Tangerines, or Lack Thereof

MIT has been my dream school since 7th grade, and I've now visited it twice. Believe it or not, I still have not been on a campus tour, but that's not to say I didn't try. There are special tours that take place during CPW that are secret, meaning nobody knows about them. Shhhhhh, it's a secret!!! Via word of mouth, a couple hundred prefrosh were all organized to meet at a certain place at a certain time in order to be whisked away to all the secret parts of MIT (tunnels, roofs, illegal places). Such tours are known as Tangerine Tours. Obviously I needed to do this, so our group of 9 went to the place at the time and waited.

We were the first there


but eventually there were a ton of people, all ready to go.


Soon the tour guides started to arrive and whisk people off. We were so excited, but then, wait, we heard a voice from above (not God, just somebody on the second floor). "The tours are now full. Time to leave."

WHAT?! We were the first bloody ones there, and we didn't get picked up by a tour guide. They took 300 kids of the 350 that showed up, and we weren't picked. We were MAD, so we said screw it, we'll find a group and latch on. We ran through a door, up a couple of flights of stairs, and then started wandering the halls, looking for a group. We found one group, but weren't able to latch on, so we decided to find the roof ourselves. Wandering some more, we found a door to the roof! Lo and behold, it was even unlocked and propped open slightly. Now was the moment of truth, do we go onto the roof or do we leave? We pushed the door open, it was definitely outside on the other side. Hmmmmmmm, what to do? We ended up leaving, not wanting to risk getting caught on the roof without a guide. We were all just glad that we'd found the door, we felt sneaky all the same.

Here's the funny part, you ready? Turns out, the Campus Police suspected CalTech of pulling a huge prank that night and had doubled their security. The end result was two groups of 100 hundred students each getting nabbed and sequestered. One of the groups had been spotlighted while on a dome, very smooth. Basically, the kids on the tours had some fun, right until they were caught by the police. In the end I guess it was better that we didn't go on the tours, because we wouldn't have experienced our next adventure: Chillin' at Burton Conner.