gained from failing over and over again. Not from succeeding. What’s more is that some of the very same people I had debated actually were not very good at public speaking: they lacked the finesse of reaching an audience emotionally as well as factually, which I had been able to practice from a couple years also doing oral interpretation (a speech event, basically acting without props or costumes). So, debate just wasn’t quite the right environment for me to perform in, but it was the perfect environment for me to train in.
I think that, slowly, I’m starting to see MIT like I saw debate. I greatly enjoy most of the work I do at MIT, but I definitely do a lot of failing. Perhaps the real problem is that most of us don’t realize our frame of reference. We are studying at one of the most intense engineering institutions in literally the world. We all have different specialties, different strengths and weaknesses. It’s fine that the one kid has a 100% in math or whatever--I know that I dislike math and won’t be pursuing that as a major anyway, so why should I be so worried? As long as I pass the class, I’ll be okay. More importantly, as long as I actually learn something, I’ll be okay.
A huge problem at MIT is also selective thinking, or failing to view good things and only viewing the bad. I have a pretty good biology background from high school, but I didn’t think my 7.013 (Human Biology) grades were that great until I realized some people were struggling as much in that class as I was in math. I had actually never noticed. I was so obsessed on how badly I was doing that I forgot to appreciate the things that were going well--or at least the things that were going okay.
MIT, like debate, is a place that tempers people, again and again, until we are forged into something stronger and different. Michael C. ‘16 made this post about how well he’d been prepared for “the real world” (*insert choir sounds here*); I’m sure many other alums share similar sentiments.
Maybe the problem is not how much we have to do, but how we think about it. Yes, we work really, really, really hard. It’s very difficult to really believe all this when it’s 3AM, or even if it’s 3PM and you just failed a test for which you studied for three days. Furthermore, we all have different backgrounds, and it’s very easy to simply see others as geniuses and prodigies when you don’t know how much they, too, have failed in the past, or even how much they fail at MIT and just don’t talk about it. In debate after researching for weeks and giving up my entire Saturday to get whooped in rounds by some pretentious kid in a suit, I didn’t want to ever do it again. But you know what? By the next tournament, I was ready and waiting.
It is okay to feel upset; I certainly don’t think it’s healthy to suppress that feeling. What’s important is moving on from that, and breathing. Tempering is not a simple process. It involves fire and pressure and heat. But you can begin with just mud, and in the end there is porcelain.
In the beginning there is iron, and in the end there is steel.
It is not the first memorial dedicated to Sean on campus. Last April, under cover of night, students installed Collier's Cranes, a hack of thousands of paper cranes hung suspended inside the Stata Center by the entrance near where Sean was killed.
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The memorial unveiled today is, however, the most permanent. Assembled out of 32 blocks of granite, carved from the New Hampshire quarries near which he loved to climb, this memorial to Sean will last as long as MIT does. Maybe it will last longer.
This is a very difficult subject for me to write about, so I am going to stop and let you read a description of the memorial written by Professor J. Meejin Yoon, Head of the Department of Architecture at MIT and lead architect of the Collier Memorial. I will close with this: when I ran the Boston Marathon last Monday for Team MR8 in memory of my friend Martin Richard, who was killed in the bombing two years ago, I also ran it for Sean.
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Professor Yoon:
Situated on MIT’s campus where Officer Sean Collier was shot and killed on April 18, 2013, the Collier Memorial marks the site with a timeless structure—translating the phrase Collier Strong into a space of remembrance through a form that embodies the concept of strength through unity. The memorial is composed of 32 solid blocks of granite that form a five-way stone vault, each block supporting the other to create a central covered space for reflection. Inspired by the gesture of an open hand, the memorial’s five-way shallow stone vault is buttressed by five radial walls that extend outward to the campus. The ovoid space at the intersection of the extending walls creates a passage, a marker, and an aperture, reframing the site of tragic loss.
