A head-and-shoulders illustration of Jenny. She has light skin, medium-length brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, and is wearing a dark pink hoodie.

Spring break Q&A! by Jenny B. '25, MEng '26

ask me questions :-D

It’s spring break here at MIT and I’m busy with thesis work. I want to procrastinate. Give me reasons to procrastinate by asking me questions in the comments section!

I’ll update this post with my answers throughout the week until next Sunday, Mar 29, with your comment displayed, so make sure that you use a name or alibi that you’re ok with being public.

  • Doesn’t matter if you’re a high school student, a college graduate, an 82-year-old, or Hollywood actor Matt Damon — anyone’s welcome to ask!
  • I’ll try to answer as many questions as I can, but there’s no guarantee that I’ll get to every one. I’ll probably be updating this post with my answers in the evenings (Eastern Time), but I’ll try to keep an eye on the comments throughout the day!
  • I can’t tell you how to get into MIT. What I found helpful in high school though was reading through the admissions website and prepping myself for any courses I need to take before I apply.

Fire away!

By Anonymous: What was your favorite event from the last few (it doesn't have to be the year you attended as a prefrosh) CPWs? I can't wait for "my" CPW this April! If you have any fun/interesting stories share those as well!

Eyy I hope you have fun!!

So when I was a prefrosh, MIT hosted “CP*” (“CP Star”) because this was during the COVID lockdown, so everything was virtual. But even then, people still found a way to make it fun. I got to tour the MIT Minecraft server, and we were throwing snowballs and eggs at each other the entire time.

In past CPWs, East Campus (one of the dorms) built a roller coaster in their courtyard that prefrosh got to ride. Completely student-made, and it’s really neat how they pulled it off. As a former Next House resident, I also gotta mention Next Act, which is a club that puts on a full-production play for CPW. I highly recommend going if you’re into musicals: they’ve done Groundhog Day and Legally Blonde while I was an undergrad. There’s honestly so many CPW events going on that you won’t have a shortage of things to do.

By M. A. If you were forced to distill the lessons (academic or social, seriously or humorously) that you have learnt at MIT into one (grammatically correct) sentence, what would that sentence be?

“Don’t be afraid to look stupid if you want to learn something new.”

By Dinosaur How do you imagine your life would be different if you didn't attend MIT?

I probably would’ve used my driver’s license more. Boston (or at least Cambridge) is such a walkable city, and I hate driving, so a good chunk of my weekend outings have involved walking or taking public transit.

Assuming I go to a college, which was my plan after high school, I’m not sure what would change. My life would definitely look different to some degree, but I’d still be starting from the same skills/flaws/aspirations that I ended high school with. No matter where I would’ve ended up, I’m pretty confident that I would’ve met at least one good person there. I think I still would’ve gone for a computer science degree, but who knows. Hopefully I’d still be drawing and writing.

By Michael Snively '11 What's the most efficient way to get low-calorie caffeine at odd-hours during CPW? Personal recommendations?

Oh no, I might be the worst person at MIT to answer this. I can’t drink caffeine because it makes me shiver for 10 minutes, and then I end up falling asleep for 2-3 hours. Which is apparently not why most people drink caffeine!

I know the Banana Lounge has coffee… or at least it often smells like coffee. Do they still have coffee when it’s late at night? I’ve seen grad students cram work at 2 a.m., so there’s gotta be coffee around then, right?

I’ve also taken some teabags from department lounges, and the physics/math department lounges had green tea and stuff when I last visited them. So if your host is a physics or math major then they could probably tap you in.

(Caffeine Drinkers @ MIT can feel free to pitch in your thoughts)

By teertha How can I get into MIT without one of those big inventions that I see people make on social media

If it makes you feel better, I didn’t have a big invention to show when I applied. I don’t really know anyone in my circle at MIT who did, either.

By Dead Poets Society Biggest regret your okay sharing? Would you do anything differently? Why do you regret it? How do you handle that regret now?

The biggest regret is not going to Springfest 2023. I could’ve seen Doechii in person. :(

Most of my regrets come from my sophomore year. Classes were rough. I had to change my study habits a lot so I could match the pace of my coursework, but even then I wasn’t getting the vast improvement in my grades that I was hoping for. That was the year where I got both a 100% on an exam in one class, and a 29% on an exam in another. And I studied way more for the second one. I already got my bachelor’s, so I’m fine with admitting that online.

I had a lot of doubts about my fit at MIT that year, and whether my peers were going to accept me if they knew how much more effort I had to put into my classes. I isolated myself so people wouldn’t find out that I was stupid. I didn’t hang out with friends, I didn’t go to office hours or join study groups. To this day, I regret doing that. At one point before junior year, I figured out that my education and my college experience were a lot more important than what people thought about my intelligence. I became more proactive with joining study groups and going to office hours. I got to meet a bunch of cool people, and I got a lot more out of the course content than if I still holed myself up in my room trying to white-knuckle my way through without anyone’s help.

By Prisha the craziest/coolest research project you've heard about or been a part of at MIT?

There are so many cool projects here at MIT that I don’t know where to begin. I know someone who worked in the nuclear reactor, and another person who worked with the guy who proposed cosmic inflation.

The one I like to mention is the MIT Mini Cheetah, which can do backflips and stuff. I actually work next to their lab! I guess my own thesis project is cool too — I’m working on a computer vision program that gets a treaded robot to detect if a user is pointing to a location on the ground before moving to it, as well as stopping when you make the “Stop” gesture.

The most surreal project I’ve worked on (as in “oh wow I can’t believe I’m working on this”) was using generative machine learning to clean up images taken by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which is a satellite that MIT worked on with NASA to scan the sky for signs of exoplanets. I didn’t end up adding any meaningful results though, lol.