Boston is a marvelous city! During the school year, I have regrettably failed to take advantage of its historical and culinary wonders, but when the post-finals laze took over, I devoted most of my time to local exploration. Armed with an all-powerful MBTA Pass (with unlimited trips for a week!), I discovered new favorite places and once again ascertained that MIT has the best possible college location.

On one side of campus, Central and Harvard Squares inspire with quaint shops and cafés and occasional art festivals. On the other, just beyond the Harvard Bridge, Downtown Boston splits into diverse districts, one for each type of adventure. This post is Part 1.0 of my favorite ways to burst the MIT bubble, dedicated to Downtown Boston.

Boston Common 

Located conveniently by the Park Street MBTA station, the Boston Common, oldest park in the country, is the best beginning for Downtown exploration. Marvelous for people-watching! There is plenty to look at besides passing humans as well, like the old and new, wide and narrow buildings all squeezed together. Surrounding the park in a glorious architectural mix are an AMC movie theatre, a Masonic Lodge, an alleyway towards Chinatown, a Starbucks, one of many ubiquitous local Dunkin Donuts, the Massachusetts State House, and the historical 1809 Park Street Church. On mild-weather days, my friends and I love sitting in the Common’s green spaces with the freshest breeze teasing our hair, looking up and around and having the greatest time. We have gone to the Boston Common to watch movies, trace the American Revolution, continue onto other parts of Boston for modern entertainment, or simply grab a coffee at the Thinking Cup, an adorable coffee shop for the tired explorer.

Chinatown

Love bubble tea? Prefer to share food with friends? I do, and Chinatown is awesome for that. My memories of the district’s architecture are blurry, as the last time my friends and I went there, the air was brutally cold, and sightseeing was not desirable. I did, however, adore eating and drinking in the Chinatown indoors. There is an array of good-looking restaurants offering Asian foods in the area, with delectable green tea always available. Our soup, meat, and salad were served in giant dishes, enough to share among the merry group of four. And to complete the satisfactory outing, we had at least a dozen different bubble tea shops to choose from, with the best prices in town (although I still love the MIT Student Center bubble tea best!).

Faneuil Hall Marketplace (with Quincy Market) 

Further down lies the 1742 “Cradle of Liberty,” Faneuil Hall (with Quincy Market), Downtown Boston’s prime location for a quick and satisfying meal along The Freedom Trail. There are 36 food vendors in the Quincy Market building alone, with additional historical Boston cuisine restaurants inside and around it. For toy lobsters and other Boston-related merchandise (like baby onesies that say “future Harvard freshman”), it’s quite a convenient place, too. And for history lovers. And for shopping aficionados. For tourists, there’s the Make Way for Ducklings toy store and a discount ticket kiosk. For pop culture geeks and music connoisseurs, Newbury Comics. For the no longer hungry but still craving a snack, a two-story Ghirardelli haven. Once, I also caught one of the daily performances. Ever seen a man in a kilt and superman underpants (with a special butt cape) riding a unicycle and playing bagpipes? That would be the world-famous Kilted Colin, entertaining by Faneuil Hall. For a festive mood, there’s also Christmas lights and music shows by Faneuil Hall in the winter.

Boston Harbor

I saw the ocean for the first time this academic year, and loved it. The movies have an inspired way of depicting overjoyed protagonists, plunging into watery vastness. I had high expectations for my first oceanic viewing as well. When I first got to the Boston Harbor (for a really cool Freshman Pre-Orientation Program), I experienced quite the Hollywood-esque joy. Then I shivered through a Boston Harbor boat tour, loving every minute of it. Since, I’ve revealed a personal fascination for bodies of water (Charles River <3), and returning to the ocean for my second boat ride was even more inspiring. If a boat is not available, however, the edge of the Long Wharf is a perfect place to sit and dangle feet over mild waves, guess the destination of outgoing Logan Airport planes, watch the sky turn from blue to navy, and look back at the sparkling Boston skyline. For the prefrosh, the nearby New England Aquarium will also be the place to meet their best first-year friends (and look at adorable penguins).

North End, Boston's Little Italy

Boston and Cambridge shut down early. By 9pm, most stores and restaurants lock their doors and streets fill with crowds looking for late night entertainment. At that time, it’s most fun to walk over to the North End, Boston’s Little Italy, for a chance to participate in the midnight hustle, grab a cup of the most delicious and well-decorated coffee, and indulge in Italian deserts. On warm days, the North End restaurants also open up their facades, and everything feels friendly and lively and free. Crowds roam the streets for cannoli, gelato, eclairs, and tiramisu. My friends and I have often mingled in those. At the Gelateria & Cannoli Factory, we have witnessed firsthand the assembly of beautiful cannolis, filled upon request with flavors like tiramisu, hazelnut, pistachio, or Nutella in an exquisite creation ritual. When most North End restaurants and bakeries lock up for the night, usually around midnight, students can still venture to the district for a snack at Bova’s Bakery, where delicacies are available 24 hours a day, every day. I have been told that every student must try a 4am all nighter snack at Bova’s. This tradition is quite commendable, as the choices at Bova's are vast and mouth-watering.

Haymarket

Haymarket is a not the most tourist-appropriate location. On Friday and Saturday, starting from about 6am, local vendors gather with ripe fruits and veggies, cheese, and fish. The sellers come from a variety of different backgrounds, and so do the customers. Some are friendly, and others grim. Regardless, Haymarket is the place for best grocery deals, ones a buyer can legitimately brag about at home. The shockingly low prices at a market in Downtown Boston are real because “much of the Haymarket produce is what the wholesalers haven't been able to sell during the week to the city's supermarkets” (more here). It’s a trip worth taking for the struggling college students who own cash and are willing to navigate the occasionally tough (but never terrifying) crowds. Plus, the Haymarket is squeezed right between the North End and Faneuil Hall Marketplace, so it’s the perfect destination for a sunny weekend. So much great produce and food all around!

That's all for now! Come back later for adventures in art and science, including the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Science, Boston's South End, and various Cambridge music festivals and art exhibitions. 

P.S.: 24.118 Paradox and Infinity, a course that I raved about here, is now available on edX for public access and learning! If you love math and computer science, want something to learn over the summer and possibly get a verified certificate for it, or simply enjoy thinking about puzzles, paradoxes, logic, and the meaning of truth, make sure to check out Paradox and Infinity here: https://www.edx.org/course/paradox-infinity-mitx-24-118x. The class, taught by the man who currently holds the record for naming the largest finite number, left me mind-blown and even more enamored with math and MIT's uniquely technical approach to philosophy. For a preview of Professor Rayo's contagious enthusiasm, check out these videos on sizes of infinity and the Grandfather Paradox on Wi Phi: http://www.wi-phi.com/contributor/agustín-rayo.

P.P.S: Season 3 of MIT's own Science Out Loud YouTube series is now available online! Blogger Elizabeth C. '13 got us excited for it here and Ceri R. '16 here. In this season, MIT answers essential questions like "Why Do We Have Snot?" (hosted by Elizabeth C. '13), "Why Can We Regrow A Liver (But Not A Limb)?" (hosted by Ceri R. '16), "What Is A Fractal (And What Is It Good For)?" (hosted by me), and other awesome ones like "How Do Braces Work?" The complete Season 3 of Science Out Loud can be found here.

For those of you who didn't notice, the Supreme Court of the United States voted to legalize same-sex marriage yesterday.

MIT noticed.

The Great Dome is one of the most iconic pieces of architecture on campus, and is visible from Boston across the river. MIT hackers have long used the Dome as a medium of art, commentary, and celebration. The Dome has been hacked for the anniversary of 9/11, the Olympics, the Red Sox, the Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Relay for Life, among countless others.

And now here it is, as I found it at 3 AM Saturday morning, just 17 hours after the Supreme Court's ruling. Hackers move fast.

I wanted to let you know of a change in the admissions process for the forthcoming admissions cycle. As you may know, in the past international students (students without US citizenship or permanent residency, including undocumented students) could not apply to MIT during the Early Action (EA) admissions round.

We are pleased to announce that, beginning with this coming admissions cycle (which will begin soon!), the restriction on international students applying early will end. All students, regardless of citizenship or location, will be able to apply for either admissions round, EA or RA.

Other aspects of our policy will not change, including:

• We are a non-binding, non-restrictive Early Action school.
• There is no preference in our process for early applicants. We use the same procedures for admission during EA and RA.
• MIT limits the number of international undergraduates each year. As such, MIT admission is even more competitive for international students applying from overseas.
• Applying for financial aid will not negatively affect a student's admission. Most MIT students, and nearly all international students, are on financial aid.
• Our deadlines will also remain the same, with a November 1 deadline for Early Action. The last acceptable testing date for EA is the November testing date.

We're looking forward to reading both EA and RA applications from a broad cross-section of students.  Best wishes!

It's the middle of July, and my brain is so fried I'm punting on a few projects, so figured I'd make myself useful and answer some questions on a Friday afternoon. 

Ben used to do these big roundup "answers to your questions" posts, where he would just harvest questions from the comments and answer them in the blogs. That was pre-Disqus, and I think Disqus handles that kind of conversation pretty well now, so we can just do that. 

There are 154 people reading the blogs at this very moment, according to Google Analytics, but no one is commenting, so here's a place to do that. Go ahead and ask me anything, about admissions or whatever else, or just talk amongst yourselves in the open thread below. I've got to drive up to a meeting in a few hours, and I've got a sprint triathlon this weekend, so I might not always respond immediately, but I'll pop in and out as I can to answer whatever gets posted. 

On Friday, May 22, I put on some waking-up music and started packing down my room. My finals were done, and move-out day was tomorrow.

I only lived in East Campus G212 for half a semester--just barely two months. Temporary as it had been, my room was a home and a safehouse. With a west-facing window, the sun slanted in past the Green Building in the afternoons and filled the high ceilings with a gentle in-betweenness, half out and half in, half exposed and half enclosed. Occasionally, loud voices and running footsteps, from the stairwell on the other side of the north wall.

The door was always unlocked and often open, leaking music into the hallway. Friends wandered in at odd times; sometimes to say hi, sometimes to share a hug, sometimes to tool in the comfort of silent company. I spent many hours there alone, and just as many not: nights with food, drink, and the chatter of sixteen Toons; afternoons working on group projects; evenings of popcorn movies or quiet conversation. A friend once told me that my room felt welcoming, and I knew I'd done something right.

It was emotional, then, to strip these four walls of my existence. Photographs make a poor substitute for the sensation of interior space, but I grabbed a few anyway.

north wall: aerospace postcards, AeroAstro patch, feathers, prayer cards, buttons, necklaces, swiss army knife, keys, Friendly Toast postcard, tambourine, photos, posters

desk + window under loft: zip-tied power strip, airplane pushpins, rental applications and receipts, computer, lamp, speakers, watch

support wall: letters, cards, friendship bracelet, a portrait done by a friend, an email from Petey about my CMS.400 final project

It will be a while before I return to MIT. Following in the footsteps of many other admissions bloggers, I'm withdrawing from MIT next semester, with plans to return in spring 2016. Over the summer, I'm interning in structural analysis at Northrop Grumman in San Diego; then, I'll be spending 4.5 months in Seattle working for Amazon. It will be the longest time in my life (since preschool, anyway) that I have spent being a non-student.

I anticipate that learning to be a non-student will make me a better student when I return. I hope that I will return with a better sense of what's Out There in the Real World, and also a better sense of What I Don't Know That I Don't Know. I'm looking to find a better understanding of myself: my motivators, my work, my interests, my dreams. I'm trying to shape myself into a better person. For now--one day at a time. Eat three meals a day, sleep at least seven hours a night, exercise two to three times a week. 

I probably won't be blogging much while I'm away, but I'll be on social media. I may resurface here occasionally with news from the outside. See you soon.

Twitter: @allank_o
Tumblr: xeaphyr
Email: ask-allan [at] mit [dot] edu

"I got it on Reuse," people say, with the emphasis in the word falling on the re-. When I see the word elsewhere and say reuse in my head, I'm reminded of the times I said 'UROP' and my grandparents thought I was mispronouncing the name of a continent, or the way I refused to call class and majors by their course numbers my first few weeks here, because it felt elitist to speak in a code no one outside MIT could understand. I gave in. I now speak in numbers and nicknames and mailing lists.

Reuse is a mailing list for giving things away. People email out, describing what they've left where, and people scurry to claim it and carry it away. There's a whole region of the pika basement called Reuse, where people leave what they don't need or want, and take what they do (a good portion of my clothing comes from or goes to pika reuse. I have also obtained from it a nice floor lamp, a little bookcase, and fancy sunscreen. I have also seen some much stranger things in there.) There are a few legends of extraordinary Reuse scores, and tales of Reuse gone wrong, but most of it is pretty mundane.

The author of MIT Reuse Poetry takes Reuse emails, adds line breaks, and makes poems that are sometimes pretty, sometimes mundane, and sometimes leave you with the feeling you have looked into someone's life through their belongings, or seen the chaos of the world through a jumble of discarded items. Some are funny, some are weird, and some make me sad but I can't tell why. Some I scroll past without reading, like I do with most of my emails. Below, for your entertainment: five Reuse poems, straight from the tumblr.

