(un)Empty Nest

(un)Empty Nest There are no undergraduate classes here at MIT over the summer. Hopefully you already knew that, or at the very least figured it out from all the great summer blog posts. MIT encourages students to do research, travel, do service work, or just recharge and have some fun. While that’s a great opportunity for you, it does make things much quieter on the old homestead. It’s not a complete “Night of the Comet” (or “28 Days Later” for those sadly uneducated in the ways of cheesy ‘80s movies) because there are research opportunities year-round, and we get to meet several thousand prospective students in our Info Sessions. Still, the campus doesn’t vibrate with the same lightning-in-a-bottle energy. All that is starting to change. Shhhh, listen! Put your ear to your favorite graphing calculator or Petri dish* and you can hear the distant sounds of life returning to the Infinite. The new pre-frosh, sans pre, are arriving on campus! * On second thought, that second one is probably a bad idea. It’s been months since I could wander through Lobby 13, enjoying an echoing rhythm as two students practiced ballroom dancing, deftly winding their way around a hurrying, lab-coated young woman cradling a graduated cylinder of purple liquid. A year ago a sight like that would have stopped me in my tracks. Now having been without the zany, ‘you wouldn’t believe me if I told you’ serendipitous moments that make up a normal day on campus, I can’t wait for summer to end. I missed you guys!