Mitra's Blog

Don't Go Away

My blog has moved! I'm now at

mitra.mitblogs.com

(for those who don't know, I blog for the MIT Admissions Office)

MIT References

Okay, I'll admit that it's been a slow week for me, so I'm going to blog about some MIT references.

First up, the book Freakonomics by Chicago economist Steven Levitt. He received his PhD from MIT in 1994, and recently was awarded the John Bates Clark medal. As Matt's blog discussed, this year, MIT Professor Daron Acemoglu won the Clark medal. The MIT News Office reports, "Acemoglu is the fifth member of the present Economics Department to receive the Clark Medal." According to Soundings,

"Number of Nobel prize winners among current and former members of the MIT Economics Department in the past 5 years: 5

Number of John Bates Clark Medal winners in the past dozen years who are current or former members of the MIT Economics Department: 5 "

Consider that #1, the Clark Medal is given every two years, and #2, this was written before Acemoglu received it this year. Not too shabby, eh?

Anyway, I bring up Freakonomics in the first place because Levitt cites MIT Professor Dan Ariely's research about dating websites. (I mentioned it in my April 17th entry.) When I read it in Freakonomics, I freaked out. And then I groaned about what a lame pun that was.

On a slightly unrelated note, the film Mr. and Mrs. Smith also references MIT. When John (Brad Pitt) and Jane (Angelina Jolie) are revealing to each other the lies they have told over the years, he confides, "By the way, I didn't go to MIT."

Though we didn't get the real thing, we got as close as you can get, short of going with a wax model. Steve Asles, his stand-in, attended and received three degrees from MIT. Again, not too shabby.

(Sorry this picture is so large, but honestly, does anyone mind?)

In The Recruit, Colin Farrell's character received his MIT degree in non-linear cryptography. Unfortunately, we haven't yet approved that major, though we did get bioengineering! (...Look how I manage to work in all this random MIT stuff. It's brilliant, I know.)

Someone already caught the mistake -- good work.

Ah, the stuff dreams are made of.

... non-linear cryptography, I mean.

Actor Steve Buscemi played an MIT alum in Armageddon. In the film, he said,

"You want to compare brainpans? I won the Westinghouse prize when I was 12, big deal. Published at 19, so what. I got a double doctorate from MIT at 22, chemistry and geology. I taught at Princton for two and a half years. Why do I do this? Because the money's good, the scenery changes and they let me use explosives, ok?"

At least they sort of got the majors right.

Finally, MIT Anime maintains a website with MIT references in anime.

This view is modeled after the setup of Hayden Library.

Any others?

Road Trip -- sort of.

Sorry I haven't posted in so long! My friend Rose '05 came to visit, and we took a mini-trip to Santa Cruz, Capitola, Monterey, and Watsonville.

We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which is rated the #3 family attraction in the country. The MB aquarium reminded me of the New England Aquarium, which is in Boston, just a few subway stops away from MIT.

Here's our boat, the sqrt(2*kinetic energy/mass) -- or, as some like to call it, Velocity

We woke up insanely early to go on a fishing trip. I spent most of the ride falling victim to a nasty bout of motion sickness (fortunately, no picture of this), but Rose caught a fish. Somehow, we ended up coming home with 19 pounds of salmon.

Now for all you physics people -- can you explain how The Mystery Spot works?!

Go Kendra!

From the MIT News Office:

'Green' labs project wins EPA prize

An MIT student design project has won a People, Prosperity and Planet Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. More than 400 students representing 65 teams from more than 50 schools participated in the first "P3" competition, which was held at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on May 16 and 17.

To win the P3, a project had to demonstrate how it would advance sustainability in the developed or developing world. There were seven winners this year.

MIT's project, titled "Encouraging Toxic Use Reduction (TUR) in Academic Laboratories," led by Professor Jeffrey Steinfeld of the chemistry department and Jamie Lewis Keith of the Environmental Programs Office, received an EPA grant of $30,000.

