As you may know, virtually all MIT freshmen are required to live in on-campus dormitories, even though they can technically join MIT-recognized fraternities, sororities, or independent living groups (FSILGs) during their first year. (Some freshmen keep paying for their dorm room while unofficially living elsewhere, thereby satisfying MIT's housing requirement, but I don't think it's especially common or encouraged.) When freshmen become sophomores, a significant percentage ends up moving into FSILGs, with nearly all of the remaining students remaining on campus in dorms. Unlike most other universities, it's rare for students to move off campus and seek their own housing. MIT's housing options provide cost-effective, convenient boarding with a strong sense of community, such that people stay in the same building, or even the same room, for nearly all of their time as an undergraduate. Seniors and freshmen often share the same space, and there are no "freshmen-only" dorms. Plus, housing in Boston and Cambridge is very expensive, with studio apartment rates near MIT in the neighborhood of $1500/month. Some folks have their dorm expenses covered by financial aid, as well.

It is true that most FSILGs are, in fact, off campus, so their residents get the feeling of being away from school at night and on weekends. However, I argue that it's still a long shot from really living on your own. MIT has a frequent shuttle (called the SafeRide) that goes to nearly all of these houses, connecting them with each other and with MIT. And instead of having your own place, or sharing it with only a couple other people, you have 20 or 30 housemates. Granted, they're usually pretty tight-knit, but it's still very much a shared living situation. Each individual in a dorm or FSILG has far less control over who comes to visit, spends time hanging out, and even who ends up deciding to move in. Messes are often made between the times janitors come to clean, and it's not always easy to determine who made them. And, face it - in any living arrangement with 30 people (even a floor of a dorm), consensus is not easy. I think living in the dorm fostered a certain sense of anonymity and lack of accountability over shared space, such that folks might not pick up after themselves or be as tidy as they might with their parents watching over them. If they know a custodian will clean something up the next morning, they are less inclined to take care of it.

That said, the MIT dorms, houses and living groups are very much the right solution for most people. They allow students to focus primarily on their academic lives by handling many of the mundane details of building management and maintenance to which one would otherwise attend. I stumbled upon the opportunity to try something different, and it's worked very well for me. I wanted to choose who I'd be living with, I wanted a place I could have a bigger stake in calling "mine," and I think most of all, I just wanted a change of pace. Living on campus is incredibly convenient, but I sometimes found myself really wanting to put the title of "student" aside for a moment or two. I didn't always want to look out my window and see academic buildings -- I wanted something that felt more like what I'd be dealing with once I graduate, on a residential street with neighbors who weren't all my age. I wanted a little bit less energy at night, a place where I could unwind and enjoy my own brand of the MIT ethos on my own terms.

I didn't want to move too far away, because it would be too hard to get to those 9am classes, so we mainly looked at places that were easily accessible by bus or subway. I thought I might want to bring my car from home and have it here in Boston, so we also looked for places with parking. (Parking for resident students on campus is something like $700/year, and it's not necessarily in the most convenient lot. Some people try bringing their cars and parking on nearby streets, but it always becomes too much of a hassle, with parking tickets and street cleaning to contend with.) We ended up settling on a charming old house two or three miles from MIT, with nearby bus and subway links... it takes me about 20 minutes to get to campus by bus, or about half that if I decide to drive. The bus literally leaves from the end of my street and goes to Kendall Square, the transportation hub on the east side of campus. We have a backyard, a basement, our own kitchen, hardwood floors, everything... and per person, it's pretty close to what we were paying in the dorm. And our cable internet connection is actually faster than that of many MIT housing options. :) [Some places still have 10Mbit connections!]

