Good morning readers!
Readers, I see no comments on any of the blogs for the past few weeks! Tsk, tsk. I feel like Edna Mode from the Incredibles: “Gobble-gobble-gobble-gobble-gobble! Too much [talking], darling, too much! That is why I show you my work…”
Alas, my work is talking at you, so you’re only going to get more of it if you choose to read :). But please be a penpal! I miss talking to prospies…
Anyway, it’s a beautiful day outside; there’s nothing quite like groping around near the windowshade when your alarm goes off, feeling the light attack you, then waiting a moment and then being like: oh, hey, it’s actually gorgeous out, let the day begin :).
My days begin usually around 8:30am. If it’s a Tuesday or a Thursday, I get up at 8:30am, have a super quick breakfast at the dining hall Pomeroy up the hill from my dorm, then shuffle down to the bus stop to await the 9-o’clock bus. Wellesley has a shuttle bus to MIT that runs every hour, and the Wellesley side is usually on time. (The MIT side depends on traffic. The 6pm bus is pretty much always late, for example. The 10pm bus is never late.)
Once I arrive at MIT, I usually find and wrestle with the printer a bit before class starts at 10:30am. My first class is 9.40: Intro to Neural Computation, and we’re modeling the biophysics of action potentials. This means that we’re getting a lot of differential equations thrown at us, and it’s been incredibly helpful for me to go through the slides beforehand, and print them out. This is a lecture-style class with about 50-60 people in it, and since this is the first time the class has been offered, Professor Fee has encouraged us to provide as much input as possible. It’s not Wellesley— in my Wellesley Physics I class, questions were asked probably every seven minutes— but it’s an open environment, small enough that the professor is able to modify based on the class’s reactions, and we generally hear a thoughtful question about every 15 minutes.
9.40 ends at noon, and then I head out with my friend Caitlin to lunch. Many MIT students cook, as compared to Wellesley where almost every is on the unlimited meal plan, so Caitlin heats up her food and I buy mine. Wellesley provides cross-registered students with enough TechCash money to buy a meal a day, which is wonderful and means that I only have to bring food in from Wellesley when I’m staying in Boston past dinner. Sometimes we eat in the Stata Center, sometimes in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Building, both of which have building numbers (Building 34 and Building 46, I believe?) but that’s one MIT convention I haven’t successful adopted yet :).
After lunch Caitlin and I both head to 18.05: Introduction to Probability and Statistics. I have to say, I unquestionably lucked out when I chose my classes at MIT. I chose them purely based on scheduling, but they turned out to have been my best possible choices. Both 18.05 and the class I have from 3-5pm, 8.02: Physics II, are TEAL classrooms, and I’m going to quote from the hyperlinked website to describe it:
“In the late 1990s, educational innovations in teaching freshman physics, specifically a method called interactive engagement, were delivering greater learning gains than the traditional lecture format [in which attendance was often low]. These innovations were not lost on Professor John Belcher, teacher of first-year physics at MIT and one of the three principal investigators on the Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) project…
In the TEAL project, Belcher teamed up with Co-Principal Investigators Peter Dourmashkin and David Litster to reformat the teaching of freshman physics at MIT with a new mix of pedagogy, technology, and classroom design.
MIT funded the renovation of two classrooms for $1.5M each. The two 3,000-square-foot TEAL classrooms each contain an instructor’s workstation in the center of the room surrounded by 13 round tables, each seating nine students. Thirteen whiteboards and eight video projectors with screens dot the room’s periphery. Each table holds three groups of three. Groups are formed by mixing students of varying levels of knowledge in a single group to facilitate peer instruction.
A typical 8.01 or 8.02 class incorporates lecture, recitation, and hands-on experiments in one presentation. Instructors deliver 20-minute lectures interspersed with discussion questions, visualizations, and pencil-and-paper exercises.”
So essentially, what happened is that there a total of two TEAL classrooms on campus and a very limited number of TEAL classes, and I happened to land in both of them. Whenever I tell MIT students this, they’re amazed, because I’m definitely not getting the typical classroom experience. Most classes, they tell me, are in lecture halls, and not showing up to class is common practice. TEAL classes are based on constant student interaction with the material, with up to half of class time devoted to working on problems on the boards in groups of three rather than lecture. Participation in class is heavily weighted, you’re strongly reliant on your peers, and there’s a lot of preparation work required for and after each class. In short, it’s my best kind of learning—a lot of prep work being done alone, working problems in class in an environment that facilitates making strong friendships, and active engagement from everyone all the time. MIT students have varying opinions on TEAL, but as I have no other comparison point, I love it :).
My professors are also high in demand: Professor Orloff in 18.05 and Professor Dourmashkin in 8.02 are popular, and I can definitely see why :). However, while they are both excellent teachers, there are different feels to the classrooms. 18.05 is more relaxed, has around 80 people, and we really learn most of the material before we even get to class, leaving most of the class time to problem-solving. 8.02 is a freshman class, around 110 people, and incorporates more lecture.
