Now it’s finally time for my update on what happened during winter break! I went home after finals and enjoyed spending time with my family. We had uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents at my house for the holidays, so it was crazy but lots of fun. I saw a few friends while I was back home, but I mostly relaxed. I got a Nintendo Wii for Christmas, and I’ve been playing the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Gus is actually way ahead of me in the game now, which is amusing considering I had a lot of break to play it and he did not. I even got my grandparents to play Wii Sports, and I think they had fun too!
MIT gives you all of January off, so you get 1.5 months of vacation. This January period is called “Independent Activities Period” (IAP). During IAP, you can take classes (for credit or not), and it is just a great time to hang out with your friends with no stress. To see some of the offerings for IAP, check out this website: http://web.mit.edu/iap/overview/index.html.
During IAP, I searched for internships, hung out with my friends, attended a few seminars, did a short class, and just relaxed and had fun in general. I have summarized a few of the things I did below:
-Mystery Hunt! The annual mystery hunt is a big tradition at MIT. It is a huge puzzle competition and lots of people take part in it. The team who wins gets to organize the next mystery hunt. Some of the puzzles are really hard, and others are easy. It doesn’t matter if you are bad at puzzles or not, because some of them just require you to know something really random, like the name of a song, or a movie, or something. Many people stay up really late working on puzzles each day (it’s a weekend with hardly any sleep). The Simmons “Lego my Ego” team (remember that Simmons looks like a huge waffle) did pretty well this year, we didn’t win anything, but we were far from being last. Below is a picture of the white board used to display answers people had gotten.
-Seminars: I went to a few lectures about searching for internships. I also went to one on science writing. They had four actual writers (who were all related to MIT in some way) in the industry come out and talk about their jobs, so that was cool.
-Storytelling and Games in the Digital Age: This was a week long class that involved a lot of effort, but was also a lot of fun! Sony puts on this workshop for students and we got to design a video game (and when I say “design” I mean we come up with ideas and present them, we don’t actually create a videogame). We had to come up with an already existing franchise and make a game out of it, and then we did a presentation at the end. My group designed a game from the Twilight Zone, and it was in the adventure/horror genre. We stayed up a pretty late a few nights trying to finish everything. Our presentation went well the last day, although we didn’t win the competition. The team who won had a Beatles game that was very creative. I had a lot of fun and I’m glad I did it, even though it did take a lot of time. A pic of my team is below:
-I also went to a Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) concert during IAP with Gus. The music was pretty good. I love Beethoven, and Schoenberg was good, although I just don’t like the sound of his music as much as other types of music.
It was also my birthday in February (I’m 20….which is kind of strange). We had celebrated Gus and Annelise’s birthdays in December, so we had quite a few birthdays within two months of each other. My friends threw a surprise party for me the day after my birthday, so it was a lot of fun. Below is a pic of the beautiful (homemade!) and delicious cake that Gus and a few of my other friends made me.
I think those are the major things that happened during my winter break. Sorry it took so long for me to write that up! I’ll do an update about my spring semester classes soon.
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