Sunday 15 April, 2007 at 7:30:02 pm
filed under personal, school
I had an extremely romantic vision of MIT before I went to look at it. I had read stories about brilliant students running about executing ingenious hacks involving the Great Dome of the school, and had pictured a fun-filled campus full of exceptionally intelligent but otherwise perfectly normal people. MIT had produced Feynman, Stallman, Aldrin, Netenyahu - indeed, the only argument against it seemed that it had also produced (along with Stallman) EMACS.
A meeting with Annie Thomas (a Piedmont grad) did a lot to change my mind. Many students at MIT are, like Annie, indeed intelligent but otherwise perfectly normal. Many of these students are swamped by the workload (Westinghouse winners among them) and many are stressed out and unhappy. They certainly do not have time for hacking.
The Hackers live on the east side of campus, and do crazy things like decorating the Great Dome to look like R2-D2 and building hot tubs on stilts. They do not, however, bathe. Many are lacking in basic social skills.
The whole situation she described to me sounded disturbingly like that in HG Wells’s Time Machine, with a separate Morlock society in the east and very little interaction between them and the other students.
Though I may be a (teeny-tiny) bit of a nerd myself, I still appreciate a good shower once in a while. And besides, college is supposed to be fun - I don’t want to spend the entire time sweating under a massive workload and struggling to keep up with a class full of math prodigies.
On the other hand, the AI class I sat in on was really cool, and I didn’t have any trouble keeping up. I think I could have a lot of fun there, also.
Of course, I have to get in first.
no comments
RSS / trackback