Life off campus isn't perfect, but it's a positive change, a step in the right direction, and I definitely made the right decision. I still live with four other people, and while we're all friends, we don't necessarily share the same views on everything. Some of us are very proactive about taking out the trash, and others aren't. Some are vexed by stray recyclables in the kitchen, and others aren't. Some leave dishes in the sink longer than others, and some have personal habits that don't exactly mirror others'. Some are louder than others, and we sometimes have different sleep schedules, which leads to making noise at hours that aren't mutually convenient. But it's all minor stuff. On the whole, we get along well, we share a lot of the same interests, and we all pay the rent when it needs to be paid. Most importantly, we all trust and look out for each other! :)

Yeah, I sometimes miss the bus and have to wait another twenty minutes on the sidewalk. Yeah, I'll occasionally forget something at home and not be able to retrieve it easily. And it was a lot more convenient to just throw my garbage down a trash chute, instead of having to worry about trash bags and cans and carts and them being impossible to dig out from feet of snow in the backyard. Did I mention that shoveling snow is a pain? Being able to have my car entirely outweighs those drawbacks, though. I look at the city so much differently than I did when I was bound to public transit -- and I'm a huge mass transit advocate, too! I know that MIT's official position is that cars are not a good idea to bring to campus, and I tend to agree (given the lack of space and general driving mayhem in Boston), but don't entirely discount the thought. I think MIT won't give parking permits to freshmen, but perhaps other arrangements could be made if you had your heart set on it. And while there's always Zipcar, you have to be 21+. Just FYI, MIT subsidizes public transit passes by up to 50%. An unlimited one-month pass for all Boston-area buses and subways will only set you back $29.50, instead of the list price of $59.

I think I'll close this entry by saying that living off campus has made me a more responsible person. It actually takes some advance planning to go to class, so I make a point to be up earlier each day and create a schedule. I started using Google Calendar, and I love it. Plus, when I lived in the dorm, I'd go back during breaks between classes and kill the time socializing and hanging out with friends. Now, it's not worth going home if I have only an hour or two to spare in the middle of the day, so I head to a library or coffee shop and catch up on work. You'd be surprised how much time during the day I used to waste! I've become a better student, a better employee, and a better citizen.

What am I hoping to impart with this message? Live in a dorm your first year, see what you think about living on campus, check out all of the other dorms and FSILGs, and make an informed decision about where you want to be. If nothing really strikes your fancy, consider rounding up some friends and getting your own place. You just might find that it will help you in ways you could never have expected. :)

Today was "Bring Your Audience to Work Day," definitely one of the more obscure occasions of note. Created by a leading young visionary in the online blogosphere, this special day aims to shed light on the professional lives of bloggers, authors, and even stage professionals who have unusual day jobs.

This summer, as in January, I've perched myself atop the flat terrain of Fort Worth, Texas, as I continue to explore the complex field of freight railroading. I'm not out working in a rail yard -- I've actually got a desk job at the BNSF Railway's national operations center, working in the area of Service Design. (Basically, figuring out how to make trains move more quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively along BNSF's 25,000-mile railroad.)

I thought that, as part of today's underappreciated holiday festivities, I would bring you a window into my daily commute (sadly, by automobile - but at least it's not too long) and into my work surroundings.

This morning, I woke up late, thanks to two conflicting alarm clocks, one of which somehow reset itself to Eastern Time when I hooked it up via Bluetooth to my GPS. I had to get out of bed and look at the microwave clock to realize that I got up a whole hour early, so I went back to bed and woke up 45 minutes late. No matter - this is the first time it's happened since my arrival, and I stayed late today to compensate. :) (Despite being a performance-oriented shop, work's a very laid back atmosphere, with fun projects, personable supervisors, and pleasant co-interns. Most of them attend universities within a 200-mile radius.)

Good morning, I'm so happy to be awake at 8-in-the-moooorning!





Yeah, it's trash day.



This attractive housing tract in North Fort Worth provides a predictable, neighborly base for my summer lodging.






Well, it looks like I've been stymied by a recycle bin. I had to throw the e-brake and move the darned thing!






Yeah, there is a full-fledged elementary school within the housing subdivision. I couldn't believe it, either.












A tad agrarian, no?



























That's a Starbucks. Never seen one before, honest.



A Whataburger and a Waffle House.







































Beep! The gate opens and I am granted entry to the automobile kingdom.











































































I sit right between Jacob (junior at Texas A&M) and Sarah (junior at Texas Tech).









Sodexho calls this the "Smoke House Club." It was pretty good.

We have pretty cool courtyards with rail cars, fountains, landscaping, the works!

