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?

(Oh man I love otters so much)

So, let's take a look at the schedule of a first-semester senior with two classes and a swim test* left between her and graduation:

9.15 - Biochemistry and Pharmacology of Synaptic Transmission. This is the last of my six Course 9 elective classes, and it's looking to be one of the best. Twice a week, Richard Wurtman stands in front of 40 students and talks about neurotransmitters and drugs for 90 minutes. He does not use any notes. I have been trying to figure out how any one man can have that much information in his head. (Please send any hypotheses you may have to keri-lee at mit dot edu. I'm dying to know.)

9.71 - Functional MRI of High-Level Vision. Remember when I was a TA for a neuroscience class this summer at nerd camp? With these guys? We spent some time in class talking about neuroimaging studies and their uses in localization of brain function. Most of those talks were in relation to the fusiform face area (FFA), which responds selectively to faces over objects presented in the visual field, and Nancy Kanwisher, who has taken part in many elegantly designed neuroimaging studies and co-authored just about every neuroimaging paper that isn't a gigantic pile of crap.

Yeah, so she's teaching this class.

My thoughts when I walked into the room were as follows:
1) HOLY CRAP YOU ARE A VERY IMPORTANT PERSON I AM INTIMIDATED BY YOU
2) HOLY CRAP THAT IS A GOLDEN RETRIEVER SITTING ON THE FLOOR OF THE CLASSROOM
3) HOLY CRAP I AM TOTALLY SITTING NEXT TO YOUR DOG

After sitting and actually listening to her for two classes, I concluded that Nancy Kanwisher is my new favorite person ever. Her discussions are really interesting, and she consistently brings up points that make or break neuroimaging studies.

7.342 - The X in Sex: A Genetic, Medical, and Evolutionary View of the X Chromosome. An advanced 6-unit seminar class in the Biology department being run by a postdoc at the Whitehead Institute, 7.342 assigns two papers a week on some aspect of the X chromosome and its role in biology - in the first few weeks, we've discussed the multiple causes of sex reversal, the discovery of X-linked traits and sex-specific areas on the X chromosome. it's a super small group that meets once a week for two hours, so we actually get to talk in depth about the papers we read for the week and what each of us got out of them. I wish the Biology department would promote these classes more and start doing so earlier, since so many people are eligible to enroll in them (juniors and seniors who have taken at least one class beyond Introductory Bio can sign up), but if they did, there'd be too many people for the discussions to work as nicely as they do now.

4.343 - Photography and Related Media. This is a grad class, which I'm taking because I took the undergrad-level class last fall and I am running out of photography classes to take for credit. We take pictures using digital and film cameras and go through workshops on printing, lighting, and other aspects of photography, all the while working towards a final term project.

If you're interested in photography classes at MIT, Biyeun from the ARTalk blog has written quite a few posts on it, which you can check out here, here, and here.

On that note, I'm also taking a color photography class through the Student Art Association. The class rocks so far, and I've managed to successfully not spill hot toxic developer all over myself yet. (Progress!) The SAA has amazing classes and studios for all sorts of different artistic endeavors - ceramics, sculpture, drawing, painting, all that - and I've always had too much on my plate to do anything with them, but not anymore because I'M ALMOST DONE WITH MIT. YEAHHHHHHH. The class meets on Monday nights, though, which means I had to drop a class I've been trying to take for two years:

21W.763/CMS.309 - Transmedia Storytelling: Modern Science Fiction. Admittedly, I was mainly interested in this class because of the instructor. I worked with Beth Coleman at WMBR for over a year as an engineer for her radio show; she's a sound artist, DJ, and a pretty swell lady. The class was nothing like what I'd expected - there's some science fiction writing at the start of the term, but the class is mainly using that as a jumping point for the creation of an augmented reality game (ARG) in a style influenced by I Love Bees. This is completely unlike anything I've ever done, and it's wayyyy out of my comfort zone, and it's exactly why I was psyched about the class after the first meeting. Anyway, now I can't take it because COME ON, COLOR DEVELOPING AND PRINTING.

When I'm not in classes or trying to have a life, I spend about a million hours each week working desk. Welcome to Senior House. I let you in. I sort your mail. I offer up your daily dose of snark.

It's a rockin' good time, y'all.

*No, I haven't taken my swim test yet. Yes, I've known how to swim since I was 3. I was scheduled to take it my freshman year at 11:30 on a Monday morning, which was too early for me then and is too early for me now. I'll take it soon, I swear.

