So here's a lesson for you: never delete your Public. NEVER DELETE YOUR PUBLIC. If you are trying to delete an item in your Public that you do not want there anymore and you have done this a thousand times before and twelve times already that morning, you will probably accidentally delete the entire folder anyway and then you will be made of fail and then the little voice in your head that mocks you all the time will point and laugh at you for ten million years.

JUST THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW.

Anyway, half the photo posts on my blog are full of broken links. What up, guys. I got a degree from MIT and it has taken me two months to figure out how to fix my broken blog. I am working on fixing this, anonymous person who probably got assigned to Senior Haus in the housing lottery and then sent me an email asking to fix the links in my posts about the dorm.

So yeah, I'm working on it, guys. In the meantime, take this picture of a drawing of a Slowpoke as a token of my affection.

Edit: Fixed! Alex '12 is made of awesome. Also this was fixed by a one-line Athena command that I have totally used before and definitely knew. Um. Yes. Definitely.

(Learn your way around Athena, guys. It's super useful.)

32. Take a lot of pictures. One of my major regrets in life is that I didn't take more pictures in college. My excuse was the cost of film and processing. Digital cameras are cheap and you have plenty of hard drive space, so you have no excuse.

22. Take some classes that have nothing to do with your major(s), purely for the fun of it.

41. Make a complete ass of yourself at least once, preferably more. It builds character.

37. In the long run, where you go to college doesn't matter as much as what you do with the opportunities you're given there. The MIT name on your resume won't mean much if that's the only thing on your resume. As a student here, you will have access to a variety of unique opportunities that no one else will ever have - don't waste them.

23. It's important to think about the future, but it's more important to be present in the now. You won't get the most out of college if you think of it as a stepping stone.

18. Take risks.

50. This is the only time in your lives when your only real responsibility is to learn. Try to remember how lucky you are every day.

7. At least a few times in your college career, do something fun and irresponsible when you should be studying. The night before my freshman year psych final, my roommate somehow scored front row seats to the Indigo Girls at a venue 2 hours away. I didn't do so well on the final, but I haven't thought about psych since 1993. I've thought about the experience of going to that show (with the guy who is now my son's godfather) at least once a month ever since.

49. Enjoy every second of the next four years. It is impossible to describe how quickly they pass.

...I'd say it's worked out pretty well.

SUCCESS AT LAST.

(Well, I still have one grade that isn't in. Whatever. I'M DONE, Y'ALL.)

Clearly MIT is refusing to let me graduate without a few last hard kicks in the face. (Remind me to tell you about how I failed my swim test last month.) This morning was out of the ordinary, though, because my KeyboardFace™ wasn't caused by one big epic scientific fail for once.

If you're anything like I was before I left my soul behind and enrolled at MIT, you're probably really into art. You're probably a huge nerd with a love of all things scientific, too, or you probably wouldn't have applied to MIT in the first place. And now that you're in and you've sent off your reply card (send off your reply card and come here, by the way, mmmk?), you're steeling yourself to leave all your cameras and sketchbooks and paints behind and to dive headlong into four years of SCIENCE SCIENCE SCIENCE. Abandon all art, ye who enter here.

False.

There are organizations all over campus specifically so that you don't have to do this. If art's an important part of your life now, it can be an important part of your life at MIT. And if art isn't already a part of your life, but you've always wanted to change that, we're still here for you too.

That said, let's talk about the SAA for a bit.

The Student Art Association is one of my favorite things about MIT. Students and members of the MIT community can take classes in ceramics, photography, life drawing, sculpture, and about eleventy million other areas. Classes are offered at every level, so you can get in on the action even if you think that throwing a pot can be classified as violent assault. Students even get a discount on the classes, so a life drawing class that might be over $200 elsewhere in Boston will cost you $85. You can't beat that. Really. You can't.

What's particularly awesome about the SAA is that the things you so there aren't just an escape from the stress of classes and, well, life. Almost all of them teach you something that you can take and apply to your work. My experiences in the darkroom have carried over to lab classes in my major; sometimes, you won't get the result you want on your first try, but you have to have the patience to look at what you've done and figure out what it means and how to change it if necessary. Wait, am I talking about brains or pictures? I'M SO TIRED.

I took a Color Photo class through the SAA last term. Their darkroom is one of the only ones equipped for color film processing and printing, and they have one of the few color enlargers in New England that takes 8x10 negatives. It's huge. It's scary. It's awesome.

Biyeun has blogged about the SAA before, so some of this might sound familiar, but it's always nice to be reminded that there's more to MIT than science and engineering.

Don't forget about art once you come here. There's no excuse for it.

And if I haven't convinced you, maybe this video will.

Welcome to the SAA: PATD 2010 on Vimeo.

