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> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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 ... Partake in the hazing rituals, or else.
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"
Reading this made me downright sad that I didn't, and probably never will, attend MIT. Oh, the interesting people! The interesting projects! How I wish I had worked harder.
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 :-)
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>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 ... Partake in the hazing rituals, or else.
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"
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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. What makes you say it's a shit school?
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…
Reading this made me downright sad that I didn't, and probably never will, attend MIT. Oh, the interesting people! The interesting projects! How I wish I had worked harder.
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.
> 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…