Steer Roast was this weekend.

If your initial reaction to that was "...um, what?", then I'll fill you in: Steer Roast is Senior House's claim to fame - it's our annual weekend-long party centered around the overnight roasting of a steer in our courtyard and the subsequent feast. The following description is courtesy of a presentation on Senior House and Steer Roast created by Charisse '03:

"I present Steer Roast as an extreme barbeque: instead of grilling hamburgers and hot dogs, we roast over 300 pounds of meat over a giant spit for 17 hours; instead of getting a band or two to perform, we hire a dozen bands to play over two nights; instead of general barbeque activities including horseshoes and lawn darts, we provide a 10 by 10 foot mud pit, strippers, and a casino. The festival celebrates Senior House culture by sporting death, because only life can kill you."

Steer Roast has been held in the spring every year since 1964. Legend says it started as a small barbeque in the courtyard, but alums - who return en masse for Roast every year - state otherwise. From Michael Potash '69:

"No, this did not start out as a little barbeque and grow. No. It started out as a big bang, it was a huge thing... it was 1964 in the spring... it was big from the very first day."

That said, I present you with pictures from the pit lighting and mud wrestling from this year's Roast. Captions will appear if I feel like it - that is, not often.

The courtyard Friday afternoon during setup

People filled the courtyard and crowded on balconies for the pit lighting:

A considerable number of alums bring their families to pit lighting and the feast.

Former GRT Foley got Laurie '11 to record this year's lighting:

The pit is traditionally lit by a flaming roll of toilet paper sent from five stories up, hence everyone looking skyward.

I didn't get a shot of the roll on its way down, but I do have these pictures of the flaming pit (which is what you were all waiting for anyway):

SO MUCH MEAT. MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT MEAT

The meat is taken off the spit the next morning and served as part of a full meal in the courtyard that afternoon. Upwards of 300 people attend each year - I was one of the people cooking for the Feast, and at one point on Saturday morning I managed to fill all of the ovens in the Haus with massive amounts of baking pie.

Our housemasters kicked off the mud wrestling, as they do every year. (Hey. Prefrosh. You know that Guide to Residences in the NBM? Check out our i3 video in the DVD. Yeah, that's them. Cynthia Jenkins always wins. If you can't take the time to get out the DVD, here's a YouTube video of them wrestling at last year's Roast.)

So yeah, you're looking at Paul in the picture below. Paul does not yet know that this picture exists. Hi, Paul. You can kill me later.

I spent some of Friday night hanging out with Dorota '10 while she was on Meatwatch (what, you think six sides of steer just roast themselves?) and listening to some of the bands.

Of the bands performing, I got to see five; Professor Murder and Oxford Collapse were probably my favorite two.

Roast is also a time for halls and suites to do something art-related, or just something awesome. The residents of 433 ordered thousands of googly eyes and glued them to everything in the suite.

Yes. Everything.

My hall, the 4th HNC, went with an overarching theme, "Things that pop." This involved bubble guns that made their way throughout the Haus during the whole of Friday night, but the highlight was the three hundred balloons stuffed with little packets of Pop Rocks, inflated, and used to fill the entirety of our hall lounge. We started doing this the Sunday before Roast, so the balloons had to be stored someplace during the week.

This place ended up being my room.

Somewhere under those balloons is a couch.

I'm still exhausted from not having slept this weekend. My voice is completely shot, and it doesn't show signs of returning any time soon. It was absolutely, absolutely worth it.

More pictures later. Or you can look for them yourself if you want. I'm not the only one who had a camera, and some people were smart and used digital instead of film.

Moving on to the point of this post - a few weeks ago, MITblogs got a question from Claire: "I have multiple food allergies (eggs, wheat, dairy, gluten), none of which cause anaphylaxis, but I'm wondering how food-allergies are accommodated at MIT. Can people opt out of the meal plan in order to make their own food in dorm kitchens?"

If you have multiple food allergies that require specific methods of food selection and preparation, you might want to consider living in a dorm with kitchens instead of a dining hall. (Burton-Conner, East Campus, Senior House, Random, Bexley, New House, and Macgregor fall into this category.) I go grocery shopping at either Whole Foods or Trader Joe's every one to two weeks, both of which have tons of options for people with food allergies. You can go shopping for food even if your dorm does have a dining hall (Baker, Simmons, McCormick, and Next, for those of you following at home), since they're only open for dinner anyway and buying all of your other meals gets really expensive really quickly. These dorms also all have one kitchen open to all residents (for example, Next House's Country Kitchen is in the basement).

