(beginnings

(beginnings On December 17, 2011* at 12:17pm EST**, I was accepted to MIT. After slamming my laptop lid shut, running around the house screaming, and generally alarming everyone within a half-mile radius, I promptly posted a lame Facebook status about it and got a bunch of likes. Since then, Ive been asked the question Why MIT? more times than I thought possible. Thats a difficult question for me to answer, because theres so much I could say. I could mention the quirky culture, the hacks, the UROPs, the pset parties***, the awesome people but if I had to narrow it down to what first made me notice MIT, it would be the blogs. You see, when I was a wee tenth grader (remember when the site looked like this? Im old, man), the blogs were my first window into MIT my first glimpse into all the previously mentioned Awesome Stuff that it offered. And I loved what I saw not just the content of the blogs, but also the fairly radical concept of allowing students to post freely and honestly about what they felt about a school on its admissions website (which, incidentally, appealed to the journalist side of me). And thats why Im really, really excited to join the blogs. I want to pay it forward to be a window into MIT for others, to provide some insight that a high school student looking at colleges couldnt have gleaned from a glossy brochure. Thats not to say that I know what Ill be posting about over the next few years, because I dont. They**** say MITs like a box of chocolates, or Schrödingers cat, or a box of chocolate Schrödingers cats, in you never know what youre going to get. But I do expect that my MIT experience will transform me in ways that I never expected, expose me to people I never would have met, challenge me more than Ive ever been challenged before. I wouldnt have come here otherwise. So as you follow me through my blogographical and MIT-ographical adventure (Im not assuming too much here, am I? please follow me), picture this post as an unclosed parenthesis the metaphorical beginning of an metaphorically open-ended journey (ooh, this is getting deep). Over the next four years, lets see if we can close that parenthesis. Metaphorically speaking, of course. *thats Earth years, by the way. Im finally off the Martian calendar because I kept showing up 687 days early to appointments **actually 12:19 because my Internet lags and is measured in carrier pigeons per second ***let it be known to all that as a naive prefrosh, Michael once looked forward to psets ****I (cats courtesy of my friend Alison) The cats are simultaneously dark and white chocolate.