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Every year, there are events around the country for incoming frosh to go to in their area. The prefrosh, their parents, current students, their parents, alumni all come. It's both a social event that, presumably, can allow you to arrive at MIT already knowing some people, but also very much an opportunity for prefrosh and their parents to get questions answered and become more comfortable.

Unlike the one I went to as a prefrosh, this one had no coordinated panel, which seemed a bit of a pity.

I spent my time at the event hanging out with two groups. The first, with whom I spent about 80 minutes of my total 120 minutes, was a cluster of some people I knew from MIT (Yuri, Casey, mshaw, and maybe another person or two for a while), a prefrosh from Mathcamp (who had also been at ET for CPW), and some random prefrosh. I believe the group never had any parents. The second, with who I spent the remainder of my time, was a fluid group of parents of (mostly) incoming students. When I first arrived, the group included a parent of a current student (though she wandered off fairly quickly); later, Yuri showed up. Largely, however, it was me and a slowly changing couple of parents

The conversation with the students was fairly undirected. There was the occasional question from a prefrosh, but it was mostly just random thoughts. We talked about Mathcamp a bit. We talked about how one of the prefrosh had managed to end up with a Splash 2009 teacher t-shirt. We tried to figure out how we knew each other.

The conversation with the parents, on the other hand, was quite directed. It was mostly a matter of one parent asking a question, and me trying to answer, with occasional pressure towards elaboration by one of the parents. Many of them were pretty predictable.

I got asked a couple of times about food. I tried to convince them that, by and large, people seem pretty happy with MIT's (lack of) meal plan. At some point, the topic of what I've cooked came up. Me: "Well, stir fry..." (Chinese?) Parent (incredulous): "French fries?" Me: "Uh, stir fry." Her: "Woah, that's Chinese. I don't think my daughter can handle that. That's really hard... I should get started teaching her now." Me: "..." Related topics included whether people needed a cube fridge (my answer: not really, though lots of people have them and might have gotten one if I were cooking for more than a semester) and the cleanliness of the kitchens.

Available time was also a popular topic. Do people have time for a job? When do people wake up? Is there time to get your work done?

Clothing was another common one. What kind of clothes do you wear for the winter? (Heavy jacket, gloves, and boots.) How did you get your clothes? (I'd gone to high school out there, but thought that the GRTs or older students tended to organize a trip to a mall or similar to go shopping. Also, parents' weekend was a decent chance to get that stuff.)

One of the stranger questions (I think from the father of a guy assigned to Burton-Conner) was where was Burton-Conner ("Uh, somewhere on dorm row") and how many floors it was ("... no idea.").

Anyway, I found it striking just how much less free-flowing conversation there was in the parents' cluster than the students', and how similar the questions the parents had were amongst the parents. (It was sorta neat to hear one of the parents repeating some of my answers to another parent.)

Anyway, that was my experience. Did any of you go to a similar event (for MIT or another college, and as a prefrosh or a student)? What did you think?