Effluvia

Appearing shortly
on the bench
outside of the first floor nautical museum
is a box containing,
but not limited to:

Keyboards Dell/Apple/wireless Microsoft
Cables (various usb ones)
Juicy fruit tin (no actual gum inside)
Devil guy from Fantasia (tiny desk thing)
James dean pin
Pocket bike racer (Xbox game)
Reusable Target bag
Pocket translator mini computer thing
Star Wars republic commando (this reuse pile is cashing in on the latest Star Wars mania)
Clipboard that is also a box that clips shut with pencil compartment
2x 512mb pc3200 ddr
A thing your aunt gave you that you don’t know what it is

Come
and get it. Post
if you take something
and save someone else the trip.
We aren’t savages
here. 

Felt

Felt on bench by 1-132
Red,
dark brown,
and the color of some humans’ flesh

A bag of ice melt

It’s a 50-pound bag
that’s about half full.

A red chair—kind of a like a Papasan, with a metal frame.
A bag of moss.
A stand fan, operational status unknown.

It's summer in Cambridge, which means three things:

1) I'm slow-cooking ribs at least once a week

2) My Google search history is basically variations of "where to buy industrial sized vats of SPF 50"

3) It's time for those of you who might want to be bloggers to TAKE THE PLUNGE

What does it mean to be an admissions blogger? Here is the opening paragraph from the blogger training manual that Lydia and I send to all the new bloggers during blogger training:

The mission of the blogs is to allow our bloggers to express to the world what being a student at MIT is like.

You should interpret this mandate expansively. We want you to write about the formal admissions process (essay tips, interview advice, etc), but we also want you to write about things you do at MIT. Admissions officers can write about holistic admissions authentically. We can’t write about what it’s like to be in a Sadoway lecture, or planning stuff for REX, or UROPing, or deciding how to pick your classes, or a really cool new thing you learned today in class, and so forth.

The day-to-day experience of your life at MIT is a perspective only you can provide, so you should feel reasonably free to write about things you do, think, and experience while you are here. Beyond that, we will not tell you what to write or what not to write, with one golden guideline: don’t get the blogs shut down.

MIT operates by setting a very high standard of admission to the academic enterprise and then offering those who clear the bar substantial creative autonomy to independently pursue whatever they think is interesting and worthwhile; the blogs are a specific example of the general case.

At a high level, we are looking for bloggers with good judgment who can write clearly and regularly to help communicate to their readers something about what it's like to be an MIT student. Note that I say 'write.' Over the years, we have had many, many bloggers who have deployed pictures, cartoons, and video with wonderful, adorable, beautiful creativity. But fundamentally, the blogs remain a written medium, and students who have a demonstrated track record of (or in their application demonstrate the potential for) writing consistently and well tend to be the most compelling candidates.

Bloggers are expected to blog at least twice a month. New bloggers will also spend at least 3 hours a week "in residence" in the admissions office during normal business hours, to a) help new bloggers structure writing time into their schedules, and b) make it easier for them to ask staff and student workers for clarification on matters of fact (policies, procedures, etc) if they're responding to questions or comments. You will also be inducted into our grand global conspiracy of nerds who write about MIT on the Internet and learn the secret blogger handshake and stuff. 

If this sounds like something you might like to do, then head on over to Slideroom and fill out the blogger application, due July 31st. If anything isn't clear, let me know in the comments or via email! 

Close up shot of Pluto. (Image Credit: NASA)

On Jan 19, 2006, the New Horizons team at NASA launched a space probe to the Kuiper Belt. Nine and half years and 3 billion miles later, it has reached its destination and made its closest approach to Pluto. It sent back a preliminary photo of Pluto, much crisper than the 1996 Hubble photo. Right now the probe is facing towards Pluto to collect data. Once it's finished, it will turn back to the Earth and begin transmit it.

The New Horizons team estimates 16 months before all the data is fully transmitted. But when the data is fully transmitted and the full resolution photos arrive, scientists will be able to pick out details on Pluto as small as the ponds in New York City's Central Park.

Photos of Pluto in 1930, 1996, and 2015 pic.twitter.com/Nfw63iQBjG

— John D. Cook (@JohnDCook) July 14, 2015

Richard Binzel, a New Horizons mission co-investigator, is also professor in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. He's been studying Pluto for 35 years and helped design the New Horizon's spacecraft.

“Just the inspiration of that human spirit of exploration the insatiable curiosity we have as a species I hope that gets into the minds and hearts of every kid around the world,”  said Binzel, according to an article in CBS Boston.

MIT professor Richard Binzel, MIT graduate student Alissa Earle, and Cristina Dalle Ore (SETI Institute) react to seeing the spacecraft's latest image of Pluto. (Image Credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA)

But Richard Binzel isn't the only MIT affiliate working with New Horizons. In fact, MIT has had a long history with Pluto:

Professor Jim Elliot - MIT EAPS (Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences) professor. Pioneer of the stellar occultation technique that led to the discovery of Uranus' rings, as well as Pluto's atmosphere by his steam including Leslie Young.

Professor Richard Binzel - MIT EAPS professor. Co-investigator on the New Horizons Team and expert on near-Earth asteroids. Among other things, Binzel invented the Torino Scale, a method for categorizing the danger levels of near-Earth objects like asteroids. He was also on the committee that developed the proposal on whether Pluto should be considered as a planet.

Michael Person '94, SM'01, PhD '06 - Research scientist aboard SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy), a high-altitude NASA plane that went over New Zealand on June 29 to catch the stellar occultation of of Pluto passing directly between Earth and a distant star. The way Pluto blocked the starlight gave hints as to its atmospheric composition.

Amanda Bosh '86, PhD '94 - MIT Lecturer, part of a team in Arizona that triangulated the planetary and stellar positions at the same time as Person.

Read more about Person and Bosh in Q&A: Catching Pluto's shadow | MIT News.

Eliot Young ScD '92 - MIT grad student studying planetary sciences in the late 1980s. Worked with Professor Jim Elliot and Ted Dunham to build instruments for airborne missions, including ones to study Pluto. Then worked to map out the dark and light areas of Pluto by measuring how Pluto's face dimmed as sections of it eclipsed with Charon - a property called albedo - between 1985 and 1995 when Pluto and Charon where regularly eclipsing each other.

Leslie Young PhD '94 - Deputy project scientist on the New Horizons mission. She's been studying Pluto since the 80's, helping to discover Pluto's atmosphere as an undergrad at Harvard. Her MIT team, led by Jim Elliot, used stellar occultations to deduce properties about Pluto. In measuring how much the light dims during an eclipse, Leslie's team more closely estimated Pluto's size. And in noting whether the light dims suddenly or slowly, Leslie's team deduced that Pluto did have an atmosphere. Her first job out of college was programming for Jim Elliot at MIT. She then did her doctoral thesis on Pluto with Elliot as her adviser. Now works for the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).

"When Leslie and Eliot Young were growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, family life revolved around their father, Larry Young, a legendary researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. Young specializes in the biological effects of weightlessness, and he trained to fly on the space shuttle although he never went into orbit." - Read more about Leslie and Eliot in Planetary science: The Pluto siblings | Nature

Cathy Olkin '88, PhD '96 - Another of New Horizon's deputy project scientists. Was part of Jim Elliot's MIT group a few years after Leslie. She also worked on observing occultations and has chased Pluto's shadows across Pacific islands and New Zealand, as they require very time-crucial measurements.

Amanda Zangari PhD '13 - Postdoctoral Researcher at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) working with NASA’s New Horizons Mission. She has a blog called Postcards from Pluto where she shares all the different tasks from her job. She studied astrophysics at Wellesley College and then went on to graduate school at MIT, graduating with a PhD in Planetary Science.

Alissa Earle - Current MIT graduate student pursuing her doctorate in planetary sciences, working for New Horizons. She graduated undergrad in '13 with a physics and math major from Sienna College. She appears in the New Horizons photo above next to Binzel.

But why is all this important though? It's just a rock, right? Well, no, we can't even be too sure what it is yet. It's in the Kuiper belt, in the far reaches of our solar system. And the Kuiper belt could be home to many strange things we have no idea about. Pluto isn't one of our terrestrial planets like Venus or Earth nor is it a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn. It, along with the possibly millions of other cosmic bodies whirling around in the Kuiper belt, are another thing entirely. And now we have crystal clear photos to figure it out.

The last time a space probe visited a new world for the first time was when Voyager 2 shot photos of Neptune during its flyby in 1989. And now, in 2015, the initial survey of all the known planets, starting when NASA's Mariner 4 flew by Mars and captured its first images fifty years ago, has been completed.

We should feel proud we will soon know much more about Pluto that may surprise us. Textbooks will change, but our movies and fiction books might too. When Mars was heavily surveyed, Martian films became popular. The same may go for Pluto.

In the realm of politics, things may be different too. America is now the first and only country to have surveyed all the major known bodies in our solar system. NASA continues to demonstrate American ingenuity and capability.

Sadly it seems exploring a new major territory outside of the solar system is very unlikely with our lifetime, so enjoy this moment. It may be the last of its kind.

What did you think of the flyby?

Read More:

Pluto Flyby: Anybody Home? | Slice of MIT

MIT professor hopes Pluto flyby proves picture perfect | The Boston Globe

3 Questions: Richard Binzel on New Horizons' closest view of Pluto | MIT News

MIT Astronomer Was 'Gasping For Air' After Seeing Historic Pluto Flyby | CBS Boston

What New Horizon Means to An MIT Professor Who Spent Almost 35 Years On A Pluto Mission | RadioBoston

Erick is an MIT rising junior studying computer science and electrical engineering, blogging mainly on college advice and social entrepreneurship. You can find a full archive of Erick's posts on his website www.erickpinos.com.

We’re sitting in my room doing pretty much nothing, because I guess we’re lame, or because there’s not much to do in the first place. It’s a Friday night, but campus is quiet in the summer.

My door is open. It’s pretty hot in here, but I’m pretty used to it. There are a few people on the bed and one in my chair, when enter Brenda through the doorway. Brenda is bubbly and sweet and used to live on this floor and is wearing a red dress with white polka dots to match her red (pink?) hair. She acquaints herself with the room. I tell her she should come sit on the bed, if she wants, and that I think her dress is cute.

Nick is on the other side of the bed, by the window, and I mention to him and Brenda that I hadn’t been working on my UROP. I say this in a sort of half-jokingly-triumphant way because I had been uninterested in the project for a while, but felt sort of conflicted about whether or not I should do it anyway, because I don’t know… is quitting your summer UROP a thing? is a resume a thing I should care about? is there a good reason I should feel obligated to continue? to which I had settled on “probably not” for each. Brenda applauds this decision; Nick expresses a similar dispassion. Emilio suggests that it might be more interesting to do research than to do nothing, a comment I would think comes from a place of him being very interested in his own work. I know a lot of people who feel this way, but I don’t think I’m one of them yet.

To follow this discussion, Brenda raises a thought. She says “you guys, it’s weird to think that this is probably the last period of time where we can just exist as people.”

And I think, wait, what? But she continues, and clarifies that she expects the rest of her foreseeable future to be defined by pressing obligations, exams, internships, careers, deadlines… commitments that, in one way or another, limit one’s ability to exist as a person.

Emilio says “what, no, it’s definitely not,” and I agree with him that it doesn’t have to be. I’m not sure in reality if it will be or not, though she’s right that it’s weird to think that.

~

The other day I woke up at 10 to say goodbye to my mom and sisters. My two little sisters are fraternal twins who are both two years younger than I am. We had spent the last few days wandering around Cambridge and eating lunch multiple times in a row and generally being cute.

A night-shifted sleep schedule makes 10 way too early, so I was still sleepy when they left. I took a shower, did all the normal waking-up things, and erroneously decided I was awake enough to go into Boston to pick up a thing I’d been meaning to buy. Soon after I sat down on the Green Line train, I drifted into sleep.

I was the only person left on the train in what you could reasonably classify as the middle of nowhere, way at the end of the line. The driver was telling me to get off, and so I came to my senses, felt silly for a second, then stepped out to see where I was. There was a hospital, I think. A parking lot, the occasional car, a person or two in the distance. Google maps told me it would take 40 minutes if I wanted to walk back, to which I decided “why not.” It was slightly more hot than was comfortable outside, but I guess I’d handled worse.

Huh? I didn’t actually hear what he yelled at me. He was the only other person in the vicinity and we were both walking in the same direction from the middle of nowhere to the middle of somewhere and I was mildly afraid of him, because I don’t know, stranger danger. He approached me. I asked him his name. “Fred.”

He was shortish, smiley, not dressed super well. He must have been in his late twenties. He told me he regretted that he hadn't taken his education seriously when he was younger because now he had all of these ideas for public transportation innovations that he would never be able to work on. He was instead a landscaper, and he said he felt angry too often. He was waiting for a “catalyst” to change everything in his life, and joked that he might run for office to make history as the first politician with tattoos on his face. I told him I would totally vote for him.

After I walked all the way back to where I actually needed to be, I said goodbye and it was nice meeting you and I walked north as he went east. I bought what I wanted, then settled into a nearby café to read about anarchist poetry and literature for a while. I ate a one-scoop cup of their overpriced gelato before returning to campus to meet some friends for dinner. Harry, the beautiful British ray of sunshine who lives two doors down from me, was visiting for a few days from his internship in DC. We realized the place where we wanted to eat was closed so we ate Mexican food instead and went back to East Campus and lit a massive cockroach on fire.