Read the whole article here

Great job to Kendra, who "developed much of the project content" !!

(Meghna '06, Kendra '05 and I from Bad Taste 2004.)

For another Kendra Reference, check out my December 12th entry, in which Kendra '05 and I kazoo to celebrate William Barton Rogers's 200th birthday.

A Visit to eBay

On Sunday, Phil (MIT '07), Irene (MIT '08), and I (MIT '07) got lunch with our friend Carter (MIT '07), who is interning for Apple this summer

Unfortunately, Carter's job is so awesome and amazing that he can't tell us anything about it. Despite his secrecy, we still took him out for pearl milk tea.

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Today, I met my friend Tiffany (MIT '06) for lunch; she's interning for Accenture, a consulting firm, and is working on the eBay account. The eBay complex reminds me a lot of the Stata Center, with its bright colors, vibrant dining area, and general nerdiness.

Instead of numbering their buildings, like the cool people do, eBay names their buildings after products.

I got lost somewhere between jewelry and sports.

To pay homage to the product that made it famous, eBay has a case full of Pez dispensers.

Tiffany, Melanie, and I model eBay shirts that have cute slogans.

Apparently Wednesday is bagel day.

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Thanks to Tiffany for a great lunch and lovely tour of the eBay complex! Yay MIT for helping people find sweet summer internships.

Why it Pays...

Why it Pays to Be a Math Geek (from msn.com)

Selected passages:

"Surviving those advanced integral calculus lectures and organic chemistry labs meant downing gallons of coffee, but that math- or science-related major might just be worth it – in terms of job outlook and high starting pay, that is."

"According to NACE's Job Outlook 2005 survey, eight of the top 10 degrees in demand are quantitatively based – accounting, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, economics/finance, computer science, computer engineering, and information sciences and systems."

"Lisa Earle McLeod, columnist and author of Forget Perfect (Penguin/Putnam), agrees that good communication skills are key to long-term career success. 'Being the best scientist or engineer might make you the head of the department,' she says, 'but you have to be a good communicator to be put in charge of large groups of people.'"

Read the entire article here

Eigenburgers, Part II

One of my first entries, entitled Eigenburgers, was about my flying in an In-n-Out burger for my friend Jameel last August. Recently, Jameel and his friend Joey took a road trip up from Southern California to visit some friends and try out the Northern California burgers. Here are some pics:

Joey is majoring in Course 7: Biology and Course 21S with Chemistry and Comparative Media Studies, and Michelle is studying Course 4: Architecture and Course 15: Management.

As for the smilers, you may be asking... Jameel is studying Course 15: Management and Course 21E with EECS and Comparative Media Studies.

(Despite the proportion suggested by this entry, about 20% of undergrads double major.)

Okay so what is this 21E/21S stuff? From what I understand, 21E/21S is a single major that combines a concentration in the humanities with a concentration in engineering/science, respectively. If you go to the site, you can see the degree requirements.

For old times' sake, I did a quick google search on the word "eigenburger" and found an interesting story that talks about the frequencies of fast food at Brianstorms

Then I did a google image search on "eigenburger" and found a seemingly-unrelated photograph. Can anyone explain this?

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Also, here's the birthday cake we "baked" for my dad's birthday:

Okay, so we didn't really bake it, but we chopped the strawberries with the utmost care and placed them lovingly around the cake.

Halfway Done!

During finals week, I went out to Chilli Duck in Boston for dinner. The restaurant is underground on Boylston, right across from The Prudential Tower.

Mango chicken curry!

Here are two of my good friends, Mahreen and Veena. We're all economics majors, and worked together a lot this semester on our econometrics homework. Mahreen is working this summer at a bank in New York City, and Veena is participating in the Washington, D.C. summer program. The program connects students with different organizations, bureaus, and think tanks in DC, and also takes care of their salaries for the summer. Sweet.

