If you've been reading the blogs a long time, you may have noticed a few trends. Every year, each blogger gets two freebie posts; for fall and spring semester, you can write about your schedule. Easy, over, done. However, the nature of MIT lends itself to one more blogger freebie. In four years of reading the blogs, I don't remember ever seeing it advertised as such, but that's what it is. It's not a freebie in the sense that it requires little effort or thought to write about, but in the sense that MIT gives you the topic with little effort on your part.

Yep, I'm talking about failure.

Marcela has already written about 18.022; I'd like to elaborate a little on my experiences in that class.

The first test was altogether not that bad for me. However, it seemed that way at first. I walked out of it with a horrible sinking feeling, not wanting to talk to anybody. I thought it was fairly likely that I'd failed the test, even though I'd studied hard; near the end I took the time to figure out that I had barely completed 65 out of 100 points. I had been able to confidently complete at least some of that material, guaranteeing that I would receive points. I suppose that's better than nothing, right? Either way, I walked out of Walker Memorial (one of the common exam-taking-areas) completely crestfallen. After a little walking around, I ran into a friend, a senior, who asked me what was wrong; I told him I thought I'd failed my first test, and he somehow refrained from smacking me (which I would've deserved; I was being ridiculous about the entire ordeal). Failing tests isn't all that bad, around here, and completing 65% of the material isn't all that bad either. However, even though people had said that to me, I hadn't quite come to accept it, so I felt horrible. He cheered me up a little before I moved on in my mindless wandering.

Eventually, I decided to stop moping and do something about it. I had been considering dropping 18.022 for weeks, and taking 18.02 -- a less challenging multivariable calculus course, the one that most freshmen take. I had been struggling since the beginning in 18.022, and everything seemed impossible; still, I wasn't sure if that was how it should be, and I wasn't sure how to make a decision to drop the class. I wandered over to the professor's office -- Professor Kemp -- and talked with him about it for a few minutes. He was busy, but he told me not to worry so much; he had made the test too long, and very few people had finished. Since I was thinking about dropping the class, he offered to schedule a meeting with me later in the week to discuss it.

After that, I cheered up a good deal, and distracted myself for a few hours. I had an evening class, but I skipped it to make myself some comfort food; a steak and mashed potato dinner later, I was feeling worlds better. Finally, the grades came online. I was shocked: 65. Having barely completed that many points, I was more surprised than disappointed with my score. Soon after, I received an e-mail from Professor Kemp (also a great lecturer, with the unfortunate ability to write faster on a chalkboard than I can on paper) telling me that my grade was (slightly, as it turned out) above the class average, and that looking at both that and my pset grades, I probably had a B in the class. I was amazed; I almost immediately stopped thinking about dropping the class, and realized that I had to adjust my standards from what they'd been in high school.

However, that was the last test; all in all, it went fairly well, and is certainly not a story about failure. I did learn a lesson or two from it, but it is not the story of this blogpost.

The story of this blogpost can be summarized in a slightly-trimmed-to-500x23 screenshot:

...Err, yes.

And, just to be clear: on the first exam, the average was a 60, so a 65 was a decent grade. Two hours after I saw the above results online, Professor Kemp sent an e-mail to the class, containing the following:

The average on Exam 2 was 70%, with a standard deviation of 18%. Passing was 50%. If you would like to speak to me about anything grade-related, please e-mail me to make an appointment, and I'll be happy to meet you sometime this week. Onward we go! Cheers, Prof. Kemp.

This places me squarely in the "failing" category; the average is almost twice my score, and I am close to two standard deviations below the mean. Some statistics (say, a normal model) would say that this places me in the 2.9th percentile for this exam. In a class of.... 100? Wonderful.

Hey, at least I get a blog post out of it, right?

I'm still not really sure what to think of failure, at MIT. Despite all my studying, my test average is now a 50.5 in that class, something that would've slaughtered me in high school; although I was not an A student, and not at the top of my class, (if memory serves) I don't think I got a grade lower than a 70 on any test or quiz until my senior year. And this test was different than the last one; there was no panic-y rushing through the exam, looking for problems I could solve. This time, I sat there (much more painfully) for an hour and watched myself be completely unable to do the problems. 10 of my points came from the 10-point bonus question. This exam was not too long at all; that gave me a good 40 minutes of uncomfortable thought, exploring the same mathematical dead-ends over and over again. Can I still pass the class? Hopefully. I still usually feel like I can follow along, at least, in lectures, and I can kind-of do the psets (one of which I will be attacking as soon as I finish this post; they're due Monday mornings, ugh). However, I may take Professor Kemp up on that meeting offer, now (I didn't, after the first exam, because I did much better than I'd expected after walking out of Walker), and I'll see where things go from then.