Unfortunately, living in a dorm with a dining hall requires that you buy into the House Dining Plan each semester, and you are not permitted to opt out of it regardless of your situation. There's hope for you yet, though - Gillian '10 (yes, that Gillian), who moved to Baker last semester, sent me the following email about being gluten-free while living in a dorm with a dining hall:

"I live in Baker now and I have to pay for preferred dining, so I figured I would make the best out of it. i introduced myself to the head chef and he introduced me and my gluten-free situation to the other chefs and told me about all my possibilities. They include almost any kind of stir fry or salad--both of which are offered nightly, so I'm always guaranteed choices for dinner. They use mostly gluten-free sauces in their stir fry and offer it with rices or rice noodles! I can occasionally have soup, but I can never remember which. And I generally steer clear of the specials, but if I felt like it I could ask whether things are gluten-free or not. Also, I keep a mini fridge in my room with other gluten free staples and snacks. Having LaVerde's central in our campus is great because as anyone with serious food limits knows, the supermarket is always a guarantee!

"Lastly, Au Bon Pain is going to be your best friend, as they are wayyyy ahead of the curve with accomodating the foodly challenged. At the Kendall Square location, they have this computer with their menu that tells the complete nutrition info of ever item they serve along with the ingredients and possible allergens--it's amazing! And they have soooo many choices--their soups are a winterly staple of mine."

Jessie (yes, that Jessie. No, I could not resist the possibility of using parallelism. My AP English Language teacher would be proud of me) also compiled a list of local stores and restaurants with gluten-free options:

"Most local grocery stores (though not LaVerde's as far as I know) have a gluten-free section. Whole Foods even has gluten-free bagels sometimes."

Verified to have a gluten-free menu available:

PF Chang's (Chinese, locations at the Prudential Center and near Boylston)
Legal Sea Foods (Kendall Sq and other locations)
Outback Steakhouse (Medford and other locations)
The Elephant Walk (Cambodian, Davis Sq area)
Wagamama (Noodle dishes, Harvard Sq)

Claim to have gluten-free menus:

Pizzeria Uno
Carrabba's Italian Grill
Jake & Earl's Dixie Roadhouse
Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse
Not Your Average Joe's

Claim to accommodate GF diners (I have not been to these):

On the Border
Burton's Grill

I realize that most of this response was specifically about having a gluten allergy, but everyone should feel free to ask me questions about food allergies that this entry didn't answer. I'll get to them. Really. I will. Even though I'm perpetually hosed.

-Sleep. As second-semester seniors, you should have become well-acquainted with this sometime around January. (Um, I mean, I SAID NOTHING YOU ARE ALL BEING DILIGENT STUDENTS FROM NOW UNTIL GRADUATION)

-If you have a ton of free time on your hands, learn ozonolysis. Oh man, was that a meta-metapost? It's gonna be a good day. Speaking of, why do people shorten "organic chemistry" to "orgo"? Does Inorganic Chemistry (all the cool kids are calling it 5.03 these days) ever get shortened to "Inorgo"? I hope not, because that sounds really, really silly.

What was I saying? Oh. Right. More things you can do between now and Saturday afternoon:

-Buy really cool brain-related t-shirts on the Internet. Now you too can declare your nerdiness on your chest for the viewing pleasure of small children and passersby.

-Sleep.
--Also, DON'T PANIC. You're scaring your family. (Thank them for the last couple of months, by the way. College application time causes tons of stress for everyone.)
---On that "DON'T PANIC" note, read (or reread, if you've already made your way through it) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Similar to gateway drugs, this book is the first step before reaching a level of sci-fi hardcore known only to a select few. Next comes Neuromancer and Battlestar Galactica, and then you're on to the very depths of obscurity. If you find yourself living every waking moment in fear that you're really a cylon, all hope is lost.

-If reading science fiction isn't for you, you can always read a newspaper. Any newspaper. Something that isn't centered on the United States, even. Anything at all. Ignore any of those "RECORD NUMBER OF HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS APPLYING TO COLLEGE" articles, as they will only lead to panic, and we just discussed how you aren't allowed to do that.

-Leave a comment on the blogs that displays more than just your knowledge of ordinal numbers. (This one is really just in here to see how many of you will even read the post before commenting. Substance! Give it to us! Tell us stories!)

-Discover new music. Once you've done so, get all statistics-happy about it.

-Learn to knit! Don't be as bad at it as I am.