Sorry guys, no pictures of my messy bedroom.

It's Director of Financial Aid Daniel Barkowitz, holding up some fondue!

As his associate advisor for a group of six freshmen, I got to tag along to the end-of-year dinner at the Wine Cellar Restaurant, just across the Harvard Bridge from MIT. We had an exquisite dinner of cheese, meat, and chocolate fondue... paid for by the Office of Undergraduate Advising and Academic Programming. It was about $50/person!

(There were three types of fondue -- this one had cheddar in it, and there was another that had artichoke hearts and emmenthal.)

Kim Brink '10 is all dressed up for the occasion

The main course -- three or four different meats here ... lamb, shrimp, all raw... you cook it yourself on a skewer in a marinade, fondue-style. The sauces were excellent!

And then for dessert, we had hot chocolate fondue -- this one had caramel and almonds in it. Yeah, it was really good. Those fruits were skewered, dipped, and consumed in short order.

Back at East Campus, Cameron Lewis '07, an electrical engineering and computer science major, was preparing his final project for 6.115, the Microcomputer Project Laboratory. He's been building a spinning, multi-colored LED "sphere" from scratch -- that means designing the circuit board, machining the parts, drilling and threading the screw holes, and programming the controllers. It's been a huge part of his life for a month or two now!

The term's almost over! While I'm excited for the summer, with a continuation of my January internship at the BNSF Railway in Texas, I'll also be missing some of the great experiences I've enjoyed this semester. I'll tell you about one of them here.

For the past four months, I've been working with the MIT Design Lab to propose improvements to and new ideas for the metropolitan Paris subway system. (I introduced this to you sometime in February.) Our effort is directly sponsored by RATP, Paris' public transit authority, and we met at their corporate offices over Spring Break to present research we had done so far. Technically it's a grad class, and yeah the class is about half master's, half PhD students (and then me), but age doesn't matter so much in these things.

RATP headquarters (Maison de la RATP/House of RATP) near Gare de Lyon, Paris

For the first three weeks or so, we developed ideas independently... we urban planners, architects, designers, and MBA students, that is! As you can imagine, we all came up with wildly different stuff, though very interesting in all of its own ways. The workshop began very open-ended: our weekly assignments were literally things like "think about the Paris subway system, do a little research, and come up with some ideas about useful improvements" and "now that you've learned some more about [x], extend your ideas to reflect that new insight." It was really refreshing to just sit back and see what everyone brought to class, and how they were inspired by your previous thoughts, or vice versa. One bright concept could change the direction of the entire term!

The professor and instructors took our ideas and split them into four big groups -- cultural, commercial, learning, and social connection -- and assigned three to four people from the class to work on each of these four project areas. I had suggested education as a possible use of subway station and train space, so not surprisingly, I was assigned to the learning group. :)

Each group then met with Marco Susani, a design director at Motorola whose team developed the RAZR phone. He had some good initial insight about what it means to "be mobile," in the sense of exchange of information in a mobile environment like the Metro. The next week, Madame Furstenberg, my French teacher from last semester, came to the class with the director of the MIT-France program to give a crash course on Parisian culture. She pointed out a neat site called Objectif Respect, which RATP created to promote more friendly interactions on Paris buses and subways. :-P (I hadn't seen it, and it's worth a click -- check out the "Top 10"!) And then in true French style, a wine and cheese reception followed.

We arrived in Paris on a Saturday, and our first assignment was to perform an "ethnography" of the subway during the weekend. We toured the various lines and spent a good two days underground examining everything from the advertising on the walls to poorly designed staircases that disrupt crowd flow. Yeah, they paid for our subway fares.

(those red boxes show where on the platform the camera is pointing)

We took thousands of pictures of station entrances, train interiors, chairs, vending machines, posters, placards, people walking, and even overflowing trash cans. We sorted through all of this stuff and picked out the 20 or 30 shots that best represented things we wanted to demonstrate. The hotel wasn't too happy with our expropriation of the breakfast room as daily workspace ... we moved the cups and plates around on the tables to accommodate our laptops, and they made us put them back perfectly as we had found them!

For each photo that we selected, we added a caption that explained the phenomenon of interest.

