I kinda got lazy
August 27, 2006
Yale
Trolley ride-
The guy and his formal way of talking into the handset
The marshes during the 10 min trolley ride
The trolleys and nostalgia for the past
Yale-
Gorgeous residential colleges
Awe-inspiring architecture… perfect campus. I love quads w/ courtyards! I’m obsessed w/ courtyards
New Haven as center of biotechnology cinches the deal.
August 28 2006
Harvard
- ppl at info session were alright… gave the whole Yale feel to campus… great faculty, great families w/ your ‘residential college’… competition between colleges…etc.
- one tour guide for a lot of people… he didn’t do that great of a job either… we left halfway anyway.
MIT
- quirky people- ppl were moving in, and on the floor big long strip of paper with stuff like "are you going in the right direction?" "this sentence is halfway through and it still has not said anything" " + O2 -> 2Na+ + 2 OH- + H2 (g) + explody-fire-thing" "when life gives you lemons, throw them back at life’s head", and "Am I evil? Yes I am".
- HACKS. I love this place. So I took pics of stuff in the hall of fame of Hacks and stuff… including the famous police car hack, and a bunch of other stuff. I saw those buildings- it’d be HARD to pull that off. I’m in awe, and really freakin’ excited because if I was blessed enough to get into a place like MIT, I’d want to pull that off before graduation. Preferably multiple times >: )
- quirky tour guide! She had a Scottish accent and she saw a couple of ppl on the way that she knew and she was really cool! And this police guy decided to watch and she looked at him sheepishly and was all ‘you’re makin’ me neeerrrvous!’ with this really cute Scottish accent, and it’s interesting that she’s from Tennessee too. LOL
- the admissions guy was really good. He started off saying that he’d rather talk about stuff ppl couldn’t find on websites (THANK GOD! Omgz.) and he talked about the learning community at MIT and how he thinks that’s the most important thing on whether you’d fit in the college… he said explicitly that ppl at MIT, even if they do major in humanities or stuff other than math and engineering and science, that they do like math and science- and that the love of knowledge and love of those subjects to fulfill the college’s motto, which is to use science and technology and stuff to further humanity. He was like ‘if you hated math in school, MIT might not be the place for you.’ Hahaha :D and he talked about the rumors that MIT is pretty dang hard, and he was like ‘yep. It’s true. But ppl here generally take more than the course load they have to take, so obviously they like pushing themselves’ ( = ME)! And yeah MIT is awesome.
- the fact that my cousin goes there currently will not help me at all to get in. which is a good and bad thing- good in the sense that if I do get in, I know it’s by my own merit, and bad in that maybe I’m juuuuuust almost good enough to get in, and I just need that extra something… oh well. I think it’s good that MIT doesn’t do the alumni thing or athletic stuff or anything like that. So I’m not sad about that policy at all.
- the campus is pretty green! Lots of trees, and I like the area, too- right along the lake that separates Cambridge from the populated Boston area. Some of the buildings are ridiculously ugly, but there are some pretty funky ones, and with all of the other things going for it- I could care less about the architecture. MIT students rock my world.
Boston University
-lots of research opportunities
-gross anatomy lab for undergrads- physiology major available
-BS/MD program… but if I did it I can’t do engineering.
-interesting management program
-I don’t like how it’s next to the street and it’s sorta like NYU in that way.
-I’m not really interested in this school, to be frank. I guess it’s sort of an extra backup.
- Nothing really draws me to this university except some aspects of the social life on campus.
Science Museum in Boston city
- got into the BodyWorlds2 exhibit at 2:30… didn’t get out until 4:30
- the ways it affected me:
intellectually: things labeled in the diagrams, stuff on the tables…
spiritually: it’s moving to see how intricate the human body is. the cadaver ‘the drawer man’, really got that through. the quotes about death were also interesting… Eruclides had one, I believe… where he argued that death shouldn’t be feared because it isn’t not something that affects us while we’re alive, pretty much. We don’t *feel* the state of death nor recognize it. There was another one that was similar to it: it said that we can only fear what we sense, and since death is the absence of sensation, we cannot and should not fear death.
