Lyra Belacqua

I used to use gel pens a lot because of how comfortably smooth writing felt, but they always bled through the page if I was writing on both sides, making everything less legible. I bought a set of Bic Atlantis pens before this year; they work well in that respect, but I find it harder to write neatly.

The problem is that people often say or imply things like "If you have opinion X on issue Y, then you are not a reasonable person."

Anyone have an opinion about cell phone carriers? I have Verizon right now because it's the only one that really works in my area. I assume that this is not the case in Cambridge, since unlike my current location it's not in the middle of nowhere. Without having any experience of any other companies, I don't think Verizon is very good; I just don't know if it's worth getting a new cell phone/new number. (Might be a good opportunity to get a phone that's "smarter" than my current one, at least…)

They obviously DO feel excitement – otherwise they wouldn't be doing research in their field of choice, would they? But they have to use "boring" and "dry" things like technical terms and precise definitions, because that's the way stuff works.

About a year and a half ago, when I was still deciding between fields, I emailed a bunch of DGS's in various programs for one of them, basically saying "I read the information on your website and I had some more specific questions about the application requirements." Of the 4 I emailed, only 2 ever got back to me, and one of those didn't answer my questions at all and told me to read the website (which I said I had read, and I was asking about specific things that were not on the website). I ended up not applying to programs in this field in the end anyway, having chosen to go on in the other field I was considering, and I don't know how I would have done. So if these people actually responded to you, I would take it as a good sign; they could have just ignored you like mine did.

Same here. I'll admit that I sometimes have trouble reading linguistics papers that have a lot of mathematical formulas, and that's something I'm going to have to work on when I get to grad school. But luckily for me, the GRE didn't test my ability to read stuff like that! XD I wouldn't have thought it was that hard to figure out that my sentence and the Garibaldi sentence mean pretty much the same thing. But even though the author of the article apparently isn't American, I lost my sympathy for whatever cultural disadvantage he might have had when he gave Friedrich Engels as an example of a historical figure that it's unreasonable for the GRE to assume that people will know. I mean, the Communist Manifesto is so internationally prominent that I do think it would be safe to assume. And it's not like those guys were from Anglophone lands, either!

They think you might never have heard of Salmonella, so they are telling you what it is: a genus of bacteria. Although…most people learned "King Philip Came Over For Greasy Spaghetti" in middle school anyway, so I don't really see what the problem is. Well, if you've ever been told as a kid why you shouldn't eat raw cookie dough, then you know what Salmonella is too, so I don't know why they felt like they had to explain that either. If they had decided not to use any words they thought people might not know, the passage probably would have come out sounding a little like "Once upon a time, there was a dude who did some research on beings that can't be seen without a microscope and found out that there was a link between temperature and iron levels."

From the article: And that's really all you need to know. Knowing the definition of "genus" is actually not important to understanding the passage (whereas in a passage about cladistics or speciation or something like that, it might be). The point of the sentence that includes the word "genus" has nothing to do with what a genus is; neither does the purpose of that sentence in the paragraph. It's there to give evidence for the "relationship between fever and iron" discovered by some guy named Garibaldi (specifying what exactly it was that he discovered). The sentence could have been "He found that microbial synthesis of siderophores -- substances that bind iron -- in Salmonella declined at environmental temperatures above 37° C and stopped at 40.3° C." So the GRE is actually doing what the author just claimed it's not doing: explaining possibly unfamiliar terms. They didn't have to let you know explicitly that Salmonella is a genus of bacteria…but they did! And I'm not about to claim that the GRE should be in the business of testing people's general knowledge (like knowing what a genus is, or who Friedrich Engels was), but I still don't think it's an entirely bad thing if your knowledge of history, science, or literature gives you an extra clue to understanding something (e.g., "this sentence is quoting Engels, so it will probably be about social class and/or economics"). I'll grant him one thing, though: the issue of people taking the GRE who don't understand US cultural references (or, for that matter, aren't native speakers of English) is indeed quite problematic, and I don't know what should be done about that. I was reading about the history of the GRE a while ago, and I thought it was awesome that they used to have the "analytical section" (although I was disappointed that they got rid of it). Apparently, the GRE used to have LSAT-style logic games – how cool is that? (And, yeah, I wonder why it was taken out. God forbid grad students should be expected to perform tasks of logical reasoning, eh? )

The school where I'm currently finishing undergrad has 4 fitness centres around campus, and we do have to pay for membership (although it's probably a lot cheaper than a regular gym).