(This was a slide explaining something about social interaction and the indirect means we currently use to express ourselves to strangers on the train.)

These ethnography images formed the basis of further inquiry for the rest of the semester. We also incorporated many of them in our formal presentations to RATP (which I'll get to shortly).

A photo of Madeleine station, under construction

On Monday, we enjoyed a tour of the new driverless Line 14, with a visit to its Bercy operations control center at the end. I've visited operations centers for Amtrak, MBTA, and BNSF, and I can pretty much say that they all look pretty similar. :-P Line 14's was like a mini version, comprising a single room and a few personnel.

We broke for a few hours and reconvened at 6pm for a tour of Chatelet-Les Halles, the central hub of the Paris subway network. This involved a tour of not only the station itself, but also the surrounding Les Halles shopping complex and outdoor areas. We spent a fair amount of time underground just walking around, taking pictures, and observing the unique crowd behavior that forms at rush hour.

Our midterm presentation to RATP was the next morning, so everyone worked feverishly into the night to incorporate all of the things we had experienced in the preceding days with the research we had done prior to arriving in Paris. Again, we commandeered the hotel breakfast room, though some of us who were still working past 1am were kicked out (!) since the lobby manager was leaving for the night. My group ended up on the stairs!

The next day saw us rising early. We didn't expect so many people to be there -- managers of entire subway lines (1 and 14), directors of entire departments, project managers (like one lady who manages all of the information kiosks in the stations), and even a few graduate students who are interning at the agency. We talked about what we had seen, problem areas to consider, and defined a trajectory for our work going forward. Examples include new navigation systems, ways to make existing signage less confusing, methods to teach history and culture to Metro riders, a system like Craigslist's "missed connections" forum, social "games" to play with other passengers (like scavenger hunts), and more effective business models for transactions of goods/services within the Metro.

Yeah, we're intently watching. :P

Feedback was given by RATP after each group’s presentation. We were reminded to consider the less technologically savvy customers, and to cater to their needs as well. Additionally, challenges of physical security often limit potential uses of the Metro space. The balance of creativity and security is an especially important one -- you've got to be able to evacuate tons of people quickly in case of emergency.

Many of our ideas focused on platform and residual spaces, without giving enough thought to the spaces within the trains themselves. Also, many slides talked about events or activities involving lots of people – but while more people means more potential revenue, the higher traffic also results in services becoming harder to deliver. We gathered some great direction for our future work.

After an excellent lunch, we had an "ideation session" in which the personnel split up between our four project groups for some rapid-fire idea generation. This involved large sheets of butcher paper and hundreds of brightly-colored Post-it notes! (I'm not kidding.)

When we came back to Cambridge, we began some serious work on refining our proposals, culminating with this past Monday's final review. I'll blog about that soon!

So you got into one of the best, most stimulating and resource-rich universities in the world. Welcome – MIT’s an amazing place (no matter what you’re here to study), and I bet you’re really eager to come – not just for Campus Preview Weekend, but to start your academic and life voyage as a freshman this fall semester. You’re probably already planning your summer, the changes from home to college ... what to bring, how you’ll spend those last days with friends and family, perhaps visiting your favorite childhood haunts in a last bid to say goodbye. But what if you held off on all that?

Sounds crazy, right? – because you want to get away from your parents as soon as possible, start your own life, and not be told when to go to bed and what not to eat... well, whatever the reason, college is a way to leave home that’s accepted by both your friends and your folks (no matter how conservative), and you’re all ready to GO. It feels like the "right thing to do," because after high school, don’t all good students go to college? And besides, what else would you do to prepare for that promising future you’ve always dreamed of (and, no doubt, the one everyone *expects* you to have)?

Let me ask you something else: if you had an entire year to do anything you want, with unlimited time, no expectations, no SATs or class ranks or gossip or student club presidencies to get in the way... what would you do? Let’s just pretend that after you graduate, instead of just returning to school in the fall, you finally get to work on that dream project, tinker in that lab, or spend a year overseas (all expenses paid) teaching something you know and learning everything you never knew all at the very same time. And you’d wake up every day knowing that MIT’s just down the road.

