In Their Own Words (Part 1)

In Their Own Words (Part 1) A few weeks ago, I sent this email to a bunch of my friends: Hey everyone, As you may know, I am not-so-secretly a blogger for MIT Admissions. I want to put up an entry highlighting the various awesome things that MIT students (being, ourselves, awesome) do for the summer. So if you want to (a) be famous, (b) brag about your awesome summer, (c) help show prospective students why MIT is amazing, or (d) all of the above Id appreciate a quick line explaining what youre up to this summer! Thanks a lot, Paul Happily, it turns out that I have a lot of friends who like to be famous so many, in fact, that all of their responses wouldnt fit in this one entry. Over the next few days, Ill be sharing all of the 30-plus responses I received with you all. I hope you enjoy this cross-section of what MIT students do during their summer off! Annelise Beck 09 (Courses 5 and 8, of Simmons): Ill be UROPing in Prof. Fields lab (in the chemistry department) again. Unlike last summer, when I was relatively inexperienced and mostly did experimental work, it looks like Im going to start my own theoretical projectwhich means improving my programming skills as well. In August, Im going to the ACS meeting in Philadelphia as part of a special program for undergraduates in physical chemistry there are special talks and dinners with featured speakers and various professors for the students selected for this program. Its the first year that this program has occurred, so I dont really know what it will be like, but Im really looking forward to attending talks and physical chemistry poster sessions, both because physical chemistry is great and because I need to start deciding what grad school I want to attend, so scoping out research at various places will be helpful. (Oh my god, grad schoolpanic!) Mike Bennie 10 (Course 6, of Phi Sig, formerly of Burton-Conner): I am working at Capital IQ in NYC this summer. We write software that can be used by almost anyone involved in the financial industry from universities to investment bankers to recruiters. It is kind of cool because I get to write code in jeans and a T-shirt on Wall Street. I am writing internal software for the company using some of Microsofts newest development tools such as Avalon and ASP.NET. Maybe I will just copy and paste this paragraph into my resume now. :D Jonathan Chapman 11 (Course 15, of Simmons): Im working Simmons front desk for 40 hours a week, which gives me free housing; browsing for UROPs; and having a good time. Right now Im also writing a game for the Assassins Guild. Finally, Im tagging DVDs at Hayden Library. Its like YouTube, but for DVDs that Hayden has. Were using del.icio.us, and the project is about halfway complete. Erik Fogg 09 (Course 17, of Senior Haus and Phi Delts): Im spending 10 weeks in Beijing, starting on the 29th of May, as an intern for the Horizon Research and Consultancy Group, a consulting firm for many large Chinese companies, including CNOOC. I will be spending my evenings and weekends wandering around the city, trying to improve my Chinese and learn the culture enough to be comfortable. Ill be blogging, including political commentary and analysis, from foggofwar.com; Ill also be keeping another blog, The Peoples Daily, to catalog my day-to-day experiences. In my last two weeks, I will be traveling throughout China, probably to Xian, Dalian, Qingdao, Guilin, and Shanghai. Jason Forte 09 (Course 15, of Chocolate City): I am performing investment banking equity research for Credit Suisse in New York City. Ill be researching companies in the machinery, engineering, construction and environmental sciences sector. Teresa Giblin 11 (Course 9, of Senior Haus): Ill be doing a UROP in the TedLab (MIT Language Lab) with Professor Ted Gibson. Im running an experiment that will test whether or not the parts of the brain used for language processing are shared with other tasks by examining if there is correlation between peoples processing times for different, unrelated tasks. I will also test to see if presupposition the use of a definite article in language causes problems in language processing (i.e. if it takes a few milliseconds longer for the brain to process the concept). Finally, Ill be testing if the type of modifier used in the object position of a sentence significantly affects processing time. Keone Hon 11 (Course 18, of Phi Delts, formerly of Next House): Ill be doing a UROP in the Broad Institute specifically, the Imaging Platform to do some programming for a software package called CellProfiler Analyst that analyzes cell images, identifying cells and automating the process of counting or measuring various phenotypes. After work, Ill be serving as a counselor for Research Science Institute (RSI), a summer program for rising high school seniors thats hosted at MIT. For that, Ill be living in Simmons with the students and will be organizing lots of fun activities (for example, Im planning on playing frisbee every night). Ekaterina Kuznetsova 09 (Course 18, of Random Hall): Im working at Akamai, which is not all that exciting. :) Nathan Lachenmyer 10 (Courses 3 and/or 8, of Tetazoo): I could write >1 page about everything Im doing this summer. For a start, Im UROPing with the Nanostructures and Computations Group (Collaborators with Ab-Initio, which is part of the Center for Theoretical Physics), doing Solar Car Team, self-studying 18.06 this summer, Shotokan Karate and Kokikai Aikido, and practicing my various trades (including juggling clubs, meteor-hammer, and throwing knives). Michael Lin 11 (Course 3, of Next House, formerly of Simmons): Summer internship at NASA-Langley Research Center in southeast Virginia, Advanced Materials and Processing Branch. Mwahaha. (Pauls Note: Yes, he included the evil laughter in his email.) Samantha Marquart 11 (Course 9/Pre-Med, of Conner 2): I am taking this summer to reflect on what Ive done in the past year and on my journey towards MIT. Im spending time catching up with friends and family. Getting to MIT was truly an adventure, and I love everything about being at MIT, but sometimes its nice to sit back and reflect on the good things in life. Additionally, I am the director of my communitys vacation bible school program. The week-long camp held in Dallas, Pennsylvania, is for kids in kindergarten through fifth grade. Its my third year in charge of the program and the theme this year is Rainforest Adventure. Im also working at my local hospital and baking a lot of cookies this summer too! Vrajesh Modi 11 (Course 15, of East Campus, formerly of Burton-Conner): Im working as a GE-Infrastructure Engineering Intern for General Electrics Energy business. Im a member of the Logistics and Trade Services team, which figures out how to transport abnormal objects (e.g. wind blades) from the place where they are manufactured to their final destination. The second day on the job, I visited the Port of Albany, where I observed the arrival of a ship much like this one. Brent Parham 10 (Course 16, of Skullhouse): ARES Corporation in D.C.! Cody Rebholz 10 (Course 2, of Skullhouse): I am the swim beach manager at the Boy Scout Camp that I went to when I was growing up. Im also playing as much Ultimate Frisbee as possible with a summer league team.