Here are the different events and how they contributed to the team’s point total:

Sunday:
- Cake and pie baking contest (pictures below)
- Eating contest (pie tin filled with whipped cream and a gum ball. Find the gum ball using only your mouth and the first person to blow a bubble wins.)
- Participation (team with most cake/pie entries wins points.)

Monday: Salsa night (team with most participants wins)

Tuesday: Community service day
- Made activity books for kinds at Children’s Hospital Boston
- Bake sale where all proceeds went to the Hospital

Wednesday: “Chariot racing” = pushing someone in a shopping cart down the Infinite Corridor

Thursday: Dodgeball tournament, with a small entry fee donated to the Children’s Hospital Boston

Friday: Powderpuff game (where girls play football and guys are the cheerleaders). Points based on how many people came to watch, how many played, and if your team won.

Sunday: Greek Convention

Throughout the week there was a “Jar War”- each team had a jar and you could either put pennies and dollar bills for positive points in your own jar, or nickels and quarters as negative points in the other jars. They raised $1300 for the Children’s Hospital!!!

As you can see, Greek Week harnesses the natural competitiveness of ambitious students while raising money for charity and having a lot of fun!

Here are pictures from the Cake-off competition. What are your favorites?

Believe it or not, several of these cakes were made by guys! Way to go, guys!

Muhahahaha:

Some of my sorority sisters at the event:

ZBT shows their Greek Week spirit:

The lovely judges, who had to try so many cakes that they almost puked. (Sigma Kappa alone submitted 29, and Zeta Beta Tau submitted 20!)

The pie eating contest:

We received the invitation in the mail a month or so ago, and I was surprised to see that it was exactly the same stationary that my high school prom committee used.

The last few months of MIT are tough for most seniors – we are torn between our ever-worsening condition of Senioritis and the stress of knowing that we should be writing our Senior Theses and final reports that are prerequisites to graduation. So the time between receiving the invitation and the actually going to the ball went by really quickly, and before I knew it, it was May 3rd.

In addition to the stress of graduation, we also needed to find dates. Luckily for some, the Senior Ball Committee of 2005 created a Survival Guide (http://web.mit.edu/2008/seniorball/survival.htm) with pointers on how to find a date, things to discuss with your date, etc. They even provided a list of nerdy pick-up lines:

Pick Up Lines for Nerds (from http://askthebeaver.blogspot.com/)
--Hey, baby; wanna test the 'k' of my bedsprings?
--Are you the square root of 2? Because I feel irrational when I am around you.
--How can I know so many hundreds of digits of pi and not the digits of your phone #?
--You are one well-defined function.
--Hey, baby - wanna be sinusoidal functions? We could oscillate horizontally¡K
--Want a hot Euler body massage?
--Oman, I want Djibouti!
--Hey baby, how about I tinker with your software while you turn on my hardware?"
--Hey, you're O positive too? Guess you're my type!
--Remember my species - you'll be classifying it later.
--Why don't you come over later so you can balance my equation?
--Asexual reproduction is for pansies.
--Let's get together later to converge.
--Hey, I'd like to sample your population.
--I think I need to work on the structural formula of your fatty acid.
--I'm just a cute piece of DNA who is still looking for that special transcription factor to help me unwind.
--Hey baby, can I be your DNA helicase? 'Cause I can unzip your genes

(note: I don’t think anyone legitimately uses these lines…don’t assume that we’re crazy nerds. Except, in the spirit of full disclosure, my roommate did buy a t-shirt from the Coop that says “Talk Nerdy To Me.”)

Before heading over the Harvard Bridge (yes, the bridge connecting MIT to Boston is called the Harvard Bridge; it's because it was built before MIT moved to its current location) to the Sheraton Back Bay hotel, most people picked up their dates and met up with a group of friends to take pictures. Here’s a picture of my group:

At 6 pm, hors hors d'oeuvres were served- bread, crackers, cheese, deli meat. Since most seniors are over 21, there was also a cash bar (but they checked IDs and gave wristbands at the door. For some reason they thought it would be a great idea to use blue and white striped plastic bands that made just about everyone’s outfit look tacky.) It was great to see almost the entire class in one place, I even ran into some people that I hadn’t seen since freshman year. I should also note that there were many non-senior present, both younger and older (for example, I had gone to the Senior Ball of 2006 as a sophomore.)