~

I don’t really know what I want. I don’t always enjoy studying for classes, but I like the feeling of having studied, then seeing in an email a few days later that my score exceeds the average. I like the feeling of concrete accomplishment and the notion that each good grade or resume item might help me do what I want in the future. Not that I’m sure what that is.

I like to learn new things. I recently spent a day reading about indigenous cultures, for example, then the next day looking at human intelligence. I’m learning about different philosophies and deciding if they make sense to me. I can read ten hours a day without any class or exam to do it for.

I like having silly nonsensical text conversations with my boyfriend. I like when my friends show me videos of terrifying sea worms. I like the feeling of walking along the river and smiling at a passing Labradoodle then considering that the person walking it probably feels neglected, because her dog is getting all the attention, and then awkwardly smiling at her too.

I don’t really know.

~

Archana’s family is traditional, but Archana is unconventional. She has a quick wit and vibrant personality and hides a collection of tiny happy phallic decorations when her parents come to visit. Earlier this summer, we were hanging out in my room when I told her I was thinking of getting a septum piercing, you know, in the pursuit of a folk-punk aesthetic.

“Oh, I was just talking about that recently with Jessica,” she said, “I was thinking of getting one on my eyebrow. But I’m not sure.”

I said “you totally should, cause we could match and be like… a gang.” We went on my laptop to look up nearby piercing parlors and pictures of people with piercings, and I ended up getting mine the following day. I learned in the aftercare brochure that you can’t actually take out jewelry from a facial piercing for several months after getting pierced (something I maybe should have considered beforehand, whoops). Fortunately, if it’s a septum piercing, you can easily hide it if you need to by just flipping the jewelry upwards.

I told Archana the thing about not being able to hide most piercings, knowing that her parents wouldn’t approve (my mom, for the record, told me I looked punk). She ended up getting the septum piercing too, and we agreed we were officially twins, or a gang, or both because why not.

Some time later, I wrote out a several-thousand word overview of a political philosophy I had been interested in. It wasn’t finished, but it was something like an infusion of my own ideas into the anti-authoritarian leftism that Chomsky writes about. I had spent the past while reading as much as I could about these ideas - their criticisms, the assumptions behind them - and carefully considering it all.

I sent the document to Archana, to whom I had mentioned I was interested in this kind of thing. She wrote me a generously detailed response about what she thought was good, what was unclear, and potential counterarguments I neglected to refute. She then asked if she could send me her own writing; it was a poem about her introspections and family and life.

~

I have a job to pay for housing here this summer. It’s non-academic and non-resume boosting, but it gives me freedom to spend most of my time how I want with the occasional disruption for attending to someone. When I’m asked what I’m doing this summer, I tend to not mention it at all.

I would say that this summer I’ve learned about political theory, psychology, and the practice of hypnotism. I’m most of the way through a cute online course in Esperanto where a green cartoon bird cries if you don’t practice every day. I’m trying to develop a more complete personal philosophy, and I think I’m becoming the kind of person who uses the word “fascist” in describing things that aren’t governments. heh heh.

I’m spending more time with other people. I’m not naturally the most outgoing person, but I feel very close with the friends that I have. We take trips together, make each other laugh, get the same holes in our faces, and share things that are important to us.

I finally made friends with the cat on my floor who used to always run away when I tried to pet him. He’s orange and his face reminds me of a surprised owl. His name is Caboodle.

   
figure (a)                                          figure (b)



I think I’ve been very happy lately.

~

The other day Nick and I hung out by the river from one to six-something in the morning. We talked about a wide range of random thoughts, and it was very sweet and wonderful.

At one point we were discussing the prospect of grad school. I told him that I still wasn’t sure whether I would rather get straight As or tread more leisurely to enjoy little things along the way. Balance is obviously a thing people do, or try to do, but that simple ideal doesn’t answer these situational dilemmas about whether you should study for 18.03 an extra hour vs. write a poem about your thoughts. Or say, complete a research internship or just spend your time how you like.

I got so caught up during the year. Maybe part of it was the vague anxiety of failing college and becoming an angry yard worker, or at least not being able to do the job I want. Definitely a lot of it came from the fact that I wasn’t yet taking classes that interested me (GIRs and stuff), so I would procrastinate too much and provoke the little voice in the back of my mind to whine “staaap enjoying yourself and go work.” It’s not hard to forget how to just be a person with the craziness of this place, sometimes. But it's quiet in the summer. 

My high school was this tiny sort of dinky-looking building on the campus of a community college, forty-five minutes from my house. It was a public science and engineering magnet high school that runs an annual admission exam and accepts the top scoring kid(s) from each town in our suburban New Jersey county. I applied mostly because a friend was applying, but I got in, and he didn’t.

When MIT hopefuls ask what an MIT student did in high school, they tend to mean “what went on their application.” There is obviously a lot of your high school self that is conveyed when you apply to college, but that filtered projection of an imperfect person isn’t nearly representative of “what you did in high school,” so it’s not what I wanted to write about.

Instead, here’s a genuine account of one way to be a living human person in high school and end up at MIT. Maybe I’ll write about my application some other day so we can like compare the two for fun. But anyway!

During high school, I:

• Didn’t always consider that college was a thing.

I remember sometime during freshman year a classmate was whining about his grades. He mentioned something about colleges, which confused me, because I was under the impression that your college application was literally entirely based on your junior year.

On another freshmany occasion, a classmate was whining about having to do community service, which confused me because our school didn’t have any such requirement. When I asked why he was doing it, he said it was to get service hours to qualify for National Honor Society come our junior year. I think I teasingly called him a nerd, because I still didn’t understand.

It took a bit of time for me to start working as hard as I did in the end. I was never a bad student, but initially more the type to go hard learning things I wanted to and leave Algebra II studying for the lunch period before the test. I sometimes got Bs, and I sometimes got Cs, and it wasn’t the end of the world.

• Learned that college Was in Fact a Thing

I think it’s somewhat silly to contend that there are teenagers who innately want to learn about everything they study in high school - kids who simultaneously care about titrations and ancient civilizations and every important historical figure and his cousin. I mean, maybe they’re out there, but I won’t pretend to be one of them, and I doubt most MIT hopefuls are either. I started getting serious about studying these things when I learned you need good grades for college.

My GPA jumped from a lowish A to a solid A to an even more solid A from my freshman to junior year. It felt good to me to get good grades because good grades are pretty important. But please don’t believe for a second that they’re the most important thing.

• Made “”“art”””

What I did spend a lot of time doing that first year of high school (and all of the other years too) was messing around with my totally legal copy of Adobe Creative Suite to make ridiculous creations for fun.

Here is the first GIF I ever made, feat. Robby circa early 2011. wow. Amazing

(at that point I hadn’t yet figured out how to infinitely loop GIFs, so to preserve the historical integrity of the piece, you’ll have to reload the page if you want to watch it over and over again.)

• Made art

Eventually I got somewhat better at the design software I was using and procrastinated on my schoolwork by making these single-afternoon art projects. Most of them are sitting away on my old computer, but I started uploading a few on YouTube in junior year for the world to see.

random stuff like this:
 

and this
 

and this.
 

• Spent an ungodly amount of time on Tumblr

In hindsight, I am positive that signing up for a Tumblr account was actually a terrible idea. I don’t know if I can think of any other activity that’s so consistently effective for distraction. On the flip side, I now have an Internet archive of rambly thoughts and writings (and teenage angst) from my high school days, which I think is maybe worth something.

• Worked at a daycare my sophomore summer

My mom told me she heard about a daycare in the town next to ours that had job openings for teenagers. I super love little kids and I thought that sounded like fun, plus a good opportunity to practice my Spanish, since that’s what most of the staff and kids spoke. I don’t think I’ve ever been closer to physically melting into a puddle than when I made a two-year-old stop crying by sitting her on my lap and reading to her. Or more intimidated by another human being than by the belligerent five-year-old Carla… like, I was just trying to be nice and help the kids with their game when she told me I was too old to play with them. :(

• Joined the school play

Basically I’m horrible at any skill potentially related to being in a play (speaking loudly, memorizing lines, not being terrified of the audience, acting) which totally didn’t stop me from being in a play in sophomore year. I think I was pretty awful, but I got to play the granddaughter of this girl I thought was really cute and our characters hugged at the end. Also a girl who I think realized I was feeling nervous told me afterwards that her mom commented that my character was very believable, which made me feel a bit less unconfident. After the last show, the upperclassmen who gave funny superlatives to the participants sarcastically named me “loudest.”

• Was involved in research

One thing that was great about my high school was that we had to take classes about how to do research and then each do a project ourselves. My project was about the effect of acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) on the drought stress of Solanum Lycopersicum (tomato) plants, which I grew from seeds then deprived of water then chopped up at the stems like the sadistic maniac I am. Heh heh. Anyway, it was a pretty basic high school thing without any fancy equipment, but I landed first place in my category at the tristate level science fair. “Great project,” said the judges on the scoring sheet, “but work on your presentation skills.” (I was also super nervous to present.)

I definitely enjoyed doing research that year, though I was never invested in it enough to go to ISEF or anything. The following summer I arranged a research internship at Rutgers University, for which I pretty much functioned as a data analysis slave. I was okay with grunt work, though, since I could listen to music and hang out with the cool big college kids at lunchtime and my professor was really cute and old.

• “Creatively interpreted” school projects

Another thing I did for fun in high school was filming dumb movies and then putting bad special effects on them. I would also usually try to find ways to make school assignments more interesting by incorporating the things I enjoyed. As a result, my teachers were often confused.

A lovely gem I put together for an English project. If you want just a few seconds to summarize it, I suggest 1:33 or 0:40 when I wave to a ten-year-old kid in the park laughing at us from afar.

For Digital Electronics literally I just had to submit a raw video of the thing working, but I noticed that the unedited videos didn’t have a satisfactory amount of flying CGI skeletons in them, which resulted in masterpieces like this.

• Hung out with Robby and his family

You might be asking “who exactly is this Robby fellow?” which might then prompt descriptions of a boisterous, fluffy-haired boy who talks about neuroscience and has a good/crazy/confusing sense of humor, depending on who you’re asking. Robby and I have been dating for four years now and we’re both rising sophomores at MIT and I think we’re maybe cute.

We used to walk to the Dunkin Donuts after school to hang out before going home. Gradually that turned into us usually both going to his home, where we watched like every episode of The Office and I got to know his family. Robby’s dad went to MIT, and he talks about it sometimes. They still have the McCormick Hall sign that he stole as an undergrad as a decoration in their house.

• Hung out with Bill

Robby and I and a couple of other friends got to know our janitor after school, who was cool and funny and occasionally gave wise life advice. Robby would do a screechy voice and yell “BILL!” and Bill would yell “wahhhsahhhhp” and I would laugh at them for their antics. One day after school he said he needed a haircut, so Robby helped shave his head.

• Made bad puns

Somehow my friends and I got it in our heads that terrible puns should be made as often as possible (of course not to imply that I have at all stopped believing this). We used to amuse/enrage each other by thinking of some garbage wordplay for every situation.

Occasionally we would utilize these “skills” in our classes. In perhaps my proudest moment, I presented a project in chemistry class about the family of elements we were assigned - carbon, silicon, germanium, tin, lead. Gertrude Germanium was the mother in the family who loved instrumental music. There was this compelling back story I wrote about her: she was a stay-at-home mom who was finally following her passion by taking music classes at our local community college, and training to lead an orchestra one day. But as she wasn’t yet a full conductor, she was only a semi-conductor. (ba dum tish. sorry.)

• Played a lot of League and Minecraft

On League of Legends, my favorite role was top lane and my favorite champion was a mad chemist who poisoned enemies and wore bandages for pants. On Minecraft I would stay up till 5 a.m. on school nights building tunnels and a sponge-dungeon and an Omar Hotel on my friend Omar’s server Omarville. My mom is really sweet and would come into my room like “here, I poured you a cup of coffee, you’ve been in your room so long… you must have a lot of work today.” ._. Not exactly.

• Took AP tests without taking the classes

AP self-study was a surprisingly big thing at my school, where we had the option to sign up to take any AP test we wanted. Robby and I saw it as a way to motivate ourselves to learn material for interesting classes (economics, psychology, comparative government..) that weren’t offered in our limited curriculum. I self-studied ten of them in total, and got mostly 5s and some 4s. Robby is I guess more hardcore than I am and self-studied 16 (?) and got 5s on all but two… that nerd.

• Entered like, a ton of random contests & competitions

Here’s a friendly step-by-step guide to being Junior Year Michelle, i.e. a high school kid with some interests that were not even vaguely touched upon by anything in her high school’s class offerings, but who wanted some formal way to practice them.

Sooo step one, you go on to Google dot com and type in “animation for high schoolers.” When nothing relevant comes up, you get sort of discouraged, but you keep going - “animation contests for high schoolers,” “video contests December 2012,” etc, etc. Eventually, you’ll find something along the lines of “NASA Aura Communications Contest” or “High School Video Contest - Explain any neuroscience concept in a viewer-friendly format.” It’s due in two weeks, and you know some people who like biology, so you team up with them and decide to give it a go. You do the animating, your friend does the script-writing and audio, and two weeks later you’ve got a super adorable new animation in which smiling neuroglia tell you what they do for the brain.

D’Awww.

Another science visualization contest, starring… stars. Baby ones:

(If you want to make me happy you can watch this video and exaggeratedly comment about how much you liked it because I honestly spent like 10 hours getting the stupid gas cloud to spin properly and we only got 2nd place and I need validation from the Internet for my efforts.)

