<p>COMING SOON!
I'm hosed this week but...</p>
<p>Watch this spot ;)</p>
<p>ACK, a teaser!</p>
<p>haha virtual tourr</p>
<p>College students come to live life by the week, with the come and go of psets and quizzes. Some weeks are rougher than others. </p>
<p>I've noticed a curious tendency in myself to be as clean as I am stressed out. I've also noticed that I'm not alone in this. There's apparently something therapeutic about hot water and wet hair and the smell of shampoo that just makes everything ok again for a lot of people. One famous example off the top of my head was during a particularly test-happy week. I suffered through three tests and a presentation in two days. I took five showers. My skin was pretty dry for the rest of the week. Stereotypes swirl about the strange/scarce hygiene habits of MIT students. Maybe this will help: MIT is stressful. Showers are good stress-relief. We're pretty squeaky clean for the most part.</p>
<p>I came in with 18 general elective units and credit for 18.01 (Calculus I). I came in with no research experience, one AP score in the maths and sciences, and a wide range of interests. I came in with apprehension bordering on terror.</p>
<p>I did poorly enough on the math diagnostic to warrant a suggestion of 8.01L (the slowest paced version of Physics I). After a week-long discussion with my advisor (an EAPs professor) and the upperclassmen on my hall, I registered for 18.02 (multivariate), 3.091 (solid state chem), 21L.004 (poetry), and 8.012 (physics I). I was also in an advising seminar (more on that later). I was about to fully take advantage of pass/no-record. </p>
<p>3.091 was cake. One of the best lecturers but easiest professors in the school teaches that course year after year. Homework was optional and 'quizzed' on a weekly basis. There were three tests and a final. You're allowed a full front-back 8 1/2 x 11 aid sheet for formulas, concepts, stupid drawings, anything. In general, the freshmen on my hall spent fewer than an hour a week on material for that class, some even less than that. All of us received an A or a B.</p>
<p>18.02 required me to learn a lot of calculus in a hurry. Many concepts were completely alien to me: parametrization, polar coordinates, matrices, the dx at the end of an integral... But all that aside, it moved at a reasonable pace and was easy to follow. There were 4 tests and a final. It required about 7 hours of work a week, sometimes more, sometimes less. You won't find it too difficult.</p>
<p>24L.004 was a great class. It was the class I enjoyed most attending. My class was composed of about 12 students and one professor. The students managed fairly lively and interesting discussions but for the most part I went to class every monday and wednesday to read classic poems and listen to the professor speak. He sure had a way of putting thoughts into words; sometimes I found myself expressing visual shock at his brevity and precision, and wishing secretly that I, too, could make the English language sound so satisfying. Like all communication intensive courses, it required three 7-8 page papers the entire term. This one also included a presentation. It comes recommended to anyone with an interest in poetry.</p>
<p>8.012 was hard. You'll come to notice that some classes at MIT come with unusual-looking grade distributions. 18.03, for example, is so skewed to the left the mode occurs almost around a 90. 8.012 looked like two bell curves stuck end to end. You had the "most of us" bell-curve, centered around a 60, and you had the much smaller and more exclusive "look at us" bell-curve, centered around an 85. The first encompasses the vast majority of the most ambitious freshman physics students at MIT, while the second consists of the most successful. Jumping curves was rare, but not impossible. There were two tests in the class and one final. There were 15-20 hours of homework a week. The shortest pset easily took us 10. I say "us", because there were 5-8 East Campus freshmen working together on any given pset. But more importantly, 8.012 is worth it.</p>
<p>It's 11am, I'm going to 8.022 recitation, I've got no one to impress. </p>
<p>It seems I am in the deepest slumber of my life when my alarm goes off at 10:40am. I roll over and bury my face a little deeper in my pillow; my fist comes down on the snooze button. It goes dark for awhile. 10:50am. Despite my reluctance, relativity waits for no one and we need to be acquainted if I even dream of finishing the pset this week. I try not to miss a step as I climb down the ladder from my loft. I pass my reflection in the mirror; I use this opportunity to tie back my hair. I'm groggy. I'm grumpy. Sometimes I change into jeans or sweatpants, sometimes I anticipate going back to sleep in an hour. One way or another, I drag my ass into building 13 about 10 minutes late.</p>
<p>I'd been up until 5am the night before studying for a test (and procrastinating with hallmates). I hope you didn't think I was going to iron my hair and curl my eyelashes.</p>
<p>My visual arts class this semester (4.301) grants me free permanent access to basically every photography studio/lab on campus. For the price of the paper only (for glossy something like $.50 a square foot for digital and for film something very close to, if not, free), visual arts students can print photos as big and as often as our little hearts desire. I am slowly wallpapering my room in this manner.</p>
<p>4.301 is a 6-hour per week in-class commitment, basically twice that of normal HASS classes, and includes the execution of three big, individual, projects. The woodshop, the photo lab, the digital art mac lab, and whatever the heck else you feel like you might need, are all available. The second project is a video project. I now have a three-thousand-dollar digital video camera at my disposal. I can pop into the mac lab to use the video editing equipment (and boy is there ever video editing equipment) any time of day. I was last in there at 4am.</p>