Here’s a picture of some of my Alpha Chi Omega sorority sisters. Gwen, on the left, made her own dress! She’s very artistic, clearly, and I don’t see how she finds the time to sew dresses when she’s on the Varsity Crew team and a Civil Engineering major…

At 7:30, dinner was served and a nice jazz band played in the background. You were allowed to send in the names of people that you wanted to sit with at dinner, and the Senior Ball committee did their best to make everyone happy.

After dinner, there was a dancing… lots of dancing. The music selection was pretty interesting, usually we’re overwhelmed with a continuous stream of hip-hop songs that direct us to get low and throw our hands in the air. But for some reason, the songs alternated between Latin and 80s music. It was great at first, but we quickly exhausted our small cache of dance moves.

At about 11, everyone started to go their separate ways. A few of us decided to go to Top of the Hub for a plate of freshly baked cookies. They’re delicious and I’d highly recommend them, as well as the view from the 52nd floor of the Prudential Building. The weather wasn’t fantastic, but this was the view from a previous visit:

Alas, I am happy to report that Senior Ball was fabulous and I hope you’re all looking forward to going.

I think every MIT student has an intense love-hate relationship with four-day weekends. On one hand, it’s four days off in a row! Imagine the possibilities! You can go home, enjoy Boston, catch up with friends, and hey, maybe even catch up on work and sleep. And yet, there’s never really time for the latter two options; Tuesday night is always so horrendously stressful and work-filled that you vow to never, ever procrastinate again. As a senior, I thought I had learned my lesson, and so I worked on Sunday, was in lab all day on Monday, and worked on Tuesday morning, too. Yet, somehow, I spent all of Tuesday night trying to write a chemistry lab report and listening to “It Sucks To Be Me” from Avenue Q.

But there were several very cool events that happened over the weekend, which I definitely do not regret going to. The first event was the Inaugural Millennium Campus Conference, hosted by MIT’s Global Poverty Initiative (http://gpi.mit.edu/). Forty MIT students got together to organize this amazing three-day conference, which was attended by hundreds of people around the country. The conference schedule is posted on their website and the keynote speakers included Senator John Edwards, Henrietta Fore, Paul Farmer, Ira Magaziner, Jeff Sachs, and a concert by John Legend in MIT’s very own ice rink! If you have an interest in global health, many of these names may be familiar to you.

I was only able to go to two of the keynote speeches. The first was by Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist at Harvard. He founded an organization called Partners in Health, which has made ground-breaking changes in the way that people think about delivering health care in developing countries. He spends much of his time in Haiti and Rwanda, and considers Haiti to be his home. Overall, he’s incredibly inspiring and seems like a genuinely nice person who is helping so many people with tuberculosis and AIDS. At the conference, his talk was called “This is not a hobby: taking global poverty seriously.” He told us about the technological abyss between the developed and developing world and two myths that are preventing us from doing more good.

The Sunday morning keynote speaker was Ira Magaziner, who is currently the chairman of the Clinton Climate Initiative and the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS initiative. He served for six years as Senior Advisor to President Clinton for policy development, and before that he was a successful corporate strategist. Magaziner’s public policy experience is immense, and he talked about the Clinton Foundation and how they were able to bring the price of antiretroviral treatments down from over $1000 to about $100 (a 90% reduction) by changing the economics of drug production and partnering with many groups. Magaziner also talked about climate change and then gave us a set of five principles used to inform the Clinton Foundation (including, the need for respect for local leadership and the need to focus spending directly on people and programs). He ended with advice for us students, like “only unreasonable people accomplish big things because they piss people off.” That’s almost a direct quote =)

After hearing about those complex matters of life and death, it was a little strange to walk with my two friends to Fresh Pond, a reservoir about four miles northwest of MIT. It was a gorgeous day and gorgeous weekend in general. The picture below is actually of Spy Pond, which is ~1 mile away from Fresh Pond.

