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This year, I had the opportunity to participate in a pair of orientation events.

The first event was the "Dean's Brunch", a brunch with several dozen students, largely drawn from Dormcon, IFC, Panhel, LGC, UA, and similar organizations, and parents (and other family and friends) of incoming freshmen. The people I interacted with there were much less inquisitive than the people at the summer sendoff; I'm not sure if I got unlucky, they'd had their questions answered already, or what.

I'm a bit disappointed by one quirk of the setup. Along the walls of Johnson (the winter ice rink that's otherwise used for a bunch of large events) were a series a booths manned by various MIT staff/administrators --- booths included Housing, Student Activities Office, FSILG office, and similar organizations. One booth was labeled "Student Life at MIT". What did it have? Brochures titled "Alcohol Resources" and a couple of staff from the Community Development and Substance Abuse Center. I'm pretty disappointed by the implication that "student life" and "alcohol" are synonymous at MIT, both because I don't think it's true (certainly not for me) and because I think it gives a very poor impression to parents who have not yet had a chance to get much of a better impression.

For the second event, I served, as Living Group Council Speaker, on a panel on Housing, alongside the Dormcon President, IFC President, Panhel President, Director of Housing, Manager of Housing Assignments, and Director of Campus Dining, and Dean of Residential Life. A couple things stuck out at me.

The first was that this was my first panel (and probably my first time speaking to that many people), and I really wasn't very active at interjecting myself.

The second was that the audience (largely parents of incoming freshmen) tended to ask questions about "fraternities and sororities", having presumably forgotten about the independent living groups. I tended to answer anyway, if I had anything to add; "after all, people at MIT always forget about the LGC too."

The third, and much more interesting, was the differences in how we addressed dining. For me, when I get questions about dining, particularly from a parent of a student in a dining hall dorm, I tend to sneak in a "your students will be fine cooking --- their hallmates can teach them, the facilities are decent, and Shaw's is within walking distance." For Rich Berlin, the Director of Campus Dining, and the other panelists, responses seemed to be directed towards "buying precooked food on campus is totally doable". I never got to see a really explicit question --- for example, "Do students generally find that cooking for themselves is easy and/or doable?", so I don't know whether they would have directed that towards the dining halls ("frequently, but if they don't..."). However, many less explicit questions that I would have taken as an opportunity to talk about cooking for yourself they took as an opportunity to talk about the availability of dining halls. It made me a little sad, but such is life, I guess.

Apparently LiveJournal has recently made it really easy for users to publicly tweet their comments on friends-locked entries, or something. Partially as a result of that, I gather, a bunch of my friends appear to be jumping ship to DreamWidth, and Rebecca is encouraging me to do the same.

After a bit of work, I've got my blog set up to allow crossposting to DreamWidth as well as LiveJournal. (This was six more (and one changed) lines of code to support crossposting to multiple sites, one changed line to support DreamWidth as well as LiveJournal, and eight new lines of configuration. Yay? Or something?)

Anyway, I'll probably start paying about as much attention to DreamWidth as I do to LiveJournal now, or something. (Which is to say, approximately none.)

Most of the week I've been back at MIT has been spent on Work Week at ET, where I live. During Work Week we thoroughly clean the house and do various maintenance tasks that we defer during the year or are just too big to do while classes are going on. This year, it started on Monday, finished on Friday, and lasted 9AM--5PM each day (except Wednesday, which was a half-day).

I spent the first couple of days working on the kitchen (which was originally scheduled to take four people four hours, and took three people three days instead...). The kitchen was... somewhat disturbing. Apparently our stools are light brown, not dark brown. And finding an ancient tin of caramel corn is not really pleasant... Oh, and our window sills are white, not dark gray.

Wednesday morning I took a brief break from the kitchen work to visit Home Depot with Katya and Chinua. For lunch that day, Alioth organized top-your-own-pizza, which was pretty awesome. Thursday I was back in the kitchen / dining room area. Thursday afternoon Adam and I raced to install some broom holders in the kitchen (our brooms and mops have a habit of falling in an untidy mess behind the door, which is annoying) before Rebecca and Chinua made enough progress on cleaning the grease trap that the smell made the kitchen uninhabitable. We managed... but not with much time to spare, I think. I spent the rest of the week doing yard work and some light tidying. Part of the yardwork was putting mulch in the front yard --- I'm pretty excited that it now has something better than "weed patch" or "dust bowl"...

Altogether, I was pretty happy with Work Week this year --- I felt like we were pretty productive, and spent very little time wandering around trying to figure out how to do my assigned task (which tends to be demotivating).

In some sense, Saturday was a continuation of Work Week. In the morning, Alyse (alumni corporation president), Ted (alumni corporation treasurer), Tony (ET commander), and I (ET treasurer) (plus some bored actives) spent several hours filling out the long and somewhat stupid Basic Data Form (?), which is required for accreditation. It was... painful. Once they left, I did ET treasury work (while watching Buffy --- that part was fun); that was followed by the traditional duck drawing and Princess Bride watching. After that, we went out for crepes. 'twas fun.

Onwards to REX and Rush!

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?

*sigh* So... after I'd been home for a while, I tried fiddling around with copan's ethernet cable, since it seemed possibly loose. That got me vaguely respectable networking again (~10% packet loss on pings). Trying it just now gives me ~1% packet loss. I still need to properly sit down with my laptop and see how how good the internet it gets is, both with copan's current cable and with another one... Maybe I'll figure out the issue. I really sorta hate this thing... It does seem like it isn't software, though...

If I could move the NS record for dehnert.arctic.org to masada, at least I could reasonably go back to not caring...