<p>I chose MIT ultimately because it was just a good fit, as vague as that sounds. I attended a summer program there - WTP - which was pretty much the deciding factor in all of my college decisions. I liked having Boston right at my feet, as oppose to being way out in the middle of nowhere. Boston’s a pretty neat city; I like the way public transportation is pretty reliable and there are a lot of cool places to see there. </p>
<p>I didn’t mind the MIT campus. My dad and brother think the place is ugly, but really, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? haha. I personally think it’s kinda cool. In my humble opinion, the Stata Center is amazing-looking, even if the two afore-mentioned critics think it looks like a heap of scrap metal. =P It’s not a liberal-arts school pretty, by any means, but it has character, I guess is the best way to describe it. An immediate example that jumps to mind is visiting ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Tool,’ this little alcove wayyy underground that supposedly some mysterious student used to work in. It’s neat how almost all the buildings connect; at CPW, I played Underground Capture the Flag at midnight, and that wouldn’t have been possible had the buildings not all connected up. heehee.</p>
<p>I also liked the people! Or the ones I’ve met thus far. Our TAs at WTP were MIT undergrad students, and our teachers were MIT PhD candidates. And yeah, they were really awesome. Fun, down-to-earth, friendly. My friends there, most of whom will be attending with me in the fall, were also really cool. They were different from my school-friends in that we’d always have fun staying up late - doing homework. Well, and a bit of talking and playing games and climbing the dorm walls. I’m not sure, efficiency-wise, how much more quickly we would’ve gotten hw done if we did it alone, but hey, it was way more fun working as a group, and there were definitely problems that we all had to put our heads together on. Occasionally, we still were unable to come up with a solution. Recursion with the Tower of Hanoi comes to mind. </p>
<p>One thing that struck me about MIT was how chaotic everything seemed! CPW was actually a pretty good example of this chaos. At CPW '07, there were like 600 + events going on over the span of 3 days. No possible way to make every single one; we just had to pick and choose. I guess to me, that represented how there’s so much out there at MIT, but ultimately, the student has to choose what works. I think in this advertisement-booklet-thing MIT sent me, they wrote something like, “YOU WRITE THE CODE!” which makes sense. As I learned more about MIT, I began to realize that I wasn’t keen on the idea of lecture halls during my freshmen year - my high school class size is 120, so all my classes are small - and then I learned about freshmen learning communities like ESG and Concourse, which have class sizes much more like my high school did. In other words, provided that you go looking, there are opportunities out there. </p>
<p>I hope this is helpful - bear in mind that I’ll be starting as a freshmen this coming fall, so I haven’t actually gone to school there…but nevertheless, I guess that more-or-less sums up why I chose MIT. :)</p>