There were other exciting things that happened, but I’ve got to get back to making pretty pictures for my Senior Thesis… so I will leave you all for now.

It was 2:03 pm when I ripped out the carbon record of my experimental results and dashed out of the 5.310 (Experimental Chemistry) lab. Though the lab period is scheduled to end at 5 pm, today was the end of a four-day experiment and we had finished early. I had two minutes to get to Kresge auditorium, where Julie Gerberding, the director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), was scheduled to give a talk titled "Health System Transformation: Getting Our Money's Worth of 'Healthness.'" What is healthness (not a typo)? I had no idea, but ever since elementary school I have dreamed of working in the Biosafety Level 4 facilities of the CDC, and I wasn’t about to miss an opportunity to hear an infectious disease expert speak, let alone someone who is basically in charge of protecting the health of our country.

President Susan Hockfield gave an introduction to the talk, citing Gerberding’s experience in medicine and public health and that she was named #12 on Forbes Magazine’s “100 Most Powerful Women” list in 2005. Gerberding was also apparently involved with setting up the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing (a 10-year partnership between MIT and one of the biggest pharma companies in the world. )

The main problem that Gerberding and the CDC are trying to address is the fact that the U.S. is ranked #37 in the world for its health system (according to the World Health Organization.) This is appalling; we consider ourselves to be a world leader and we spend the most money on healthcare, yet our health outcomes are dismal! The current system spends an inordinate proportion of the money on people who are already sick, instead of preventing sickness from happening in the first place. Gerberding believes that protecting health is a strategic national investment, and that we’re at a tipping point where we can greatly increase the value of the healthcare system if we just invested a little more. Her vision is a “value-based health system.” She also emphasized that we need to find better measures of “healthiness” and we also need to reward good results in the healthcare arena. (If this interests you, consider taking 17.315 (Health Policy) or 17.317 (U.S. Social Policy). I’ve taken them both, they’re great!)

For those of you who think that changing the healthcare system is impossible, she gave the example of Kennedy’s 1961 space challenge. Even though sending men to the moon seemed utterly unattainable to most people, including NASA scientists, the challenge was met eight years and 59 days later. Gerberding hopes that by May 30, 2016 (the same # of days from today), America will become “a healthiest nation” (again, not a typo. She emphasized that all nations need to be healthy, we shouldn’t be the only ones.)

How does this apply to MIT? The end of the talk focused on “translating health discovery to health.” She emphasized that bench research (done at places like MIT) ends up becoming clinical practice. We need to use our knowledge of systems to evaluate the health outcomes of these clinical practices. Finally, we need to combat problems like obesity by examining a person’s environment. Otherwise, Gerberding warns, our children may have shorter life spans than we do (!)

I saw President Hockfield slip out of the auditorium at around 3:00, and the talk ended at about 3:05. A friend and I made the decision to skip the Q&A session and see if we could make it over to Tom Brokaw’s talk, which was scheduled to begin at 3:30 pm in the Stata Center. Off we went to follow Hockfield!

Of course, the line outside of the Stata lecture hall was very long (as opposed to Gerberding’s talk, which had plenty of seats to go around.) The MIT news page introduces the event best:

“An internationally respected journalist, Brokaw served as the NBC anchor for 21 years. He was the NBC White House correspondent during the Watergate scandal, advancing to lead NBC's coverage of primaries, national conventions and election nights in 1984, 1988 and 1992. Brokaw, 68, is the author of "The Greatest Generation" (1998) and "A Long Way from Home" (2002).

The Karl Taylor Compton Lecture Series was established in 1957 to honor the late Karl Taylor Compton, who served as president of MIT from 1930 to 1948 and chairman of the Corporation from 1948 to 1954. The purpose of the lectureship is to give the MIT community direct contact with the important ideas of our times and with people who have contributed much to modern thought.”

