<p>Hi, let's make an official advice thread for CPW people! And yay, my parents are letting me go, see all of you guys there.</p>
<p>I'm specifically interested in advices from past MIT students who went to their respective CPW's (was it called CPW back then?), and saw differences between CPW and the actual MIT experience (apart from problem sets I guess?). What kind of factors can make CPW inaccurate/misleading? Any advices? Any "Whooop! I'm pumped b/c I'm going to meet my prospective comrades"?</p>
<p>I don't really feel that CPW is that inaccurate or misleading -- it's kind of an amped-up version of an MIT weekend, but the things that happen are all things that would happen on a typical weekend. It's just that at CPW, they all happen together. I think it's great that MIT students put a lot of effort themselves into CPW -- if everybody hated MIT, you wouldn't see such an effort by students to recruit new students.</p>
<p>Anyway, my spiel as a former dorm rush chair is that you should definitely take the time to check out as many living groups (dorms, frats, sororities, independent living groups) as you can. It will help you decide if there's a place at MIT you really fit nicely, and it will help you make the best decisions you can in the summer housing lottery if you decide to come to MIT. Your living group can make a big difference in how happy you are as a student, so it's important to explore even before orientation and rush.</p>
<p>When I first arrived at MIT, I felt CPW was misleading - I wasn't doing anything! I had no activities! I was just working all the time!</p>
<p>This term, though, I realized that I needed to be a little more proactive about activities (ie no one was going to drag me there). Now I'm really involved, and - frighteningly - it looks like I'm picking up a couple more activities. It's really fun to be running around a lot doing cool things :D</p>
<p>So, how your activities are depend entirely on you. MIT has no limits on what types of things you can get involved in, and people certainly make the time.</p>
<p>The only thing CPW doesn't show you (and it can't, really) is what the work is really like. It will be a lot harder than you expect, I can promise you that. In a school full of geniuses, your ego will take a hit because you're used to being the big fish in a small pond and now we've thrown you into the ocean with sharks.</p>
<p>If you don't like your host living group, that doesn't mean that you will hate MIT or hate all living groups. Admissions has very limited info to go on, and is constrained by logistical factors, when assigning you a host. Look around.</p>
<p>Even if it's raining all weekend like it did during my CPW, still look around.</p>
<p>If you're being hosted across the river, make sure that you actually spend some time on campus.</p>
<p>Don't have sex on your host's bed with another prefrosh, especially not if your host might walk in on you doing it (I knew someone whose prefrosh did this).</p>
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I don't really feel that CPW is that inaccurate or misleading -- it's kind of an amped-up version of an MIT weekend, but the things that happen are all things that would happen on a typical weekend. It's just that at CPW, they all happen together.
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<p>I mostly agree with this. Not all CPW events are events that would happen in a typical weekend. :) But the overall feel is one of an amped-up "real MIT" weekend, rather than a completely different ballpark.</p>
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is it possible to find a roommate at the event?
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<p>It seems highly unlikely, and a bad idea. The summer housing lottery assigns you a temp room, not a permanent one. I'm going to be repeating this a lot over the next few months, I expect. Temp, temp, temp. Your living group is temporary until after you've gone through dorm rush/REX. So the idea of picking a roommate in the spring, before you've seriously investigated your living options and well before you actually know where you will live, makes absolutely zero sense. How can you possibly know that you will want to live in the same place? </p>
<p>Given that rooms range from singles to quads, and dorms range from singles-only to singles-through-quads, you have no idea if you'll even <em>have</em> a roommate, and, if you do, how many you will have.</p>
<p>Can you staple to a roommate in the summer lottery? I can't recall.</p>
<p>I actually know several people who met their eventual roommates during CPW -- they met and became friends, and the two investigated living groups together. At the very least, you can meet friends during CPW and decide to room with them if you pick the same place in the fall.</p>
<p>I met my roommate during CPW, but it was totally a coincidence. By which I mean, by complete random chance, the one person I really got to know during CPW later became my roommate. It was a pretty crazy coincidence.</p>
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<p>I know someone who had that happen to them <em>twice</em>. Hooking up during CPW is generally not encouraged. It's just desperate.</p>
<p>Basically, ditto everything that Mollie and Jessie said. Visit as many living groups as you possibly can- <em>especially</em> the ones that you don't think you'll like or that are drastically different from the one you're staying in. I was in McCormick and my view of EC was that it was terrifying, basically because the people I stayed with during CPW thought it was terrifying. I will gladly go on the record now saying that I currently find McCormick much scarier than EC. =)</p>
<p>My host when I was a prefrosh told me not to even think about MacGregor, because it was scary and anti-social. Glad I'm not the listening sort. :)</p>
<p>If any of you want to be my prefrosh, you can PM me, but know that you are getting thrown out my 5th floor window if you have sex on my bed.</p>
<p>CPW was a lie, but it was a beautiful, beautiful lie. You will never have as much free food (except during orientation), you will never have as many events open to you all at once, and you will never be able to get into any dorm that you want just by going 'I'm a prefrosh, can you let me in?' But there were definitely parts of it that I thought were lies that turned out to be totally the truth, like when I stayed up until 4 am on my host's floor talking to current students about ridiculous, inane things, and when those upperclassmen showed me around and gave me advice, and when those upperclassmen were extremely, extremely excited to see me in the fall when I matriculated.</p>
<p>So yeah, CPW is kind of a lie. We don't have activities fairs and free food all the time (well, I guess we do, if you know where to look), but the parts that are important are definitely true. When I came back to MIT in the fall, I found the same sorts of people and liked them just as much as I did in the fall. I didn't end up living on my temp hall, because I found somewhere that I fit in even better. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, and the weather is a <em>lot</em> crappier than it is in the middle of April for most of the year, but the important parts are true :)</p>
<p>Also, for the summer lottery, there's a place to write a roommate request if you want one, but don't worry if you don't find a temp roommate. Depending on what dorm you live in, you might have a single, but even if you have a forced quad, you're only going to be living there for 2 weeks tops.</p>