I Went to MIT My First Year--And Lived!

Okay, so I made a mistake.

Not four weeks into the fall semester of my first year, I sat in calculus lecture with 599 of my best friends and listened as the professor wrapped up the first unit of the course.

"Now that we have finished," he said, "with all the preliminary material about vectors and projections and curves, we will now embark upon a study of a topic which is very important in science and engineering, and that topic is multivariable calculus proper."

Brief silence. An instant later, at least twothirds of the class whispered breathily, emphatically--erotically--and in union, "Yes!"

I didn't understand the pathos that lay within said math professor's nerdy pronouncement, but I guess a few hundred other first-year students did ("Yes!"). I liked calculus, too, but not enough to whip myself into a hot-and-bothered frenzy over partial differentiation.

I thought for a few minutes about this quick professor-student exchange and then added it to my growing laundry list of reasons why enrolling at MIT was the dumbest thing I'd ever done.

The decisions that you make--or at least the biggest decisions I made--at the age of 17 may seem ill-advised later on.

Unlike eighty percent of those high-school seniors who find fat envelopes from Byerly Hall in their mailboxes in May, I spurned my first offer of Harvard admission. I headed instead for the tech school two miles down the Charles.

I don't know why. My hosts during my pre-frosh visit to MIT belonged to a fraternity that bragged about its basement computer cluster. "Four VAX stations! Yes!" People referred to academic departments by their numbers not their names. "What's your major?" Three." "Really? I'm six. and meet Fred here. He's ten."

Individual classes had numbers, too. My first four college courses were 1802, 3.091, 8.01 and 9.00. Though stereotypes generally mislead, don't disbelieve all the nasty stuff you hear about MIT.

A social-science geek at heart, I nonetheless felt taken in by the MIT recruiters' fauxacademic-diversity rhetoric. No, you don't have to sell you soul to the physical sciences, they said. I believed them. Later, I realized that just because it's in the promotional literature doesn't mean it's true.

Yet I couldn't blame the spiel for my (irrational) decision to study engineering. That's right, folks, I settled upon engineering at the wizened old age of--you guessed it--17. brief lesson: if you're 17 and you think you know anything about life, you're wrong. Period.

Pragmatism required, I thought, that I attend a technical college. My hand quivered a little when it wrote a checkmark in the yesbox on the MIT reply card. I dreamt in July that I'd move into Harvard Yard in the fall. Pleasant thoughts about wrought-iron gates, about pointless but titillating intellectual arguments and about a huge, well-financed library danced about in my brain, but disappeared when I woke up and remembered which school I'd chosen. It didn't mater. Prospective engineers go to MIT.

MIT wasn't universally horrible. First-year bonding works the same way at every university. You'll meet some randomize whose names you will instantly forget. You'll converse with others for ten minutes during orientation week and then say nothing but passing hellos to them for the rest of the semester before you begin to ignore each other in the spring. And then you'll find some people who matter a lot to you.

I met the Various Other Posers. Actually, we all met each other and then became the Posers. I don't remember the origin or the purpose of the name.

There were twelve of us--fewer males than females, a rarity among MIT peer groups--and we lived in a dorm called Next House. We procrastinated our problem sets by playing with Jessica's Play-Doh, Megan's Nerf fencing set and Kevin's keyboard. We ate dinner together at six every evening. We watched "Say Anything" over and over, just because Andrea liked it. We even staged our own formal, because Next House didn't have one.

Sure, the whole notion of the Posers was excessive, juvenile, formalistic and exclusionary--almost like a final club, but without the schmoozing and the gender restrictions--but it fulfilled an emotional need.

My fall-term regimen of 18.02 et al., on the other hand, didn't flip any emotional switches. And when my half-hearted commitment to the hard sciences began to look even paler in comparison with the devotion professed by those made orgasmic by "multivariable calculus proper," and when I decided in early November that engineering sucked, I found myself in a bind.

See, once I realized that I was at the wrong college a mere two possible paths became apparent. I could have, on the one hand, decided to get in touch with my inner vagrancy, bailed out, gone somewhere else and felt like a stranger for a semester or two longer than Most college students do. Otherwise, I could have sucked up my misery and wallowed in it for four years.

Easy choice, right?

Beginning college anew would be a hassle. I thought about leaving, but the prospect of filling out more applications and writing a bunch of dippy essays didn't thrill me. What's more, I felt like I would be abandoning my friends.

But just thinking about another three-or-so years at MIT gave me gas pains. Neither the Posers nor the extracurriculars I'd picked up along the way could mitigate my disillusionment, and for a long time I might have been the most cheerless individual in Cambridge.

It's okay to hate your college and to want out. But don't hate it too much. You may have to stay.

My roommate Sameer and I both went overboard. If I was our fair city's most glum resident, Sameer took a close second. That two people with uniformly negative views about the same institute ended up rooming together defies the laws of probability. Maybe bad vibes are contagious.

In any case, we fed off each other. Room 427 in Next House--or room W71-427, if you like--became the headquarters of a mental guerrilla war. Nearly every day, both Sameer and I found new and exciting reasons to hate the Institute. Then at the end of the day each of us returned home and traded stories.

Our kvetching didn't change MIT, though, and we only succeeded in making ourselves more unhappy. Comparing notes with Sameer steeled my desire to leave, but I be came increasingly despondent over the possibility that a vengeful Harvard might turn me down. And Sameer, who initially tilted away from transferring, ultimately decided that he might be happier at Stanford.

Luckily, the fat envelopes came in July. And both of us, oddly enough, ended up at Harvard. If I'd stayed at MIT, I'd learning about queueing systems and computation structures. instead, I now fill my head with arcana about American governmental institutions, Soviet disintegration and the meaning of the state. I'm glad I switched.

Starting again wasn't easy, though, and I would have ended up as the Perpetual Other if I hadn't made a conscious effort not to. I lived in off-campus overflow housing for a few months and couldn't move into the dorm system until the beginning of junior year. I roamed from comp to comp before winding up as design editor at The Crimson. Even now, most of the people I know at Harvard are Crimson editors, gov jocks, ec nerds, Russophiles or transfers.

But although leaving my old concrete wasteland of a college wasn't exactly the key to everlasting bliss, I'm nonetheless ecstaticabout being at Harvard. I'd have gone spastic if I had to stay at MIT, because it didn't feel right. Harvard does. Yes.

Ignore my pro-Harvard cheerleading if you like. After all, should you trust a soft-science fan who started college at MIT? And am I so much wiser at age 20 than at age 17?

Yes, and yes. My first year taught me an awful lot about college and about colleges. Life up the river made me realize that, for whatever reason, you sometimes end up where you don't belong. Knowing when, where and why to go becomes a matter of survival. And Harvard might not be your paradise, just as MIT wasn't mine. Everyone makes mistakes.

But tread lightly. Decide quickly, but not rashly. You willmiss your friends. You will feel left out of first-year memories at your new school. You may even want to re-transfer to Harvard; one woman I met returned to MIT to study architecture, and one guy went back to Georgetown for a week in a fit of academic and social malaise.

Most of all, think twice, three times or more before you even consider leaving Harvard. It is a special place, and somewhere amidst all the bricks and ivy and money and pretense you will likely find happiness. Leave Harvard if you must, but I don't think you have to.

Dante E. A. Ramos is design editor of The Crimson.