priorities: choosing between cpw and..

mootmom
Wed, 20 Feb 2008 17:35:13 +0000

CPW is indeed awesome (and that’s both from the standpoint of a parent who attended the parents activities and toured dorms, and from the reports of many students who’ve attended in the last few years), but you might ask yourself a few questions.

Have you already been to MIT and seen the campus? (You wouldn’t be using CPW as a chance to tour campus, then.)

Do you feel you know enough about the campus and the students there to know whether you’d want to attend? (If so, you might miss some fun times, but you wouldn’t be lacking in insight with which to make your matriculation decision.)

Activities like touring all the dorms are a focus of Orientation, so although CPW might help you decide how to rank the dorms for your temp assignment during Orientation, you’ll also be getting the i^3 which will give you a flavor, and your Orientation housing assignment is only temporary anyway, so nothing lost there.

Basically if you already have a feel for MIT and have visited, you’re only missing a fun, cohesion-building long weekend with other pre-frosh if you skip CPW… and the real cohesion stuff starts, from what I understand, at Orientation and in your eventual living group. CPW would be fun but not necessary. And if you’re part of a team that’s counting on you, you’d probably be well advised to stick to the competition.

If, on the other hand, you have not yet visited MIT or if you aren’t clear on whether you’d matriculate or not if admitted, it would be worth visiting sometime before May 1. It does not have to be during CPW, though.