After dinner, we walked towards some of the MIT fraternities east of Mass Ave and waited for SafeRide.

We came back to Burton Conner for dessert. My housemasters sponsored a study break for everyone who still had finals, and told us to invite our friends =)

Even if you've read only a couple of my entries, you'll realize just how much I post pictures of food. People think I'm constantly trying to convince people that there's plenty of food at MIT, but honestly, I just post these pictures so my mom will stop worrying that I don't get enough to eat.

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On Friday night, I went to the Media Lab's production of Seamless. I'm copying and pasting directly from the website: "Seamless is a fashion event featuring innovative and experimental works in computational apparel design, interactive clothing, and technology-based fashion. each project [re]interprets the conceptual goal of a seamless relationship between technology and fashion. these are real clothes that inspire and provoke."

First, the obligatory pictures of cool Media Lab stuff.

First, an MIT News Office article on LEGO's sponsorship of the LEGO Learning Lab.

Second, Living LEGO City.

My explanations are not going to do these pieces justice, so I'll refer you again to the Seamless page.

Here, you can see just how much packing my suitemate Gabe had left on his last night at MIT.

Aww, *sniff* -- my room's all packed up! On my desk, you can see some essentials: telephone, laundry detergent, wheat thins, roses in vase, highlighter, and computer. (Note the victory screen from Freecell -- Best. Game. Ever.)

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Now I'm back in Northern California, and I heard about an event at the Computer History Museum that brought me right back to MIT.

Irwin Jacobs '57, '59, who is this year's Commencement speaker, was giving a talk at the museum. Jacobs is "the Qualcomm guy" -- co-founder, chairman, CEO, etc.

I didn't take any photos of Jacobs's talk, which was a conversation between him and Elizabeth Corcoran, a senior editor at Forbes magazine. Donna Dubinsky introduced the conversation -- she's former CEO of Palm and founder of Handspring.

The museum had a large section containing old pieces of hardware, and is opening a huge exhibit about chess software later this year. If you're in California, I recommend you check it out -- it's in Mountain View.

I'll admit that I kept doing a mental Ctrl-F for "MIT" whenever I read the plaques in front of the old computers. I would estimate that a third of the captions attributed the equipment to or associated the founders with MIT =)

Hope everyone is doing well, whether you're still in school or finished for the summer. Take care!

Freshman Advising

I received the following question from an MIT 09:

Hi, could you advise me on the merits of traditional advising over seminar advising, and vice versa? What would you suggest I take if I don't want it to consume too much of my time, yet at the same time be able to establish a substantial connection with my advisor?

Before I offer my thoughts, I encourage everyone to check out the Academic Resource Center's (ARC's) official website for freshmen advising: http://mit.edu/firstyear/2009/rightnow/advising.html

Some general terms for the non-MIT 09s (note: definitions are very unofficial)

advisor: Faculty or staff member who helps freshmen with classes, dorm life, student life, and other issues

associate advisor: An MIT undergraduate student who helps with the aforementioned topics

traditional advising: Freshman has a faculty/staff advisor and an associate advisor, and meets a few times throughout the term

seminar advising: Freshman meets for 2 hours a week in a group with one or two faculty members, 1-3 associate advisors, and 5-7 other freshmen

My thoughts:

I took seminar advising, and really enjoyed it. My group had 2 faculty advisors (one who taught mechanical engineering, and one who taught French), 2 associate advisors, and 7 freshmen. I liked the consistent contact and structured meetings. We would discuss our advising topic for the first 1:30, and then spend the last 30 talking about classes, roommates, laundry, etc.

I feel very comfortable around my advisors, still say hi to the upperclassmen advisors, and still hang out with some of the 07s in my group.