Yeah, that was pretty much my reasoning as well. I've just gone into the housing lottery, with efficiency apartments as my first choices (and all of the buildings that have furnished efficiency apartments are apparently the closest ones to campus proper), and I'll be keeping an eye out for possibilities for the following year.

Also try the "Boston and Cambridge, MA" thread in the City Guide. We've been having a similar discussion about the MIT dorms in that thread recently, but it's a single thread with posts from several previous years, so there's probably some discussion of the Harvard dorms somewhere in there.

Yeah, knowing for sure where you'll be next year feels SOOOO GOOOOOOD!

Yeah, also, I had to visit before making a decision because one school gave me my funding information in person when I visited, rather than emailing it to me earlier, and that was obviously their preference (otherwise, they might have sent it to me on the day I was supposed to be there before I had to reschedule). So that's a pretty important thing that I had no way of knowing about until the visit actually happened.

pipe dream

clock tower

I was wondering what people thought about the MIT on-campus housing, because I've heard some conflicting things (from posts in this thread from previous years, as well as from people I talked to there when I visited). I've never lived in an apartment before – I'm posting this from my current undergrad dorm – so 1) I don't have any of my own furniture yet (my parents are advising me that this particular hassle might be better postponed until sometime after I move to the area for the very first time) and 2) I don't know much about the process (especially since my current location isn't a "real" city, in contrast to Cambridge/Boston). So, I've heard that it's cheaper to live off campus (especially in the long run), but I'd be interested in hearing what people have to say about whether the dorms are a decent place to live (in terms of the quality of the actual living space, which buildings to avoid, &c.…I've also heard rumours that a lot of "forced fun" goes on, which I had enough of in undergrad – and which MIT's housing website apparently calls "vibrant community"!), especially if it's just for 1 year. Of course, since it's apparently so competitive to get on-campus housing (?!), I might not get into any at all and this whole issue might end up being moot. In any case, I'm glad I won't have to share a bathroom with 10 other people anymore…

Man, they're just making the GRE crappier and crappier, huh? I would totally have preferred to do logic puzzles (LSAT style?) than write those essays.

I agree that it's not as necessary as people often make it out to be. What I did for the GRE (and the SAT and the PSAT way back in the day) was to get a big review book that had a bunch of sample questions and practice tests (with answers explained). I don't think I ever did it while simulating timed conditions (which, for the GRE in particular, would have been a bit of a waste of time because I took the real one in the computer-adaptive format and actually ended up having a lot of time to spare); I just did some if I felt like it when I had free time (longish bus rides are good for this, because the bus is one of the few things more boring than the GRE questions ). Then I read the explanations of the answers I wasn't as sure about and/or got wrong. There are some things that you just have to get used to (like when the question consists of a single word, with some other words as choices, they always want you to pick the antonym, not a synonym; I also had to re-memorise some geometry formulas that I hadn't had to use since taking the SAT), and doing some practice questions now and then over the month or two before the exam was certainly enough for me.

I'll be turning 22 a few months after I start.

This seems absolutely ridiculous to me…so I guess I'm lucky that the schools I'm considering happen to have separate grad dorms. But seriously, who could possibly have thought that randomly mixing grads and undergrads was a good idea? I can't imagine that most people would be entirely comfortable being roommates with a stranger who's also 4 or more years older/younger than them.

I feel sorry for waitlisted people too, but I'm waiting to decide because I still need to visit one of the schools I got into. I was supposed to visit last week, but due to a blizzard I couldn't make it out there. If not for the weather, I probably would have decided by now…

I got an email a while ago that was sent to the MIT prospectives as a group (apparently there are 10 of us)…so yeah, it seems they have. I don't know why they wait so long to tell you – another school I applied to has a web page where you can check your application status, and mine still says "No decision" even though I know (from these very boards) that their admissions and open house already happened. I actually didn't know that this forum existed until I'd already gotten into some places (another prospective student I met on a campus visit told me about it) – it would have been so comforting to read the boards while I was waiting to hear…