These quotes make a good point, though I think the philosophers miss a certain aspect about the fear of death. People don’t just fear death because they don’t know what happens after they die- some people just love life and fear the day that they’ll be unable to continue appreciating it. That’s the reason why I’d fear death. And in fact, it wouldn’t be a fear of *death* specifically, but rather the fear of the cessation of life.
Artistically moving: Most aesthetically pleasing: Angel, the ballet dancer, the yoga woman, the pondering guy, the figure-skating duo.
Favorite cadaver: The drawer man (guy with pieces of himself pulled out like drawers… AMAZING exhibit). Funniest one: the person who had just the brain and eyes and tongue in the middle, skin on the sides, and stuff pulled away from the center. A lot of ppl found that one disturbing because the face was pulled apart, pretty much. Most disturbing: Explosion, where they took the body and just separated all of its parts from each other… I guess the title was the one that was disturbing.
Emotionally moving: I cried a little when I saw the little baby cadavers. That was a sad thing to see. Also the cadaver of the woman with a baby inside of her… it affected me a lot because they had a sign before saying that the pregnant woman knew she might not live until the baby was born and decided to give her body to science, and it so turned out that the baby didn’t make it either. She had a smoker’s lung… I don’t know if that was part of the cause of death. Also, seeing the slice of a stroke victim’s brain after a stroke was moving as well. It really made me understand how lucky Pizutto was to recover as well as he did because strokes are… man, strokes are just disastrous illnesses.
Breathtaking: especially realizing how much work and how hard it’d be to prepare these bodies! Just looking at the nerve fibers, scraping away around them and making sure they wouldn’t break… phenomenal work, really. One lady was talking about the cadaver in front of her to her husband saying how the guy who prepared these bodies must be very very good at what he does because you could see the brachial nerves- and I whispered ‘what are the brachial nerves’ and she pointed to the nerves coming from the neck down to the arms… and I never realized it before and then I began to understand. Taking away the extra fat and stuff around these delicate parts of the body… wow. Wow, wow, wow. Also, the eyelashes were preserved in most of them… what delicate work. Just amazing.
It was funny too! One guy touched the cadaver on purpose (GR. I respect the exhibit and though it is so so tempting one has to remember that these are real people and that they filled out a form saying whether they would allow ppl to touch them and maybe or maybe not they answered no, I don’t want ppl to touch my body to that form and since we don’t know, I’d rather not touch them even though I would like to know how they feel; of course I would. Anyhow, this guy touched one cadaver’s muscled chest on purpose w/ a finger and drew his hand away quickly, saying it felt like ‘gross beef jerky’. I looked at the cross-sections of parts of the body amusedly, imagining them to be steak, and thinking that I was glad I was vegetarian. One person looked at a cross section of a… hm. What was it. I can’t remember- but of maybe an arm or something because they said ‘mmm, looks just like ham. You hungry?’ to their loved one next to them, who laughed and told them to cut it out. I remember looking at the butts of the cadavers and thinking ‘oh my god, I can’t believe I’m checking out a cadaver’s ass.’ Hahahaha. And a very common question I kept hearing all of the time was ‘Are the eyes real?’. Also, seeing the random camel w/ baby camel was random… and the colt. The muscle man w/ his skeleton and nerves w/ a tiny miniature guy w/ him was a cool one as well.
I think the most moving parts of the exhibits were seeing the actual cadavers themselves and how intricate they are, and also seeing the difference between healthy and unhealthy parts of the body. Seeing people interact with the bodies, too… most people were so reverent, and if my feet didn’t hurt after a while from standing all of the time, I would have been happy to just stand there for a long, long time because it brought me such joy to see others awed by their own bodies and talking about the diseases their loved ones passed away from and seeing the effects of that on the parts of the bodies under the glass… looking at the little tiny embryos in the first 9 weeks or so, week-by-week, seeing the umbilical cord form, the tiny person grow bigger… seeing the little babies that died too young. Seeing a body shown as the masterpiece of art, and seeing people talk about physiology, explain it to others- admire the intricacy of the work in front of them.
believe me, I'd say a lot more about Yale because I totally fell in love with it. I was just dead tired that night and didn't elaborate on stuff.