I got fourth row center seats and couldn’t wait to hear his familiar voice bellow from a few feet in front of me. Again, President Hockfield introduced the distinguished guest, and then Brokaw took the stage. He is the most poised speaker I have ever seen. With a pen in his right hand, he delivered his speech in a way that nobody else could. His pauses were perfectly placed, he emphasized just the right words and captivated everyone’s attention. I have to admit that I was so caught up with thinking about his gravitas that my mind wandered and I didn’t pay all that much attention to what he was saying =) I also didn’t take notes because I wanted to focus on watching him…just like on TV but better!

He began by making a joke that giving the Compton lecture was the only circumstance in which he would be admitted to MIT (according to Wikipedia, “Tom Brokaw dropped out of The University of Iowa, where he says he majored in "beer and co-eds" before receiving his B.A. degree in Political Science from the University of South Dakota in Vermillion in 1962.”) He also joked about how he was afraid that he would also have to speak at Harvard (which he referred to as something along the lines of the’ lesser institution up the street’, which drew much applause) and how he has commiserated with Harvard dropouts like Bill Gates over not being accepted to the college. Anyway, he described how he grew up in South Dakota and then talked about some of his experiences as a journalist. He has met every president since Kennedy, conducted the first American TV interviews with Mikhail Gorbachev, Vladimir Putin, and Yevgeny Primakov, reported the collapse of the Berlin Wall, covered the September 11th attacks, and so much more. He’s been in the midst of almost every conflict that you can imagine and he told some heartbreaking and inspiration stories. Basically, he’s the kind of person that you’d die to have dinner with (incidentally, some MIT students got to have lunch with him earlier today. They said it was amazing!)

The directly MIT-relevant part of his talk was about the role of information technology in our lives. He described the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet as a media outlet, and the advent of the 24-hour news cycle. He warned us that we have to be careful about where we get our information and that, as consumers, our decisions can affect what is covered (like car chases vs. world conflict.) There was more that he discussed… but I’ll leave it to Bryan to fill in the gaps =)

I still can’t believe that they scheduled these lectures back-to-back. What happened to spreading the love? I should have added this to my “10 reasons why I love MIT”: the lectures! We get to hear some of the most amazing people in the world, it’s really a privilege. Incidentally, our graduation speaker will be Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace prize. I can’t wait!

P.S. Thanks for the Brokaw pict, Bryan!
P.P.S. An example of Brokaw in action:

1. The students
This one is a no-brainer. Thanks to the Admissions people, my classmates are a ridiculously talented bunch with the most diverse interests. There are the pre-meds and the hackers, the thespians and the band geeks, the gear heads and the tissue culture nerds. Everyone is involved with a million activities, which can be frustrating when you’re planning a meeting, but is generally amazing to witness. Additionally, no matter where you live or what your major is, MIT students can always bond over how much work that they have to do. It’s an instant conversation starter. I’m surprised that the song, "It sucks to be me," isn’t more popular (maybe because not enough people have seen Avenue Q.)

2. Rooms with a view and living in Beantown
I love the river. The majority of dorms are by the Charles River and in Baker, for example, 80% of rooms have a river view. I also can’t imagine a better a college town than Boston. For more about the community service and fun opportunities in Boston, read one of my previous entries here

The view from my sophomore year room in Next House (my Baker rooms have better views but I don't have pictures):

View from Baker roof:

3. Nobel laureates are a dime a dozen
According to the MIT website: “Seventy-one present and former members of the MIT community have won the Nobel Prize, including seven current faculty members: H. Robert Horvitz, medicine/physiology (2002); Wolfgang Ketterle, physics (2001); Richard R. Schrock, chemistry (2005); Phillip A. Sharp, medicine/physiology (1993); Samuel C. C. Ting, physics (1976); Susumu Tonegawa, medicine/physiology (1987); and Frank Wilczek, physics (2004).”
These Nobel laureates do not sit perched in ivory towers, there are many opportunities to meet them. Just a few weeks ago, I saw a talk by Carl Wieman (Physics, 2001).