Uhh. But yeah! I entered 15 or 20 of these over the span of a year and won at least some award or mention (or $$$$) in I think 11 of them. I had a lot of fun making cool videos and pursuing a passion and crushing the brittle skulls of the competition between my hands. (☉‿☉✿)

Also there was one video contest held by the United States Treasury and the grand prize was getting to meet Treasurer Rosa Rios, whose signature you’ll find on any recent US paper money and who seems to be up to some interesting stuff now re: women on currency. We had this 40 minute conversation in which she told me about her job and life. She also told me that her family calls money with her signature on it “Rosie bucks.”

• Connected Four

One day I was sitting in class when my friend sitting next to me drew a little rectangle on a piece of graph paper and made an “o” in a cell at the bottom. She asked if I knew how to play Connect Four, to which I responded with a countermove, which ended with the graph paper being covered in rectangle "game boards" after we’d played like 10 times that period. Soon I started playing the game with whomever was sitting next to me and they started playing the game with whomever was sitting next to them and before long it infected a reasonably sized group of students, which culminated in a Connect Four club meeting after school with every member as the co-president. We wrote up an elaborate set of by-laws and devised a ranking system and I made an advertisement (see below) for new members that we mass-mailed out to the school.

• Quit the National Honor Society

I joined NHS because someone told me colleges liked that kind of thing, and I quit for a similar reason.

If you come from a high school where a lot of students are interested in going to top colleges, you’ll know what I mean when I say that often high school involvement in service activities can be bull..uh…stuff. Not all of it, of course. But maybe you know at least one or two people who are half-heartedly volunteering so they can write their college essay about the glimpse in the poor child’s eyes that changed their entire perspective on life, and how they’re a really, really good person, like seriously. How could MIT reject someone who definitely totally cares about poor people? Does MIT hate poor people?… should we anonymously troll the blogs with this accusation? I think yes.

And okay, you might point out that even apathetic volunteering can have positive effects on communities, which is true, but beside the point. I got volunteer hours for NHS through school club participation and counting my Rutgers internship (I didn’t get paid so.. sort of counts?) and by volunteering at this community-funded thrift shop where I cleaned and organized clothing. I even sometimes exaggerated the number of hours I spent cleaning so I could uphold my membership in an organization for students who were honest, morally upright, examples for their peers… which I thought would help me get into MIT. eugh. I never wanted to be that person, and cleaning never felt so dirty.

But then… cawwwlege. But dreams. But ends, not means. It doesn’t seem like an easy dilemma when you’re standing right in the midst of the mania, where so many of my peers in NHS were standing alongside me. There’s this crazy culture of 8% acceptance rates and SAT prep and CollegeConfidential that compels high-achieving kids to feel like this superficial stuff is necessary, and so I don’t think it’s their fault for having this misconception. But let me repeat that it is a misconception.

I had a friend whom I told I was going to quit NHS. He’s this friendly absent-minded genius type who does physics and is MIT ’17. He was never eligible to join NHS in the first place because I think he had the record for the most lates and/or detentions (from accidentally breaking silly rules) out of anyone in our high school. The first time I saw him he was actually sitting diagonal from me in detention and working on some math thing. I don’t remember exactly what he said when I told him I was quitting NHS, but it was something like “Congratulations, man.” He was so against the institution of kids feigning interest in community service (and recognized that it wasn’t actually necessary for college) that he was at one point trying to talk to as many underclassmen as possible about it to start a mini-revolution in the way people think about admissions. Do something if it’s meaningful to you, essentially, and don’t do it if it’s not.

Here, I dug this up for you guys.

• Helped classmates with homework

I have always been somewhat uneasy with individualist attitudes. For me it’s utilitarian: if someone is struggling with something you can do, you help them out, save them some struggle, and feel happier yourself knowing that.

I often tried to find little ways to steer classmates in the right directions. In junior year a close friend was dealing with hard things that made it more difficult for them to work than for me, so I would say like “I’ll do half of this English homework for you if you do the other half.” I think maybe a lot of people would view that as a bad thing, but I personally didn’t agree.

• Hung out with Madame

Robby loved his French class. In addition to purely enjoying the class, he thought the French teacher (called Madame) was a cool and wonderful person. I never personally took French, but I ended up getting to know her because Robby would always bring me along when he went to her room during lunch and after school to hang out and talk about random stuff.

• Had mixed relationships with my teachers

I think I overall had positive relationships with my teachers. I mean, I was a good student in most classes, didn’t talk too much, and often had fun with their projects. I definitely wasn’t like a “favorite student,” but I was rarely troublemaking either. Rarely, as in, not never.

There were a few teachers who I wasn’t on great terms with. The one that comes to mind is this teacher who I guess I found to be arrogant, and would express old-fashioned opinions that really upset me on principle. I didn’t like him, and I didn’t care whether he liked me either.

I once was sitting in the first row of his class drawing a cute picture of my friend Joanna (MIT ’18, actually) when he started talking about how if you start a company, you have to make sure that all your employees are working and there aren’t any lazy “bad apples” drawing pictures all the time. Tee hee. I would sometimes write dumb stuff on my homework assignments and he would write “not funny.” I was, on one occasion, defiant. People have different opinions about how important respect for authority is; most people believe it’s a good idea to respect the authority of your teachers, even if you don’t much respect the teacher themself. But I don’t know. I’m presenting without comment the fact that I occasionally didn’t.

On the other hand, I had notably positive relationships with some of the teachers that I liked. For example, I remember in sophomore year there were two physics teachers who I thought were the coolest ever. One of them would write and sing silly physics songs in class which made me sooooo happy, so my friend Matt had her record one of them for me over an instrumental track as a gift for my birthday. The song was called “Delta P” to the tune of “Let it be.”

~When I find myself in a collision, Isaac Newton comes to me…. speaking words of wisdom, Delta P, Delta P. ~

:’)

The next year, as per a friend’s (probably joking) suggestion, I asked this same teacher if she thought it would be a good idea if I threw a surprise 70th birthday party for the other physics teacher, whom I had the previous year for my engineering class. She said (enthusiastically) yes, so I invited the whole school and organized food and decorations and everyone yelled “surprise” then sang a cute birthday song written by my Biology teacher for the event.

*obligatory party horn noise*

• Was clearly the best dressed at my senior prom

One thing that I tried to never do in high school was to take anything too seriously, and to follow the wisdom of (my crush) Aubrey Plaza to “Make all your decisions based on how hilarious it would be if you did it.” Here are some cute pictures of Robby and me at prom.

• Co-wrote a graduation speech

..about how important it is to collaborate with peers, to mutually believe in outlandish goals, to do instead of think about doing. To be a bit crazy, and a little bit silly; to always go out of your way.

A lot has changed in my life since then, and I think that I’ve learned a lot too. But I hope I never learn to do things that I don't find meaningful or enjoyable. I think that’s the bottom line. 

When I'm feeling irritable and/or stressed, I dislike empty advice. I particularly loathe the phrase “work smarter not harder”, probably because it was said to me many times last year by half-hearted well-intentioners who wished to somehow alleviate my IHTFP feelings (then negative) but couldn’t think of better advice. I don’t blame them, certainly, they were just trying to be positive. Still, I don’t believe in blanket statements. I like details, caveats, and qualifications. I like taking a little bit of this and that and putting it together into what works for me. I hate those cliche commands--”Work smarter not harder” “Be more focused” “Be more efficient”--because they never tell you how to do any of that, and though the sentiments behind those goals are good, I’ve never found them actually very helpful.

Summer is a good time for planning and reflection. My nerdy corner of Tumblr is where I put a lot of this reflection. In particular, I seem to have an obsession with productivity for the pure sake of productivity, analyzing and re-analyzing my personal behavior, and, as can happen anywhere on the internet, I was surprised in the last couple years to find an entire niche community of people--called “studyblrs”, and consisting largely of college students--that had created a space for expressing this obsession, among other study and work-related pursuits. 

When summer began, I saw a lot of “Things I learned from college” posts from other college student "studyblrs" on tumblr, and I applaud them for being very specific--I once saw a list of sixty-six individual items that were all pretty detailed. But that being said, we’re still all a little different--which is why you can never have too many of those posts, I think. This was my own little contribution, and I have since modified and added to it for the blogs. I hope that people might glean a new procrastination-combatting tactic or two from it, and learn from my own mistakes.

(Note: Of course, there were many more important and personal revelations that occurred after freshman year of college that you might think should be included in this post, but what’s included here is simply an obsessive analysis of my habits and how I might change them. Indulge me.)

Studying/Academic Work

(^how to make studying for finals in December cozy)

I have had ADHD since I was a small child. I’ve now (presumably) grown out of it, to the point that for a time I wondered if my diagnosis had been false. After a lot of personal reflection and research (and realizing I trusted my doctor immensely) I realized that it was definitely not false, and what's more, some of the effects still linger. I have tried, in the past year, to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate my work habits. Instead of fighting against my own strange idiosyncrasies with traditional studying or work techniques, I decided to allow them to exist, work around them, and hopefully take advantage of them. Most importantly, this involves realizing what they are.

I noticed that the following occurs when I am very stressed/tired/etc., since it is the behavior I exhibited during the end of finals when I was already burnt out, but still needed to cram. Some of it is rather odd, but there you have it. Since this is the case at an extreme, I hope that if I take action in accordance with these behaviors even when I am not as worn out, my productivity levels will increase.

• I work best in 2-hour intervals, preferably there is a change of location between each interval (e.g., library→coffee shop→library→home)
• When I am feeling exceptionally tired and unproductive, I should just give in and sleep/nap. This will make me more productive later.
• I work best in the early morning or the evening, I work worst in the afternoon (around 2-6pm)
• If I have a whole day to work, regardless of when I go to bed I should just get up early and then take a nap in the afternoon, because getting up later than 7:30AM throws me off (in the spring time that is; this is probably a different time interval for the fall/winter when the sun rises later)
• Although I enjoy listening to music while studying, I work best when I do not listen to music. The best sound environment is the library, or a cafe when quiet, around other people working. Sometimes, music is good to start my work, because it makes me feel less stressed and more comfortable, but as my concentration mounts it's best to turn it off.
• Other people working influences me to work. This is why libraries and cafes are good environments.
• I do not work well in my own room/home.
• The worst work environments are: 

                  1. by myself in my own room anytime before 10pm.

                  2. around other people not working/only sort of working/talking/etc. 

• Physical movement is the best break (walking from one location to another, stretching, taking a walk, doing ab exercises, etc.) Watching things/writing distracts me for too long a period of time.
• If I am feeling particularly lazy, it helps to find someone disciplined/equally worried about the next test or assignment/etc. to work with. We can then explain things to each other without distracting each other.
• In Hayden library, although I like the window seats, I work best at the long outlet tables, preferably when other people are working there.
• The best way for me to study/work is to first organize information and then problem solve/do examples. If I try to do this in reverse order I get easily discouraged when a problem is hard. Passive studying first, active studying second, but in short blocks of passive-active, passive-active, passive-active, by subject material.
• When I feel overwhelmed when studying (all the time) it is best to first make a study plan, whether I follow it or not. A study plan involves writing down all resources, practice exams or problems, available notes and relevant topics. I can organize these into what will help me most and/or what I should do first. Making a plan calms me down and allows me to focus.

Sleep

• Ideally, I would always get 7 hours of sleep a night.
• More often I get about 6 hours of sleep a night. This is doable for the week, but I have to rest well on weekends.
• If there is a test the next day, I have to get at least 6 hours of sleep the night before.
• If I get 5 or fewer hours of sleep, I have to get 7+ hours the next night.
• I have to wake up before 8:00AM at the latest, or else I am significantly less productive the rest of the day.
• Classes after 3pm are hard to sit through; it is preferable to start early and end early.
• I usually cannot work efficiently after 2AM if I am problem solving or studying
• If I am writing a paper, I cannot work efficiently after 4AM.
• Naps are great. Take them, but not for more than an hour.

Food

(^my roommate and I killed the cooking game over IAP) 

• Breakfast should be light and late. Eating too early makes me hungrier the rest of the day, and there’s no point in forcing my metabolism to start up before it’s ready.
• Lunch or dinner should also be light, and potentially split into twice a day or interspersed throughout the day.
• Eating less food but more frequently is most effective; I usually feel awfully tired or uncomfortable after a full meal.
• It’s important not to drink coffee too regularly. When there’s a less stressful week of work, take a detox (no coffee or even tea the whole week). This will also keep smaller amounts of caffeine more effective when you do drink it.
• If you’re hungry late at night, go ahead and eat to maintain your energy, but try to eat fruit or nuts or yogurt or something healthier. Drink lots of water with it.

A Note on Food: college students (and most definitely MIT students) usually have a less regular schedule, and often longer days. We don’t wake up at 8 and sleep at 8 every day--if you do, you’re very on top of things, but it’s my belief that you don’t have to do that to be on top of things, especially if, like me, you know that’s never gonna happen. People say this irregular schedule contributes to the Freshman 15, but I don’t think it has to.

Rather, pay close attention to when you get hungry. Throw away social norms, and just plan to eat whenever and how often you get hungry--frequently, but in smaller amounts of healthier food. If you always get hungry at midnight, consider splitting your dinner into two parts, or just eat later, or plan for healthy night snacks. If you are always hungry every four hours, bring granola bars or whatever to class. Drink lots of water, especially late at night and whenever you’re tired.