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The intersection of the star-shaped extrusion and ovoid space creates a smooth curved surface that acts as a bevel marker under the vault with the inscription, In the line of duty, Sean Collier, April 18, 2013. The longest walls shelter the site from Vassar Street while the void creates an entry into the memorial. The two most acute walls point toward the specific location where Officer Collier was shot in the line of duty. Carved into the south-facing wall is an epitaph from Sean’s brother’s eulogy: Live long like he would. Big hearts, big smiles, big service, all love. Amidst the solid stone memorial are a cluster of honey locust trees that create a living canopy above the structure to mark the passage of time. In contrast, point lights set into the pavers permanently inscribe into the ground the constellation of stars in the sky the night of April 18, 2013.
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The design of the memorial combines age-old structural techniques for spanning masonry vaults with new digital fabrication and structural computation technologies to create an unprecedented form. The stone arch is among the most elemental of structural organizations, ordering materials in space and translating force into form. The design relies on the exact fit of the 32 stone blocks to transfer loads in pure compression from stone to stone. The shallowness of the massive stone vault overhead creates an effect of suspension and weightlessness, while the tapered geometry of the individual stone blocks that form the compression ring reveals the keystone geometry of the masonry arch.
The fabrication process involved the cutting of quarried blocks of stone, first with a single-axis robotic block saw, then with a multiple-axis KUKA 500 robot. The vault geometry necessitates a perfect fit between blocks, and the robotic milling process produced final stone pieces that are within a 0.5 millimeter tolerance. The massive stone blocks were then set by masons through an elaborate scaffolding sequence. The design showcases new digital fabrication methods, as well as traditional stone setting masonry techniques, celebrating both contemporary technology and timeless craft.
Methodologically, the design process for the Sean Collier Memorial involved a back-and-forth process between the construction of physical models (foam, wood, stone, and 3d-printed powder) and simulations with digital tools.
The vaulted design of the Sean Collier Memorial embodies structural principles in its material configuration and symbolizes generosity as service. This didactic visualization of forces is consistent with MIT’s ethos of openness and transparency, while the idea that all five walls are needed to achieve a stable form is symbolic of a community coalescing to commemorate a loss.
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The permanent Collier Memorial will offer our community the opportunity to remember Officer Collier’s life and to honor his service as it reminds us of our values: openness in the face of threat, unity through diversity, and strength through community.
Tomorrow is, yes, the First of May[?], which means those of you who have decided to join the incoming class have a very crucial choice to make: choosing your MIT username.
You may not appreciate yet how big this decision is: your MIT username (also referred to as your Athena or your Kerberos) will be your login to the computing systems here, it'll be your first (and likely primary) email address while you're at MIT, you'll have the ability to edit files at http://web.mit.edu/username, and it will likely remain your MIT email address (@alum.mit.edu) after you graduate. In other words, this is for life.
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Fear not, though. After consulting with many others (as well as compiling from some earlier blogposts), I've prepared the following list of guidelines:
Your username must be between 3 and 8 characters.
Avoid numbers and underscores. You are technically allowed to use them, but they aren't needed and add confusion and clunkiness to your username.
Say your username out loud a few times to check for clunkiness or awkward pronunciations.
It's usually best to go professional. Your username will appear all over the place: emails, URLs, academic papers, etc. "Choose a username that you won't be embarrassed sharing with your professors."—Matt McGann '00
Usernames can often become nicknames of a sort for people, so consider whether you'd be comfortable being referred to by your username. "In some circles on campus, you may become known by your username, so choose wisely."—Matt again
If you want to go invent a nickname as your username—say, flipfrog@mit.edu—then go for it! Just also make sure you're ready to answer the question "Why is your username flipfrog?" for the rest of your life.
Often the best usernames involve your name. Some common (and excellent) username structures for a hypothetical student named Alyssa P. Hacker:
alyssa (Every once in a while these are available, so try it!)
hacker
ahacker
alyssah
aphacker
aph
Note that if you do throw your middle initial in there, you will receive questions about your middle name.
Truncating your name into 8 characters can be annoying sometimes. You might not want richards@ if your last name is Richardson, for instance. Just something to keep in mind.
If you're still feeling stuck on what to choose, you should know that it's easy to make alternate email addresses later, so in general it's better to choose a more standard/professional username for your official MIT account. (To make alternate email addresses later, you can set up mailing lists on whose behalf you can send mail and of which you are the only member, thus making it another email address. This isn't hard and means you can own email addresses which are much more ridiculous, like dannyfirstnames@ or danny-why-are-you-making-stupid-mailing-lists@.)