Maybe you just want to spend time working to have some cash during your college years. Or maybe you just want to decompress after the rigorous academic program that got you into MIT in the first place. The sky is the limit, and odds are, you’ll never have the chance to be so free ever again in your life. So what’s the rush? It’s not like you wouldn’t be going to MIT. You’d just be hanging out for a few more months to get a better handle on what you’re really coming here for.

This might sound just a bit surprising, but I’m willing to bet that in that year off, you’ll learn more than you ever would as a college freshman. No, perhaps you wouldn’t be sitting in a classroom, but you’d be doing a ton of that "other" kind of learning – the learning that helps you figure out where you’re going, who you are as a person, and what you were put on this earth to do. It’s a fact that a lot of people here change their majors – heck, maybe several times – because they just aren’t sure what they want to do. Taking time away from school can help you be better prepared for these kinds of decisions – you’ll likely arrive on campus a more confident and prepared individual, with some time away from HS to really think about what you want out of life. Are you really sure that you want to be a doctor, or an engineer, or whatever it is that you’ve got your heart set on right now? Do parents, family or friends suggest that you be one thing, yet you’d really prefer to be something else? (Why not take some time to sort it out, spending time in hospitals, labs, or perhaps as an intern at a nearby firm?)

No, taking a breather after high school isn’t necessarily for everyone. If you qualify for full financial aid (your family’s tuition contribution is zero) at MIT, it may well cost you less to come straight away and get a head start on your degree. (For the vast majority, that’s not the case, and your year off would likely be far less of a financial undertaking than a year of college.) In my case, I took two years off and arrived on campus with a lot of perspective, but had to spend time getting back into the student mindset so I could put in the kind of effort it takes to succeed in classes here. Things are great now that I’ve had some time to adjust – I’m very glad I took the time I did, and I don’t have any regrets. I’m a far more directed, focused person than I would have been, and I’ve got a better idea of what I want from MIT than (dare I say) a whole lot of my classmates. I came from a rural area where education wasn’t especially valued, and I never gave a passing thought to university admissions as a high school student. It wasn’t until after I graduated that I really began to investigate anything about college!

MIT endorses the taking of "gap years" because of the unique opportunity to gain purpose and personal enrichment like you’ll never be able to during a full-time academic term. Sure, college is an amazing place to be, and lots of exciting things happen here, but there’s far more to life and the world than your university campus. It has always been helpful for me to keep that in mind, especially when things get rough, because I just bounce back and march on. And I feel like I’m getting a lot more out of this place because of it!

Come talk to me and fellow students, as well as a MIT professor, during CPW – we’ll be having a Gap Year Panel on Friday at 12 noon in the Student Center, 3rd floor, Private Dining Rooms 1 & 2. Parents are warmly welcomed and encouraged to come too!

RATP has asked us to consider new uses and features for the Paris metro (subway) system -- ways to make it not just a simple means of transport, but an integral part of community and leisure. Everything's becoming automated -- ticket sales, even the operation of the trains -- and new space is opening up where those tasks were previously performed manually. What can be done with a ticket booth now that people buy from machines? Who is taking the metro, what kinds of things appeal to them, and how do they interact with their fellow passengers and the surroundings? Plus, once staff members are no longer needed for newly automated tasks, how can they be put to use in new and innovative ways?

Yeah, that was an intro slide I put together...

Anyway, once we identify potential new services and prepare our recommendations, the authority's research and development staff will be hosting us in Paris. The trip will allow us to validate what we've found and also do some on-site research, exploring the metro and its integration into Parisian life.

RATP is known for experimenting with new and innovative concepts, including a "faster" moving sidewalk (no joke...):

This thing is called the TRR, or trottoir roulant rapide, and is being tested at Paris' Gare Montparnasse as a possible time saver in that long tunnel. Apparently you stand on a slower portion for a few seconds, keep your feet straight, and it glides you onto the fast section so you don't fall. Wikipedia says, "At first it operated at 12km/h but too many people were falling over so the speed was reduced to 9km/h. It has been estimated that commuters using a walkway such as this twice a day would save 11.5 hours a year."