Next year, I’m going completely off the meal plan and cooking for myself, so I’m trying to get a really good idea of exactly what my needs are, for my own health....and the health of my bank account. I hope to get on a path toward more self-sustainability. Here goes nothing! 

I came to MIT a wide-eyed froshling. The sun shone brighter through campus windows. Every classroom exuded a dream glow. Every view overwhelmed the heart.

I got by on 3-5 hours of sleep then.

Soon, the lessons began. I learned to conserve clothing. Laundry Day became a special surprise and a victory over the demons of laze. It came when all my socks expired.

I’d bought too many pairs in anticipation for college. 

{First Sighting of the MIT Dome: making sure it's real since 2013}

The hardest thing you will do in college is wake up after a series of unfortunate events, unfinished nights, unreasonable psets.

The fight to rise will start in your subconscious. Without your say, your body will silence 1 alarm, or 5 alarms. 10 if you really fucked up.

If your subconscious doesn’t keep you down, you’ll wish it did. A tired body feels like a metric ton of cotton balls.

I have over 200 alarms pre-set on my phone.

I may need to awaken for lecture at 11:20, but sometimes 11:21 or 11:22 work just as well. When I rise at 11:22, I don’t get to wear jeans. Nice things are for the early birds.

The easiest thing you will do in college is do too much. Try it. On the 1st week, you only need to lift a pen and know your name to join a 100 clubs that will send you up to 1 email a day until you find “unsubscribe.”

You will want a UROP or a job. Those are tricky to balance. Which UROP will accept the uninitiated? How many hours can you commit?

Experts suggest 6 to 10 per week.

Working too much is easier than working too little. Takes the pressure off. 5 classes on your 1st semester, the hardest ones there are, will yield more value for your Pass/No Record, your tuition, and your dreams.

I dropped Analysis after 3 all-nighters. In October, I sought a reasonable HASS replacement. The class catalogue was a constantly open browser tab. I read all the course descriptions.

I wondered if the change of schedule meant I could obtain more money-yielding jobs. I added 1 to see how many I could handle. I subtracted 1 a week later to snooze. 2 remained.

My froshling battery, supercharged during Orientation, sent alarming signals to my body. Dangerously low. Lower. Gone. Time to find a charging station. A stress outlet.

A 4-day weekend worked like a new battery. We the students discussed the mountains of work we’d accomplish in its anticipation. 96 hours seemed vast. Not in retrospect.

Take out 36 hours for sleep. That’s 60 left. 12 for movies with friends. 12 for meals, 14 with eating out.

2 hours for 4 showers. 5 hours for river walks. Approximately 16 hours to socialize. 5 hours to waste on grooming, latest YouTube hits, and spontaneous Seven-Eleven runs.

Okay, maybe 6 or more for that. Which leaves about 5 hours for work, or about 1 pset worth of time. Not much for a 4-day classless extravaganza.

The best discovery you will make in college is what you love.

I love when a solution pops up after hours of rumination and pages of beginnings. My first time, this happened under a full moon over dorm row. I knew exactly when the hypothetical cars would collide.

I love nights when pset parties spread in the hallway at party o’clock. The continuous flow of sweet ideas merits the festive status.

I love sliding a stack of neatly completed homework into its intended slot. I love stapling the pages of psets together with a precise corner shot. I love laughing with my friends all the way home after the assignments are safely disposed.

I love consuming lungfuls of morning freshness after an all-nighter. Relief is a powerful force.

The coolest things you will hear in college come from professors. I love when they talk about their lives during lecture, showing off pictures of spouses and children, recalling work stories that might have changed the world.

Professor jokes are another excellent treat. Like this one:

“There were once two mathematicians in an asylum, and one of them was e^x. The other mathematician was angry at e^x, and exclaimed, ‘I’ll differentiate you!’
‘Go ahead,’ replied e^x. ‘That won’t do me any harm.’
‘Ah, but I’ll differentiate you with respect to y!’”

Pretend you’re taking Multivariable Calculus. Ready? Now think how glorious that joke sounds after learning the partial derivatives of e^x.

Sometimes professors tell jokes about Harvard. The first one comes as a shocker. The next ones amuse. Why not enjoy a learned human being making jabs at a school of other learned human beings?

Teachers often invite students for dialogue. Some lure us with cookies and tea. Others with pizza and soda. They tell stories of family and food, research and blizzards. They try to remember their students’ names and passions. We get a conversation to remember.

I could never learn from a professor I don’t know personally better than one in front of whom I spilled vanilla ice cream on a grey carpet. He told me that it happens all the time. Then he shared the latest scoop on the P vs NP Millennium Problem.

My ice cream was melting. He told me about a bet he'd made with a friend in the 1970’s. Then, he claimed that the P vs NP problem would soon be solved. It’s the 2010’s now and the coveted solution remains a mystery.

The most important lesson you will learn in college is The Value of Friendship.

I have a friend who dreams with me of a blissful life on a boat in neutral waters where we’d dance in sundresses on deck. I have one who doesn’t stop at any obstacle to attain victory in a glorious prank war. And a friend who listened to enough music last year to fill 72 days with sound.

I have friends who love sailing, cats, Sting’s “The Last Ship,” Doctor Who, space, linear algebra, running, that one crooked tree at the Esplanade, cannoli, chain-mail, medicine, oscilloscopes, performance art. Not in that order of importance.

{oscilloscope photo credit to Banti G. '17} 

I can speak continuously about the Tiny Insignificant and the Giant Important of MIT.

But the morning birds will soon sing. Unlike MIT’s birds, Ohio’s winged creations have proper sleep schedules. I hope to beat them to bed.

Outside, crickets perform a fancy serenade and 770 miles away there is a vacant room in East Campus waiting for me.

In 30 days, I will fill it as a wide-eyed sophomore.

Until then, good night.

Soon writing season will be upon us. College and graduate school applications amidst the back to school drill. For my survival through this cold season, long and bleak like the emptiness of this blank iPhone note I'm typing into, I now see that, at this point, the best option is to use the remaining summer time to fall in love with the writing process. Okay this isn't too bad. Right Anastassia? Sure, I guess it's bearable. Aren't you all about becoming more evolutionarily fit anyway? Yep, I do always say that. Isn't that why you always try do physically challenging things, and push yourself? Yeah, I mean I try. Definitely when I'm not sleeping that is. So doesn't writing fall into that category? Yep, I'd say it's my single handed biggest weakness at this point. Shouldn't you stop talking with yourself and talk to the reader? Oh god there's a reader? That changes everything wait I'm not ready yet I haven't planned what I'm going to say yet--Just go already! Gah, hi.

32 minutes.

Everything I'm late on, every mental clog I have, every nagging thought in the back of my head involves writing. I won't detail the list here, but it's why I'm not yet a clean slate for my upcoming senior year. Also I have no idea how in the world senior year happened. This recently came to my attention since as a Senior Blogger I get to read your blogger applications! And also according to a recent emaill, if I don't blog, I will get fired before I read them. //omgwaitplzdontfiremeIpromise2writrfrmnaon

Since entering MIT, and especially over this last year, I have significantly, p<0.05, improved many skills. However this process is not without its growing pains, and, perhaps a complementary atrophy of other abilities. Actually, I'm a little surprised, or maybe not, that the phrase "complementary atrophy" came more naturally than, for example, "other qualities became worse." Though I do admit to spending a few seconds wanting to write "deproved" for parallelism.

*Upon a quick re-read, I believe I wrote this sentence because I was trying to ease myself back into writing through a factual declarative statement. It worked. So that is my piece of wisdom, maybe to myself, from this post. Start small. To proceed, here is another:

I'm in Japan now. I'm writing this from the shinkansen train to Otsuchi with 8 other MIT students and the MISTI-Japan program manager for a weekend volunteer trip amidst all of our various research or internship programs.

I climbed Mt. Fuji recently, likely in preparation for this psychological coming of age hike. It was fun to say the least, so certainly this will be too. Maybe I'll say more details later?

**I'm no longer sure this is a good metaphor. It's more like an increasingly simmering volcano, or a once gushing rapid into which I've thrown a whole bunch of objects-mental difficulties that I've chosen to indefinitely store instead of tackle, and it's really slowing my flow. And actually I really love all of nature so I'm not sure I want to equate writing with it... But maybe that is precisely what I need to begin my romance with it. Anyway, this probably doesn't make sense.  I'm not sure it makes sense to me anymore. Unlike this post, good writing is concise and takes time, or at least a round of editing. But anyway, I will make the mistake of posting this instead of anxiously abandoning it, and therefore finally grow from this experience.

Okay forget metaphors, because I'm out of time and I should maybe say something concrete. The point is, I think, is that our brains are plastic. Neurons are always rewiring. So you can learn anything you want and change your habits and overcome your fears and become a better person and all that good stuff (all in only three weeks according to the literature) with the simple ingredients of sheer willpower and practice. So everyone let's do fighting spirit and 頑張りましょう！

#Learn Coding Before School Starts
#by Erick '17

def intro():
     print("Learning your first coding language can be really hard. By your second language, it gets slightly easier. Your third language? Okay now it's easy. Your fourth? Took less than a day. Fifth. Sixth. You get the idea.\n")
     print("Why the exponential growth? Learning coding consists of two parts. 1) concepts. 2) syntax. With your first language, you have to learn the concepts of coding. What coding is, how you literally have to tell the computer what to do step by step, what variables, etc. Then, you learn the syntax. in Python, whitespace matters. In Java, just be sure you have brackets. You write expressions differently but the core concepts are the same. So with each additional language you learn, it gets easier as you just have to adopt a new syntax.\n")
     print("So how do you start? Do you pick up a textbook? Watch videos? Take a course? Let me share with you how I started coding and then give you some resources so you can too.\n")

def history():
     print("***A Brief History of Coding***")
     elementary = ["Elementary school - I got a book on HTML from the library. I made a few HTML pages, but they were mostly text, links, and pictures. So I made an account on Freewebs to built my first website using their drag-and-drop website builder. I also got a Lego Mindstorms Kit to build and program Lego robots. This was when I first learned the word 'variable'."]
     middle = ["Middle school - I made games using the drag-and-drop GameMaker program, modifying some scripts using a their proprietary language."]
     highschool = ["High school - I learned how to purchase a domain name and hosting space. I set up my personal website erickpinos.com with Wordpress.","High school senior year - I took the 6.189 Intro to Python course on MIT OpenCourseWare. I did a few lessons before stopping to have time to study for the SAT Subject Tests."]
     freshman = ["Freshman fall - In my MAS.110 Fundamentals of Computational Media Design class, we used Scratch’s drag-and-drop coding to make 3D animations.","Freshman IAP - I took a two day class taught by Microsoft, learning how to program games with Unity's drag-and-drop interface. They taught us how to make slight modifications using C# scripts. It reminded me a lot of GameMaker. Also, my dad got me my first Arduino kit for Christmas, so I put together my first Arduino bot and learned some basic commands on C++.","Freshman summer - I wanted to learn app development so I downloaded Eclipse and got a book on Java. I made it through the first two chapters before I got interested in doing other things."]
     sophomore = ["Sophomore fall - I took 6.01 Introduction to Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. They assume you know Python, which made the class rough since I didn't know any. I spent the first few weeks learning Python on top of everything else the class assigned. By the end of the semester the assignments became more project based, like programming the robot to navigate through a maze, and I started to get the hand of Python. I started getting the hang of Python along with everything else the class taught. I was also a co-web developer of the MIT Ring Committee 2017. I didn’t know much actual coding web design, so my co-web developer Casie ’17 built the website from scratch and I added things here and there while managing the social media pages.","Sophomore IAP - I took 16.682 Momentum, a month long IAP course taught by the Office of Minority Education. This year's theme was Brain-Computer Interfaces and we build a robot arm that you can control by flexing your muscles. This is where I really sat down and learned C++. Our team really wanted our robot to move smoothly and efficiently, so we spent days rewriting the code to make it simpler and more robust.","Sophomore spring - I UROPed at the MIT Media Lab working on the CityScope project. We built dynamic city models out of Lego that can have data projected onto them like weather patterns, traffic, and even where people are tweeting from. We used Processing to write the software, which used C++. Since I had just spent a month learning C++, it was easy to transfer over. I also took a seminar MAS.S64 EdibleBYTES, where we built mini-fridge sized hydroponic boxes that could grow crops inside. A classmate and I redesigned the sensor system. We used a breadboard and sensors from Seeed Studio so that it was easily customizable and all open source. We used an Arduino, so I got more practice in C++."]
     summer_this = ["Sophomore Summer - I had an app idea. So I downloaded Android Studio again and committed to building an app. I made huge progress, designing the layout in XML files while coding the Java files for the intents and actions. I even learned SQL to store the user's data online in a MySQL table so they can log onto their account from another device.","Two Weeks Later - My app was almost finished, and I started getting back into web development. I wanted to rebuild my website with my own custom theme. I installed the Genesis Framework onto my original WordPress installation, which uses PHP to code the website and CSS to style it. I made a template for my own website and for my Tech 101 4 Kids website.","This past week - Now more confident in my coding, I went back into the RingComm site and made some edits and added more pictures. As the technology chair for my fraternity Phi Kappa Sigma, I’m also now embarking on the project of redesigning our website to prepare it for Rush. I learned about the Apache Web server and how to SSH into the website to modify it with PHP scripts."]
     history=[elementary,middle,highschool,freshman,sophomore,summer_this]
     for x in range(len(history)):
          for y in range(len(history[x])):
               print(history[x][y],"\n")