Now go forth and think of your username! Just not flipfrog. I already got that one.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.Happy Sunday!
I am doing end of semester things and also reading Hemingway in dramatic black and white. There is perhaps my favorite meme that has been going around tumblr and finally found its way into our corner: MIT Gothic. I think it paints a very concrete picture of life at MIT, especially around this time of the semester. The rest of this blog post is by MIT tumblr users of varying anonymity. I hope it gives you a sense of our dramatic lives and a break from your own.
(You are reading Hemingway. You are reading tumblr. You are reading an information theory textbook. You are reading tumblr. You are reading an admissions blog post. You are reading tumblr. You are reading tumblr. You are reading tumblr.)
ivynewton ‘16:Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
You lay down for a 15-minute nap, and wake up a day later. You’re still tired. You’re always tired. You slept all day. You haven’t slept in weeks.
You arrive late to lecture. The chalkboard is already covered in equations. The desks are covered in equations. The walls are covered in equations. Your notebook is covered in equations. They don’t look familiar.
You try to find your professor’s office in the Stata Center. You go up the elevator. You’re in the wrong tower. You return to the first floor and walk to the other tower. You’re still in the wrong tower. You walk down the stairs, and exit on the top floor. You don’t know how to get back down.
You finish a problem set. There are two more to take its place. Each one has more problems than the last.
You’re walking back from Boston across the Harvard Bridge. You look down and see the scrawled marker: “Halfway to Hell.” You turn and look back the way you came. Boston is miles away. This is much more than halfway.
The administration has announced changes to the dining plans. The administration has announced new security procedures. The administration has announced that all GRTs will be replaced with ravenous bears. You write an opinion piece in The Tech to complain.
You get your Brass Rat. You joke that you can drop out now. But you know it’s not true. You can’t leave. They won’t let you. You’re not sure who ‘they’ are, but you know you’re stuck here. Your friends can’t tell if you’re laughing or crying.
You help take down a hack. It’s back the next morning. It wasn’t ready to leave yet.
The poster on the bulletin board says ‘IHTFP.’ Every poster says ‘IHTFP.’ You find yourself whispering ‘IHTFP’ at random moments. You can’t remember what it stands for anymore, but still you whisper it. IHTFP.
You ask your bio major friend for some help with taxonomy. They draw out a tree. Kingdom Animalia only has one line coming out of it: Pisces. One of the branches coming off that is Felidae. You copy it down.
You tell the freshmen at the sailing pavilion that the river water is perfectly safe, but they must never disturb the mud of the riverbed. You tell them it’s because of residual pollution and chemicals in the mud.
Your best friend is Course 6. All their friends are Course 6. Everyone you know is Course 6. You’re pretty sure your resume has a different number on it, but the only companies that will talk to you at Career Fair are software firms so maybe you’re wrong.
The classmate you’re talking to says he’s a HASS major. You blink. There’s nobody there.
You wake up to your alarm in bed and go to your first class. You take notes. Your second class is having an exam, and it seems to be going well. You sit back in your chair after problem 3 to stretch. You wake up to your alarm in bed. You have just crossed the boundary between sleeping and waking but you don’t know in which direction.
Your professor makes a joke about “that place downriver from here”; you laugh because you know that nothing exists off campus.
One of your friends says that the biometric for the Guest Indemnity changes every time they visit your dorm: last week it was a piece of hair, this time an ounce of blood. Neither of you decide to question why this is being collected.
You keep getting cryptic emails from a mailing list, and no matter how hard you try you cannot seem to unsubscribe from it. You think that you’re on the list because of the Activities Fair back in Freshman year, but when you look up the group that the list is affiliated with you discover that the student group was disbanded in 1967.
It is the end of term, and every posting space is filled with ads for various student performing groups—you hear that someone you know will be in two of them, so you look the shows up. They’re occuring at the same time.
There is an email about Boba sales in your inbox, and every time you delete it a new one gets sent out.
When asked about how much sleep you get from night to night, you shrug and say one to ten hours, muttering something about a scaling approximation.