8.02 is also significantly harder. Caitlin and Micah, who are in 18.05 with me, think I’m crazy to be taking 8.02 since it’s not technically required for anything I want to do in the future. “It’s not a funsies class,” they informed me. This is true—I’m spending the majority of my time working on physics rather than my neuroscience or math class. I even was contemplating dropping it two weeks ago. However, talks with my parents and friends convinced me out of that, so now I’m taking it pass-fail and learning a lot, not to mention getting some serious practice in my multivariable skills, which MIT calls “vector calculus.” I’m going to a lot of office hours, getting help from Brynna (who’s in my group of four in 8.02), working at it, and am going to do just fine :).
Oh—another question I get asked a lot is why I’m taking three classes at MIT, and why these particular classes. All the classes I’m taking (save my English class at Wellesley) are actually pre-requisites for 9.66: Computational Cognitive Science, a class I really want to take next fall. My classes all have equivalents at Wellesley, but scheduling at Wellesley didn’t work out for me, so I moved them over to MIT. And I’m glad I did; I had originally wanted to spend a junior semester at MIT, and I’m so glad I’m able to experience being a student there.
The main reason why I didn’t often go into Boston before this is because transportation takes awhile. Wellesley is awesome, and I’m so grateful for the fact that we have a reliable shuttle into Boston that’s free and runs every hour on weekdays. However, we are a suburb of a major city, and it’s undeniable that takes between 30 minutes (on the 10pm Monday bus) and 90 minutes (on the 6pm Friday bus) to get into Boston by bus, depending on traffic. It usually takes around an hour, and it can be hard to do homework on the bus depending on who’s riding.
But I’ve actually found being a commuter much less difficult than I anticipated. This has a lot to do with how fortunate I’ve been with scheduling: I go into MIT on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays for class, as well as Mondays to attend office hours. That totals 8 bus trips per week, when I’m basically acting as a MIT student this semester, which isn’t bad at all considering I usually make it back to Wellesley in time for dinner. Moreover, I often manage to do homework on the bus. Even when I’m not able to do work, I listen to a lot of conversations (especially one-sided cell phone ones :P) which isn’t necessarily a bad thing :).
On a typical MIT day, when I get back to Wellesley I’ll eat dinner and then hop on the ellipticals. I love doing this, because it has all sorts of benefits: I get to read on my computer while I work out, I get to work out, I get to take a break from studying, I’m forced to shower afterwards, etc. I find I’m usually working out an hour a day between five and six days a week, which is exactly how I like it. I could of course walk over to the Wellesley Sports Center and use some other machines, but the fact that my dorm has two ellipticals literally 50 feet away from my room has some definite benefits.
After dinner and working out, I’m usually on my own to do homework for a few hours. I’ve shifted my schedule later, so I’m not surprised anymore (though I do get a bit annoyed) to find myself still working at 1am in the morning. I’ve developed this weird kind of procrastination in which I do all my homework except for the one that really needs to get done, and then have to stay up late to finish that. It’s weirdly productive, and I’m still sleeping at least seven hours a night every night, but my study habits are definitely changing.
This is the pattern for M, T, Th, and F: if it’s Wednesday, it’s a Wellesley day. I really can’t say enough about how happily my scheduling worked out: having a Wellesley day in the middle of the week has been wonderful. I get up and go to English class, where I am enlightened and amazed by Professor Cezair-Thompson’s analysis of great writers, and her and my peers’ comments on our writing. Then I go to lunch, where the majority of my research lab gets together to pre-game our upcoming lab meeting: the part of the lab working on fMRI (most of us) have lunch together and discuss our progress for the week. Then at 1pm we go up to Professor Conway’s office for actual lab meeting and get input from him or present what we’ve done.
After that, I have a free hour, then go and help tutor the CS Matlab class (in which most of the Conway lab is also enrolled). I then do homework before going to dinner with Christine, who’s my “little sister” at Wellesley. Then I have more tutoring for CS, and then at 9pm my day is over, and I can go back to the dorms, work out, and do the prep work that’s required for Thursday classes. Having Wednesday is wonderful, because it’s a sharp shift away from my MIT routine: creative writing, research, and tutoring are all rewarding to me in different ways than succeeding in science classes. Also, I end up talking to a lot of people on Wednesdays, which makes it by far my most social day of the week :).
Saturdays I do homework, and on Sundays my preferred method of operation is to Skype Gabby (who’s in China) in the morning with Suman and Tiffany, and then follow Tiffany around the rest of the day to do homework with her :). It’s not always very successful (the pre-med students who are not taking a gap year, which includes Tiffany, are busy right now, as the goal is to get MCAT scores and applications in by June), but I come close enough each week :). I also hope to do something on Saturday or Sunday that is not classes, so that I have pictures of non-school things to show you :). Last week, I went to the TEDx talks, which were absolutely wonderful, and I refer you to Lia’s blog for her reflection. I second her conclusions, especially as we went to the same session and saw the same speakers—all of whom stretch the frontiers of what it means to live a full life :).
Isabelle and I at the TedX talks. (The pretty stamps on our hands proclaim so!)
All of which is a long-winded way of telling you about one Wellesley student’s daily life :). I’m loving the combination of Wellesley and MIT, and even though classes are starting to pick up (I had my first physics test yesterday, and I have math and neuro next week), I’m so grateful to be able to experience the breadth and depth of education that I am.
Questions and comments are encouraged and squealed over :P, and I hope you all have wonderful Fridays!
Monica