Past, Present, and Future

Past, Present, and Future As the NY Times article states, this whole blogging thing began with a single blog by a student five years ago, at the dawn of the Facebook era. Let me share with you an anecdotal history of blogging, what Im doing lately, and how MIT has continued to shape me post-graduation. Since Ive worked in corporate America for about 5 semesters now (they dont get IAP off), I will organize my entry more than I ever have before. Hold me back from making PowerPoint slides!! EXECUTIVE SUMMARY MIT blogging was not always this fancy I put my Course 14 skills to good use MIT alums are cool HISTORY OF MIT BLOGGING Ill keep this short. During my CPW in April 2003 (wow), I took some photos of all the madness and sent them to Matt McGann. You know, the usual: a cappella concerts, liquid nitrogen ice cream, etc. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Matts a big deal so he didnt respond immediately. I am very detail-oriented (some might use a different word here) about stuff like this so I sent him another email in November 2003 asking if I could delete the photos or if he still wanted them. He hired me on the spot to write some photo journals over IAP. Had I known this would have happened, I would have emailed him in September. Good thing I was on pass/no record still. (Check out that linkage not rusty at all!) Drafting my first couple of entries was hilarious. I would make Word documents with photographs of things I was doing and punny captions below, and then email these to Mari to post to the old, old admissions site This was while everyone in the entire office is reading thousands of applications and planning CPW. I believe I wrote 4 entries: making fondue for Valentines day, going to a formal, and then maybe some stuff about playing in the snow. I dont remember anymore Im an old. Sophomore year, we moved to the Institute-wide MIT blogs site and thought we were pretty pro. Matt and I continued to blog and had a few other entries by another student, I believe. People who knew where these were seemed to like them, but they certainly did not click. In fact, I received more comments from older MIT students than I did from prospective students and their parents. (And no First! comments it was the Dark Ages.) Ben realized that the admissions office needed to customize its own site to unleash the magic and bring blogging to the forefront. By junior year, we had created a spiffy website and I had gotten my friends Bryan and Sam jobs. (No kickbacks, though.) WHAT AM I UP TO I now live in foggy, hippie, fair-trade San Francisco. Fortunately it feels quite similar to Cambridge especially with the pi-themed pizzeria. I just finished the incredible two year consulting program at Bain, and now I work for the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Gordon Moore is the co-founder of Intel (Moores Law!! for all the Course 6ers out there) and he and his wife established this foundation to support the environment, science, and the Bay Area. I work as an investment associate, so I help invest the foundations endowment (just like a universitys) to fund all its excellent grant-making work. HOW MIT HAS SHAPED MY ADULTHOOD SO FAR Its funny how much MIT helped me identify my identity. Like I did back on Conner 2, I still wake up early to go running, and visit the library (1, 2, 3) bi-weekly. MITs emphasis on using what one has learned to better the world certainly resonates with me, and I hope that all of my career and personal (I compost now!) choices continue to reflect this. The best part of graduating and moving to California has been connecting with other recent alums, some of whom I did not know at MIT. We have a semi-shared set of experiences and friends (quantifiable on Facebook) so it makes it much easier to skip the niceties and jump straight to the nerdy pick-up lines. Thanks to all of the meaningful things that nearby alums are up to (e.g., finding breakthroughs in research, starting new companies, planning new transportation systems, making a mark in established firms, investing in new technologies and ideas), I am so proud to wear my brass rat. And I owe a final bravo to all 07s in other cities doing similarly amazing things can I crash with you when I visit? P.S. In case youre as detail-oriented (see above) as I am, the answer is none. I dont remember any 18.06 at all. Past, present, and future Something very important happened on Friday. The final report of the Task Force on the Undergraduate Educational Commons was released. The TFUEC has been working for two and a half years to redesign MITs GIRs (the classes that all undergraduates at MIT are required to take), and this report contains its recommendations. Any changes made on the basis of the recommendations will probably start being implemented a few years from now, so some of you might have a vested interest in knowing what they are. The full report (158 pages) can be read here. The summary of the report (only 11 pages) can be read here. I anticipate that theres going to be a lot of talk about this over the next few months, especially among the undergraduates. Already a couple of the talk lists that Im on have exploded with commentary, and there will be a survey and a forum and meetings and a student report. This process, and the student reaction to it, illustrates something about MIT that I think is very important. At many schools, students only care about policy as relates to the present. If it doesnt affect them while theyre at the school, they dont care about it. And new students dont ever learn that there was a change to begin with, if they arrive after it was implemented. They have no basis to support or condemn it because they dont know that there was anything before it. None of this is the case at MIT. The students at MIT care very deeply about policy changes, even if those changes wont take effect until theyre gone. They take pride in, and memories out of, what theyve experienced, and want future students to be able to have experiences that are as satisfying as theirs were, and there are values that are part of MIT culture, that they believe in, that they wish to uphold for future generations of students. Do you like or live in Simmons? Students were part of the group that decided how to structure the Simmons community, students who never had the chance to live in the dorm that they helped design. You can read their story, as written by Jeff Roberts 01, here. Theres currently a new undergraduate dorm being designed for the old Ashdown building, and current sophomores and juniors are applying to join the new committee my friend and hallmate Mandie 08 made it on. When the residence system was being redesigned, a group of all students wrote the report that saved Dorm Rush (the ability of incoming freshmen to choose their residence after arriving on campus). Matt, who was a senior at the time, was one of the students who wrote it. The changed residence system certainly wasnt going to be implemented in these students time as undergrads, but that didnt stop them from caring that MIT preserve the values of its residence system, that future students be able to have the enriching experiences that they had. By the same token, MIT students care about the past. Through the past, you learn what to expect for and how to shape the future. You learn about the patterns of thought that shape MIT. You learn about the causes that those a few years older than yourself thought were worth fighting for. Most of the young alums enjoy telling the stories of their battles, whether they won or lost them in the former case, they get to relive their triumph to an interested audience, in the latter case, they get to vent their bitterness. I care about the past because Im kind of a history geek, and also because I care about the future. Thats MIT. Its not a complete turnover of opinion every four years, and students having no sense of where the lives that theyre living came from and where theyre going. Its a long and colorful story. Those of us here right now are writing our chapters. What will your chapters be like?