Also, thanks to the UROP program, you can do research for all four years of college and who knows, maybe you'll get to join this elite Nobel club one day!

4. It’s a meritocracy
It doesn’t matter who your great-grandfather was or what year you are, as long as you’re qualified you’ll get a UROP as a freshman, become editor-in-chief of an MIT research journal as a sophomore, and become president of your dorm as a junior. This is a beautiful thing, and not one to dismiss quickly.

5. You have freedom to choose your classes
It is so cool to be able to take pretty much any class, in any department, at any school (MIT, Harvard, Museum of Fine Arts, Wellesley.) There are a few classes that are notoriously difficult to lottery into (like some Management classes offered through the Sloan school and some of the pre-med lab requirements), but in general you can’t whatever interests you. If you don’t feel like working too hard in the class, you can take it on pass/no record or as a “listener.” You can play a fun game by going to the subject listings and making a hypothetical schedule for yourself on WebSIS.

6. Freshman 1st semester pass/no record and IAP
This is proof that MIT is not out to get you. They’re so kind, in fact, that they give you an entire semester to acclimate to the pressure-cooker of MIT. For more info, read the entries on: "Why You Can’t Fail A Class Freshman Year."

I’ve probably talked your ears off about IAP, but it’s such a fun time to do whatever you want. This IAP, I worked on my senior thesis, explored Boston, took a wine tasting class, worked out at the gym, and saw several movies. My classmates traveled around the world, got experience in companies through externships, and shadowed doctors in hospitals. To read more, click here.

7. The professors care about you
One of the reasons that I didn’t go to University "X" was because I heard that the professors were much more concerned about their graduate students than the undergrads. At MIT, I would definitely say that this is not the case. When professors are teaching an undergraduate class, they really dedicate a lot of time to preparing the lectures (I heard that it takes ~10 hours to prepare a 1 hour lecture) and they hold weekly office hours where you can just walk into their office and barrage them with questions. Additionally, you’re automatically assigned to a professor who serves are your advisor, and they’re a tremendous resource.

8. People will assume you can fix their cars and build the next space telescope
This comic, from the Feb. 29, 2008 issue of The Tech, says it all...except the attention is not always negative (especially when it gets you a job)!

9. Everybody loves a nerdy joke (or at least they won’t pellet you with rotten tomatoes if you make one)
Re: my entry on math jokes: here

10. There’s always too much to do: the work hard/ play hard mentality
Sometimes, I’ve had so much work to do that it made me cry. That’s the reality. When it’s 2 am on a Thursday night and you still have half a problem set to do, it’s nice to know that the weekend is just a day away. I’ve never taken the time to count up how many emails I get about events on a particular weekend, but I’d venture a guess that the number is around twenty. There are hundreds of student groups that get money from MIT to host cool events. Consequently, the choices are dizzying.

The three professors in favor of the hamentashen were:
- Hazel Sive- Professor of Biology (sitting on the left)
- Ari Epstein- Terrascope lecturer (sitting in the middle)
- Erik Demaine- Professor Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (sitting on the right)

The three professors in favor of the latke were:
- Peter Dourmaskin- Professor of Physics (far left in picture below)
- Patrick Winston – Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science (middle left)
- Stephen Van Evera- Professor of Political Science (middle right)

The debate was moderated by Jeremy Wolfe, who used to teach a wildly popular Intro to Psychology class and is now a teacher in Concourse. (He's on the far left of the Team Hamentashen picture, standing up.)

After a humorous introduction by Wolfe and a Ramen noodle toss (“heads” won), it was decided that the Latke team would be the first to present. Prof. Dourmaskin stepped up to the plate and applied his physics knowledge to explain why latke is a “major food” and that Galileo discovered that a latke and potato fall to the ground at the same time.