I don't know very much about traditional advising, but I think it will take more effort to establish a strong connection with your advisors. (It is up to you to decide how important it is for you to have a strong connection with your freshmen advisor.) One of the Associate Directors of Admissions is an advisor, and she still gets lunch with seniors who, three years ago, were her freshmen advisees. Clearly, some matches are really good and long-lasting. I do think, however, that the average traditional advising advisor-advisee relationship is less close than the average seminar advising relationship. (Keep in mind that this could be a function of what kind of person chooses each kind of advising.)

Another thing to consider is time. Do you have 2 hours a week free to meet with your advising seminar? Another female in my advising group went to crew practice after our seminar each Monday, so it's doable to play a sport and do seminar advising, but if you're an athlete, make sure you schedule it around when your team practices.

In either case, your advisor has funding to take his/her advisees out for activities. Our group went to a fancy French dinner, and then saw Les Triplettes de Belleville. Stella, my roommate last year, took a seminar on homelessness, and volunteered with her group at a shelter. Other advising groups (both traditional and seminar) I know of have gone out to baseball games or musems together.

I'm actually going to be an associate advisor for one of the seminars next Fall, and I'm really excited about it. I have friends who are associate advising for both traditional and seminar advisors, and both are planning all sorts of things to do with their advisees.

What are your thoughts on seminar vs. traditional advising?

Ring Delivery photos

I finished finals yesterday (Tuesday), so now I am pretty much done with the first half (2/4 years) of MIT. That is both an exhilirating and scary thought.

Here are some photographs from Ring Delivery, last Saturday at the Moakley Courthouse in Boston. The event was a smashing success, and over 700 members of our 1000-person class attended!

Here are 10 of the 12 members of Ring Committee.

This is the outside of the courthouse. Not very impressive, is it?

Every guest had to pass through a metal detector! Good thing the rings didn't set off the alarm.

Here's the lobby where people mingled and waited in line for their rings.

The roof of the cylinder lobby ring area.

A jazz band played for the first hour or so.

See the plastic martini glasses? We had mashed potato-tinis for dinner. You put the potato in the glass, and then add cheese, meat, and veggie toppings.

Lots of other food too: salad, bread, turkey, stuffing, pasta.

The event space was in a gorgeous arc shape.

Sharlina and Tabitha with two friends.

More of the angles of the space.

Baker House people show off their rings.

Amazing windows.

For all of the pictures from the night, check out 2007 Ring Committee's website.

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Okay I just took the Which Housewife Are You? quiz.

Bree!

Woah There

The Athena computer I am currently using is named "minimum-wage"

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Check out this New York Times article on fonts. Boo, Arial!!!

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Here's the deal with the "Economists do it with models" t-shirts. We have them in, so if you ordered it for yourself, we'll have a shirt for you that you can pick up during Orientation.

Special cases:

1. You need it before August. Email me at askmitra@mit.edu with your address and the date by which you need it, and we can work out a payment method.

2. You're not coming to MIT. This is a bit trickier, but I think we can make it work. Email me.

Inauguration!

I'm sorry I haven't posted in such a long time!

Things around MIT have been pretty crazy lately, due to Ring Delivery, Time Traveler's Convention, and President Hockfield's Inauguration week. I will post photographs and stories soon. For now, I'll just say that this week has made me so feel so lucky and proud to be part of the MIT community.

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MIT Professor Alan Guth is in a competition for messiest office! Honestly, look at these photos and then ask yourself how anyone else is even close to his level.

http://www.boston.com/realestate/contests/springsweep/vote.html<>

VOTE!!

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On Saturday night, we went to dinner at Pour House, in Boston. The "restaurant" serves half-price burgers on Saturday nights -- they come out to about $2.50 each.

The next night, my dorm, Burton Conner, took us out on a cruise. Dinner and dancing are entirely free for residents =)

What a nice view.

American Idol-style dancers.

The next night marked the beginning of President Hockfield's inauguration week. At this reception on Kresge Oval were uncommon deserts, including fried cheesecake! Oh man...

Rose interviewed with a local news crew.

