Closet Cleanout

We're at my parents' house for the holidays; they are getting ready to move into a smaller house in Baltimore so my sister and I need to go through all the stuff in our childhood bedrooms and decide what to throw away and what to take back to our respective homes. My closet had all my binders and notebooks from high school and college, the vast majority of which are getting recycled, but I've been  flipping through them to look for things worth keeping. The high school work in particular reminds me of how extremely neurotic and bored I was at that time - for example, check out my math notebook:

Every speckle is colored in a different color, and outlined in pen - front and back, and even the sides are colored in rainbow. The inside is much the same:

The actual contents are page after page of meticulous notes, complete with color-coded section headers:

My favorite thing I've found from college so far is the page of quotes written down from my calculus professor, who was a very sweet old man who was also somewhat crazy. Highlights include:

• MIT has many strange rules, and one of them is that I'm not allowed to torture you any more than I do.
• ≈ is a sort of Saturday night equal sign, you're not quite sure what you're doing.
• There's nothing magical about the damn second derivative!
• It's complicated, so my advice is to use the arm-waving method to decide what's true.
• Mathematics is difficult to explain to someone who doesn't know any mathematics at all.
• We could solve this by bribing a friend, or an enemy, or by standard methods, or by writing down the answer.
• You won't need to know this til after Thanksgiving, and you'd better give thanks.
• So much for that problem, which I'll never assign again for as long as I teach this course.
• Greenspan wrote those problems, I don't know how the hell to do them.
• Any questions? This is pretty easy stuff, right? That was meant to stop you from asking questions.
• You don't believe me? You'll believe me when you're sitting there again next term.
• Mean Value Theorem - some are meaner than others.
• Lagrange was a very smart guy and now he's dead so we have to give him credit.
• The Jacobian is always lurking in the dark alley of calculus.
• Whether you remember it or not, Simpson is still dead.
• I don't want to test you on the intricacies of elementary calculus, but I might mistakenly. 
• I am available to take the test for anyone for the price of one million dollars. I will put on my teenage disguise.

Dollar Pledge for MIT

This will mostly only be interesting to my MIT friends, but I thought I would post the letter I sent to the Alumni Association and assorted others when I made my dollar pledge (which all you MIT people better do if you haven't already!).

Dear MIT,

I am disappointed to learn of this year's decision to limit the Residence Exploration period to a single day of freshmen orientation. My residence hall formed the core of my MIT experience, and after I graduated and joined Teach For America, it was my residence hall that for two years in a row banded together to help me raise the money to bring my students from the Bronx to MIT for a day to experience college life. It was students at my residence hall that offered up their time to take my students on tours of the campus and of their laboratories, to do experiments with them, and to cook them a delicious barbecue dinner with liquid nitrogen ice cream for dessert. These two visits were absolutely life-changing for my students, and are what I am proudest of as an MIT alum. They would not have happened without support from my residence hall, including from students I never even lived with while I was an undergraduate. That support would not have existed without the strong emphasis on residential community and culture that was in place when I was an undergraduate, and it saddens me to learn that this vital component of MIT is being deprioritized for future generations of students.

I still care about MIT and its mission, but I cannot support the way that decisions are being made, or the way that student life policy is being set. I have donated $1 to the MIT Marching Band fund, and the rest of my donation, $60, is being given to StudentsFirst instead.

Sincerely,

Caroline Rubin '08

Updated: I got this form letter response from Julie Norman, Director of the Office of Undergraduate Advising and Academic Programming:

Dear Ms. Rubin,

Thank you for your feedback. Though we are looking at orientation, as a
whole, no decision have been made on the final schedule. While we are
reviewing our options, there is no plan to shorten the REX period in the
coming year.

We appreciate your support of MIT and hope that, with the correct
information in hand, you will continue your commitment to the Institute.

My best,

Julie

Basically, what she said is not actually true, so I replied with:

Hi Julie,

Thank you for your response. My understanding is that while REX will not technically be shortened, it will overlap significantly with FPOP's and ASE's, and that students who are not participating in an FPOP will not be able to arrive on campus early (when REX officially begins). These changes do in effect shorten REX, even if on paper it appears to be the same length.

I cannot continue to support the Institute until I know that fully participating in the entirety of REX is possible for all incoming freshman, and that it remains that way not just "in the coming year," but in all the coming years.

Caroline

So if you did the pledge and got the auto-reply, I definitely encourage you to reply back and call her on trying to fudge the truth!