And now, for a continuation of my series on MIT CPW.

After waking up really late, I wandered around trying to find breakfast, only to discover that I had woken up too late, and all the places doing breakfast had closed up, and the lines at all the food joints were too long, because I had to get the keynote.

The keynote lecture was given by Eric Lander, after a welcome from President Hockfield (which started off with, “So how about that cannon?”). Professor Lander basically talked about how MIT (and other places) is owning genetics. Also, we can sequence DNA really fast now. Also, MIT and others are sequencing other mammals and comparing the genomes to that of humans. They can use some spiffy computer analysis to find similarities between the genomes. Where they are similar, that section is for some reason important to the invisible hand of evolution, because otherwise random mutations would have persisted and been allowed to reproduce (natural selection and all that good stuff).

The really weird thing? Two-thirds of the similarities between the human and the mouse don’t code for genes, which is weird because it was previously believed that genes were the only things in DNA that matter; the rest of the genome (about 90%, if I remember correctly) was thought to be meaningless. Meaningless code like that should have been completely changed by the random mutations of evolution. The fact that it wasn’t means that it’s important. And nobody knows what it does.

Of course, I don’t want to really study biology, but I can get worked up about any subject. It’s that damn love for learning stuff. No seriously.

In any case, I definitely want to try and take 7.012 with Professor Lander next year.

After that, I rushed over to 54-100 to observe a lecture for 18.02. They were doing 2-D line integrals. This, actually, made me very happy. The last time I observed a math class, 18.022 in October, they were doing the Change of Variables Theorem, something we didn’t cover at Vanderbilt until February. Line integrals, however, we did several weeks ago. This is probably related to the fact that 18.02 and 18.022 are both single-semester courses.

In any case, I talked to the professor afterwards, and he basically told me that I was learning way more in my class than they were in theirs, and there was no reason for me to not test out of their calculus requirement.

Next, I took a tour of CSAIL and the Stata Center and got a free Course VI (EECS) t-shirt at the EECS Open House. Then I played Super Smash Brothers in the Student Center while I waited for the rain to die down.

Once it did, I headed for the MITBeef Beef-Off, sponsored by Random Hall. I ran into Sara Roland from GSS, who I didn’t even know would be at CPW. I ate some beef, toured Random Hall, ate some more liquid nitrogen ice cream (which really is as good as they say it is), then went back to the student center.

Oh! I said I’d deal with a dorm each day. Today’s dorm of choice is Random Hall.

Random Hall is the most moderate of the dorms for the stranger types. All (and I of course speak stereotypically here) of the D&D Obsessed, Hackers, hippies, people with died hair, etc. migrate towards either Random Hall, East Campus, or Senior House. These people tend to be very interesting, talented, enthusiastic, and lots of other good qualities. For example, one of the students in Random Hall had an 80 GB server in a RAID 5 array with one hard drive that automatically took over if one of the others failed. Now that’s cool. I have no objections to spending time at Random Hall, but I’m not sure I could live there. Plus, it’s also really far away, although not as far as Next.

The other good thing about Random, though, was that they have large kitchens and are right next to a grocery store.

Anyway, I went to the Student Center because they were having the Meet the Bloggers party, which I wanted to go to, mostly because I wanted to meet the admissions staff and the other bloggers, but also because I wanted to try and get my name to Ben as a potential blogger for next year. All of the bloggers were really nice people, and it was fun talking to them. I swear I’m not saying that because I know they’re reading right now.

While I was there, I met the other Evan, who had also been commenting on the blogs. In fact, it wasn’t until a few days after Matt’s post about admitted students that we realized there were two of us. I didn’t even notice at all; Mom did. It was made more interesting by the fact that we made no attempt to distinguish ourselves, except for the fact that I always linked back to my site. We’ve agreed to add on last initials from here on out.

After the party was over, we headed to Lobby 7 to meet up with some other prefrosh.

That’s all of the story you get for Friday.

Lucky you, but you get a couple other stories, though. Mostly related to college.

I’ll be brief: I got into Carnegie-Mellon and was waitlisted at Columbia, which was OK, because I don’t really know why I applied in the first place.

Having accepted MIT, though, I went ahead and turned down CMU, Columbia, and all of my other schools.

In a similar vein, the Presidential Scholars Program. I got my letter on Tuesday that I wasn’t selected as a semifinalist. That’s fine by me, because, while being a great resume item, I only would have gotten out of it a trip to DC if selected. I was, however, slightly annoyed, because I think I did a very good job on my insanely long essay.

On Wednesday, I was called to the office at school and handed a letter from some state representative. Congratulating me on being nominated to the program. Whoever that guy was, he gets major kudos for timing.

Tags: college-admissions

This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.