Work Hard, Play Hard

Work Hard, Play Hard Sila queries: How good are the social departments at MIT? And, at the risk of sounding like a complete idiot, I have to ask: do people always talk about science at MIT? I mean, obviously it IS the institute of technology, but are people socially aware,m for example? Are there people strongly interested in the arts, politics and literature? Irena similiarly queries: Im a little concerned about MITs degree of toughnessis it possible, once one has established effective study habits, to maintain decent grades with time to do other things besides study? And I got the impression (somehow) that despite the scary workload, you guys find some fun/enjoyment in the work and what youre learning. Is that true? (I dearly hope it is) Let me start off by saying this is probably one of my favorite questions. I get it fairly often, and Id say its pretty valid since MIT students have this reputation of never going outside, never talking to other people, and never showering. This is definitely not the case as a matter of fact, I do shower. Daily. (If thats not enough for you, I also wash my hands.) At this moment Im sitting at my kitchen table feeling every butt muscle I never wanted to know I had, having just got back from two amazing days of skiing in New Hampshire a bunch of the ESG kids took a weekend away to fall down a 3-mile trail. So not only do we get outside, we get out of MIT pretty often! Going to school here is really convenient in that we actually have a campus, since were not directly in the city, but if you walk across one short bridge youre right in Boston. Or you could, yknow, take a three-and-a-half hour car ride to New Hampshire to ski down a 4,000 foot mountain. Your call! A few days before the trip, MIT Heartsafe, MIT ARCTAN (American Red Cross Team And Network) and MIT-EMS teamed up to teach around a hundred MIT students and affiliates CPR in three short hours on a Thursday night. Thursday nights are pretty notorious for having a pretty intense workload there was an 18.03 test, a 7.013 (ESG) test, and a 5.12 problem set all the next day and yet we still had a turnout of about a hundred MIT students coming to learn and teach CPR and AED use. (Mark was our EMT instructor who we spent eight hours every day with over IAP. He was a pretty amazing artist, if youll recall.) CPR is an incredibly important procedure early CPR and defibrillation can increase the chance of survival of someone in cardiac arrest by more than 50% and many who need CPR dont get it. MIT was the first university in the nation to be named a Heartsafe Community for having several public access AEDs available, as well as having a significant percentage of its community CPR certified. We upheld our status by holding our second annual mass CPR class, an almost entirely student-run event: we had student instructors, mostly our EMTs, as well as student volunteers running around teaching people how to save a life. The Fray couldntve done any better. (Wow, Im really pulling out the bad pop song references, arent I?) So I said that I really enjoy this question and I do, to an extent. I enjoy defying stereotypes. But it continues to confuse me as to how people can continue to believe that MIT students are completely one-dimensional, unhappy geeks who have no idea how to interact socially. We do other things than problem sets, actually. We have cheerleaders and fraternity guys as much as we have UA representatives and econ majors; we have people who run the Boston Marathon and play field hockey and ride trains. We have physicist photographers and radio show hosts. We also have awkward Asian girls who design t-shirts for CPR classes. (Did I miss anybody?) The fact of the matter is, MIT students cant be defined by any one steretype, and its a mistake to make one-sided assumptions without experiencing it for yourself. The last documented time I answered this question, I wrote that the best thing you could do would be to come here and see what were like. And thats still true- to understand the balance MIT students have crafted between work and play (and sleep), you shouldnt have to take my word for it. Come and visit us this weekend! Well even have Tim the Beaver here to greet you. Work Hard, Play Hard Personally, I have always considered myself a pretty social person. I have always loved just spending a bunch of time hanging out with friends and just kind of doing nothing but chillin. However, on the other end I have always been very serious about school. In high school, there were very many times that I would spend Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights studying rather than going to whatever social thing my friends were doing. Often, I didn’t really mind because I really liked school and I would also always put in my best effort to try to make it up to them; however, for a number of reasons I feel like my ability to balance work/school with friends/free time has changed a lot since I got to MIT. One of the biggest changes between high school and college is just the amount of freedom you have. I remember thinking in high school, “I hope the MIT curfew is not too early……… (there is no curfew in college :P),” you can be anywhere at any time just as long as you put in the effort to physically get out of bed (which in all honesty is harder than you might think). For a majority of high school I couldn’t drive, and when I could I spent 80% of the time driving my 4 little siblings around, so spending a lot of time away from home was not really an option. In response, my first semester here I spent a lot of my time going from place to place to place, but we were also on pass no record so it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I just knew I wouldn’t be able to continue this “always being social” life style once the second semester started. In order to compensate for the increase in social life and decrease in hard focuses on studies my first semester at MIT I decided to have a very heavy load over MITs independent activities period in January. This pushed me over from spending too much time being social to me never leaving the library/my room in order to study. Now, I think this isn’t an awful thing because there is always a number of people that have a hard time transitioning from pass no record to having grades again; however, I wouldn’t exactly say I was balanced yet. I was still far too much one side of the pendulum and kind of ignoring the other side. I would say this stayed true for a majority of my second semester at MIT, and I think the problem with this type of life was that I did not know what to do outside of work once the summer came around. The summer after my freshman year I stayed on campus and worked at the Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research. The biggest difference between school and working over the summer is that during the school year you can spend literally all of your time doing work. At any given point in time you could be doing some sort of project, or pset, or studying for exam, or watching a lecture on OCW, or doing textbook reading, etc. etc. etc. However, when you work, you work from 9 to 5 (depending on where) and when you get off you are done, and for me that was a problem and honestly still kind of is. When I would get off work I would go home, and just browse facebook or watch GOT until like midnightish then go to bed. From time to time over the weekend my friends and I would go out and do things like go to New York, or go to the beach, things like that. However, for 90% of the time I had outside of work I was doing nothing but just slumping. Now don’t get me wrong, slumping can be my favorite activity at time, and there are many days after a hard week that that is all I want to do. However, it is not the kind of thing that I enjoy for weeks at a time. I had gotten so used to school taking all of my time and energy that when I didn’t have school work to be doing I had no idea what to do with my time. Like I said before, it is still something I am struggling with this summer, but I do feel like I am starting to get a better hold on understanding the balance. I started doing things that I used to do in high school and just didn’t/don’t have time to do during the school year here. I often go to Boston Public Library and take out Chinese comic books to practice, I spend a lot of time getting back into Blender (a 3D animation software that I used a lot in high school), I have spent a lot of time dancing at different studios in boston as well as workshops being held by students on campus, etc. etc. etc. In a way I feel like I had forgotten these things were all an option to me. I had gotten so absorbed in school and my work that I had forgot that life has a lot of fun things to enjoy. So in a few words, if you feel bad just slumping this summer, the answer is not always go and drown yourself in work. There is a precious balance between work and fun, both parts are equally important. It can be easy for the type of people that tend to want to go to schools like MIT to feel like the answer is always more work = more success. However, I have found though the people that work hard do do well, people that give themselves time to get away from work breath then come back often do just as well if not better ^_^