FWIW, I never went to MIT (went to a small liberal arts college); but I work at an MIT affiliate, so by virtue of proximity and affiliation, go to talks given on campus, eat at their cafeteria, have audited classes and play basketball at their gym. But basically a third-party observer to campus culture, my subjective $0.02:
The undergrad population is much to my dismay similar to any American school trained on the professional treadmill; most conversations I overhear involves seniors applying to medical school or law school or consulting or underclassmen discussing Google internships.
To use a Bostonian (maybe NYC too?) metaphor that Bostonians can understand, there are just as many people with Canada Goose jackets on MIT campus as on Newbury Street.
Like any school, it is not a homogenous population, "nerd's paradise" as parodied in the 80's movie "Real Genius"; although there are people who are genuinely interested in tech, there are people who want to pursue academic route who don't care for the Slashdot culture, jocks who are also science nerds, theatre geeks, int'l students who don't get the "American geek" culture...
The only real insight I can offer in a Computational Biology class I audited, I've never seen so many interruptions in lecture when the professor is flying through the slides on the derivation of this algorithm and that proof. Hands fly up right there asking for clarification on what is this greek variable on the previous slide... whereas during the same undergrad class I took years ago, none of us would have spoken on the spot due to lack of confidence to avoid looking dumb/lack of drive to try to understand something right there on the spot.
You're definitely missing a significant subculture that exists among MIT undergraduates. The kinds of MIT-affiliated events that you describe are certainly not the ones where you are likely to discover it. You are correct, though, in observing that not all MIT undergraduates fit into that subculture and many will go into finance, law, or medical careers. And there is certainly nothing wrong with that.
Hi phd514, in reading your comment, you are absolutely right; my comment did paint a broad brush. In reconsidering my response, I'd retract what I said about MIT culture and say my remarks really says more about me and my own cynicism/preoccupation at my age, late twenties.
It is in direct response to the parent post where the poster lamented about missing out a chance to experience the idealistic/radical youth culture when he was young, I responded more cynically about how in college I and my other friends did live in creative undergraduate communities; but whereas it was easy and natural to take on that attitude during undergrad, I found it became much harder to sustain those ideals in adulthood, as hard choices and realization of human nature creeps in, whether to truly sacrifice precious time and energy in your adulthood working towards them vs. "establishing" oneself professionally and socially; and because I struggle mightily with this, I put more value on what imperfect choices that people commit to as adults vs. the exciting (albeit memorable/enriching) experiences that they partook in as undergrads.
Sure it is a fashionable jacket that you see a lot of people wear on the streets and subways of NYC/Boston that cost about $750-$1200 (a comparable Northface jacket would go for 1/3 or 1/2 of that price). It's a viral trend where the utility doesn't justify the price, but people blindly follow the trend as a status symbol. Newbury Street is the most famous/prominent downtown shopping district in Boston where yuppies and hipsters go to see people and be seen and hence, the jarring conclusion that you'd see as many Canada Goose jackets there as in the long hallways (Infinite Corridor) of MIT.
You really don't need to attend MIT to work on projects with people like these. Near me there's a tool library, a makerspace, two hackerspaces, a biotechspace, an art college, several medical schools, many different kinds of collectives, and several big art-focused festivals with grants.
As a person who dropped out of high school and never went to college, i've worked on big art builds involving mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, software engineering, thermodynamics, biotech, and mixed media art. The only thing i've ever worked hard on are these projects, which were all for fun.
I'm sure a school like MIT is great, but thankfully you don't need it :-)
There is a massive difference in how credible you seem (and ergo, are treated) if you have an MIT, Ivy, or Stanford degree. I'm not 100% sure, but my hunch is that very few YC founders come from state schools like mine (although I know at least one did).
Schools only give credibility as a replacement for experience. If you don't have school credibility, go get some experience. This applies to practically everything in life, the exception being when a degree is legally required to do a job.
I wouldn't actually say that's true. Maybe Harvard but not MIT. I didn't know anyone, didn't pay (they paid me), and I didn't do anything specific for MIT admission.
I agree. And certainly don't think MIT, nor Harvard, are shit. You get what you put in.
Mostly, I was educated in the Québec system, and had no idea before I was 16 that if I got good grades I could get into interesting universities -- even the American ones. Reading up voraciously on Richard Feynman, only to discover that if things had been different, I, too, could have gone to that school. By that time, it was too late, I simply didn't have the grades. My parents' perception that it would cost a fortune certainly didn't help.
Not that I'm complaining, I can't change the past. But the idea of never attending MIT is one of those very few, recurring what-ifs? that will sometime keep me up at night, half a lifetime after.
You're not missing out, don't sweat it :-) I went to a similar university, and one of the best things about working in tech is that the culture is so similar to that environment.
If Everett is right then doesn't that mean that one of him also, say, choked to death on his acceptance letter?
I like the idea of immortality (no matter what happens, I'll always wake up OK in some branch, and that is me), but I'm not sure it actually helps otherwise, day-to-day. In fact, I'd guess there's more potentially bad universes so it seems rather much of a downer in that sense.
I'm sorry, but I don't feel the need to qualify that statement. This is just one of those absolutely crazy projects that people do from time to time (although MIT certainly has a reputation for hosting a lot of them), and I love that sort of thing. As much as we talk up the importance of Bayes' theorem and other algorithms as things that can change the world, etc., sometimes, you can just build something cool, and have a laugh.