Next was Dr. Ari Epstein, representing the Hamentashen team. In order to understand his slides, I’ll explain Terrascope. Terrascope is a project-based class where freshmen solve big problems like protecting the ecology of the Galapagos Islands. In this vein, Dr. Epstein had a hands-on demonstration. His assistants handed out paper plates to everyone, and the half of the lecture hall sitting on the “Hamentashen” side also received colorful stickers. The people with stickers were instructed to decorate their plates with stickers (representing filling that they wanted. Hamentashen can be filled with many things, like apricots, poppy seeds, Nutella, and cheese.) Everyone was then told to fold their paper to resemble a hamentashen. Clearly it was better to have a delicacy-filled hamentashen than something that resembled a dry, folded latke.

Next, Professor Winston showed off his technological prowess using a spiffy computer interface that he made. As shown below, he demonstrated the intelligence of a Turing machine that he programmed by asking it latke and hamentashen-related questions.

The onus was then back to the hamentashen team. Professor Sive defended the hamentashen using a systems biology approach. She showed single-celled diatoms that have a striking resemblance to hamentashen, showed the life cycle of the “organism” h.tashen, and then explored the genetic networks that build it. Biologists commonly study mutants to understand the function of genes, and thus she showed three hamentashen mutants. Of course, one mutant was the “arrested development” hamentashen, otherwise known as a latke. This mutant was extremely simple and boring, compared to the superior and highly evolved hamentashen.

Second to last was Professor Van Evera. As a Political Science professor in an election year, his defense of latkes resorted to significant mudslinging. At one point, he had the crowd chanting “USA, USA, Latke, Latke, USA!” The propaganda was palpable.

Finally, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Erik Demaine used his linguistics and geometry prowess to explore the natural superiority of hamentashen. First, he argued to change the name of the debate from “Latke vs. Hamentashen” to “Hamentashen vs. Latke” (alphabetical order, it’s only fair!) Next, he discovered that an anagram of the word Hamentaschen is the phrase “enHances math.” Then, as someone who studies discrete and computational geometry, he argued that perfect circles don’t exist, and latkes are circular, thus there are no perfect latkes. His last argument was that circles don’t tile, so as you’re trying to cook them, you lose heat between the latkes and this contributes to global warming.

After a five minute brainstorming session, the teams provided their rebuttals. Team Latke had pre-prepared a rebuttal in the form of a video. They showed a researcher in the Artificial Intelligence lab giving a latke and hamentashen to a furry, cuddly robot. The robot embraced the latke and rejected the hamentashen.

In the end, a blind vote was taken and (not surprisingly) it was a tie. This ensures that there will be yet another debate next year, so hopefully some of you guys will get to see it. I assure you that the real thing was much better than my description…

So, you can imagine my excitement when I saw a poster advertising her upcoming MIT visit, which was sponsored by the MIT Literary Society. I literally jhumped for joy (ouch, yea, bad one.) The timing of the talk wasn’t great; it started at 7 pm and I have a class in the Longwood Medical Area (a 15-minute drive from MIT) that ends at 6:30 pm. I knew I wasn’t likely to get a good seat, but when I arrived at the Stata Center, there was this gigantic line of millions of people (ok, more like hundreds) and I realized I probably wouldn’t even get in. Sadly, even though the talk was held in one of the biggest lecture halls at MIT, there were far more fans than seats. Luckily, they had set up two TV screens right outside of the lecture hall, so I parked myself on Stata’s concrete floor and craned my neck to see the TV.

After a brief introduction, Lahiri began by reading one of the eight stories in her new book, Unaccustomed Earth, for forty minutes. I videotaped a small, random portion of it. To watch it, click here

My general impression was that the subject matter was very similar to her other stories, but it was still insightful, entertaining, and moving. The book comes out on April 4th, and she’ll actually be in Brookline, MA on April 3rd for a book signing.

