Where in the world is Mitra? (San Diego?!)
I encourage all admitted students to attend one of the admitted students parties going on this week. At these events, you can meet your potential classmates and ask questions of parents, alums, and current MIT students. There are plenty of people who can talk about academics, housing, travel, etc. In fact, I will be at one of these parties this week -- but I won't tell you where ;) See some of you there!
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On the MIT homepage today is a link to a Spectrum article about Esther Duflo. Professor Duflo, along with Abhijit Banerjee, founded the Poverty Action Lab and teaches 14.74: Development Economics, a class I'm taking this semester. Professor Duflo is AWESOME. In class, we cover topics like the correlation between nutrition and wages, health and income, education and wages, etc. (Big message of the semester: correlation does not mean causation.) The theory we learn gives us the intuition to understand the experimental set up and results from the research papers we then read and the field data we then interpret. Check out the online papers, I think they're all accessible.
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Pistol Upends Navy for National Title!!!!