> Reasons for emailing all undergraduates include event announcements for student groups and departments, flame wars, and occasionally lost items. In contrast, the kinds of emails sent within a dorm mailing list include, at the top of my inbox right now, parties, house meetings, and foodmobs to restaurants in Boston; decisions about when to turn off the heating for spring, invitations to test food experiments, and a memo to the person who left their clothes in the middle washer; and requests for empty gallon jugs, superglue, cooking scales, male-to-male audio cables, MIDI cables, 120V twist lock connectors, funnels, and hairdryers.
I can only imagine the volume of email that entails; how do people deal with it? I would guess that these days the mailing lists are through Google Groups so you can at least turn off emails and use the list as a forum, but I doubt most would know or bother to do that and let themselves drown in email.
Gmail makes it very easy (via the "Filter messages like these") to filter all messages from a mailing list. You can apply a label and skip the inbox so you just browse the list when you need to.
This is exactly what filters are for and why every decent MUA has them. You just filter each list to a folder, or all the lists into a folder, and read them there rather than in your inbox.
So, if you are aspiring to attend classes at MIT then you know what to do now. If you are applying for the admission, then you can choose your underwear color to increase your chances to get in.
this is awesome. Eg, "There is a sad, persistent decrease in multicolored underwear, ending with none by senior year." Does "none" refer to NA (None, null, etc.) or to the lack of color in the respondents' underwear, or to going commando? i suppose like all great research, it raises more questions than it answers.
more seriously, The OP seems to be inspired by a well-established tradition at the institute--MIT's sand mandala, perhaps. I graduated in 1992 and i remember some of my classmates from time to time, engaging in self-assigned projects that (i) seemed to lack any discernible purpose or utility whatever--certainly none for the student and (ii) that required a mind-boggling amount of meticulous effort. Somehow seeing these two attributes juxtaposed in a single endeavor, was hilarious to us (likewise the OP). Sometimes, though not always, these projects were deemed "pranks" but separate in my view.
I wonder how many people refrained from using an otherwise-useful mailing list because of someone they didn't want thinking about the color of their underwear.
I further wonder if reluctance to talk about their underwear color publicly impacts different genders disproportionately.
This tradition plays so lightly with a taboo so mundane and it is so easy to just send a one word email ("white") to the mailing list to pass the test that I have to wonder about the state of mind of anyone calling this "creepy".
I actually do wonder how many people refrained from using this mailing list because of the underwear color requirement, because I honestly suspect it to be literally zero, and would be fascinated by any other answer.
From one debate on bc-talk: "I'll point out that I've met someone who wanted to post on bc-talk but didn't just because they were uncomfortable with the whole underwear color thing. Also, I haven't been doing it when I post because it seemed weird to me." So at least 2.
Yes, it seems likely to me that talking about underwear color would prevent some students from using the list and those students would disproportionately be likely to be female, based on my own experiences in engineering school. But I posted what I did specifically because I wanted to see if my suspicions were correct.
I personally think this is probably intended to be just a funny tradition (and hopefully taken in that spirit by most students, of either gender). However, I think is fair to wonder about possible side-effects. The fact that the question gets downvoted here makes me, if anything, more likely to believe someone raising the issue within MIT, or choosing to send something like "unspecified"/"E_NO_ANSWER" to the mailing list,might receive, at best, an unkind response.
Some of responses in this comment thread look very much like blatant schoolyard bullying behaviour manifesting. "Why take things so seriously" "Spoilsport" et cetera ...
I was commenting more the reaction the HN crowd seems to present when someone dares to say this sounds like something they would be uncomfortable with, because that's very much the same one I remember from school. Of course in school you can't downvote, but the responses and dismissing attitude ("there's nothing wrong with the practice if you're not having fun with it") are eerily similar.
I mean technically this would be considered hazing. According to the "student handbook" of my alma mater hazing was defined as "making someone do something they do not want to do as requirement of membership" (paraphrasing here).
Personally, as a previous member of a greek organization, I find the definition ridiculous as it would qualify having prospective members study/be tested on the history of the organization as hazing.
Yeah, that definition is overly broad. Hazing requires harassment, embarrassment, or some other kind of abuse. Asking someone's underwear color is only harassment if they've got a history of inappropriate behavior, and embarrassment only if they've got serious socialization problems. Neither of which would reasonably be expected to be accounted for when asking the question in this situation.
18-22 year olds are all about hazing each other...
It's not like you have to be honest about what you're wearing, you could say any old thing - the email list police aren't spot-checking you to make sure you are indeed wearing yellow rubber ducky underpants.
I'm sort of surprised that there was not a sizable proportion of jokers that wrote-in "skidmarked"
> ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing.
> Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal pins.
Not quite sure what's happening with the votes on this post, with some up and some down votes.
In case it wasn't clear: several US universities took nude "posture photographs" of most people who attended, and did so for decades. They took the photos in the name of science, but that science was probably junk.
That feels worse than an unofficial email list asking people what colour underwear they have on before accepting their post.
Hey I voted you up. I really enjoyed the article and came back to upvote for that. My initial knee jerk reaction to your post was that it's slightly besides the point -- an interesting aside but somewhat off topic for the post. I suppose that could be why you were getting downvoted. Anyway it's super interesting, thanks for sharing
Oh, the interesting people! The interesting projects!
How I wish I had worked harder.