def paragraphtwo():
    print("Does this sound advanced? It would've sounded advanced to me if I was reading this less than a year ago. But everyone starts somewhere.\n")
    print("There's a key difference in the times when I failed and when I succeeded. When I said to myself 'I want to learn app development' or 'I want to learn C++' I committed to it by getting a book from the library or signing up on a website, did two or three lesssons, then quit. I wasn't getting anywhere, and each time I started a new tutorial, I would start again at lesson 1.\n")
    print("When I started focusing on projects was when I really started learning coding. For you it may be different, but if you think you might be in my boat, then here's some advice.\n")

def advice(a,b,c):
    print(a,"If you've done lesson 1 anywhere else, don't do it again. Start as far ahead as you think you can handle and if it ends up being too hard, then go back. You have a limited amount of time and you want to spend it learning new things, not reviewing the old things over and over again. These are tutorials, there are no penalties if you don't get it right on your first try. I suggest you look at Codecademy, Khan Academy, and MIT OpenCourseWare. All three have a wealth of guides on coding. Pick a language and pick a tutorial, preferably a project-based one because ", b,"Don't start another until you've finished.\n")
    print(b,"Learning Java was a very intangible goal for me. How did I know when I learned enough? When could I say I was proficient in Java? At first, after finishing a tutorial or a class on a language, I would test myself using hackerrank.com. This website was recommended to me by my fraterniy brother Rosé '17. It really helped me get a sense of how much coding I knew based on how many problems I could solved.")
    print(b,"The next thing to do is just projects. Make things. When I approaced Android app development learning by doing tutorials, I didn't get anywhere. But when I approaced it with an app idea, I coded what I knew then looked up guides on the parts I was stuck on, which kept me going and expanding my knowledge.\n")
    print(c,"Not for actual cheating, but for when you're working at home and just can't remember what the syntax is. It could be an online syntax reference guides you've bookmarked, or it can be something printable like these cheat sheets my friend Kenny '17 made, which I highly recommend.\n")

def final():
    finalthoughts = ["Do you need to know coding before coming to MIT? Nope, you don’t. It’s nice to know though, because MIT gives you many of resources like offering you hosting space where you can store and run your scripts, permanent IP addresses you can access from anywhere, a web address formed from your Kerberos, etc. If you’re Course 6, then during your first IAP there’s coding classes you can take like 6.189 Intro to Python to get up to speed for 6.01 in the fall. Even if you’re not Course 6 you can still take the class or the newer 6.0001 half-semester Intro to Computer Science and Programming in Python. And now there’s a new 6.S04 Fundamentals of Programming Class to get a more solid programming foundation after taking 6.0001 or 6.01.\n"]
    finalthoughts.append("So why learn coding now? If you learn it now, you could spend your IAP doing something else like participating in iOS game competition. 6.189 takes up the entire month. You could also just start coding things for fun. Like everything else, coding is one of the many ways people express themselves here and build cool stuff. Some students build their own websites where they blog and talk about their projects at MIT. Others code web apps that end up becoming really useful, like CourseRoad. Some develop and published cool mobile apps. Others take their projects to hardware. At our fraternity, we’ve coded LED lights in our party room to flash to music.\n")
    finalthoughts.append("Also, if you have a younger sibling who also wants to get into coding, read my super informative blog post Best Free Coding Websites for Kids on Tech 101 4 Kids")
    finalthoughts.append("I hope you found this fun and informative. Go out there and start coding. But not today. Today is the best day ever in the universe, so it's time to celebrate. With cake.")
    print(finalthoughts[0],finalthoughts[1],finalthoughts[2])

intro()
history()
paragraphtwo()
advice("Skip Lesson 1. ","Set project-based goals. ","Have syntax cheat sheets. ")
final()
print('i','t','s','m','y','b','i','r','t','h','d','a','y')

Erick is an MIT rising junior studying computer science and electrical engineering. He blogs about college life through the eyes of a first generation student and gives practical college advice to any highschooler who will listen. Ask him anything!

Subscribe to get free updates from Erick's blog on MIT Admissions.

I’m ranked in the bottom 39% on profile views among my connections on LinkedIn. My pageviews are down 80% from last week, when they peaked at an all-time high. I have a Basic account, but I could try Premium free for 30 days, which comes with various, non-specific benefits, and lot of street cred. Sometimes I flip through my contact list and wonder, “what kind of avatar defines me as a person?”

Who cares?

Spring semester was, in a word, frenetic. I loved all of my classes (or at least the idea of all of my classes), but I was so busy with psets and projects and deadlines that I never had time to appreciate and absorb the material. Some of it I’m just getting now, like Linear Algebra concepts from 18.06 that hit me at Chipotle because I was too focused on the due date to pay attention to the ideas, or A* search algorithms from 6.01 that I was too busy to internalize, even though I mechanically answered all the exam questions correctly. I felt like I lost sight of the forest for the trees, and got locked into a narrow tunnel vision in which I only valued the immediate consequences (grades and sleep, possibly in that order) and not the longer-term utility.

But then finals week came and went, and I was free. And rather than leverage my freedom to finally sleep normal hours or catch up on months of missed Reddit, I turned it towards the long queue* of adventures I missed during semester.

* it’s technically a stack, not a queue, since I pop off the most recently added item as it’s freshest in my memory. Computer Science has ruined normal English for me.

One Sunday in June, Reva ‘18 and I finally visited Walden Pond in Concord, which had been simmering in my to-do list for months. Concord was surprisingly easy to get to: it’s only an hour away via the Fitchburg commuter rail, and is also accessible by bus, although we rode the Red Line to Alewife and just took an Uber to drive us the rest of the way (Uber is wonderful. It’s the same transportational safety net my parents used to provide, but without any of the questions or judgement!). Walden is also allegedy within biking distance, but I’m far too lazy to even purchase a bike, much less use one.

Henry David Thoreau lived in a cabin on the Pond for two years while he wrote Walden, the success of which turned the Pond and its surrounding forest into a state reservation, complete with designated hiking trails, marked-off beaches, restrooms, vending machines, and lifeguards, none of which I think Thoreau would have been that thrilled about. “Pond” is actually very deceptive; Walden is over 100 feet deep and almost two miles in circumference. We saw schools of fish, lots of swimmers, and also a very large snapping turtle, which I don’t think the swimmers noticed.

I've no idea what this quote means, or why it was important enough to engrave in a stone slab, but it's hilarious.

Then in early July, four friends and I drove to Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire, which somehow has its own Facebook page, despite being a geological formation incapable of sentient thought. We spent the day hiking to the summit, then stayed overnight at a campground, complete with a campfire, s'mores, ghost stories, and a general feeling of rugged satisfaction.

Later in July, I finally visited the Boston Arboretum, attended my first Red Sox game, and rented a kayak to paddle up the Charles River to Harvard and back. I also got back into tennis, and started playing almost every day with friends or random strangers, including a wonderful man named Jeff who I met on the courts. He’s in his seventies, and is very nearly better than me. I aspire to someday be him.

I also visited MIT’s libraries with the intent to check out a book for the first time (as it turns out, they exist for reasons other than study space)! I picked up two books on the programming language Lisp, which I’d always wanted to learn, as well as Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 monstrosity Gödel, Escher, Bach. It’s 700 pages long and three inches thick, but it’s packed with mind-bending narratives and paradoxes at the intersection of math, music, and art, and their implications to philosophy and consciousness.

The picture on the right is actually a painting of Escher's that's on the door to the room in Zeta Psi that I'm staying in for the summer. Escher couldn't just draw a normal self-portait like other artists, could he?

The Lisp textbooks were equally fascinating. Lisp is an ancient (1958!) language still in use today, particularly in AI research. It has an incredibly elegant syntax that doesn’t distinguish between code and data: Lisp programs can write other Lisp programs and execute them, or edit themselves while running (hence the AI research). I didn’t learn Lisp because it’s practical - Python and Java are far more widespread - I learned Lisp because the principles that it stresses are applicable anywhere, and I wanted to understand its model, paradigm, and general “lispiness.”

If this sounds cool to you, read a Lisp textbook. You won’t regret it.

But what does this have to do with LinkedIn and Fight Club references?

I’ll put it this way: when I look back on Summer 2015, I’ll think about the snapping turtle at Walden, the peak of Monadnock, dizzying Escher prints, and heavenly revelation that was Lisp macros. 

But when anyone asks me what I’m doing this summer, I tell them something else entirely: “I’m working in the MIT Media Lab.”

Although my UROP in the Media Lab was insanely fun, and I learned a tons of practical development skills through rote repetition, what I liked most about my job was its flexibility. I didn’t want my summer to be a repeat of spring semester, chained to a computer, churning through JavaScript for just a facet of a project. Instead, I vowed to ditch the rigid 9-5 paradigm and really explore things I was personally interested in, like Lisp or tennis or the life and works of Theodor Nelson. So in spite of working 40 (admittedly scattered and noncontiguous) hours a week, I managed to learn about myself, and came away with a clarity of focus that I lacked when I stumbled out of a hectic spring semester.

One of my friends, Colin ‘16, took this philosophy to its extreme, rejecting an offer at Apple (!!!) and choosing to spend his entire summer pursuing his own interests. He delivered a long rant about his philosophy, which I condensed here below:

It came down to a fairly simply tradeoff. On one hand, it’s important to build legitimacy, usually by taking the most prestigious–sounding job you can. On the other hand, there’s learning and skill building. In my experience, internships are a very inefficient way to actually gain skills. But working for a company necessarily comes with a set of constraints on your time, and, burdened by these constraints, it is almost inevitable that you will spend some subset of your time doing things you don’t want to do, like learning some obscure programming library, writing unit tests, or other activities that have no intellectual or recreational merit.

Consider the alternative. You can learn the skills you want to learn, read books you want to read, and builds the projects you want to build. You can frolic happily in the intellectual playland of Wikipedia. You can go on adventures, take on a new hobby, and make new friends, unconstrained a monolithic 9-5 black hole in the middle of everyday. Every social norm, unquestioned convention, and arbitrary definitions of success go out the window when you realize that you have 24 hours every day for the next three months that you can allocate entirely as you wish.

Colin’s strategy isn’t for everyone, especially people who want to make money immediately or people who know for sure what they want to pursue, but it let him study dozens of research papers (he aims for one every day), books, languages (we tackled Lisp together), and personal projects (he’s finished two and is launching a Kickstarter campaign soon). He doesn’t regret his choice.

It’s easy to go on LinkedIn and feel bad about not pursuing the prestige. It’s easy to imagine relatives’ reactions if you could tell them you’re working at <famous tech company> instead of explaining what a “UROP” is, or (even worse!) telling them you’re unemployed. Internships, career building, JavaScript are certainly important (and also earning money, which Colin does not yet), but they aren’t the only possible source of value. You don’t have to be doing something that sounds cool to be cool, and sometimes taking time off to chase your own interestes is worth more in the long run than blindly grasping for the next rung of the ladder without knowing where you’re climbing toward.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go tour Europe for two weeks before semester begins again.

As some of you know, I got my master's degree from the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. While I was a graduate student, CMS merged with Writing to form CMS/W, which includes the Science Writing program and its associated undergraduate major/minor in Science Writing. 

According to CMS/W: 

The curriculum in science writing is designed to enable the student to develop mastery of the craft and rhetoric of writing about the worlds of science and engineering for broad audiences. This writing major is an option for students interested in science journalism, longer forms like the science documentary, and communication issues related to the public understanding of science and technology. It is also designed to work as a complementary major for students majoring in science, engineering, or another field of study at MIT. This major includes a three-subject exposure to an allied field such as science, or comparative media studies. Students also fulfill an internship requirement, which provides in-depth practical experience.

Basically, Science Writing is supposed to train you to think and comment publicly on science and technology, i.e. to be a public intellectual. It nicely complements the scientific and technical training that an MIT education provides (see, e.g., Anna's posts "Writing is useful for science" and "Maybe it's ok to be this way").  You can see the complementarity through the required coursework, like 21W.777 Science Writing in Contemporary Society: 

Drawing in part from their own interests and ideas, students write about science within various cultural contexts using an array of literary and reportorial tools. Studies the work of contemporary science writers, such as David Quammen and Atul Gawande, and examines the ways in which science and technology are treated in media and popular culture. Discussions focus on students' writing and address topics such as false equivalency, covering controversy, and the attenuation of initial observations. Emphasizes long-form narratives; also looks at blogs, social media, and other modes of communication. Not a technical writing class.

and 21W.778 Science Journalism:  

An introduction to print daily journalism and news writing, focusing on science news writing in general, and medical writing in particular. Emphasis is on writing clearly and accurately under deadline pressure. Class discussions involve the realities of modern journalism, how newsrooms function, and the science news coverage in daily publications. Discussions of, and practice in, interviewing and various modes of reporting. In class, students write numerous science news stories on deadline.

My friend Seth Mnookin, who wrote a book about the anti-vaccination movement and an incredible New Yorker feature about hyperrare genetic diseases, is teaching 21W.737J Topics and Methods in 21st-Century Journalism this fall: 

Gives a broad understanding of what it means to produce journalism today. Evaluates the limitations and strengths of specific types of media, ranging from New York Times stories to Twitter feeds. Provides students with tools to effectively communicate their own work and research to non-specialist audiences. Students submit assignments via an online portal, which mimics the style and substance of an online news source. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.