The windows of the Green Building flicker in your peripheral vision. You can’t tell if it was the lights turning off, or something falling from the roof.
You drift asleep on Saferide. The same gaggle of Asian women in shiny dresses and heels gets on and off at each stop. There’s a solitary girl from Random in the back, leaning against the window. You hear someone throw up. The wheelchair contraption in the rear rattles loudly. You hear glass shatter. The lights of the Harvard Bridge roll past.
Someone’s practicing with glowing poi in the courtyard. The rainy night turns the lights into a whirling blur of red and blue. The music sounds like a siren.
The roof of the Stata Center leaks continually, even when it’s not raining. They use some of the water to flush the toilets. The rest spills down onto the sidewalks and into storm drains. You suspect the drains connect directly back to the roof.
Your parents call. They’re driving into town. They want to take a photo in The Alchemist. There’s an endless line of parents and tourists waiting to take photos in The Alchemist. A convoy of Korean tour buses waits eternally along Mass Ave.
A passing duck tour points out the buses. The Koreans wave back and take photos. The tourists are themselves attractions for other tourists.
You swear the trees move around when you aren’t looking, especially the ones near the course 20 buildings.
There’s a bike locked to a lamppost, surrounded by flowers. It’s painted white and seems to be melting into the ground. In the morning a Hubway station has sprouted in its place.
There was a video showing the Great Dome opening up and swarms of drones flying out of it. That was CGI, right? Some nights you aren’t sure.
There’s a scale model of Building 7 outside Steam Cafe. Somewhere inside it, there’s a scale model of you, and a scale model of the model. If the course 4 students have fractal armies of homunculi helping them, maybe they won’t have to work so hard.
Some days, there’s a car in your reserved parking spot. A few times, it was a police car; once, an Airgas truck. Every once in a while, the spot just isn’t there at all. The other spaces are unchanged, but occupied by unfamiliar cars whose makes and models you don’t recognize. You sigh and pull around to another lot.
Residential Life starts offering a new dining plan, in which you are paid money in exchange for agreeing to be dined on. Residential Life doesn’t specify what will be doing the dining. It does note that freshmen are tastiest, and will be paid the most.
People rush past you in small knots, clutching phones and laptops and chattering excitedly about minute details of the hallways. You assume it’s a Mystery Hunt thing. It’s probably a Mystery Hunt thing.
The SIPB office is out of staples, but it never runs out of staplers. Wanking spontaneously generates staplers, as well as useless cables and bottles of juice. SIPB sells the juice to ESP in exchange for fresh souls, which they keep in an applesauce jar.
You look up an advanced course 8 class and discover that its units are listed as 20/4/-12. Past students have rated it as taking more than 168 hours a week. When you try to add it to your schedule, your Athena workstation crashes. You should probably be taking jlab instead.
The class shows up on your registration anyway. It’s listed not as Listener, but as Taster. You do notice a distinct flavor in your Anna’s burrito that evening. You can’t really place it, but it makes you think of dark matter, or maybe quarks.
A cluster printer is producing reams of color printouts, covered in patterns that hurt your eyes to look at. No one else is around. You thought Pharos was supposed to keep this kind of thing from happening, but the touchscreen tells you the print job is owned by Pharos itself. Later, when you leave, the printer’s trays are empty and its display shows PAPER JAM, but the pages are still coming out. They flutter to the floor in a heap.
The Milk arrives on campus for orientation. All the other frosh take it in stride, because this must be what MIT is like, right? No one would say The Milk doesn’t belong.
After an all-nighter on campus, you try to make your way home through the basements, but after a few wrong turns you no longer recognize where you are. The GetFit maps on the walls continue to appear every so often, but they’re marked with letters that aren’t from any alphabet you know. There’s a continuous slow breeze at your back, and it smells of cinnamon and ozone.
You see a door labeled “DANGER: Keep Door Shut” standing propped open. It seems to compel you to walk through it. You emerge into a secret courtyard you didn’t know existed. It’s wonderful here, under the predawn sky, but you know you can’t stay.
Under building 36 you come across a LARPer trapped in a temporal prison. His frozen mouth seems to be forming a word, but you can’t make it out. The next time you pass by, someone has carted the prison outside and tossed it into a dumpster.
