Last spring, the Angles editorial board began selecting material for this year’s edition just as MIT announced MITx, its new online education initiative. So, while we’ve been preparing to go to (virtual) press, we’ve also been thinking about the continuing place of a magazine like ours—one dedicated to writing by MIT’s undergraduates—in the context of the Institute’s expanded commitment to online education. We’ve been reflecting on the value of making public the voices of MIT students, chronicling their experiences, and reporting on their intellectual discoveries here on campus as MIT reaches out to a larger virtual community.
The good news is that in assembling this year’s collection of exemplary work from our introductory writing classes, we’ve found rich confirmation of the vitality of MIT undergraduate life as it takes place in this distinctly non-virtual community.
In the following pages, you’ll spy on MIT students’ strange ways through the eyes of a mouse, or read a “day in the life” report by an MIT-embedded freshman—from the wrench of the alarm clock to bed again at night. You’ll hear a sleepless undergrad chant “Owl” to the cadence of Ginsburg’s “Howl.” You’ll also encounter students in graphic form—inside MIT’s pottery studio or facing a daunting architecture review. You’ll find out what one student discovers in the archives as she tracks the history of Kenyans at MIT—learning who came before her, and why, and what they did when they left. You’ll get an appreciative look at Walker Memorial from a student whose parents were married there, as she discovers how Walker has become a truly iconic MIT building—sturdy and flexible as a good marriage. You’ll follow a dubious Wisconsin pre-frosh on a night visit to the top of the Big Dome to take in the view which, she realizes, though not the same as “the millions of stars at home,” is “equally magnificent”—and so is inspired to come to MIT.
And you’ll hear what one student learns on an MIT-sponsored trip to Yellowstone, not just about geology but life in general, that you “can’t predict its changes,” or “how the different forces… will shape the course of your time on Earth,” that you can’t know “which springs will dry up and where new blue pools will begin to flow.”
You’ll also be introduced to some of the remarkable people who live and work with MIT’s undergraduates including, in “A Professor of Puzzles,” John Essigmann—whom MIT students know as both Professor of Toxicology and Biological Engineering and housemaster of Simmons Hall—and, in “Armed and Dangerous,” Professor Edward Farhi, Director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT, Associate Head of the Chemistry Dept., and winner of multiple teaching awards.
As you read, we hope you too will take interest and pleasure in accompanying our students as they arrive and make their way through the complex culture they discover on campus. We hope you appreciate the wit with which this remarkably diverse and appealing group of undergraduates meets the challenges they encounter. We hope you find their creativity and wide range of interests as stimulating as we do. For us, the writing our students have produced not only sheds light on the remarkable culture in which they live and study; it also confirms the value of their experiences within it. So we’re glad for the chance to provide others with this virtual window on the vibrant intellectual and cultural life we think you’ll find, as we did, as it thrives here on MIT’s campus.
We want to thank our editorial staff and all the writers who contributed work to this year’s Angles, and we’d like to give special thanks to Rebecca Faery, Director of the First Year Writing Program.
Lucy Marx, for the Angles editors