You know you're at MIT when...

(Disclaimer: a lot of these are probably also true for other colleges, high schools, and/or just life in general. But they’re things that define, for me, the MIT experience. And as a result, they’re the things that let me know I’m at MIT.)

... It’s only the second week of classes and you’re already sleep deprived.

                 

                  Classes in the spring semester started last week. You’d think that at this point I’d still be totally on top of everything that I need to do and getting 8 hours of sleep a night. You’d be wrong about that, unfortunately. I’m not actively behind in anything at the moment (except readings for my classes, but who’s ever on top of those?). But I have been getting not quite enough sleep in order to not be actively behind in anything. A grad student in my lab put it quite nicely the other day. He said, “The semesters at MIT are just so short that you have to jump in with both feet on the first day in order to fit everything in.” I imagine that this plays a big part in the traditional sentiment that going to MIT is like drinking from a fire hose. Everything gets thrown at you at once, and you just have to try your hardest to catch the important bits. (There were a lot of mixed metaphors in that one... sorry guys.)

... Your humanities class for the semester focuses heavily on coding.

                  So if you recall from last week, my humanities class is called “The Word Made Digital”, and it’s about how we can use computers to make art. Full disclosure? The reason I’m taking this class is that it was the only art class that fit in my schedule that didn’t sound like I would actually have to do too much art-y work. (File under: reasons my sister and I are actually totally opposite people... she actually likes art classes. :P ). I need to take an art class to graduate, and this one sounded like it wouldn’t require too much actual art-type work. Having not done very well in art classes in the past, I decided it was probably a good idea to avoid them now. What I wasn’t betting on was the fact that I would need to write computer code in order to do well in this class. I have a basic knowledge of coding, so in practice this isn’t the worst thing in the world. But our first project is due next week, and based on the presentations we’ve had so far, I can already tell that I’m going to be very out-classed. The first presentation was a program that uses an algorithm to model the comments section of a popular website. Let me clarify: one of the guys in my class wrote a program that looks and functions exactly like the comments section of a website. But instead of people leaving comments, his code leaves comments. I think I might be a little out of my league.

... Despite the fact that it was the first week of classes, people found a way to have fun.

                  So last week we got about a foot of snow. The obvious response to said foot of snow was to have a snowball fight on the courtyard. Was it the first day of classes? Yep. Did this occur again on the second day? Yep. Are there currently snowmen and snow creatures and snow thrones and snow forts all over campus? Yep.

One of the things I love about MIT is that it’s widely considered one of the most difficult schools in the country, but people here are basically just brilliant 5 year olds. People are probably going to graduate and run companies, or find cures for various diseases, or come up with some new polymer, or any number of other things, but if you give us a foot of snow, we’re going to play in it. Maybe that’s some sort of commentary on human nature; No matter who you are, there will always be things that amaze you, and that drive you to do something completely frivolous. Or snow is just fun. Either way. :P

                 

... HACKS!

                 

                  At some point in my MIT career, I’ve probably mentioned the pranks that MIT students pull. They’re never malicious or property damaging (see the Hacker Code of Ethics), but they are usually pretty incredible. In this case, the one that I’m thinking of was a hack in honor of the Sochi Olympics. Some enterprising students strung 700 feet of wire between two of the dorms and hung Olympic rings over our grass field. I didn’t see this in person, but I was extremely impressed by the picture in the newspaper on Tuesday morning.

source

... You ‘accidentally’ end up staying in lab for 7.5 hours on a Monday. After 2.5 hours of classes.

                  ‘You’ in this case is actually ‘I’... and ‘accidentally’ is more like I didn’t know the time passed that quickly. I knew I had been in lab for a long time, but I didn’t realize it was quite that long. But I got a bunch of things done, which was nice. The experiments didn’t quite work as we were expecting (which seems to be par for the course when I’m doing experiments) but they did give us some interesting information. Which is more or less what science is about, I guess.

... It’s only the second week of classes and you actually have no idea what’s going on.

                  My classes are a lot more engineering heavy this semester... which means that I have to work about 10x as hard to understand what’s going on. Yay not being good at math. For someone whose favorite classes were math and science in grade school, I’ve sure gotten bad at math. I’m actually mildly impressed with how much I’ve forgotten. Unfortunately, this means I have to relearn all of the math concepts in my classes, in addition to learning the new engineering/science classes. On the plus side, maybe I’ll know how to do math again at the end of the semester? A girl can dream, right? :P

On that note, I should go learn the math for my psets and the lecture I have in my engineering class tomorrow. This post was a bit short... but math waits for no man (or person. We’re talking about gender stereotypes in my humanities class, so I’m trying to be more conscious of when I use gendered language. This is probably also a phase that’s pretty consistent throughout the college experience).

As a second aside, I’m trying to decide what to do for my project for my humanities class- I was thinking of either having my computer write made up scientific abstracts (paragraph-long summaries of scientific papers) or new proverbs. But if anyone has any brilliant ideas they want to share, please comment or email me! :)