The First Week

See the title of my blog that stands boldly emblazoned at the top of this web page? When I arrived at my dorm last Saturday, I found the weather to be quite contrary. Thanks to Tropical Storm Bill, my dorm was around eighty-five to eighty-seven degrees which didn't bode well with the insomnia I had been experiencing the week prior.

My arrival in Boston was pretty uneventful. The bright red suitcase and humongous brown, polka-dotted behemoth I brought with me were readily identifiable on the conveyor belt with the added bonus of being among the first pieces of luggage to come out the chute. A young man with a heavy Nigerian accent brought a rolling platform to assist me with my luggage. We made idle chatter as we moved my luggage out to the cab pickup area. As the driver loaded my suitcases into the trunk of the cab, the Nigerian man said something I found unintelligible as he shook my hand. Upon seeing my confusion, he leaned in closer and I was able to make out a most dreadful word. "Tip," he said. Normally, I don't carry cash as I see it pointless when I have a debit card however I had a few twenties in my wallet to pay for my cab fare and a couple of lose one dollar bills that I handed him before hastily making my way into the cab.

Before I left home, I neglected getting my dorm's address (as well as eating which made for a very long flight since I didn't have time to buy anything during layover). When the driver asked me where, I just told him Memorial Drive at M.I.T. I figured once I was in the area, I would be able to remember approximately where my dorm was. The area I chose was somewhat close to where I needed to be: I knew that the intersection I chose to be dropped off at was either really close to my dorm or really far away. To my dismay, it was the latter. I had such a feeling but I couldn't bear to watch the meter go up any further and hoped things would work out. The GPS screen located in the passenger seat of the cab had a tip calculator on it but it didn't quite work the way I expected it to. I thought that when I punched in the amount with the tip, it would be shown to the driver and he would handle making change. When I paid the driver, he said "No tip?" The first thing I thought was "It's not a tip if you're expecting it, it's a service tax." I gave him a few dollars and proceeded to see if the dorm I was outside of was the correct one. I needed MacGregor but I was outside of McCormick, a newer girls-only dorm. Off in the distance loomed MacGregor about several blocks away. After a block or so, I ran into a girl and guy that helped wheel me wheel my two lighter suitcases. Checking into MacGregor was simple and painless. Getting my things to my room, not so much but this time I actively recruited someone to carry one of my lighter suitcases up the stairs. I realized the heat of my room would provide me no rest or refuge so I hit the town in search of food.

Down Massachussets Avenue I walked in a direction that seemed like it would have food from what I remembered of Campus Preview Weekend in April before I happened upon a pizza parlour. I ordered a large cheese pizza and downed every bite of it save for the crusts and gladly, as well as voluntarily, tipped the restaraunt. Best pizza ever though having nothing more than half a sandwhich and a bowl of ice cream at ten in the morning probably had something to do with it.

My first week at M.I.T. has been exciting and full of new experiences, both positive and negative. From last Saturday night through this Saturday, I was in the Discover Mechanical Engineering (D.M.E.) Freshman Pre-Orientation Program (F.P.O.P.). It began with a night of basketball and volleyball in the university's primary gym, the Z. Center where I got acquainted with some of the upper classman responsible for organizing D.M.E. as well as a number of the people I would be working with over the week. One of the first things I noticed about M.I.T. was just how innaccurate the stereotype of a programming, computer hacking nerd is. There really is no "typical" student at M.I.T. I have run into a number of people whose experience with a computer extends no further than basic word processing and the community here is just as diverse as that in world outside of campus life.

For D.M.E., we were divided into teams of four people each to create robots from bare plastic, unassembled gearboxes, wires and for most of us, no practical knowledge of how to go about completing such a task. We selected which two people in our groups would construct treaded robots and which two would construct wheeled robots for the soccer competition and set to work with the guidance of the upper classmen that served as our mentors. The first lab session was a quick run through of how to use the soldering irons, drill press, the heating element for melting plastic, calipers and bandsaw. Over the next few days, the teams grew to know its members better as well as their mentors. My team went from a disheveled group of slightly shy people to eventually uniting as the Mermaid Hunters whose identity was developed by a sole member before being adopted and embraced by all of us as we sought to take out the Team Mermaid and its ring leader Ariel (AH-ree-uhl). Each day, outside seven to eight hours of working on our robots, the mentors would have something planned which kept my out to midnight or later most of the time but the experiences proved invaluable in building friendships, navigating the Boston/Cambridge mass transit system and discovering a number of new foods and stores.

Soccer bot D-Day was Saturday at a museum not too far from the school in which a number of spectators gathered to watch our bots vie for victory in the plexiglass arena. In between matches, competitors franctically made revisions, modifications and repairs to their robots: dismembered limbs and destroyed treads were not uncommon. My team got a fair way up the bracket and while we did not win, we took out team Mermaid mercilously. Twice. Dinner that night was a bit bittersweet but a relief at the same time as I would finally be able to get some decent sleep now that I wouldn't be gone all hours of the night.

Now that the F.P.O.P.s are over, orientation has officially begun and all of the freshmen have arrived. All over campus, there are commemorative events, shows and free food as the dorms and Greek societies try to recruit inhabitants and members. Just yesterday, I had competed in Jell-O wrestling. Despite the rather shall we say invasive nature of Jell-O, it was well worth the messiness. I came out one draw, two losses though the latter of which were to people I discovered wreslted for some years in high school. I expect orientation to be just about as exciting as D.M.E. though not as structured.

I can't say I really like the Boston/Cambridge area. There is noise, traffic and squeeling brakes constantly, few trees and way too many people but for the time being, it seems at least tolerable even though I can't gaurantee I'll be saying that when the mercury starts to drop. I don't miss "home" but I do miss being able to see the stars and go to sleep with silence as my lullaby instead of horns and chatty pedestrians.