But what is it like to major in science writing at MIT? In addition to Anna's posts, I wanted to share this reddit post by David B. '11, about his experience (unexpectedly) majoring in Science Writing and going on to become a science writer (among other things). I've reproduced his post (with permission) unedited below: 

A bit of backstory: I originally went to MIT for biology. I thought I was going to be a genetic engineer. I've always had a creative/expressive side as well though, and the two sides were kept very separate. As I got into my second year and started taking more of my course 7 major classes, I started to realize it wasn't for me. A perfect storm of bad academic performance, personal shit, and a nasty pneumonia resulted in me being asked to take a year off. If I came back, I had no idea how I was going to graduate in any reasonable time, and in which degree program. Before I left though, my advisor told me about the science writing program. It was a perfect mix of my science background and my expressive abilities and I wondered why noone had told me about the program sooner! A year later, I came back ready and raring to go. I had already completed all of my graduation prereqs, so it was just a matter of doing all of my major classes over the course of the next year and a half. This meant taking a course load of nearly all writing classes, four or five at a time, but I couldn't have been happier. I was succeeding, and even more, excelling. It was a lot of work, but it felt right. I graduated in 2011, and in just four academic years (plus the one year off). I learned that I didn't have to keep my intellectual and artistic sides separate, and I found a program that perfectly suited me.

 

Writing at MIT is like anything else at MIT, first class. Your instructors are Pulitzer Prize winners and Hugo Award winners. My advisor had worked with PBS and Nova for years. I got to intern in the Harvard Public Relations Department working with and learning from a Pulitzer Prize winner that had been my professor the previous semester. MIT attracts the best and holds itself and its students to the highest standard, and the writing department is no exception.

The program at MIT is different from other schools because you still get the MIT experience and culture. You have access to some of the greatest minds and facilities in the world and matriculate with some of the smartest, wildest people you will ever meet. Around the end of junior into senior year, a lot of people learn to stop worrying and love MIT, and those were some of the absolute best times of my life. Also, you'll graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Writing, vs a BA from those wimpy liberal arts colleges.

The biggest difference you'll find is after graduating. While all your CS friends are going off to Google and Facebook, making six figures, times will be tougher for you. I will admit I had a lot of self doubt about the decisions I made and still do question if I made the right choice. But then I realize that I'm following my passions and having a blast doing it. I've always been a performer and wanted to end up in Hollywood as a writer/actor. I got a master's in creative writing for entertainment and moved to LA in April. I've started working with a great production company and am learning the ropes and climbing a career ladder I've always wanted to be on. Yes, money is tight. Yes, I sometimes wish course 6 was my thing and I was making bank. But I can't tell you how many times those friends of mine who are making six figures have told me they envy that I'm following my passion and having fun for a living.

You will notice a lot of weird stares from employers and questions about your resume (if you even get an interview...fuck the job market...). Literally every interview I've had, I get the question, "you went to MIT? What are you doing here?" But that sets you up for a fantastic response. What do you call a student with a course 6 degree and a student with a course 21W degree? MIT graduates. I turn that question back on them and explain that regardless of what degree anyone ends up with, they go through the MIT wringer. Late nights, hard work, overwhelming pressure and expectations. And no matter what course you take, MIT teaches you life lessons like how to learn and how to persevere in the face of overwhelming odds and how to find self confidence and how to be proactive and go after what you want (and a million more things). That response blows the interviewer away every time.

In terms of what kind of jobs to look for, that's up to you. You're only limited by what you can convince an employer you can do. Obviously with a science background, I was looking at Discovery Channel or Popular Science type things. I worked at a science center for a bit and probably could have run the place eventually if I didn't find it kind of depressing (it was run down and underfunded). I'm guessing if you're pursuing a writing degree, you already have some jobs in mind. And it may not seem that the MIT name carries as much weight outside of the science circles, but you'll find that smart people know what it is and will value you highly for it. My one bit of advice (and something I wish I had done) is to be proactive about finding jobs and internship opportunities before you graduate. You'll have so many opportunities available to you in that time right before and after graduation that will evaporate a year down the road. So many of my Harvard friends used their experience and the Harvard name to get awesome internships right out of college (The Onion, Colbert Report) and I didn't because I was so focused on just graduating. So reach out to the employers you're interested in as early as possible.

If you're thinking about changing your major and you're passionate about writing, follow that passion. Now, if you're in high school looking to go to college for writing, I wouldn't say that MIT would be my first choice. Not that it isn't an incredible place and an incredible experience, but you'd save yourself a hell of a lot of stress and sleepless nights by going somewhere else that's a bit more arts focused.

The biggest lesson I've learned though all of this is that everyone has their own path. It's sort of my mantra. Everyone has their own path. You're gonna compare yourself to everyone around you, and you're going to doubt and second guess your decisions when times are tough. And you're going to get ignored time and time again by jobs and say WHAT THE HELL? I WENT TO MIT, DAMMIT. But everyone has their own path.

So find your path.

This is the way my hiatus ends

This is the way my hiatus ends

This is the way my hiatus ends

Not with a bang but a vaguely-poetic angsty video. 

It's been a crazy 101 days since I last posted in this corner of the Internet (even typing that number is terribly guilt-inducing, BUT NOW I AM FACING THE GUILT HEAD ON. TAKE THAT, GUILT.) However, I'm a lurker at heart and have loved keeping up with the other bloggers' summers through their lovely writing. Anastassia's post, in particular, helped give me the final push/panic moment/motivation/etc. to just write and edit and finish something. And this is that something. Hopefully there will be many more somethings in the near future, now that there's a little bit of momentum fueling the blogging part of my brain. 

Here's a transcript of the video for those who might want it (I may have changed a word here or there, some of it was scripted and some of it was just saying words over and over again until they seemed right-ish): 

Dear July,

I won't see you again for some time, but I thought I'd send a note anyway. It's been a while since I did this. Just writing. The words are clunky in my brain and in my hands and on my paper and on my computer screen. That's how I've felt, though: clunky, with a jumble of thoughts and fears and worries in a tangled cloud around me.
I'm trying to sort through them one at a time. And I'm hoping this will help. Writing, that is. Speaking?

Even though I don't feel right blaming you, July, you have left me more isolated than I have ever felt before. Displaced, lonely, wandering along sidewalk-less streets before returning to my temporary attic home. It's a lot less romantic than it sounds.
For the first time in my life, I'm hundreds of miles away from family and friends and not really in a place to make new ones. I mean, I have a job. A job where I'm paying to work for them, the disappointing reality of many internships. But the more disappointing reality is the lack of people my age, the lack of mobility, the lack of day-to-day kindness and stimulating conversations (or any conversations at all).
Early adulthood feels like purgatory. It's so easy to hide in nostalgia, to bask in the carefree memories, to avoid facing the uncertainty of my present and future. I think mostly I'm just tired.

July, I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't recognize me. I barely recognize myself anymore. My body is bloated with sadness that sometimes boils over into anger. It doesn't feel like me.
I thought being away from MIT would start to fix it, but it's not like falling and scraping my knee where my body knows what to do to heal. It doesn't know, and I don't know, and the melancholy is bleeding out into everything I do. Staining it. Even this letter. Especially this letter. Trying to craft these sentences in a lighter tone feels fake, and I hate that.
Maybe if I keep expelling the gloom, there will be room for something else. Content? Happiness?

I'm sorry, July.

It hasn't been entirely bad.

I visited friends with you. We had picnics and briefly lived our own summer coming-of-age movie in the space of an afternoon. They're the reason I keep swimming upstream towards graduation, keep fighting even though every muscle in my body hurts. I don't say thank you enough.
You brought my dad and my brother with you too, and for that I am in your debt. I desperately needed a slice of home, of people to help nudge me along on adventures and help find warm food for my belly.
These memories feel ethereal, pinpricks of sunlight against a cold, seemingly endless, fog. I like the rain, but fog is heavy and frightening. I need to remember that it's okay to need help navigating sometimes.

I hope your brothers and sisters will be kind, July. I'll try to be kind to them, too. And next time we meet, I hope I have more direction, more confidence, more good memories. I hope I have a better grasp of who I am, instead of continuing to fade away.

The cicadas are screaming, July. Singing. Vibrating their abdominal membranes, biologically speaking. The cicadas are shouting from the treetops and some days I just want to shout with them.

Love,
Ceri 

Also, this video was inspired by Emily Diana Ruth & her 'Letters to July' series. 

In 4 weeks, you will leave home for an academic journey of 4 years. Commence the packing process!

Frantic scrambling. Wading through piles of clothing and mementos on the floor...

But what should you pack, really?

Erick P. ‘17 says this.

Jess K. ‘10 suggests these items.

MIT Housing compiled a packing list for students here, to be used with caution.

Some things I’ve found helpful. Pack:

-- a memento for your shelf or wall. There are no restrictions on memories, and pictures of family and friends will brighten the hard times. Guaranteed.

-- a surge protector. Electric sockets appear in the oddest places. 

-- a Twin XL sheet set, a towel, and a shower caddy. Summarized as “the stuff Bed, Bath & Beyond says you require.” For ease of transportation, Bed, Bath & Beyond will pack the essentials for you the student to pick up at the store through Pack & Hold. They also host special events during the summer with 20% discounts for students. Note, however, that BB&B is not the easiest destination from campus.

-- a swimsuit, if you wish to beat the required swim test and suggested boat test (which involves treading water for 10 minutes and is harder than it sounds). Bonus: Freshman Orientation test-takers receive an MIT Engineers t shirt with a witty-nerdy saying on the back: “Technically, the glass is always full.”

-- a casual wardrobe. This is optional, but will prevent the need to adjust impeccable outfits during the high energy Orientation Week and fall semester. Sweatpants, yoga pants, and shorts are your friends. And wait till you discover the wonders of free t shirts!

-- a formal suit, for job interviews and Career Fair

-- documents establishing identity and work eligibility, Social Security Number being one of them. For the I-9 form you will fill out once to receive access to all on-campus job possibilities.

-- items you use most frequently at your current home. I sacrificed precious suitcase space for a hair dryer. Totally worth it.

-- basic school supplies like notebooks, pencils, pens. The nearest Target is quite far, and the MIT Coop is not the go-to store for minor purchases. Don’t drag a mound of erasers and rulers on a plane, but have something for the first day of learning.

-- basic life supplies like toothbrushes and toothpaste, medications and a hair comb

-- laptop case or bag. You will take your laptop everywhere. Also, don’t save $$ on the laptop security stickers sold at Orientation by the MIT Police. They may stain the tender shell of your computer, but will also protect you from on-campus theft.

-- snacks for the trip, arrival, and the first late night

-- a dress, if there is >1% chance you will consider attending sorority rush or a formal. There is a free and regularly scheduled shuttle to the local mall, Cambridgeside Galleria, from Kendall Square, but that trip may not fit into your first week’s schedule.

-- soap and shampoo, if they fit into your luggage. If not, there is a campus convenience store, La Verde's, for first-day shampoo emergencies and tragically over-priced midnight indulgences. 

-- cash money, including some $1 bills, for the times you’ll want fresh fruit from a farmer’s market or a movie from the MIT LSC film series or a snack from the vending machines. Also good for splitting bills with friends and buying cannolis at the North End at midnight.

Don’t Pack:

-- fancy adornments from garish college shopping catalogues (like this one from Bed, Bath & Beyond). Among other things, you probably don't need a soda machine and a pile of decorative pillows. Not on your first week of college. 

-- chairs, bean bags, and other larger items like desk lamps. You will most likely move from your temporary room assignment after the brief REX, so travel light.

-- comforters and winter gear, unless you don’t plan to visit home in the winter. These take up space.

Don’t assume what you need. For example, some rooms in East Campus have trash cans, and some don’t.

Luckily, Boston is a giant city. No need to bring the stock of a lifetime on the plane. And once you move into your permanent residence, you can receive care packages from Amazon and parents. Prime Pantry, now with back to school deals, will reduce the burden of heavy household items and snacks. Join Amazon Student for 50% off Amazon Prime and other special deals. 

Be mindful of space. Plan to partition your room evenly if you have a roommate.

If you take a suitcase or two, keep them close. They work great for storage and shopping trips. Producing a carry-on suitcase at the register is a satisfying experience. Makes you feel like Shopper 007.

If you forget something, worry not. There are plenty of stores and two malls within a 20-30 minute walk. Public transportation opens even more destinations. MIT shuttles with free wi-fi run (with delays) every weekend past Orientation. They will take you to Target, Costco, Starmarket, Whole Foods, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Home Depot, and Trader Joe’s. Word of caution: plan the shuttle trip for a sunny day. Boston traffic halts with the first drops of rain.

Always feel free to consult an upperclassman for directions and advice. We’re happy to help.

Cheers, and see you in a month!

Important P.S.: Let me know if you have any questions before you arrive on campus! All topics from culture to logistics are welcomed here, via comments below or email above. 

Late last month, on July 25th, I boarded a Lufthansa flight from Boston to Frankfurt, and then Frankfurt to Almaty, the cultural and educational (but not political) capital of Kazakhstan, en route to the 27th International Olympiad in Informatics.