11.5 hours a year saved? But what happens when you get to the end of the trottoir and have to wait a minute for your train, or for escalator congestion? Well, I'm sure they'll figure it out! (or maybe I should include that in my notes... hmm...)

I'm sure most of you have heard about OpenCourseWare, a large (and well-funded) effort to put all of MIT's course materials on the Internet. George S. Zaidan '08, a chemistry major, figured that if MIT is opening the doors to its classes, why not do the same for its research? He saw it as an educational opportunity, a way to explain the research process through material, context and anecdotes that don't make it to the final papers. And he even had a project to start on -- his advisor, Prof. John Essigmann, the first author of important work done in the 1970s concerning aflatoxin, had volunteered to contribute to the effort.

George envisioned OpenLabWare (OLW), an interactive Web site of research "modules," each with scanned lab notebooks, timelines of experiments and events, video and audio clips, and personal profiles of the individual researchers. He wanted to highlight the human aspects of research, to show anyone with a knack for knowledge how scientific questions can evolve to real findings. George had a number of ideas as to how all of this should be presented, but he was no programmer, and had no idea where to start. Furthermore, his budget was limited, which meant finding someone with the experience necessary to share his big-picture view would be difficult.

Luckily, that sort of thing is easy at MIT. I first heard from George through this blog -- he stumbled upon it on the admissions site at the end of the Fall '05 semester, and learned about some high-profile work I had done for Amtrak.

I am e-mailing you on the off-chance that the OLW project interests you, perhaps not as much now as trains, but enough to talk to me about it. I am developing the prototype this IAP, and I have funding from a professor in the Biological Engineering department. That said, it's a big job and if you're not interested, there's no point doing it just for the money. But I know from your blog that you wouldn't ever work only for the cash anyway.

He was right. I'm always looking to get in on the ground floor of new initiatives, but only when I think they've got a high chance of taking off. I agreed to meet him in the Student Center, where we went over his thoughts and goals for the project. Even at that early stage, I could really tell he had all of his ducks in a row -- he was even rattling off names of top MIT brass who had expressed interest in the idea. We chatted about large projects I'd developed in the past, some for profit, but many just because I felt they needed to be done, and had the means to do them.

We began to work together during IAP 2006. George sent off one of Essigmann's lab notebooks to be digitized as he turned aflatoxin into a true full-time job. From a seventh-floor office in Building 16, George isolated research material, documented experiments, determined a timeline, and set off to interview the professors and scientists for the module. Back at East Campus, between French 1 homework and weekend trips, I was developing the software foundation for the new OLW. And we brought on a new team member, Chris Varenhorst, to assist with coding new extensions for the site.

George wanted a working OLW prototype by the end of IAP, a goal that kept both of us (and Chris) very busy. George was constantly rounding up new data and anecdotes while I busily added new functionality, like a digital lab notebook viewer and a way to relate the experiments to the timeline on the back end. The work continued throughout the spring. It was all residing on an old development server in my dorm room -- a machine that used to serve as my phone switchboard in the pre-college days. (Somehow I never anticipated it would have anything to do with MIT research!) I still have a horrible memory of being absolutely exhausted one evening, getting to bed early for the first time in weeks, awakening to a wrong number call on my cell phone, realizing the battery was about to die, reaching up in the darkness to see if the charger was plugged into the old outlet at the foot of my bed, grabbing what I thought was the wire, and realizing not only was it the cord to the server, but that I had just unplugged it while on. It took me several hours that night plus the following week to reconstruct work I had managed to corrupt. But anyway...

Over the course of the spring semester, OpenLabWare really started to take shape. It seemed like new features were going live all the time, and along the way, the prototype site was presented to key academic players in science and technology. For example, I recall a very positive meeting George and I had with the executive director of OpenCourseWare, in which we pitched our site and ways OCW and OLW could collaborate. (They loved the idea and have been helping us with production support, being well-versed in what it takes to deploy lots of MIT media content to the outside world.) And I still remember the smile on George's face as we walked away from the meeting, attempting to digest the positive reception the two of us had gotten from someone so senior. We had only known each other for a couple of months, but already we were well on our way to something very, very promising.