Dorm security has been upgraded and now requires a spectral identity holomatrix from all visitors, although no one can tell you where you might procure one. Despite the policies, deskworkers continue to let visitors in, but the process visibly wears them out, draining their vital energy, until they leave at the end of their shifts stooped and hobbling. A fragment of the self is required in payment for passage, and if the guest cannot provide it, an equivalent must be given by another.
You go to TEAL and start working on a group problem. Lights flicker on and off in the classroom, and the table shakes. You have awoken Ba’al, the elder demon, by chanting in Greek while sitting in a circle of six. He leaves because he doesn’t want to be in 8.02 either.
One of your friends replied to an email sent to eecs-jobs-announce looking for a “technical cofounder.” She returned from Harvard two weeks later, pale, drawn and silent with dark circles under their eyes. She doesn’t speak or smile anymore, but some nights when the moon is full you see her staggering down Amherst Ave to the Sloan School, whispering “diiiisruuupt” under her breath.
You try to tell your friend about your terrible, terrible day, but all that comes out is a correctness proof of Dijkstra’s Algorithm. You try again. This time, you recite a uniqueness proof for a minimum spanning tree provided all edge weights are unique. A few days later, all your friends have forgotten you and all your dreams are of algorithms and invariants. You’re not even sure the proofs are correct.
You go to your HASS class, and someone complains about the “soft” ideas and the lack of upstanding, reliable numbers under their breath. The professor, who has suffered this stoically for years, begins to weep. Her tears are acid. The floor begins to melt. You wish you hadn’t left your NaOH at home, but it’s too late now.
As the semester has worn on, the lecture hall you return to each morning has become more and more empty. You ask the kid sitting in front of you where they’ve all gone. His eyes go round with fear. “They are dead to us now,” he chants, monotone. “We are all that remain.”
Today we're releasing our decisions regarding transfer applicants who applied for admission for Fall 2015.
Transfer applicants, unlike freshman applicants, receive decisions via email from our office to the address listed on their application. The emails will be sent late afternoon today, May 4th, and you should receive it seconds later through the magic of midichlorians.
Our transfer admissions process was quite competitive: 489 students applied to transfer, and we have admitted 22. And as usual, we are very excited about the students we have admitted, and often chagrined about those we could not.
As a former transfer student myself (not to MIT), I know that this process can be a difficult experience. For those of you who were admitted: welcome to MIT. For those who weren't: keep on trucking. I transferred, but if I hadn't, things would have been fine. Remember, college is mostly what you make of it, here or anywhere else. Either way, I wish you the best of luck wherever you go, and whatever you do.
I received the following question on tumblr the other day:
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This is a really good question, because it forced me to think and deeply consider why I found MIT so hard--and exactly what it is that causes people to buckle under the pressure. I’ve adapted the response I created for tumblr to this post, which I hope will shed some light on the teaching and learning philosophy of MIT, and exactly what makes it this burning furnace that, through a lot of heat and pressure, turns all of its students into steel (see last week's post for even more fire metaphors!).
Recently, this video made by the MIT media lab (which includes Chris Peterson and many others) called “How MIT Learns” was posted to the admissions homepage. I’d encourage you all to watch it if you’re interested--it’s pretty cool, and also touches on a lot of the general reasons as to why MIT is both so difficult and very effective. Then, below, you can read my more specific take on the matter.
The reason MIT is so hard is because you are not just given knowledge–you have to earn it. I’m going to guess that at your high school–just as in many high schools–the days you spend in class might go something like this:
1. Introduce a specific concept (let’s use integrals as an example). Your teacher talks about integrals for a little bit, maybe where they came from and gives some background on the theory behind them.
2. Work on Examples. Your teacher might do some simple integral problems on the board a couple times, and one of these times they might write a problem and have you solve it in class.
3. Homework. The homework you receive on integrals starts out easy and gradually becomes harder. Generally speaking, the homework will line up with what is taught in class (at least, it should).
4. Tests. The tests might be a bit harder than the homework, but often they still line up pretty well. If you study, there are not usually many surprises. Most people get B’s. Some get A’s. Sometimes a lot get A’s. Some get C’s–and the C people often drop down a class if it happens consistently.