-If you do get in, don't get all self-righteous about it. You're fantastic and all, but you too were sitting in your desk chair full of self-doubt and convincing yourself that you weren't good enough to get in before you checked online, and your friends and family all know it because you probably went ahead and panicked a lot anyway. Worse than the "none of the fifteen colleges I applied to will take me because I suck at life!" guy is when he turns into the "I knew I'd get into fill-in-the-blank University all along!" guy. Don't do it.

For more things to do, check out a post Jess made a while back. She's better at this kind of thing than I am. Can't say I didn't try.

The best of luck to applicants on Saturday!

I just shared that with you for two reasons, the first being that I already go to MIT; denying my nerdiness is futile, so I might as well be unabashedly proud of it. The second one involves what I do all this pipetting for: let's talk about my UROP! (You want some wine with that cheesy intro?)

Remember this Paint-classy picture of how far I walk every day?

It still applies. (The fun part comes when I'm standing at the west parallel of EC, since I can see both my window at work and my window at home.)

Last September, I started a UROP in the O'Connor Lab. The lab's a part of the chemistry department; our research, however, is centered around the natural compounds produced by the periwinkle plant C. roseus, so a major part of what we do involves techniques in molecular biology as well as biochemistry and organic chemistry. I came across the lab's website last year when I was looking for a summer job, and the work they were doing sounded really interesting. Since Sarah O'Connor was one of my 5.12 professors at the time, I stayed after class one day and told her what I thought. I also asked for a job.

The exchange went exactly as awkwardly as it sounds. "Um, I don't actually have a question about lecture today, but I was looking at the webpage for your lab and what you guys do sounds really cool. Can I have a UROP?" It couldn't have been that bad, though - rather than immediately turn me down (which is what I thought would happen - it's hard to find a UROP if you start looking too late in the year), she asked me if I was okay with starting in the fall instead. I spent my summer at CTD instead and started working with a grad student at the start of the fall term.

Since last semester was my first experience with anything in a lab outside of the experiments in AP Bio, I spent most of the term learning basic lab techniques and playing around with bacteria. More than once a week, you could hear me swearing loudly at petri dishes I'd inoculated with mutant strains of E.coli - "Express my f***ing protein! EXPRESS! Don't make me have to do this again..."

This'll start happening again in the spring. (I'm sure everyone in the lab misses it.) My project this IAP, though, involves running kinetic reactions for twelve different analogs of one compound, secologanin, to find out whether any of these new substrates react more effectively with the enzyme strictosidine synthase (STS) than regular ol' secologanin. (I referenced Wikipedia! Twice! If this were a paper for a class, I'd be in hot water right now.) If you've ever taken samples while running kinetics before, you know that it essentially works like this:

A three-sample example of what I've spent the last two weeks doing at my UROP
0:00:00 - Start first reaction.
0:00:30 - Start second reaction.
0:01:00 - Start third reaction.
One hour and fifty-six minutes of downtime, during which I prepare LC-MS vials for the rest of the day, look for summer research programs my GPA is too low for me to be accepted into, and take care of the million emails I've received from people about Wild Party or prefrosh who want to know how to get into MIT
1:57:21 - Suddenly remember I'm supposed to take samples of the reactions at the two-hour mark. Wonder whether I've missed it. Panic, run to my bench, spin down samples, wait.
2:00:00 - Take sample from first reaction.
2:00:30 - Take sample from second reaction.
2:01:00 - Take sample from third reaction. Repeat at 3, 4, and 5 hours.

This is my last week working full-time, though - I'll be taking a three-unit neuroanatomy class (braaaaaiiinnns, yay!) for four hours every morning next week, and then spring semester will start. (Already?! Didn't IAP start around two seconds ago?) Next week is also prod week - known as "hell week" to anyone who has ever been involved in theater - for Wild Party, so I'll be swamped with producery things until we close on the 9th. If you're in the area, come see us! It'll be wild. Some might even call it a wild, wild, party.

It's almost 2:00:00, so that's all you'll get from me today. I'm about to show off my pipetting skills like nothing else.

Wait, what was I saying?

Ah. Yes. Right. I was about to embark on a discussion that may sound all too familiar to regular readers of the blogs, since Laura just wrote a version of it a couple of weeks ago: sometimes, you will hate this place. And when you do, you'll really hate it. Trying to get through MIT is hard, and you'll often wonder whether or not the struggle is worth it.

This is how I felt during the entirety of November and December. Finals week ("I hate everything and everyone, including you") was just the point when I reached a less-than-uplifting epiphany: I'd spent an entire semester working harder than I had ever thought possible, and my GPA was actually going down.

Behold, the ultimate demotivator.