Now I know, and I really know -- I don't just hear people say it -- that failure is something you'll have to get used to at MIT. The fact that this wasn't as crushing to me as my above-average performance on the first exam says that, at least a little, it's something I'm learning to deal with (gasp, ending in a preposition; I wonder if a tacky parenthetical fixes that? meh).

However, my crazy exam week didn't end there. I'm taking both 18.022 and 8.012; the extra digit indicates they're "harder" versions of the standard freshman classes, Calc 2 and Physics 1, respectively. I would say that 18.022 and 8.012 are definitely my hardest classes. On Tuesday morning, I walked to physics lecture for the first time in weeks. We had a test coming up on Thursday, and so I thought I'd go to the lecture before the test to make sure I had been roughly keeping pace with the class. On the way into building 6, I joked with Christie and Paul, two other freshmen, that I hoped we could still recognize people in the class; it'd been a long time since any of us had sat through a lecture.

With nothing but a laptop under my arm and the clothes I was wearing, I walk into the physics room.

Christie: "why does everybody have papers on their desks?"

....oh, dang.

I took my 8.012 exam completely cold, not having been to lecture in (two) weeks, and not having studied at all. I had little idea what the exam would even cover, and yet I walked in there and took it as if I'd prepared all weekend; at that point, there's no use in panicking. I asked Professor Zwierlein (another *awesome* lecturer; my (fairly recent) lack of attendance has had only to do with the 9AM time slot for the class) if I might borrow a pencil, and he looked at me like I was absolutely mad.

An hour and half later, I walked out of that room and promptly burst into laughter. When asked how I thought I'd done, I said "between a 0 and a 90"; it felt like I had played some kind-of paper-based form of Russian roulette.

That night, I received the following e-mail:

Results for the second midterm exam are online - please click on the "Gradebook" link in the left menu panel on the 8.012 homepage.

Statistics for the exam scores are as follows:

mean: 71
standard deviation: 20

There were two perfect scores (100+10 bonus).

And the following results (out of 100 points, even though it says 110):

....w00t.

So, you can't win them all. But you can at least win a few :)

Now, that 18.022 pset.

Till next time,
-Cam

Oh, P.S.: I may have sprained or broken my foot yesterday; I have an x-ray tomorrow morning. Either way, blog posts may be about things closer to my dorm room, for the next few weeks.

...Oh, and I'm pumped to go to 8.012 lectures again, because I think we're starting to study gyroscopes -- score.

[Begin Time Travel]
(^ one of my many talents -- surprise! And yet another something that's probably only offered at MIT.)

Hey all,

No school is perfect. At college and in high school, you get occasional weeks where things just don't line up properly; your workload is far more than you're used to or should be used to, and things hit you one after another. Last week, I had three midterm tests in three of my classes, and an essay due in my fourth class. All of this happened within four consecutive days.

Ow.

I got through it okay, and emerged at 6AM Saturday morning (okay, the essay was a small number of hours late.... whoops) tired and ready for a break. At that point, I'd already received most of my grades and was no longer thinking about the results of the tests; I was just concerned with relaxing for the weekend before diving back into the school routine. Fortunately, we had a three day weekend.

What does this mean?

It means it's a Jewish holiday! Oh, wait, no it doesn't. I don't get those days off from school anymore. Okay, so it's Columbus Day. Same thing, to non-Jewish me. (Sorry if I offended any of you devout Columbus followers with that last remark; hope you all had a great Columbus Day! Spoiler alert: he discovers America.)

Ok, let's try that again: What does this mean?

It means you have a long weekend in which to get away from MIT! (Something that all you young folk and eager applicants may not want to do, but probably will want very much once you get here. Everybody needs the occasional vacation from MIT's ridiculous workload.)

Since we knew a three day weekend was coming up, my friends and I tried to plan something fun and off campus. However, many people had fraternity retreats -- I think many of the fraternities had retreats that weekend. Lame, right? (Just kidding -- I have nothing against fraternities. However, I decided this year that joining a fraternity would not be a good fit for me.) Anyway, with all the fraternities away on retreats, all of us non-Greek-life students (hence the title; yeah, I apologize for that one) were stuck on campus. This left us with only one good option: make our own retreat!