We play with the White Noise | White Light exhibit. View the exhibit's website here

Here are the winners of a biomedical engineering prize sponsored by Johnson and Johnson. The MIT Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) organized the contest and awards ceremony.

The economics department took us sophomores out to dinner (at Legal's, no less!) with our professors/advisors to celebrate the end of the semester. I love my department.

The Undergraduate Economics Association (UEA) gave awards to the professor and TA of the year.

Also happening today: Tic Tech Toe (2.007 robotics competition, watch the webcast!) and visit from Jorge Cham, author of the PhD Comics series.

Coming soon (hopefully): photos of Ring Delivery, UEA BBQ on Sunday

It's Yiwei or the Highway

On Wednesday, Yiwei, a high school senior from Maryland, came and stayed with me overnight. Before I get to that, here's some fun from last weekend:

First up: AXO LipSync. Alpha Chi Omega (AXO), an MIT sorority, hosts a lip sync competition to benefit charity. There are some really organized dances, and then there are the performances that focus more on humor than technique.

The students in Course 1: Civil & Environmental Engineering had a dance-off between the civil and environmental halves. I think environmental students were led by Captain Planet.

Happy birthday, Tina! She was attacked with cake =(

My floor has a floor fellow, who's a faculty member in Course 3: Materials Science & Engineering. Basically, we have enough money to go out with him and everyone on our floor, so here we are at Vinny Testa's (Italian food) in Boston.

So although people in general are more mature in college than they were in high school, occasionally there are times that remind me just how far we haven't come. One example is how we ordered Mikey a birthday cake for fun. (He hadn't gotten the memo that his birthday moved from January to April, apparently.)

And now here she is, Yiwei, my overnight guest! On Wednesday night, Gabe, Yiwei, and I went out for ice cream in Boston. We jumped on Boston West SafeRide, got off the bus once we had crossed the river, walked three blocks, and were right in a lively part of Boston.

The next day, we celebrated Earth Day, MIT style, in the Stata Center.

If you understand the link between a belly dancer and Earth Day, please enlighten me.

I took Yiwei to my 14.03: Intermediate Microeconomics class, taught by Professor Chipty. In class yesterday, we learned about the monopolies of sports leagues, and studied a court case between the Chicago Bulls/WGN and the National Basketball Association (NBA). In that class, we learn about *such* interesting applications.

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Up this weekend: Chorallaries concert, Toons concert, Steer Roast festivities, and Burton Conner boat cruise!

Have fun doing whatever you have planned, and good luck with any lingering decisions!

AWITL

Pictures from Boston Marathon 2005:

(This one is from 2004, but I liked it a lot)

Some weekend fun, including MIT Men's Tennis

Dinner at The Cheesecake Factory, with our Iron Chef prize money =)

You'll have to know this person's name to get the joke.

I took part in Technique (MIT yearbook)'s ADITL (A Day in the Life), when you take photos for a whole day and integrate them with other photographers' photos. Here are some photos from Thursday, April 21.

First up are photos from the Undergraduate Association (UA)'s undergrad appreciation week. The UA gave out free pizza, free cannoli, and free nalgene bottles. Also, Family Guy was doing a promotion on campus and raffled off two free "Stewie's Ultimate Dorm Room" prize sets, including a DVD player, an iPod, etc.

Baker House's piano drop

Fierce Forever 5 -- I'm sorry my photos from this are so blurry.

Neera's birthday!

Today, I was going to participate in MIT Habitat for Humanity's build, but they had to cancel it because of a fog warning. Boo =(

P.S. Does the title of this entry make sense?

Decisions, Decisions...

You FOOL! -- you thought this post was about you and your college decision, didn't you? MUAHAHA, you were wrong!!

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I had a very exciting Monday & Tuesday immediately after Campus Preview Weekend. On Monday, I went to the Undergraduate Economics Association's (UEA's) lunch with a professor, and on Tuesday, I attend the Society of Women Engineer's (SWE's) faculty dinner. At neither occasion was it really appropriate to take photographs, so I apologize in advance for one of my less-colorful entries.