<p>One of the kids in class created a personal space bubble for the last project that was about five feet in diameter and walked back and forth through the infinite corridor with it. He brought along a camera-man to document reactions. Aside from a few tongue-in-cheek comments such as quoted above and a suggestion to hook the device up to receive local radio stations, for the most part, the MIT community didn't bat an eye.</p>
<p>The tourists, however, took pictures.</p>
<p>oh YEAH? well MY girlfriend goes to MIT and SHE took a shower and she says it isn't anything like what you describe. </p>
<p>pebbles, the lies must stop.</p>
<p>There are problems with that statement, Ben:</p>
<ol>
<li>This thread is titled "A freshman perspective." Your girlfriend is not a freshman.</li>
<li>She possibly isn't (as?) stressed.</li>
<li>She (we hope) didn't take a shower with Pebbles.</li>
</ol>
<p>:p</p>
<p>tears -- maybe this will make more sense in light of <a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=154441&page=2%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=154441&page=2</a> (especially #25)</p>
<p>:-P</p>
<p>Somewhere amid the hubbub of suitcases and plane tickets and hugs goodbye, the rush of new faces and first impressions... waterslides, fairs, and choices choices choices... somewhere between the checkbox yes, the anticipation of arrival, and the results of your first institute test, this incongruous maze of concrete buildings start looking familiar and feeling like home. You can't blame us for developing a sort of attachment to this seeming pile of rubble. It keeps us company those late nights in lab, leads our way to friends and classes, takes us to and from weekends, a homely kind of place you can't fix up from gothic architecture and a nature preserve. It may be silly but we take a certain pride in being able to see and feel the charm of the place. We take a certain pride in calling it home.</p>
<p>So you're picking a college. You're choosing a bed to sleep in and best friends to make. You're choosing the angle from which to watch the sun rise, the shadows that fall over your dorm room windows. You're choosing the setting of your inevitable existential crisis, backdrop to late-night questions of where you are and where you are heading. Here, you may learn to knit, to do a handstand, to pick locks, to pull all-nighters, to breathe fire, to play team sports, tire-swing, program, act, curse, twirl a pen, write a book, swordfight, bake cookies, kiss a girl... grow into yourself one way or another.</p>
<p>Or you could be here for the seal on your diploma. Your mileage will always, always vary.</p>
<p>A common complaint around these parts is that there aren't enough hours in the day. For every project completed, there are three postponed or abandoned. With the realization that, yes, even we conform to the rules of time and reality comes the necessary evil that is prioritizing. I suppose that's what gives MIT its intensity. Time is a hot commodity, sleep is an afterthought.</p>
<p>These nerds have more dimension than you can imagine- juggling workload, friends, hobbies, projects, relationships... Weekends run from 3pm to 6am. With weekdays come sleep deprivation. Dawn is a thousand shades of blue and we know them all, and we're young enough to love it.</p>
<p>why don't you just have a real blog at mit.com like mollie?</p>
<p>not that I know, but this <em>is</em> more fun, and less commitment. Write on, pebbles! I love it!</p>
<p>Yeah, this is a good piece of writing in addition to being a great personal perspective on college. Really fun to read through.</p>
<p>Sometimes what you find is a function of what you're looking for. Education, perhaps.</p>
<p>One-way rivalries are most often spawned by deep-rooted jealousy at one end and arrogance at the other. We can't deny the existence of at least two associated with our noble institute. One turns in the guts of our quaint Massachusetts town, and the other flies from shore to shore. Though Harvard may not deserve our narrowed eyes and bared teeth, they shall endure it nevertheless. The cause is no mystery to any of us. Unlike some of Harvard's peer institutions, we're not terribly big players nor terribly big losers in the cross-admit battle, the schools are just too undeniably different. In short, we weren't rejected. Oh, but are we bitter.</p>
<p>While we slave away at problem sets chasing some stricken ideal of earning our stripes, the very foundation of our self-righteous pride is being chipped away a few miles down the road. And by what institution but the world's greatest, world's best, world's most renowned? For a brief moment we wonder if we're being naive, if we've somehow botched our schooling on the ways and works of the world. But of course the answer is an obstinate and resounding no and we stick our noses in the air pound our chests flex our academic muscles and scoff in the face of grade inflation. There, that'll show them.</p>
<p>So sometimes we think we are only affirming our superiority by not reciprocating inter-school rivalries. We're attending some of the world's finest universities and still we engage in a childish contest of will. Pride can be the most beautiful or the most repulsive thing in the world. We hear it a lot from Harvard. I heard it bouncing around campus after CPW.</p>
<p>"CIT-what?! Do we even THINK about them?!"</p>
<p>I'll answer that. Yes, we DO think about them and we think very highly of them. They're our peers and our partners in battle. Superiority is an embarrassing state of mind and this, could be fun. If Caltech wants it, they sure as hell are going to get it.</p>
<p>Does might grow wings and fly!</p>
<p>What are you, nuts?</p>
<p>And why aren't you napping?</p>
<p>I went to bed at 8 last night</p>
<p>im really enjoying these posts pebbles! : ) keep writing!</p>