<p>What’s ihouse in a nutshell? Can any MIT student participate in ihouse (sounds like an fun/interesting program)? When do most MIT students travel abroad? How easy/hard is it to travel abroad?</p>
<p>So I live in iHouse (actually the Housing Chair so I’m supposed to deal with questions like this about iHouse).</p>
<p>But I’ll get this tomorrow after I go to sleep 
it’s 4 AM here! =p</p>
<p>iHouse is a special community-dorm of 22 people that had been ongoing since its formation in 2007. The aims of iHouse is to expose the residents to opportunities in international development, to facilitate a supportive community in creating ideas/encouraging information exchange, and to build leaders in the field of development work.</p>
<p>It sounds really daunting, but it’s not really - basically, it’s a dorm with requirements - all residents have to participate in a certain number of lecture-dinners per month given my development speakers, take part in an ID fair each semester, and do a project in ID before graduation. In exchange, iHouse brings in renowned speakers to the house, reserves seats for us in D-lab, and give us monetary support to us for ID work if we want to go abroad.</p>
<p>Since we only have 22 people, you have to apply to get into iHouse. You rank iHouse within the top 4 choices for your Housing Lottery, and we’ll send you a paper application. If your paper application makes it to the second stage, we’ll interview you and select you to be part of iHouse. We aim to take about 6-8 students per incoming class.</p>
<p>As for traveling abroad - this is such a broad question that I can’t really answer. You can travel abroad for a variety of reasons at MIT - for a tournament, for MUN conferences, for international development, for an academic conference, for a student group…etc. The “difficulty” of traveling abroad (usually costs), depends on who you’re traveling with.</p>
<p>Ooh, I’ll take the “travel abroad” question: very few people actually <em>study</em> abroad, because it’s so difficult to get MIT to accept transfer credits and to work out your schedule so that MIT course requirements get done on time, etc etc. It’s just complicated. It can be done, but people who do it are usually planning on it from the very beginning, and it can be kind of a pain.</p>
<p>Instead, most people travel during the summer. Check out the MISTI website: [url=<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/misti/]MISTI[/url”>http://web.mit.edu/misti/]MISTI[/url</a>] You can easily get in touch with a country director who will help you find a summer internship in the country of your choice. MISTI guarantees that you won’t lose money on the trip- you may not make much but between money provided by MISTI and/or payment provided by the company, room, board and travel will be paid for somehow.</p>
<p>I was extraordinarily lucky and came home from my summer internship in Spain with a good chunk of change in addition to my awesome experience.</p>
<p>In general, traveling during term is pretty tricky…but traveling abroad over the summer is pretty common and can be really easy, if you know the right resources to pull on. (I mean, as easy as transplanting yourself to another country for a few months can be…=)</p>