<p>HAHA! I have precisely the same problem with Verizon. (I have to lean against the window and touch my antenna to the metal-wire screen over it.)</p>
<p>My phone works fine at MIT though :-).</p>
<p>In fact, I was convinced until recently that rain could fall for an entire month only in the tropical/subtropical climate of southeast Asia. It turns out I'd put too much faith into the polar jet stream and my spotty high school geography education. For about an hour and a half now there has been an oil-rig on wheels parked outside my dorm room window humming menacingly over the now unremarkable drip drop of rain on pavement. In walks a neighbor with an explanation.</p>
<p>"The governor declared a state of emergency and now they're pumping out the water from the ground or the sidewalk or something into big trucks and driving it over to maybe the river or the ocean some body of water bigger than the lake that is our courtyard right now if you can imagine..."</p>
<p>Cambridge has a notoriously poor drainage system due to its beginnings as a landfill. We at MIT have the fortune of inheriting that particular trait. As of 4:00pm today, the captain and crew of the sinking ship of Cambridge, MA has officially resorted to buckets. Bring your own canoe.</p>
<p>"...yeah, I dunno. I don't get what they're doing either. It's kind of dumb, actually."</p>
<p>At least you only have to go outside for <30 seconds to get to class.</p>
<p>I plan to wait for the Tech</a> Shuttle tomorrow, because hell no I am not going out in that.</p>
<p>I heard about that...It'd be nice if it decided to rain some more here instead of being just plain dreary and COLD^</p>
<p>haha, I just finished reading the whole thread and it's awesome, I really like it, keep up writting :)</p>
<p>god, 8.022 is taught so well.</p>
<p>who's the prof?</p>
<p>bad but the course rocks.</p>
<p>I am not pebbles, but in the spirit of this thread...</p>
<p>So it was not raining, and then it was windy, and then it was raining, all in the course of about five minutes. And then it stopped raining and there was a rainbow arching from the MIT campus all the way over to Boston -- you could see the full 180-degree arc, and it was a double rainbow, too!</p>
<p>Pictures</a>, not very good, but whatever</p>
<p>My friends and I are taking this as a sign that we will not fail our finals. Even if we sit in the lounge for the next several hours and watch TV and eat junk food.</p>
<p>the sky is so yellow after a thunderstorm. we had a perfect view from our lounge window. :)</p>
<p>p.s. the second rainbow looks like it ends @ east campus</p>
<p>For those who, like me, like to write or if not write at least read- draw or if not draw at least view. Our newest publication hot off the presses. Rune publishes once a year and takes submissions from students, faculty... really anyone from the MIT community.</p>
<p><a href="http://web.mit.edu/rune/www/2006/2006.html%5B/url%5D">http://web.mit.edu/rune/www/2006/2006.html</a></p>
<p>mm nifty</p>
<p>.</p>
<p>Foreward.....</p>
<p>Thanks for the pictures Mollie. And Pebbles, my son wouldn't be surprised to learn EC is the pot of gold!</p>
<p>
[quote]
It's not paradise: my little note on picking colleges.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>You know, that passage sounds very similar to this letter I got from Caltech.</p>
<p>
Dear Adam ...Random crap about stuff...</p>
<p>Listening to the conversations around me, it becomes clear; you have to consider the intangibles, not just the facts. Numbers of students, faculty or Nobel Prize winners don't matter much at 11 o'clock at night when you are trying to work through a physics problem set that is due at 9 am the next day. The facts are not going to matter when your research is producing unexpected results and you want to bounce ideas off someone whose intellect you respect.</p>
<p>What matters is the collaborative community that surrounds you. Being with others who share your passion for mathematics, science and technology matters tremendously. Having peers willing to work through these problems with you and consider all of the possibilities will make an enormous difference in your experience. And as you try to answer the age old question of what happens to a pumpkin when you freeze it in liquid nitrogen and drop it from a nine story building, being with other curious(and often quirky) minds really matters. (You can visit us on Halloween to find out the answer.)</p>
<p>...Some more random stuff...
</p>
<p>Sounds similar, doesn't it?</p>
<p>well, the two schools are alike in many ways : )</p>
<p>uh... yes?</p>
<p>yes, it does.</p>
<p>I'm not here to convince you to go to MIT.</p>
<p>For some, choosing to attend MIT was a mistake. Possibly one of the worst mistakes of their lives. Kids fail, kids drop out, kids take years off, kids transfer. Don't let stereotypes turn you away from a school that might be a great fit but please please do your research. MIT is not for everyone. It's not for most people. It might not be for you.</p>
<p>for the record people also fail out of caltech, drop out of caltech, transfer, etc., etc.</p>
<p>a quote attributed to someone smart says that you should be a poet only if you can't not be. if every time you try to do something else, you realize you were meant to be a poet, go be a poet.</p>
<p>something like that is true of choosing mit (... or caltech). if you can, without cringing, envision yourself not doing this, not being pushed to your limits, not reaching for the highest heights your mind can handle, then go do that instead.</p>
<p>maybe that's a little too idealistic, but i firmly believe it's probably a mistake if you don't feel a fair amount of certainty in your gut.</p>
<p>But I think a little nervousness is normal. A lot of people who would be happy as clams in the intense environment start to get nervous around May 1, and I think that's totally okay.</p>
<p>I was super-freaked out when I picked MIT (will I fail out? how will I handle not being the biggest fishie in the pond? how can I leave all my friends? am I really good enough for this place?), but of course in retrospect I really believe I made the right choice.</p>