On Monday, the UEA sponsored a lunch with Professor Tasneem Chipty, who teaches 14.03: Intermediate Microeconomics. (You didn't have to be in 14.03 to attend the lunch.) The UEA offered 12 spots at the lunch, and the economics department took care of the catering =) Professor Chipty got her undergraduate degrees from Wellesley College, then her doctorate from MIT when she was 24. She worked in academia, teaching and researching, for a few years, and then went to work at Charles River Associates (founded by Institute professor Frank Fisher !!), an economic consulting firm, where she is now a Senior Vice President. ::bows down::

Professor Chipty is taking a semester off from her job as an economic consultant for antitrust litigation to teach at MIT and finish some working papers. At the beginning of the lunch, Professor Chipty described some of the types of cases she has worked on: sports stadium naming rights, music ownership rights (as they relate to using the song in TV shows, etc.), the cable television industry, and hospital mergers. We asked her lots of questions: How is academia different from industry? Law school, graduate school, or business school? Do you enjoy your job? How much econometrics is used on the job? etc. For every question we asked, she had a thoughtful, articulate answer. Yeah, the lunch was awesome. Professor Chipty's job is pretty kick-a**.

On Tuesday night, we went to SWE's dinner with faculty. The following professors were there:

Course 1: Civil and Environmental Engineering

Einstein, Epstein (also Earth System Initiative)

Course 2: Mechanical Engineering

Trumper, Haller

Course 3: Materials Science and Engineering

Gibson, Van Vliet, Marzari

Course 4: Architecture

Oschendorf

Course 6: Electrical Engineeringand Computer Science

Voldman, Devadas, Bulovic, Zahn, Baldo, Kaufman

Course 8: Physics

Lewin

Course 10: Chemical Engineering

Virk

Course 15: Management

Kothari, Ariely

Bioengineering

Lauffenburger, Han

Note how non-engineering majors were represented at this dinner =) Also, men are welcome at SWE events, so if you are a guy scientist or a girl social scientist (me!!), you can still go to these events. On the sign-in sheet, there was a column to list a professor you want to see at the next event, whom SWE will contact and invite. Yay =)

Four other students and I sat with Professor Ariely from Sloan. He has two doctorates, one in psychology and one in economics. Last year, he taught 15.301: Managerial Psychology. We talked about how money isn't entirely fluid, and the form in which you receive money affects how you feel and how you spend it. One example compares lump-sum payments once a year versus incremental payments once a month. In addition, he told us about some of his research on savings, consumption, and incentives to cheat.

One of the coolest experiments he told us about involves online dating sites. He gathers data on what people search for, and uses information on people's meetings (do guys tend to want to meet women with blue eyes or brown eyes more? Do girls tend to want to meet guys who have lots of information on their online profiles, or not much info? Is having a picture important? (YES, very!)) to determine what preferences people have and what kind of information is "most important." Don't quote my description, since I'm probably getting the facts wrong, but from what I recall, when you force the people who are messaging to ask a personal question (example: what is your dating history?), you find that they have a higher success rate.

Please go to his website! In case you're too lazy to scroll up, it's here. He carries out super fascinating experiments on decision-making behavior. By the end of the dinner, all five of us had asked him if we could UROP for him, haha =)

Here's a shout-out to Veena, a prefrosh who sat with me at Ariely's table! =)

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Okay, I lied. You were fooled again! Here are some photos from a semi-formal I went to last night:

The event space was located in a really cute section of Boston, near Boston Common.

Ooooh, pretty.

Bryan's shirt is just stunning. [/Simon Cowell Voice]

They played a lot of swing music, so I drew on my extensive research, which consists of seeing lots and lots of commercials for The Gap.

Other couples were taking really sappy photographs, and Bryan and I were so disgusted by the amount of mushiness in the room that we took the silliest photos we could.

Up next: Boston Marathon!!