In this method, even if your teacher is terrible and you don’t understand the homework, the pace is forced to be slow enough that you can still manage, or work with friends and piece together your bits of knowledge. There should be a reasonably direct correlation between effort and grades. Also, for most high school subjects there’s a lot of information available on the internet, whereas in college, sometimes what we’re studying is basically hot off the academic presses, and so you can’t find much outside information to help you. Of course high school can still be very hard–I thought it was hard. It’s made even more challenging when you’re involved in a lot of outside activities, or you take a lot of AP classes. But still, from the standpoint of an individual class, the material is designed to be doable--and this is by no means a bad thing. It's important to train people in how to acquire knowledge, which is the purpose of high school.
In fact, (a brief tangent) I’ve always disliked it when college/high school/middle school professors and teachers said things like “WELL, I know your high/middle/elementary school teachers did not teach you blah blah blah and that whole time of your life was basically a waste of time and I’m going to actually teach you things now/get you closer to the “real world”/etc./etc.”
This mentality is terrible. Everyone needs different types of education at different levels. I especially never understood why public school teachers said things like that. Being teachers themselves, they should understand the difficulty of their own jobs. To say phrases like that hugely disrespects the teachers that prepared the students before they got into that current teacher’s classrooms. I lose a little respect for teachers or professors who do that.
In contrast to high school, here is how MIT teaches, a method many people call “the fire hose”:
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
(^how I feel on the daily)
1. Introduce a General Concept.
If you’re supposed to be learning integrals, an MIT professor might start off with the foundation of calculus and talking about summations. In my experience, a lot of the professors really like to tell “stories”, such as “let’s say we have a moving car, and we don’t know how far it’s traveled, but we know it’s velocity…..” and you don’t really know where they are going with this until they explain that the integral of velocity is distance. I like this because it gets you excited. Until you have to do homework.
2. Go over one example.
Expectations are higher at MIT. You are expected to do a lot on your own. If you want more examples, you have to read them on your own time. In class, we might do one or two examples, and often the professor will skip a lot of the intermediate steps. Everyone hates the phrase “and the rest is just algebra” or “…and then I’m sure you guys can do the algebra, so in the end the answer is 5″. Sometimes “just algebra” takes me an hour.
3. Collaborate on homework.
MIT has one very important philosophy: no competition. What I mean is, if, hypothetically speaking, everyone in a class got an A, then everyone would get an A. There is never a curve or weird grade cutoff thing that works against you, it can only ever work for you. This means everyone is encouraged to work with and help each other all the time. This is important, because if you tried to do everything yourself here, you would be absolutely miserable. My biggest regret this semester is not working with other people on our math homework–I really should have done that more.
The homework at MIT has a much greater gap with what was taught in class. There might be a few “confidence boosting” problems that are short, and similar to in-class examples, but most of them are completely different. You might have done a velocity/distance integral problem in class, and then all of a sudden all your homework problems are about heat dissipation. The math is the same–but I’m sure you know how much more confusing things can be when taken out of context. When the math wasn’t all that clear in the first place, it’s exponentially more confusing. You are expected to make the connection between the general concept and the specific problem on your own. The professor does not reveal this connection to you. You MUST ASK FOR HELP from somewhere–TAs, office hours, the professor, your friends. The average set of homework problems here can take anywhere between 4-8 hours, depending on what you yourself are better/worse at (math takes me forever, but physics is usually ok). In high school, I think my homework usually took two hours, except for AP Physics C (which was the most college-like high school class I ever took, take it!!). That 4-8 hours is time spent even when you are working with other people. If there’s something you really don’t understand and you are stubbornly working all by yourself, you can work on it for a whole day and end up with not much more than a pool of tears and eraser shavings (definitely have done this a couple times). We need each other to survive at MIT.
4. Exams.
……oh man.
On my first math exam in college ever, I failed. I’d never actually failed an exam before. Then my TA was like, “oh, but it was only by a few points” and I was like HOW ARE YOU SO CALM.
