Star Simpson and "Fake Bomb"

Since this is all over the news I thought I should comment. Star Simpson, a sophomore that lives at East Campus, went to the airport with an electronic name tag she made for herself . The device had LEDs on a circuit board that were in the shape of a star (her name is "Star"). State troopers thought she had a bomb and she was arrested at gunpoint. I want to make sure people knew that Star had no intention of causing such a ruckus. She made the name tag for MIT's career fair last Thursday. The playdoh in her hands was from the career fair.

I'm not trying to make an excuse for her or what happened. Star should have been smarter about wearing such a device to an airport, especially since there have been so many terrorist scares recently. It was clueless for her to do such a thing. To her, it was probably just a cool thing she made and wanted to wear it around and get some use out it, not realizing that it looked so suspicious. The MIT administration has commented on this incident, and I am disappointed with their report. Sure, they want to look good after this incident, but they could have easily clarified that Simpson was not carrying a "fake bomb" and that she didn't mean for this to happen. They still could have been stern in their comments about how she was clearly not thinking about her actions. It makes a big difference to the MIT community. This isn't something where she was like "Hey! I want to wear this so people will get freaked out and it will be totally hilarious." In that type of situation I would expect MIT to practically disown such a student. This was NOT such a case. I don't believe Simpson or MIT has handled this very well with the media. Hopefully it will all get sorted out soon. The MIT administration needs to recognize that some of the people here are extremely book smart, but not street smart. I think it's something that needs to be addressed and can be corrected.