A Snively CPW

This is the post that was featured here on MIT's Admissions website. It's a quick overview of my CPW. Consider it the reader's digest version.

Let me begin by saying that thanks to CPW, the rest of high school is simply a formality. Oh, and sleeping is overrated. Here’s just a quick glimpse at what made my CPW so exciting:



My total caffeine intake curing CPW looked something like this:

2.5 Bawls sodas
2 red bulls
1 Sobe energy drink
1 energy drink water thing
5 cups of coffee

I slept 5 hours over the course of CPW. 1 hour on purpose, 4 hours on accident (which is a funny story that I’ll share shortly).

So, from the beginning: I arrived in Boston Wednesday evening to catch an MIT Wind Ensemble rehearsal and received 2 free Rep CD’s from the director, very cool. Then, my last night of sleep for a long time.

The next morning I met Sara ’11 at South Station and we headed over to campus to get all registered. The highlight was actually seeing people in person that I’ve been seeing online forever. Nance, Ben Jones, and Matt McGann were all at registration. I got my picture taken with Matt at 9:55. Then it was off to the Stata center and CSAIL for a tour, which is when the fun actually began. This is where I encountered “The Group”. For the last several months there has been a group of people on the MIT ’11 Facebook group that have always just kinda gotten along, and we all managed to find each other about an hour into the first day.



Meet (from left) Michelle Nason, Sara Ferry, yours truly, Tim, Hank Robinson, Yuki Yamada, and Jon Estrada. Unfortunately Sauza couldn’t make the picture, and the little girl, well, we don’t know who she is.

So what adventures did we go on? Allow me to steal the following format from Milena:

Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream
Didn’t spend a lot of time at this one, but it’s worth noting because it showed up on the schedule about a gazillion times. Throughout campus there were huge containers of liquid nitrogen, they were a common sight. This is what they were used for:



Simmons Ball Pit
WHY IS THIS NOT ADVERTISED?!?!?!?!? Look, if a dorm has a ball pit, I need to stay in it, because it is automatically the coolest dorm ever, hands down. We played in it a lot, here's Jon:



We also played the “Bury Snively under little colorful balls” game and I soon found myself completely in the dark. Good times.

Oh, and did you know that the dining room chairs in Simmons bounce? It’s true!

Fire hose: λ Calculus
So, lambda calculus is one of those types of math that is probably impossible any time of day during any time of the week at any age. I’ll spare you the explanation of what it is, sufficing it to say that three 18 year olds were probably not going to grasp it at 3 in the morning. Here are some highlights:


Look at us pretending to understand what’s happening!


Yes, apparently it’s true in lambda calc.


Did you know you could use an octopus as a variable?

Science Museum!
Alright, technically this isn’t part of CPW, but it is in Boston, so it’s worth mentioning. First off, we saw an R2D2 mailbox, which was far too exciting to handle.



We stretched our MIT muscles and bartered for free admittance because we were nearly MIT students, that was pretty awesome, no $16 tickets for us! After exploring we had our picture taken with the beaver exhibit.



And then we had pictures taken in the main lobby spelling various things. Here are the girls spelling MIT:



And here are the guys and Sara spelling IHTFP. After this particular picture somebody noticed that it was 3:15 and proclaimed “Gah, it’s too bad we missed pi guys.” Then somebody else chimed in. “Wait, didn’t we just take a picture?” We dove for our cameras and zoomed in on the IHTFP picture. Sure enough, completely by accident, the digital clock in the background was displaying “3:14”. We cheered, people stared.



Meet the Bloggers
Meet the bloggers rocked because the bloggers were no longer little pictures at the top of a web page. They’re real, believe it or not! I’ll skip the stories with this one and share some pictures instead:






(Me taking a picture of Matt McGann taking a picture of me)

Student Center Sleep-over
Remember how I said we accidentally slept for 4 hours?

Here’s the scene: Hank, Harrison, Yuki, Jon, Dan, and yours truly were all tired because it was 3 in the morning. The next event wasn’t scheduled until 4:17 (Pancakes at Random Hall). We decided to just chill in the student center lobby until it was time to leave, figuring we could even slip in a half hour nap before taking off. We took our places on various couches in the lobby. Jon had to separate from the group and go to a different couch because there wasn’t enough room near us. Well, turns out it’s hard to take a half hour nap after going two days without sleep. After dozing off I hear a voice faintly in the distance: “Stupid pre-frosh sleeping in the lobby.” This woke me up, and that’s when I checked my watch. 8:00 am. CPW registration was back in full swing, people were wandering everywhere, eating, meeting friends, and here we were completely asleep with mouths hanging open and backpacks strewn across the floor. I woke some people up and we all just sat there, disoriented, and trying to figure out what had happened. That’s when we remembered Jon, where was he?! We struggled up from our stupor and wandered around, eventually finding him taking up an entire couch, sleeping while people watched him from all the couches nearby. Oh, and did I mention that Hank’s backpack, filled with bouncy balls from the bouncy ball drop, had tipped over during the night and spilled bouncy balls all over the floor of the Student Center? Yeah, we’re classy.

Chillin’ with Sam and Laura in BC
While chillin’ in the basement of Burton-Conner we happened upon blogger Sam and blogger Laura! Sooooooo, both are pretty much amazing. Sam was amazing just because he was so cool, and Laura was amazing because you can insult her all day long and she’ll just swing right back and make you feel like an idiot. She makes up some pretty awesome words too. I look forward to a time when I’m not sleep-deprived and can argue with her without totally getting pwned, it’s ON Laura!



BTW, this has nothing to do with Laura or Sam, but if you live in Burton Conner, this is the kind of stuff you get to do to your room:



And Sam sings.