I was not the number one kid in high school, but here I immediately began to feel like I was at the very bottom, even though I wasn’t. The distribution is different. I think most people get B’s in the end in most classes, but C’s are much more common, and sometimes more the norm in other classes. Getting an A is very hard in most classes. C people are not encouraged to drop–they are considered doing well enough, and if they want to do a little better, they talk to their professors and TAs. This distribution is difficult to get used to. While I’ve talked a lot about the difference between MIT and high school, I think the significantly lower grade distribution is what makes MIT different from other colleges. Some people think, why not just move all the averages up so more people can get B’s and A’s? It might help all the students get better jobs or into better grad schools.
The reason is that MIT is designed to keep you uncomfortable. Making the grade distribution so different from other places and especially from high school makes all the students here very uncomfortable--many of us were straight-A types, after all (actually, the fact that I was not a straight-A student helped me adjust a lot).
We don’t grow when we are comfortable, because our instincts tell us to stay in our comfort zone. MIT tries its best to make sure there is no comfort zone–which, even with all this rigor, is still hard to achieve because of some of the geniuses that come here. In the end, your job will really not depend on your GPA. MIT has made sure that everyone knows it does not work on the same grading scale as other places. The only time this becomes a problem is with scholarships–but don’t ever let that keep you from taking risks. I myself have a GPA-dependent scholarship, but I didn’t drop any of my classes, because I know that I could appeal to either MIT (for more financial aid) or to my scholarship provider, and they would actually understand, because it really is that hard.
In general, I think the high school philosophy is to teach knowledge–which makes a lot of sense and is very appropriate for high school. Like I said, I hate it when people discount our previous experiences and education. You need a good knowledge foundation, and that will definitely help you at any college you go to, including MIT. Difficult high schools are difficult because they teach a lot of knowledge in a short time.
But MIT’s philosophy is to teach learning.
I didn’t understand this at first. I couldn’t understand how we could pay so much tuition to go to classes where professors didn’t teach us anything (well, it felt that way at the time). You have to really learn concepts fully, and you have to reach an understanding of them that only comes from working with the concept in many different contexts on your own. Sometimes, this is not possible for some people in some classes–to be perfectly honest, I still have no idea what’s going on in math. In that case, if you work hard, you can still at least pass the class (get a C) even if you don’t fully understand everything (which is what I’m doing in math ^^”). In other words, if you really, actually learn things at MIT, you can get a B (maybe an A), and if you don’t but you work really hard, you can get a C.
You also have multiple classes that are all this level of difficulty. This is another way that I think MIT might be different from other schools. The 4-8 hour problem set time I mentioned is for just one class. You’ll have at least four, and hopefully, you’ll also have, you know, a life--friends, clubs, music, art--all these other things that you like doing but which can also eat your time. On top of all this, despite our “no competition” policy, when it seems like everyone around you is doing just fine, it’s demotivating (although trust me, they’re actually not perfect) another difficulty particular to MIT. This feeling can be more crippling than any of the actual work you have to do, and makes it difficult not to descend into listlessness or panic. Random external problems (family, social drama, getting sick, etc.) take a greater toll on your time, your life, and your grades than they would in high school. I actually get more sleep in college than I did in high school–but I also feel like I need sleep more. I cannot survive the extremely dense flood of information–the fire hose–that is fired at me in a single day with less than four hours of sleep. I just can’t.
So that’s why MIT is so hard. Success is not getting an A here. Success is not even getting a C here. Success is maintaining your mental and emotional stability in the face of this fire hose. You cannot give up. You cannot fall away. No matter how badly you do, you cannot let academics define who you are. You have to keep working, and keep working really hard, no matter how pointless it seems at times. Success here is finding or creating a group of people that support each other–giving and receiving both academic and emotional/mental support. Don’t ever close yourself off from these people. Success is knowing that it’s okay to feel upset–but you cannot let being upset consume you. Success here is still making time for the things that make you happy, and separating yourself from your disappointments. Success is failing–and being able to move on.
If you are admitted to MIT, it’s because they know that you have fire. The educational system seems to put every effort into extinguishing that fire, and that often feels awful. But actually, you just become really, really good at burning.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.(if we're going to continue with this metaphor thing then MIT students must be like Valyrian steel!)
(this gif is from Game of Thrones)
(is anyone currently watching season 5? I still need to catch up....)
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