I choose to live a full life outside of academics, albeit one filled with too many extracurriculars. Ask anyone; being on the executive board for MedLinks, producing the IAP show for the Musical Theatre Guild, doing a UROP full-time, having a show at WMBR (you can listen to streams of everyone's shows! Do it!), picking up photography on the side, blogging here (albeit sucking at it sometimes), and planning to run for president of Senior House is definitely too much stuff at a time. Some people are able to do all of this and still have amazing grades - I'm pretty sure Mollie survived off the energy from magical unicorns or something (narwhals? Other mythical horned animals?) while she was here. (Hi, Mollie.) I am not one of these people (as Jake '10 just said ten minutes ago, "Oh! You do stuff! No wonder your grades suck!"), but that's something I can and do accept. If you're wondering why I haven't been blogging, this is why. It isn't that I don't have anything to blog about, just a lack of time in which I can do so. (I am placing a statement in parentheses here because there's one in or after every other sentence in this paragraph.^_^) As I stated above, I occasionally wonder if doing all of this is really worth it.

Here's the important thing, though: I'm happy this way. There are a ton of opportunities to take advantage of here; if I didn't do so, I'd go absolutely insane. Granted, I still complain about my grades at the end of every term and tell acquaintances from high school lies of omission about how school is going, since saying "I have a 4.0 at MIT!" and not explaining the 5.0 scale is far easier than listening to people who barely know me prattle on about how I "used to be so smart!" Perhaps I haven't completely adjusted. Or maybe I just have no patience.

College is the one time in your life where you'll be relatively independent and your primary responsibility will be to learn things, and not just the material in your classes. Why would you ever want to squander that chance? There are tons of people who do so and regret it afterwards. I don't plan on becoming one of them. If that means that my grades are less than stellar, then so be it.

And hey, the upside to it all is that it gives me no shortage of things to blog about over IAP.

Either I'm not very observant, or someone acted ridiculously quickly, but this is now on the Dot outside the Green Building:

It's a chair!

But wait, there's a sign on the back!

I ran home, grabbed my camera, and spent twenty minutes wandering around to no avail trying to find the second chair.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share this with everyone. I'm off to search some more.

Why did I ever decide to double in the first place, and why am I no longer majoring in chemistry? I have quite a few reasons. Pick your favorite one.

-I love chem, but I'm not good enough at it to last a second in a department where everyone seems to be premed but me. (My high school had a medical magnet program that I was enrolled in until my junior year, when I realized that I absolutely did not want to be a doctor. I've been taking science classes purely out of interest since then; doing so has suited me far more than any ambitions to go into the medical field ever have.)

-I decided to work towards the second major because there were a ton of chemistry classes that I wanted to take for fun, and when I checked things out, the "just for fun" classes put me three classes away from a chem degree. Regardless of what anyone may tell you, this is not a good enough reason to take on another major. It really isn't.

-Recently, I came to the revelation I warned about way back in August or so: I hate physical chemstry. I also don't want to be a guinea pig for Course 5's lab restructuring, since my year is the first to be subjected to the new modular lab requirement. These were the three (now five) classes I needed to add for the degree. I still don't want to take them.

-I've always wanted my time at MIT to be about learning for the sake of learning itself, and the emphasis I was placing on the double major was taking away from that. Once I fully realized what was going on, I knew that something had to change.

The best answer to the question, however, comes from my advisor, who after he heard about my former intention of pursuing a dual degree said this:

"Were you insane?"

Maybe I am. (I've wondered this many times before.) Just not insane enough to put myself through three more years of 60-unit semesters with no room to try anything new. I bought the camera to celebrate the end of my dual degree delusion. It'll certainly be put to good use next term in SP.747, which I'll be taking instead of 5.43.

I was at WMBR last night answering phones for fundraising week when I explained all of this to ArFox, a Course 5 grad student in the Cummins Group (oh, they say they're all synthetic chemists, but that is a repository of physical chemistry if ever I saw one...). His reaction was to ask me if I'd even taken a physical chemistry class before.

"Not outside of general chem, no," I said. (Fine, so he had a valid point.)

"Take one. The quantum mechanics of the blah blah blah chemical bonds blah blah awesomest thing ever," he replied. (...what?! I stopped paying attention for half a second and got lost.) Since I listen to everything everyone tells me to do (HAHAHAHAHA), it looks like I may end up being a double major again. Or maybe I'll just take 5.61 next fall.