I completely disagree. I work desk when I need money. I blog whenever I find something interesting. As a relatively uninteresting person, this translates to me rarely blogging. Stay tuned, though, for an upcoming post about my favorite door on campus.

(No, that is not a joke. It's an ultra-cool door.)

I'm in the middle of a tough week where I'm racing to finish up an incomplete in a class from last term by Friday's deadline and surveying everyone and their grandmother for an experiment in 9.61. A lot of my work involves living in the New Media Center, where most of what I do is staring at a computer while it tells me how much time is left on my conversion to a movie in Final Cut Pro. (Two hours? Four? Should I just leave and get a sandwich now?) I still don't have a job. I still don't have an apartment. The cardboard boxes I've been hoarding in my room in case of housing emergency become more and more of a certainty each day.

Sometimes I want to find the living embodiment of MIT and slap it around a little bit. "WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME??? WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY WARN ME?! WHY DIDN'T I LISTEN WHEN PEOPLE WARNED ME ABOUT THIS PLACE?! WAHHHHH."

Luckily, an email from some of the deans on campus about the MIT Senior Survey gave me the chance to figure out what I really thought about MIT. At the very least, it was a 20-minute break where I got to click on a bunch of buttons. On the last page, though, there were two final questions that most of my fellow seniors seem to be asking themselves nowadays (although in language notably more informal):

Please use the space below to comment on what your school could have done to improve your undergraduate experience or what you wish you had done differently, or both.

Um. Easy.

"I wish my grades had been better. But hey, who doesn't?"

Please use the space below to describe the most important outcomes of your time as an undergraduate. Where possible, be specific about how your college or university contributed to these accomplishments, changes or other developments.

(Hoooooo boy. Where to start?)

"When asked what I would have done differently if I could start MIT all over again, I wrote, "I wish my grades had been better. But hey, who doesn't?" It does partially bother me that my grades have been strikingly average here. That said, early on in my undergraduate career, I realized that in order to get the most out of my education, I was going to have to take advantage of as many opportunities as possible; that meant my grades weren't guaranteed to be stellar, but I figured it'd be worth it. Looking back, it absolutely has been.

I've had a show at the radio station for four years, been president of my dorm, organized one of the largest alumni reunion events on campus, learned a ton about photography (and had some of my work included in an exhibit in a Boston gallery), seen Sonic Youth and the Pixies in the same week, produced a musical, discovered my passion for teaching, and even learned a thing or two about brains, all while living and working with some of the most amazing people alive.

It's scary seeing the last four years of my life fit in a couple of sentences. It seems like almost nothing at all, but it's all meant so much to me. My only hope is that more people keep in mind that an MIT education is more than just the purely academic; if that's what you believe, then you're doing it wrong."

Keep this in mind. This place is so much more than the classes and the grades you get in them. If you forget this, you are doing it wrong.

That's my theory, at least.

Let me remind you that I am getting a degree in June.

It is my final term here, I finished nearly all of my course requirements over a year ago, and there is one lab class standing between me and an S.B. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT. I can see the light. I CAN SEE IT. IT IS SO SO CLOSE.

Of course, my classes are impossible this term and I haven't slept in a while.

Case in point: I am working on the following assignment due tomorrow in 21M.840:

Create a text for a 3-5 minute performance. This text must be composed of no less than five different source materials. No single source may comprise more than 20% of the whole. Try to assemble your "text" from a combination of media--prose / dialogue / recorded conversation / poetry / sounds / still images / transcript / moving images / television / etc.

Your piece must include the following:
-5 entrances and exits
-2 extended close-ups (at least one so close, we aren't sure what we're looking at)
-1 example of partial view (only part of the performer is visible, other parts available by technology: mic, camera, monitor, etc.) (partially seen, partially screened)
- at least 1 moment eating, drinking, or both
-1 example of gravity
-1 example of lack of gravity
-1 short dance number
-1 radical change in shape, silhouette, or something like that (costume, something more abstract, take your pick)

Clearly, Rocko's Modern Life is the first thing that should come to mind when I have to develop experimental performance art pieces. It's the king of all weird cartoons.

Captain Compost Heap approves.

I'm pretty disappointed, but hey, it could be worse.

So it goes.

Two days before The Crowbar (Non)Incident, I wrote the following over on the emo, emo LiveJournal:

[MIT's] admit rate terrifies me more than just a little - I mean, 12.2%? Come on, you know the 87.8% deferred or denied can't have all been absolute idiots. What if they've already reached their (nonexistent) quota of black, female, National Merit Scholar, (possible) salutatorian, overachieving drama freaks with too many credits to her name? What if there's someone else out there just like me - except maybe they did something impossible or unthinkable (like teaching Latin to orphan children, or something of the sort) that made them just a hell of a lot more special than me?

Sound familiar?