It wasn't long until we heard that we were selected as a grant recipient of the Alumni Sponsored Funding Opportunities program. We had managed to get some smaller amounts of funding from other MIT sources, but this latest $25,000 award was a pretty significant step. George and John had secured a glowing letter of support from Prof. Doug Lauffenburger, the director of MIT's Biological Engineering Division, and with the prototype site well along in development, the educational goals of the project were becoming clear. Thanks to the funding, we now have the means to bring on new students to the program -- not only to develop content, but spread the open research message to professors and faculty in their own areas of MIT!

Managing OLW's technology development alongside classes and work has been a commitment, but one I make happily. It has helped me stay connected to various areas of MIT that, as an urban planning/transportation major, I would ordinarily never have gotten to know. It's kept my technical skills sharp at a time when I've been shying away from computers in favor of travel and college life. And I guess you could say it keeps me in touch with Chris, a fellow East Campus resident from that newer building across the courtyard. :) Most of all, I'm grateful for the opportunity to be a part of something that has the potential to enhance education and learning, even if the content lies squarely outside of my field.

Over the next semester and coming months, OLW will continue to evolve as new research modules are brought online by our content creation team. In fact, Melis, one of my fellow bloggers, is presently preparing one of these modules and will soon be writing about her experience here. George, Chris and I will be adding more in the way of functionality, and will hopefully (!!) hunt down some on-campus office space, an extremely elusive commodity these days. But for now, I invite you to check out the site, and let me know how you think it could work even better!

One of you asked about what I'm doing down here -- I'm splitting my time between Service Design/Performance and Technology Services, so basically, applying technology to the analysis and optimization of train routes and service. I'm working with some great people, and you know, eight hours in an office sort of fly by if you're enjoying what you're doing. So far, I've been gaining a wide overview of how BNSF runs their trains and the sorts of performance aspects one would be concerned with in the freight industry. It's all new to me, coming from the passenger side of things. I suppose the best part is that it's all making sense so far! :)

The headquarters "campus" is pretty big, and as you can see here, they've got several train cars parked at the main entrance -- these are fully-functioning conference rooms used regularly for business purposes! There's a network of roads connecting all of the various offices, but I've spent most of my time in the Operations and Technology buildings. The TOB (technology office building - yes they actually use this acronym...), located across the street from the rest, was formerly the factory where the TRS-80 was made. :-P On an unrelated note, they've got an old Xerox workstation and laser printer from the late '70s in a glass display case in the cafeteria, from before the BN (Burlington Northern) and the ATSF (Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe) merged to form BNSF.

But most importantly, everyone's been very friendly and generous, going out of their way to include me in their work activities or just to show me a specific project they're especially keen on. Take today as an example: a director took an hour and a half out of his day to give me the grand tour of an expensive piece of model dispatching software. Or I'll drop by the desk of a senior manager (the one who had me over to his house for dinner, after taking me to lunch, all on my first day) to ask about something I'm working on, and we'll get into a half-hour discussion about some interesting business problem that I'll then go investigate. I'm the only intern around right now (my boss says "he's here this month while MIT is in hibernation"), but I don't feel out of place one bit. :) The environment is great because a lot of the folks have railroad career backgrounds (as in, out in the field or in the yard, away from management), so they've always got that extra context to lend.

The hardest part about this work is getting up around 7AM! I haven't had to do that on a regular basis for what, four years? We MIT kids are so spoiled with our first classes at 10, 11, or later. It's midnight as I'm typing this, and I have a meeting at 8. Luckily, though, it's typically pretty loose, and as long as I put in a full day, my exact arrival time needn't be so strict. I think it'll be a good summer - I'm already doing neat things!

(Only in Texas can you legally drive 80mph on an Interstate highway!)

This week, I drove about 1200 miles from my house in Arizona to the Fort Worth, Texas area, where I'll be spending all of IAP (and the summer) interning at the headquarters of North America's second-largest railroad, BNSF. I start in a few hours. Now ordinarily, the trainman wouldn't be driving, but I'd be stuck walking to work otherwise... there's no subway around here and if you want to get around, you need a vehicle. I guess that's life.