One advantage of being a local: I can go home to get things. Sometimes that means I can go home and grab my winter jacket and an extra pair of pants, but this weekend it meant I went home on Saturday night and borrowed the car.

Meet Lucy, my wonderful 11-year-old Ford Explorer. Note: this picture is not from this weekend.
(Fyi, the 1998 Ford Explorer is the best car ever made.)

Somehow, on Friday night, we decided that we would go to Cape Cod on Sunday for a picnic on the beach. Cape Cod is one of Massachusetts' more popular vacation spots, with a slew of beaches and overpriced stores. As a local, I've been to the Cape a number of times, so I was confident that we could get down there and back in a day. After some asking around and browsing google maps, we decided on a trip out to Sandwich, MA for our mini-retreat. Saturday night we went to Shaw's and bought food for our picnic. We ended up with a healthy helping of pasta, a sadly bimodal fruit salad (in which I imply that fruit is a continuous spectrum?), chips, salsa, and -- for dessert -- pumpkin bread and milanos. Add some apple cider and cream soda to the mix, stuff it into a small dorm-sized mini-fridge for the night, and you've got yourself a wonderful vacation in the making.

Sunday morning we planned to leave at 9, which meant that we all woke up just before 9 and hit the road by 9:30; however, traffic wasn't bad and we still found our way down in about an hour.

Christie, Michele, and Erin enjoying (or at least pretending to enjoy) our mid-October picnic on the beach.

Dessert!

This entry peters off a bit here, because we didn't do anything particularly exciting once we got to the beach; it was just relaxing, which was the point of the day. I, as an amateur photography dork, took some time to play around with my camera (the amazing Canon EOS 40D, for all you other nerds), leading to the artsy portrait shots below; other than that, we mostly ate, skipped rocks, and relaxed. It was as any good vacation should be -- relaxing, and not too much more.

I took a lot of time taking pictures, so I'll just bombard you and let those speak for me. (The blogger's excuse to be lazy and fill up a lot of space)

Artsy angles!

Professional-like!

"Relaxing". Erin, thanks for the camerawork :)

And then it was time to leave.

Goodbye rocks, ocean, and awkwardly shaped birds (we had no idea what kind of birds they were).

We made one stop on the way home; three or four minutes away was the Sandwich Glassblowing Museum (in fact, one reason for our choice of picnicing in Sandwich. It had nothing to do with the foody name of the place). I took a whole bunch of pictures, but showing you them would probably ruin the point of going to the museum -- it's really visually impressive, and is a nice walk-through for $5. I'd definitely recommend it. We skipped out on the glassblowing demonstrations that occur every hour on the hour, because we'd all seen it before.

Oh, score! A connection to MIT. I guess I'm at least kind-of writing about the right thing here, right? Accidentally doing my job, lookit that.

All of us were in the same FPOP -- Freshman Pre-Orientation Program. These programs bring students (I think over half the freshman class enrolled in FPOPs) to campus (or elsewhere, like Yellowstone -- any blogger in that one, want to write about it?) four or five days early for something a little like summer camp. For most of the day, you're with your FPOP. The FPOPs are led by a group consisting of faculty and students in a certain major, and it is their job to take a cadre of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshmen and to simultaneously introduce them to MIT and to a major. We all enrolled in the DMSE FPOP -- Discover Materials Science and Engineering (Course 3, since we number our majors here) -- which meant that our days were filled with tours of course 3 labs, lectures from famous course 3 professors (and an awesome grad student or two), explorations around campus, and excursions into Boston. One day, during our FPOP, we went down to MIT's glassblowing lab for a demonstration: we got to see them blow and roll beautiful glass pumpkins for their annual charity event. Following that, we got to try our hands at blacksmithing (gee, where have you heard about that before?) and metalcasting; all told, it made a very convincing case for course 3.

Anyway, long story short, we'd already seen a glassblowing demonstration and so decided not to hang around for another one in Sandwich.

I bought a glass penguin. w00t.

By 6:30pm, we were back on campus, and all promptly went back to our dorms to nap for several hours.

The End.

[End Time Travel]

Also, note how I just barely manage to stay on the front page.