The International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) is the world's preeminent programming competition for high school students. Like its counterparts in math (IMO), physics (IPhO), chemistry (IChO), biology (IBO), linguistics (IOL), and other domains of science (ISOs), the IOI convenes delegations of students from all over the world to compete in a kind of academic olympics. At IOI 2015, 322 students from 83 countries competed to solve six hard problems; the top performers were awarded medals, and all contestants were generally fêted with great ceremony and circumstance.

(Note: before I came to MIT, I did not know the ISOs existed. I had never known anyone to compete in any of them, or even participate in any of their qualifying competitions, like the AMC, which was not (to my knowledge) even offered at my high school, at least while I was there. I've since learned, however, that many talented, smart students not only distinguish themselves through these programs, but also love them, and find communities of intellectual and social peers through them. Participation in the ISOs is neither a requirement nor expectation of applicants to MIT; most of our admitted students were not a part of the ISOs at all. However, they can be great experiences for the right sort of student, particularly one interested in individual math/science competitions. So if, like me ~10 years ago, this is the first you've heard of the ISOs, and you want to do smart nerdy things with smart nerdy people, you might want to check them out).

While I was at IOI, I spoke to computer science educators, policymakers, and coaches from across the world; I also gave an information session about how and why students at IOI might consider applying to American colleges in general and MIT specifically, if they so choose. While I was there independently, for Anglophonic reasons I tagged along with the American delegation, including Andrew H. '19, who placed third in the world at IOI and will be arriving at MIT to start freshman orientation in a few weeks. After the competition was over, Andrew and I met up with other members of the Class of 2019 who were representing their country at IOI, including Rares B. '19 (Romania), Nur S. '19 (Bangladesh), Kliment S. '19 (Macedonia), and Mateus B. '19 (Brazil).

I also got to visit Kazakhstan, which is a strange, beautiful country: an ancient crossroads of civilizations, waypoint along the silk road, ruled by Khans, then by the USSR, and today an independent, comparatively-wealthy, and rapidly-developing nation. Between matches, contestants and guests of the IOI attend excursions meant to introduce them to the culture and history of the host country: in this case including the Medeo stadium, Kok-Tobe Mountain, the Sunkar Falcon Station, and the Kazakh State Circus, where I was pulled into the center ring by an enthusiastic clown and made to perform humiliating acts before ~300 computer science prodigies and their whooping retinues. Fortunately, I have long practice and much experience at embarrassing myself in public, so this event played entirely to my strengths. I ate horse meat and strange sweets, heard the history of the Kazakh people in story and song, and went for long dawn runs along the Big Almaty River that cuts a canal through the center of the city. It was one of the most unforgettable trips I suspect I'll ever take. 

a Jaume Plensa sculpture outside my hotel that resembles the its counterpart the Alchemist at MIT

a pepsi ad along the street

the steps of the medeo

While in Almaty I also made some time to visit the local EducationUSA (EdUSA) office in American Corner. EdUSA is a U.S. Department of State network of over 400 international student advising centers in more than 170 countries that offers accurate, comprehensive, and current information about opportunities for international students to study at accredited postsecondary institutions in America. I spoke to ~30 local Kazakh students (and some parents/teachers), interested in freshman, transfer, and graduate education and admissions at MIT, as well as American universities education and admissions more broadly. While we contain pretty comprehensive information for international students here on our website, if you're an international student interested in applying to American colleges generally I advise you to find your local EdUSA office and look through the resources they have there.

One of the best things about my job is I get to travel to really cool places, at home and (now) abroad, to try to meet some of the best students in the world and help them make sense, not only of the MIT Admissions process, but also of themselves, and how they can best develop as scholars, but more importantly as people. Sometimes that means MIT, sometimes it means another university, and sometimes it means something else entirely. Everyone has to find their path - me included. Last month, mine took me Almaty; I am grateful for the opportunity, and for the hospitality I was shown. I don't know where I will go next. All I can do - all anyone can do - is try to put themselves in new, occasionally uncomfortable, situations, and try to take what you can from them. That's probably one of the lasting lessons I've learned at MIT, and one I've come to be the most thankful for. 

I've been breaking computers from a young age. In middle school I tried setting up a dual boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu but I messed it up and corrupted my Windows installation and left myself without a bootloader. After three days at the mercy of How-To Geek and Super User, I finally fixed it. As scary as it was almost breaking our very important computer, I enjoyed fixing it and continued to mess around with it.

I went to a vocational high school to study information technology. There I took computer repair classes to prepare for the CompTIA A+ certfication exam and network management classes for Cisco CCENT certifications. Our school ran out of vouchers to take these exams so I never got certified but I did learn a lot and worked as a computer technician for my school's technology department senior year. I also started my own computer repair business at home to raise money for college.

Choosing a laptop for college was easy because I knew more about computer specifications than just "bigger numbers means better computer". I bought a new Lenovo Yoga 11s for $800 and it was as good as the MIT IS&T recommended computers but half the cost. It served me well until this year when my laptop started getting burned in pixels, leaving ghost images on my screen. This happens when you consistently leave your screen on one image for too long. I had a warranty on it that was close to expiring so I took it to Geek Squad at the beginning of July. They gave me an estimated repair time of two weeks.

Five weeks later, I get a phone call from them saying that one of the parts needed for the repair is no longer being sold. So instead they gave me store credit to buy a new laptop. I'm now typing from my brand new Lenovo Yoga 2 which is twice as good as my old laptop and only cost me $100 on top of my store credit.

I've gotten a lot of questions from MIT parents about which laptops are good for their kids. I've compiled all the advice I've ever given on computer purchasing below. I hope it helps you make a more informed decision.

Warranties

Most, if not all, laptops come with a manufacturer's warranty that says they'll repair your computer if a part is found defective. But manufacturer warranties don't cover drops, spills, stealings. Check the computer protection plans from your store to see if they're right for you. I say get a physical plan that protects you from spills, drops, and stealing, especially if you're going to be carrying your laptop around campus. Some stores, like Best Buy, even give you your money back in store credit for a new laptop if they can't fix your old one.

But software warranties that cover antivirus scans and backups aren't necessary. You can easily learn those things yourself. I had to purchase a software warranty when I bought my Yoga 11s two years ago and I never used it.

Mac or PC?

The question on everyone's minds and the answer everybody hates: it depends.

A PC and a Macbook can function exactly the same and the Macbook will still cost extra no matter what just because it's an Apple product. But since Apple tightly controls their software and hardware, Macbooks are slimmer and lighter than most PC's. They also feel nicer and sturdier, with an aluminum body and sleek design. PC parts have to be compatible and swappable so those laptops are usually bulkier and heavier.

Macs CAN get viruses, now that hackers are getting more clever and Macs are becoming more common. You still need a good antivirus.

Some software that runs on PC doesn't run on Mac. People in Course 2 Mechanical Engineering should be aware of this as the modeling software Solidworks only works for PC.

Course 2 advice from Snively's 2008 post Laptops!:

"If you are going to be a Mechanical Engineer you should avoid a Mac. That's not to say you can't have one, but your life will be easier with a PC, the reason being the modeling software you'll be using (SolidWorks) isn't compatible with Mac. It was designed specifically for Windows and will likely never be ported. That being said, you can buy a Macbook Pro, dual-boot it with Windows, and then install SolidWorks (again, MIT provides it for free). You'll need a Pro though, of the three types of Macs only it has the RAM and the graphics to comfortably run modeling software. The air and the Macbook will be really laggy."

So in the Mac vs PC department, think about what software you might need and which one supports it. After that, judge them by their aesthetics. Then, for everything else, look at their specifications.

Now let's break down computer parts:

CPU

The CPU processes and gives instructions it gets from the code of computer programs. People refer to it as the brain of the computer as a simple analogy, but it's really more of a powerful central calculator.

Aim for an Intel Core i5 or i7. If you can get the faster but more expensive i7, then that's good for future proofing, but the i5 works nearly as well. Anything below that is useable but will be outdated soon. If you're buying a new laptop, get your money's worth with a good i5 or i7 processor.

Now there's the Intel Core M in some of the new surface pro tablets. This is a less powerful processor than the i5 but it doesn't heat up as quickly so it doesn't need its own fan. This lets your tablet be slimmer and quieter. Pick this option if you're okay having marginally less performance capabilities in exchange for a slimmer, quieter tablet/laptop. The difference in speeds is usually unnoticeable for everyday tasks.

AMD processors are budget processors. They're good for the price but Intel's CPUs are generally more powerful.

RAM

RAM is the amount of main memory that computer programs have available to use. A computer with 4GB of RAM means that it has approximately 4 billion bytes of memory for programs to use. But more RAM doesn't mean your programs will run faster, only that can run more programs at the same time. If you have 4GB and are running an intense program that needs 6GB, then adding more RAM will be helpful as it gives your program more memory to work with. But if you have 4GB and your program only uses 2GB, adding more RAM won't make it run faster but it will let you run more programs alongside it.

That being said, if you're buying a new system, you should future proof it and buy as much RAM as you can comfortably afford. As we go through the years, the same old programs need more and more memory to work as they get more complex. This is why a lot of computers today are so slow even though people don't have many programs installed. It's just that programs in general require more memory to run today than they did yesterday.

4GB of RAM has been standard for a few years now but mainstream computers have been moving into 8GB territory. Higher end laptops and gaming PC's are now even using 16GB.

IS&T recommends 8GB. That's more than enough for doing anything, including SolidWorks and virtualization. As time passes, programs are going to require more RAM, but 8GB now should be enough to get you through four years.

If you have a 4GB laptop already, you can use it but be aware you may need to upgrade in one or two years, especially if you find yourself using intensive programs like the repeatedly mentioned Solidworks. If you're buying a new laptop, skip the 4GB and go for the 8GB. 16GB is a luxury.

Hard Drive

Hard drives are what store your data. Inside hard drives are disks. To read data, physical motors spin the disks under magnetic read/write heads. Having these physical parts moving inside the hard drive is what limits their speed and makes them break more commonly than other parts.

Then come the SSD's. Solid state drives. These hard drives have no moving parts. Instead, they use electronic circuity built out of semiconductors to store data. This makes them more resistant to physical shock and faster than regular hard drives.

When purchasing a computer, the little info card will usually say whether the hard drive is an SSD. If it doesn't say, find out or assume it's not an SSD.

SSD's are much more expensive than regular hard drives. But they are a technology that is much better than and will replace them soon. So I would opt for a 128GB SSD over a 500GB regular hard drive if the price point isn't that much higher.

If having an SSD is too expensive, look for hybrid drives. They combine both technologies together for a more affordable drive.

For SSD size, 128GB is usually enough. But now that 256GB is getting more affordable, gauge how much storage space you'll take up and consider storing large files like movies and such on flash drives or external hard drives.

If you're sticking with regular hard drives, get your money's worth and get no less than 250GB of space. Even 1TB is becoming super cheap these days.

DVD Drive

Doesn't really matter if you have one, you can always buy an external DVD drive for around $30.

Ports

Make sure you have an HDMI or mini HDMI port (or a Lightning port for Mac). This lets you connect to many of the projector screens or external monitors on campus. 

You don't really need an Ethernet port if you have a wireless card in your laptop. You definitely don't need VGA, as that's being phased out.

This isn't really that important to consider, as they sell a lot of adapters for the ports your laptop doesn't come with.

Video Card

Unless you're going to be using your laptop for heavy gaming, then you don't really need to worry about which video card your laptop comes with, most cover all of the basics. If you're going to be using your laptop for heavy gaming, then you probably already now about video cards.

Operating System

For the love of beavers, do not get Windows Vista. There were a whole slew of computers that came out with Windows Vista a few years back at "affordable prices" and they were terrible. I had so many clients who wanted me to make their computers faster but they had Windows Vista so there wasn't much I could do. Those were dark times.

I actually liked Windows 8, but that was only because I had a Lenovo Yoga which can fold all the way back like a tablet. I find that Windows 8 works best on touch screen tablets but even then it was iffy.

Windows 10 however is really good. It's a nice mix of Windows 7 and 8. If you have Windows 7, 8, or 8.1, you can upgrade to Windows 10 for free but it's unclear how long this will last.

Screen

Consider what screen size you'll want. 11" is usually the smallest that's still comfortable to use while a screen larger than 15.6" will probably be too large to carry around daily.

If you have Windows 8, get a touchscreen. Windows 8 is unbearable without a touchscreen. Windows 10 is better about it, but touchscreens are still nice to have.

Final Thoughts

Get a laptop with a good battery life. Take the listed battery life with a grain of salt and read up on online reviews to see if it holds up to what's listed.

Get in the habit of backup up data onto the cloud and/or flash drives/external hard drives. You can schedule backups with MIT's central backup service or other online services. I backup my data onto Microsoft OneDrive and onto an external hard drive.

Test the computer out at the store before you buy it. I've had laptops in my Best Buy shopping cart which had perfect specifications but, when I went to the store, found out that it actually looked ugly and felt awkward to use.

IS&T lists some recommended laptops and general guidelines for computer purchases. They're similar to the guidelines I've given you above.

Some stores like Best Buy and Office Depot have lots of student deals for your laptops. I was able to get $150 back on my laptop because it had a student discount available. But I had to ask for it.

Good luck.

Which laptop did you end up getting? Let us know in the comments below!

Erick is an MIT rising junior studying electrical engineering and computer science. He blogs about college life through the eyes of a first generation student and gives practical college advice to any high schooler who will listen. Ask him anything!

Enjoyed this post? Subscribe to get free updates from Erick's blog.