Two of the last three summers, I've had the wonderful opportunity to live and work with gifted students as they took classes through the Center for Talent Development at Northwestern University. Many of these engaging, talented students are now high school seniors applying to college, and they're understandably nervous about what the next few months will bring them.

Over here on the blogs, we aren't very far removed from the admissions process ourselves. We don't forget what it's like to be that worried about your future. Some of us are dealing with it again right now. The main difference is that four years ago I was sure I'd end up at a good college doing something I loved once the whole application ordeal was over. (The same will happen to most of you!) Things aren't nearly as certain anymore.

Pooooooop.

Meh, it'll be fine. I'll end up somewhere awesome. Am I right? I'm totally right.

(Also, I don't really want to leave MIT, but that's just IAP talking. Just wait until classes start again and ask me if that's still true.)

(From my 4.341 project last fall.)

All right, maybe "gorgeous" is a bit of a stretch.

I've been floating around this school for the last couple of months doing student-type things (going to classes, sleeping very little, forgetting to wipe the crusted drool off my face before going to classes) and doing me-type things (takin' the pictures, rockin' the radio, fallin' down surprisingly few flights of stairs) - you know, the usual. I'd say you've been missing out, but I'm really not interesting enough for anyone to miss out on my daily nonantics.

Speaking of boring, I had a four-hour shift at Senior Haus Desk yesterday afternoon. (I kid, I kid. I love Senior Haus. I couldn't imagine living anywhere else.) This stretch of time is perfect for when I need to get a solid amount of work done, even though it usually turns into a marathon Futurama-watching session. I'm using my IAP time to catch up on my nonrequired reading. Today's read was One Day, All Children..., by Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. The book goes through the process of developing the program, building and expanding it, and how to work in schools across America to change how children learn.

I applied to Teach for America in October, and I received the book as a gift from MIT's TfA recruitment director after I made it to the final interview round. I find out whether or not I've been accepted on Thursday, and the rest of my life is mostly on hold until then. Hanna and Liz (both '10s) want to know if I still want to live with them next year, but apartment-hunting is contingent upon my being in the Boston area after June. I don't know where I'll be living. I don't know what I'll be doing. I hate answering questions from my friends and family about this. Let me pass on that message to all friends and relatives of current college seniors: We hate it when you ask us about these things.

This is really not the best way to go about planning for the future. I have, however, pre-registered for the spring semester, which is really as far ahead as I'm comfortable thinking about right now. (Don't be surprised. I just said I'm afraid of life way up at the top of this post.)

Anyway, a long-ish time ago in a land far-ish away, I went to high school in a low-income area of Fort Lauderdale with a magnet program, and the extreme disparity between the quality of education in the magnet and the mainstream classes was one of the more disturbing things I've experienced. My AP Physics class shared a classroom with a remedial reading class; the reading class had the room for the period before AP Physics, and the materials left in the classroom and written on the board revealed that the teacher could barely spell basic words correctly. In some of the larger, more basic math classes, students who could have done well in a more challenging course were barely noticed while the teachers tried to work with students who were even farther behind.

I've had a multitude of amazing opportunities at MIT, and I've heard from a person or two that this college ain't half bad. (Am I right?) But every time I think about the last four years, I also think about how the people I knew (and the thousands more I don't know) who had the potential to have their own college experience but weren't able to overcome the odds against them, and that's really not acceptable. I want to see students succeed even after years of being told that they can't, and I want to help make that happen. Sure, that's idealistic, but that doesn't mean it's not possible.

Here's the thing, though: I'm scared. I'm terrified that I'll fail. I've tried to do things and failed at them before - take, for example, everything related to 18.02 ever - but if I fail at something like this, I'm not the only one who has to deal with the consequences. That feeling of responsibility for someone else's future only makes everything even more terrifying. And if this doesn't work out, then what happens? This is something I care about a lot and really want to do with my life, and when I try to think of my future in a way that doesn't involve teaching, it's one scary-looking blank.

I am (understandably?) a little jealous when I think about my friends who know what they want to do with their lives and are already doing it, as opposed to sitting around in the overly neurotic state of limbo that has been my last two months.

I realize that I haven't written about any of this yet; my last post is from the day before I submitted my Teach for America application. TfA isn't the only path towards becoming a teacher, but it's a program that shares many of the same ideas and ambitions that I have. I'm worried that I won't be accepted, and I've been afraid of putting myself out there on the blogs because of the possible letdown. That's not fair to all of you for quite a few reasons, one of which is summed up in some faux-sage advice in the wrapper of a Dove chocolate I ate a few months ago:

At the time, I thought the answer was bacon. (I'm only half-joking.) But it's not. It's really not.

(That said, bacon's still absolutely delicious.)

...but I'm not the one being affected here. What are your thoughts?