I’m pretty bummed that I couldn’t meet her, or get her to sign the two books that I brought along, or even get to sit inside of the lecture hall. There was also an awesome tea and Q&A session that the Literature department held at 4:30 pm, where about thirty-five students got to speak with Lahiri and get their books signed. Sadly, I found out about it too late and I was in class anyway =(

Anyway, I'm offering yet another book recommendation. After you've read her books, go see the movie, The Namesake. It's not nearly as good as the novel (you know how it goes), but it's still worth watching.

You can also apply for this scholarship if you're a first or second year college student attending a school in Massachusetts, so keep it in mind!

In any case, MIT is known for being the breeding ground of the next big idea in science and engineering, but I thought that today I’d focus on a great idea by MIT Medical. The program is called “getfit@mit” and it is a 12-week, team-oriented fitness challenge that is open to the entire MIT community. Teams are comprised of five to eight people, and teams compete based on the average number of minutes exercised each week. The first week’s goal was 150 minutes/week and it gradually increases to 300 minutes/week. We're now into the 5th week and the goal is 210 minutes. Teams that meet their weekly goals are entered into weekly drawings for prizes.

Summer is just one (or two) blizzards away, so my friends and I decided that we should stop complaining about our laziness and actually do something about it. Our first challenge was to come up with a team name, we decided on “I Can’t Believe I Ate the Whole Thing.” Week 1’s competition was for the Best Team name, and we figured that we’d at least be in the top five. Sadly, our sense of humor didn’t align with the judges’. Out of the five finalists, the participants voted on the winner, which ended up being “Buns’n Burners.” I guess you can’t really go wrong with a nerdy name.

The getfit website (http://getfit.mit.edu/) has a function where you can enter your minutes and see other teams’ results. Team Blatieshoe is in the lead; the group of figure skaters have clocked an average of 6,360 minutes per week (with 8 team members.) One team member reported exercising 1,270 minutes last week, that’s three hours a day, seven days a week! I’m also proud of the 5th place team, called “AXO Seniors,” who have an average of 3,980 minutes per week (with 8 team members.) They’re my sorority sisters, so I know that their minutes are legit =). (Thanks to Kim Shive for the extra info on Team Blatieshoe!)

There are two things about this program that I think make it a good idea. The first is that you can see the minutes entered by your team members. So, you can hold team members accountable by sending emails like “Get to the gym!” and when that doesn’t work, “Get to the gym… seriously!” The second is that it’s team-based and encourages group exercise. My team has had a few (semi-embarrassing) basketball games (with very low scores), but at least we had fun and broke a sweat.

In any case, hopefully you all will be inspired by MIT Medical’s idea and start a fitness team of your own. It’ll give you a much deserved break from integrals.

Given the hype surrounding the potential applications of nanotechnology, it’s quite understandable that many students are interested in studying the field in college. At a recent admitted student event (*shout out to Nate and his friend Alicia*), I spoke with one high school senior (not Nate…or his friend…) who was concerned that MIT did not offer any majors or minors in nanotechnology. Rest assured that there are countless opportunities to learn about nanotech. Given the vague definition of the term (think of how many things are on the nanoscale) and its interdisciplinary nature, you can be in practically any science/engineering major and get exposure to the field. I’ll try to give a brief overview of some nanotech-related classes and research experiences.

Just to whet your appetite, MIT has some of the best nanotech research around!
On the bio-nanotech side:
Yesterday, in my class called “Designing and Sustaining Technology Innovation for Global Health Practice,” (HST.939) we had a lecture by the world-famous biomedical engineer and MIT professor Robert Langer. He’s won almost every science/engineering award available, and is famous for his use of polymers for controlled drug delivery. If listening to him speak about his research doesn’t get you jazzed up about biomedical research, then I don’t know what will.

My senior thesis project is on nanoparticles and I’m doing it in the Lab for Multiscale Regenerative Technology, led by Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia. She has done really cool work with designing injectable multifunctional nanoparticles for cancer treatment, among other things. My previous UROP was in the BioInstrumentation Lab and there is nanotech research going on there, too. For example, one grad student is developing polymer nanowires for implantation in the brain.