(Sorry, I had to. It's the classic "first program" for any new language, and ... ok, fine, it doesn't apply to admissions blogs (although perhaps they do have a language of their own), but I wanted to start off that way regardless.)

I'm Cam, your newest (and slowest, but I'll see what I can do about that) admissions blogger. I think that means that it's my job to tell you about MIT, the things I do here (or don't do here), and generally what my life's like (so that you can, I don't know, decide whether or not you'd like to apply here for school). Since applying to college is an important process for many people, and I'm not quite sure how to represent the enormous beast that is MIT, I figured I'd start off with something smaller and lighter.

Such as a large steel fork.

Smaller and lighter than your choice of where to apply to college, but bigger and heavier than most of the other forks you've used.

Why am I telling you about a steel fork?

Well, at Lame-vard University, studying for your degree in Something Lame, you might have freshman classes like:

• Boring 101
  
• Honors Boring
  
• How to Be Pretentious
  
• Polo Shirts
  
• (Intro to) Gee, my classes are boring

At MIT, fortunately, that's not quite the case. (And of course, the jab above is all in good fun -- I have no problem with polo shirts, and in fact own several)

Every Monday night, I get to put on pants*, step back from a crazy work-filled day, and sweat for several hours.

Sounds fun, right?

*(Keep reading, it'll make sense)

At MIT, all freshmen have the option to apply for a "freshman advising seminar". All students (or, most? I'm new here) have an advisor, the professor or faculty member who helps you to manage your schedule, get a job, adjust to college, and discover cold fusion. However, if you elect to take a freshman advising seminar, you also spend a few hours a week with your advisor and a few other students doing something Really Cool. I am one of the lucky four freshmen in the advising seminar 3.A04, Modern Blacksmithing and Physical Metallurgy.

!!

At 7pm on Monday nights, I change into long pants and close-toed shoes and head down to the basement of building 4. There, I work for two and a half hours with my two awesome advisors, Professor Sam Allen and Technical Instructor Mike Tarkanian. This means I don't get to watch House when it airs every week, but this seminar is worth the sacrifice. We start most nights with a demonstration, since both Sam and Mike are fairly accomplished smiths, and then we all get to work on our own projects. Since I've only been to three sessions so far, having had some kind of flu (probably the oink-oink type) during my first week, I'm still not working on anything too exciting. One of the demonstration pieces was a two-tined fork, and I decided to try and tackle that for a starter project. However, I decided to try for three tines.

As you can see above, my fork's lacking in general forkiness. I'm not quite done with it; I still need to finish the tapers on all three points, and then I will bend them to point in the fork-hat direction (oh, by the way: the first few weeks of freshman classes involve A Lot of Vectors). After that, I will touch up the handle and clean the whole thing, perhaps coating it with varnish. Then I will use this absurdly large and heavy fork for something excellent, like stabbing (and subsequently cooking) steaks.

I had hoped to finish the fork this week, but ran into a bit of a problem on Monday night.

As I was cutting out the tines in the fork, having annealed the steel (we learn actual science, in my freshman seminar! not just: heat heat bang bang. It's pretty cool) so that I could actually make ~1.5" cuts in it, I broke a hacksaw. The old blade I was using decided it wanted to go into early retirement, and snapped off the hacksaw... somehow, slicing open my pinky as I came down on top of it.

So, that's all, folks: stay tuned for my next post, on How to Sue MIT for Millions of Dollars!

Just kidding. My finger's fine, and I still can't wait for next Monday when I turn this lump of three-tined steel into a manly meat-stabbing utensil, or something along those lines.

In summary, though, I would highly recommend taking a freshman seminar if or when you come to MIT. Although this seminar was the only one that I applied for, there are many of them available, and you can apply for the freshman seminar(s) of your choice through an online lottery over the summer (there were other cool ones (pun!), but I wasn't willing to make the time commitment to them, as I'm taking (what I consider to be) fairly hard classes (extremely run-on paragraph! plus ten points!)).

I'm sorry it took me so long to get a first post out; I was waiting until Monday to take pictures for this, and then I didn't get the post out until Thursday because I had three midterms in three days. Sometimes, scheduling doesn't work out very well. As one of the new admissions bloggers, I'm still getting used to this "blogging routine" concept (although that's no excuse), but I hope you all enjoyed reading this post, and I'll be back with another one soon, so stay tuned!

-Cam

A picture which I did not successfully work into the body of the post.