Sunday was spent doing lots of traveling, as well as seeing first hand the cost of driving a car in Boston: even though the airport is about 3 miles from campus, the taxi cost over $35. I am living in a fraternity house that looks like a very old boarding house from the turn of the century. It looks nothing like the large mansions of Frat Row on the U of MN campus, or even the houses at IWU: it just blends in with the nearby brownstones and commercial buildings (mostly biotech start-ups, but there is a division of the Tootsie Roll Company a block away whose delicious smells put me into a fantastic mood in the morning).
It is not nearly as green in greater Cambridge as it is in Minnesota, but the MIT campus is beautiful. It is a mishmash of Greek academia, 1950s Catholic high school, 1970s architecture and brand new modern styles (think the new Walker Art Center Annex). There are about 12,000 students at MIT (grad students and undergraduates) as well as many more researchers and professors.
Some interesting things about MIT:
-No one calls buildings by their names…I kind of feel bad for all the trustees that gave millions to MIT to have their name on a building but it’s on a plaque in the corner someplace in the building… Instead, you call everything by its number: so I work in building 56, but walk through buildings 7, 3, 16, and 66 to get to lab in the morning. I feel sorry for anyone who is dyslexic.
-You never know what you’ll find in the hallway. Jet engines, meteorites…you name it, it’s here somewhere.
-Hacking…no, not computer hacking. It’s more like physical hacking of buildings. MIT students will do things like travel in underground tunnels, have study groups on the roofs of buildings, park police cars in lobbies, steal the Cal-Tech Cannon and drive it cross country just because, put up murals during finals week as a way to de-stress…it’s really cool.
http://www.mitadmissions.o
-I will meet more people from around the world than original Bostonians: everyone is from all over: China, Norway, France, Greece, Arizona, Canada, Brazil, and many more.
-There are lots of “squares” (Kendall, Tech, College, Harvard, Center, etc…)
-There are no degrees of honor awarded at all
-Because MIT is non-profit (unlike Harvard down the street), it pays no taxes to the city of Cambridge. Instead, whenever the university wants to put up a new building, they pay the city a lot of money: it’s an interesting system.
We went out to dinner as a group on Sunday night, but we had to make it back to the house in time for chores….mine this week was cleaning the kitchen (industrial sized with five refrigerators…let’s just say it took awhile). I share a room with a lovely girl named Becky: she’s a rising junior chemistry major at Colby College in Maine, and she lives about an hour outside of Boston.
Monday was spent doing orientation: we walked around campus and saw many of the building we’d be working in as well as the surrounding community. The Charles River is gorgeous, and you can bet that I’ll be taking advantage of the free sailing lessons on Wednesday evenings. We also had presentations from the MIT police (a Bostonian-Irishman named O’Connor who said Hah-vahd just right), as well as some safety presentations.
However, before we could get started in lab, we had presentations from 14 research groups in the Biological Engineering Department: everything from analysis of different types of pectin to searching out damaged DNA nucleotides to building artificial scaffolds for liver cells to better simulate the liver in drug testing. On Tuesday, we spent most of the day running around MIT meeting the professors and graduate students to learn more about their research and specific experiments we’d be doing.
At 4:30, we dropped off our top three choices, and spent the night bumming around Cambridge: we found this amazing dollar-a-pound thrift store that basically uses a backhoe to pile clothes in a huge room. It’s amazing. We also hit up the local hardware store since it takes TechCash (as a part of our stipend, we receive $100 a week for food…or any store that takes TechCash). Everyone in the program is really great: even though we have only known each other for three days, we get along really well and are already planning several group dinners and outings throughout the summer.
This morning, we all slept in and went to campus at about 10:30 to pick up our assignments: I will be working for the lab of Dr. Linda Griffith, and more specifically, the newly graduated Alexandria Sams. Dr. Griffith won a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2006 for her work in tissue engineering. See the websites below for more details:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoff
http://meche.mit.edu/peopl
http://web.mit.edu/lgglab/
However, the work I will be doing is more on the biochemical side of her research with nitric oxide synthesis in liver cells and how this affects programmed cell suicide (apoptosis). I will be jumping into the deep end tomorrow with my first experiment, and I’m really excited to start work here at MIT! I will have more updates on what exactly I’m doing within the next two weeks, so I’m sure you’ll here more about the coolness surrounding carboxypeptidase D.
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