Within the Biological Engineering department, researchers in the Lang Lab use a laser “tractor-beam” to manipulate single molecules and cells (and I had used a similar setup to manipulate and assemble nanowires at the National Institute of Standards and Technology). The Hamad-Schifferli Group is attaching DNA and proteins to nanoparticles with applications in therapy and disease diagnosis.

On the physical science side:

Professor Mildred Dresselhaus, Institute Professor and Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering, was a carbon nanotube pioneer. She is now “developing innovative materials for controlling temperatures that could lead to substantial energy savings by allowing more efficient car engines, photovoltaic cells and electronic devices.” (News Office) MechE professor Gang Chen is trying to increase energy efficiency using nanotechnology. Professor Angela Belcher of the Material Science department combines chemistry, biology, material science, and electrical engineering to engineer biomaterials for electronic and medicinal applications. MIT also has an Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology that is led by Material Science professor Ned Thomas.

Hopefully you get the picture…the list above is by no means exhaustive and it’s absolutely astounding to see the plethora of cutting-edge research happening on campus. I think the most valuable way to explore the field is to get a UROP in one of the many labs that do nanotech research. If you’re looking for a more formal education, there are many classes available. The majors with the most obvious connection to nanotechnology are Mechanical Engineering, Material Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Biology, and Biological Engineering.

There are categories of classes that fall under “MEMS and Nanotechnology” within each of the following majors, such as...

Within the Mechanical Engineering major:
-2.370 Molecular Mechanics: Introduction to the fundamentals of molecular modeling in engineering, with emphasis on mechanical engineering applications. Discussion of molecular approaches to modern nanoscale engineering problems. Introduction to molecular simulation.
-2.674 Micro/Nano Engineering Laboratory (New): Concepts, ideas and enabling tools of nano science and engineering taught through projects which include learning about MEMS, microfluidics, nanomaterials and characterization tools such as SEM, TEM, STM and AFM. Designed for undergraduates who want to pursue study in micro/nano technology.
-2.372J Design and Fabrication of MEMS: Introduction to microsystem design.
-2.391J Submicrometer and Nanometer Technology: Surveys techniques to fabricate and analyze submicron and nanometer structures, with applications. Undergraduates with permission of instructor.

Within the Material Science and Engineering major:
-3.052 Nanomechanics of Materials and Biomaterials: Latest scientific developments and discoveries in the field of nanomechanics, i.e. the deformation of extremely tiny (10-9 meters) areas of synthetic and biological materials.
-3.063 Polymer Physics: The mechanical, optical, and transport properties of polymers are presented with respect to the underlying physics and physical chemistry of polymers in melt, solution, and solid state.
-3.155J Micro/Nano Processing Technology (Same subject as 6.152J): Introduces the theory and technology of micro/nano fabrication.

Within the Electrical Engineering department:
6.701 Introduction to Nano Electronics (New): Quantization, wavefunctions and Schrodinger?s equation. Introduction to electronic properties of molecules, carbon nanotubes and crystals. Energy band formation and the origin of metals, insulators and semiconductors. Ballistic transport, Ohm’s law, ballistic versus traditional MOSFETs, fundamental limits to computation.

Within the Biological Engineering department (basically every class involves nanoscale phenomena…):
20.342 Molecular Structure of Biological Materials: Basic molecular structural principles of biological materials. Molecular structures of various materials of biological origin, including collagen, silk, bone, protein adhesives, GFP, self-assembling peptides. Molecular design of new biological materials for nanotechnology, biocomputing and regenerative medicine.
20.361J Molecular and Engineering Aspects of Biotechnology” Biological and bioengineering principles underlying the development and use of recombinant proteins as therapeutic drugs; fundamentals of therapeutic protein action, including cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions and intracellular signaling pathways; classes of protein therapeutics; post-translational processing and secretion of proteins; gene cloning and expression in mammalian cells; physiology of cell growth and in vitro cultivation; site-specific mutation of proteins; protein pharmacology and delivery.