I'd never driven that far in one shot before, and certainly not in two days. It all worked out fine, though, and I've been hanging around the home of my boss-to-be while he and his family are vacationing. I had some great Tex-Mex food the other night, too. It's kinda neat to be able to go wherever you want, whenever you want, even if that involves a greater-than-walkable distance... can you tell I'm rediscovering the joy of motoring after using nothing but the MBTA and Amtrak for twelve months?? Maybe I'll have to bring a car up to Boston after all... (uh oh!)

So why not stay around MIT for January like most people? It's not like I'm spending time with family instead, a popular alternative for some. I actually had the choice, but this seemed like a compelling prelude to the summer period, when I'll be working here for three straight months. And it's a month's worth of extra salary, which isn't a bad deal, either. Ironically, the guy I'll be working for is an alum of MIT's transportation master's program, and he studied under several of the faculty I know personally. The son of my advisor from last year was one of his classmates. Small world.

I'll provide a few updates as time goes on. I bet you all are relieved to have finished those applications! Now you just sit back and wait. *grin*..............

I have some documents to prepare in the morning for job #1, due technically at the end of the workday but with classes from 10-12:30, a student group meeting from 1-2, recitation from 2-3 and another recitation from 4-5, I probably won't have another chance. It's all right, because I love my job. I've rediscovered waking up earlier than twenty minutes before class, and it feels pretty good... besides, I'm more productive in the morning when everyone and everything else is fast asleep, out of distraction's way. I still have to do more assigned reading for public policy that was actually due for Tuesday, but, you know, I still manage to be a part of the discussions just fine.

You see, I'm probably one of the least academically swamped students on campus, and I won't have it any other way. The energy around here is palpable, and the best part is that I have the time to savor it. I have the time to screw around, the time to stop to think, the time (if I want it) to sleep well, the time to take off for a couple days (either for free or for some artificially-low price), and the time to remember when I, too, was being evaluated by Ben and Matt in selection committee - and oh how much I wanted to come here! - and now I'm here, and it's been two years since I got in and yes it took a little while but I'd be lying through my teeth if I said things weren't wonderfully amazing right now. :)

I may not have seen a whole lot of point in making every single freshman (read: me) drag himself through certain classes he may not like (read [...shock!]: math and physics!), watching him skin his knees in the process, and then if he trips a couple of times because he's hurt, kicking him while he's down. I think I made that clear last year. But it all makes sense now, because to succeed at MIT, you have got to self-advocate, even if that means looking past the obvious places for help. If you don't, you quickly become the weakest link, no matter how many times you've saved lives, circumnavigated the earth, or exhibited general MIT-like awesomeness. This shouldn't scare you - almost everyone does just fine.

Plenty of people come here and navigate those freshman classes with flying colors. Those subjects are precisely what they studied hard in high school, precisely the things they've always been good at, precisely the stuff of their summer vacations, precisely the stuff that made them yearn for MIT in the first place. That's why self-advocacy isn't enough: a lot of people don't even have to try. Me? Heck, I didn't even have a guidance counselor, I missed over fifty days of school each year since fourth grade, and I graduated in 2003 having only finished tenth-grade geometry. But I worked it all out, filled in the gaps, and hey, now I'm doing just fine. I figured out how to make this place work for me, and you know what? I'm pretty darn proud of that.

Maybe some people just want to be good at everything, but I tend to pick and choose my battles. I value happiness and general well-being far too much to be a workaholic, and I value a connection to terra firma. I am acutely aware of the world on the outside, because college is not my entire life, and I am unwilling to let it be. I think that the world is a beautiful place and I still smile when I bump into friends in the Infinite, when I walk past 3-107 and peer in the window, when I'm watching my neighbors through my doorway being incredibly awesome at three in the morning doing things I couldn't possibly print here, but most importantly, when I take a few steps back and realize my incredibly good fortune for being here in the first place.

MIT is an exciting and fascinating place to spend your college years and it's great that you're applying. But before you base all of your hopes on coming here, don't forget who you are and where you are headed as an individual. Because it's you who makes you, not your college. It is you who will make a difference in the world - your college will only help you along the way, giving you the tools you'll need to forge ahead.

Try to get some rest Friday night. :)