One final note: I have a paper due tomorrow afternoon for my bilingualism class. I wrote this blog post instead. ^_^

Here's what I found on my Facebook wall last night from Eric, one of the students from this summer:

"Devin (another Spectrum '07) and I have been reading A LOT about MIT. She wants to go (a lot), and I'm keeping my eyes and ears open. It sounds like all kinds of amazing. ^_^

P.S. Devin wants you to update your blog."

So at the request of two of the most awesome high school sophomores around, I'm writing a blog post.

All right, so that's not the real reason I'm posting. (Actually, it is, but I figured you'd want something more than the above.) I'm blogging because in a true show of academic superskillz, I completed two full problem sets last night.

Yes, you read that correctly. I did two whole psets in just under five hours on a MONDAY. And I got to sleep by 1AM, and then I woke up in time to get to my UROP at 10. Eight hours of sleep. SKILLZ, I TELL YOU!

Normally, my weeks are not such prime displays of time management. I really do try, though. Ask anyone - I schedule my days hour-by-hour, but sometimes I get on my computer to check my mail and somehow spend five hours watching The Office and playing Minesweeper. (I can finish the Expert level in under five minutes! Woo hoo!) This week is different - I'm going to a concert with some friends tonight, and there's a 5.13 exam on Friday. I refuse to get another 47 on another organic chemistry exam, so I finished the psets early in an attempt to carve out three days of uninterrupted study time.

By the way, I'm not a double major anymore. More on that in a later post.

Also, I didn't want my experience this week to be like that of last week, where at 11 AM on Friday, I was working on my 5.13 pset due at 11:30. Even though that only happened because I spent Thursday night paying attention to #7 on Ben's list of 50 things and playing Frisbee on Killian Court at midnight. (Sometimes, you just need to slide into a sprinkler while making an impossible dive for a Frisbee.)

(I'm just sayin'.)

In fact, I've always been the first person to make fun of them. Between the claims of sisterhood and the chanting and singing and oh god, the chanting and singing, I was convinced that joining a sorority was not the way to go. Anyway, my life was already full of far more interesting things, like watching paint dry.

Suffice it to say I was not expected to participate in sorority recruitment this year, which is precisely why I did so. Rather than continuing in the vein of bashing sororities indiscriminately, I wanted a valid basis for my sorority-bashing.

Seriously though, I was basing my opinion of sororities on everything I'd seen and heard of those in other schools. MIT sororities were apparently different. Even after a year here, I wasn't entirely convinced of that. I needed to see this for myself.

I'm of the opinion that the way to dispel stereotypes about MIT's sororities is not to put unsuspecting girls through Formal Recruitment. Formal Recruitment, while giving people equal time to all five of MIT's sororities, is sensory overload at its peak. (You'd say the same thing if you saw five instances of 100 identically dressed young women in a single day.) Sure, it works for tons of people; I'm partial to the setup of frat rush, where you go where you want to go without four solid days of alphabetical order and time constraints.

I did, however, realize that MIT's sororities are full of amazing, driven girls, and I was glad to see that sorority stereotypes were for the most part nowhere to be found. And when I received a bid from Sigma Kappa, what had begun as a joke became an extremely difficult decision. I decided not to pledge this year, choosing to wait until next September before giving a definitive answer.

So long as I never ever have to go through Formal again, that is.

So here's an unwritten rule at MIT for you: sophomores start out taking at least 60 units.

See, freshman year just isn't masochistic enough for us. We struggle, suffer, and complain for a full nine months, but it's all for naught. The point of the first year at MIT is for us to get over ourselves. What's that, you say? Someone's doing better than I am? Toto, I don't think we're in high school anymore! Everything's really hard here!

Even if we poor, beaten-down no-longer-frosh come to this revelation the way we're supposed to, registration for sophomore fall term begins and we're all, "Well, lookie here! No more credit limit! I MUST DO EVERYTHING!"

This is never a good idea.

Sooner or later, we'll become aware of this. We, the overextended sophomores of MIT, will discover that the difference between four and five classes is far larger than we ever could have anticipated. We'll drop a class or two and revert to the sane man's 48.

I had the above epiphany after spending three hours reading my 5.07 textbook and still not coming close to understanding my problem set. I dropped the class after the first week.

Now all that's left is for me to stop believing that my cursory knowledge of all of this term's material will get me As in everything else.

Short answer: doing work. Or just at work. I just got a UROP doing chemistry and molecular biology-related stuff in the O'Connor Lab, guaranteeing me the shortest commute to work I'll ever have to make.

(Yeah, you know I used Paint.)

The round trip is less than five minutes. I find this so absurd that I decided it absolutely needed to be posted on the blogs.

Expect a real post from me this weekend, once I've finished my two problem sets due tomorrow.