What made this different from all the other days when I carry my camera around all day and take awkward pictures of my friends and everything around me is that hundreds of other people on campus were doing the same thing with the same purpose: to take part in A Day In The Life, a project open to the entire MIT community sponsored by Technique, MIT's yearbook and photography club. Students, faculty, and staff alike have been uploading their photos to the website, which Technique describes as a "collective photo blog" and which allows you to view timelines of multiple people's photos at once.

Over 120 people have collectively uploaded thousands of pictures of their days so far, and it's really interesting to see not just what people do over the course of a typical day, but also how they choose to frame that. The project made me notice the things around me all the time that I never really stopped to look at.

Like eating lunch in Stata, where seats fill up around noon and everyone moves quickly all the time.

Or the pattern of the splatter paint on the walls of my room, which I stopped noticing about two weeks after I did it.

It also gave me the opportunity to take a million pictures of the disastrous construction zone all the way down Amherst Street to the corner of Ames and Amherst (also known as WHERE I LIVE. RAWR.), because my parents do not believe me when I tell them how ridiculous it looks. The stairs to Senior House were cordoned off for over a month. Everyone was using the handicapped ramp. Delivery guys and taxi drivers keep trying to turn the wrong way down what was once a two-way street and not understanding why pedestrians and the drivers of oncoming cars keep giving them the finger.

Anyway, Check out ADITL. It's made of awesome.

...all right, that statement's also a lie. There are some things about that bio that are immutable; my birthplace will never not be Jamaica, and my love for pie is still only surpassed by my love for bacon and Arrested Development.

I've now seen more snow than I ever cared to see in my life; by that token, you can tell that I'm certainly not new here anymore. (In case the last three years of blogging and my recent distress over becoming a senior didn't clue you into that.) My old bio is also a testament to my former desire to earn a degree in Chemistry (HAHAHAHAHA) and spend my life playing with brains, blowing stuff up, and curing cancer. My goals have clearly shifted quite a bit. This is partially due to a year of research, during which I learned - among other worthwhile things - that ampicillin-resistant bacteria will not grow in a kanamycin-containing medium and that spending excessive amounts of time with petri dishes full of bacterial colonies makes me want to shoot myself in the face. (Speaking of my UROP, I was explaining the O'Connor Lab's work to my friend Adrian earlier today, though, and I was shocked when I realized that I could actually do so without sounding like an idiot. Who knew?)

I'll elaborate upon my new life plan in an upcoming post. Hint: it's teaching.

"So what, you went to MIT so you could teach?" you may ask. Of course not. I came here so I could learn (Hey! See what I did there?), and I think that's been working out pretty well. No one should be expected to skip off to college with a definitive plan for their lives at an age where they're barely trusted with adult privileges and responsibilities. At the very least, no one should have to be locked into whatever plans they may have; I had an awesome, well-thought-out plan, and look how that turned out.

Anyway, this all means it's about time for a new bio.

There are people at this school who are exceptional at everything they do: they get all As, cure diseases, bake amazing cookies for their friends all the time, and manage to look awesome every day when they show up (on time!) for class in the morning.

I am not one of those people.

My name is Keri Garel, class of 2010, and my life at MIT is not what you would expect. I fall up flights of stairs only just more frequently than I fall down them (which is often). I should really cut down on the amount of bacon I eat, lest I have a heart attack at age 30. I am known for making obscene faces in photographs on the rare occasion when I am in front of the camera instead of wielding it, and I will attempt to write the next paragraph without including the word "I," to compensate for its overuse in this one.

In my homeland, snow is only a myth. My fanatical, creepy-as-all-get-out love for brains means that people never fail to remember my major. The number of Sonic Youth albums in my music collection is a little ridiculous. My dorm is better than yours.

I love music, art, photography, dance, and theater. I'm still not quite sure why I go to a school for science and engineering, but I'm in good company here. ("Do you even go to this school?" "No, I just have a lot of feelings.") The future is terrifying, but if you don't ask me about it, then we won't discuss it. Deal? Deal.

My Neuroscience class had 17 students who are pretty much the best people ever. (Don't argue. I'm right.) I have fantastic evidence to back up my argument, too.

There's a video on CollegeHumor of some students playing mattress dominoes, which involves... well, you'll see it. My class made their own version of the video last week when I was away from the floor for approximately two seconds, and it's pretty great.

That's all I've got for you today. Back to the living and the learning and all that.