Crimsonietta.net

@Matt and co.: I have a slight feeling I’m one of the earlier submissions, but hopefully this will allow you more time to continue following my blog as the application process continues through August ;)

Typical Sunday afternoon. 14-oh-hundred, the family’s out shopping, I’m sitting in front of my laptop, mouth slightly open and eyes glazed over, munching on grape tomatoes and typing away about every subject under the sun. The hours march on past, and I have somehow shifted from sitting up straight (kind of) to slumping over the surface of my gray desk. Boredom as usual. When is something exciting going to happen in my life for once, so I can actually make a decent blog post that -isn’t- advocating for proper English enunciation or whining about audio player interfaces or complaining about how Gary Jules’s rendition of Mad World is inferior to the original?

… and then the almighty Piper comes in our humble MIT’12 abode on Facebook and mentions that the call for bloggers is up on the MIT Admissions site.

Holy shit. I am so there.

… now what? I thought my days of writing personal essays for admissions was over. This is a dirty trick, extending my college application process past acceptance, past matriculation, and into the 105-degree days of summer! I guess I am now obliged to advocate for the fact that I am awesome; no easy feat, as it’s very hard to convert my awesomeness to words.

public String toWords() {
Scanner input = new Scanner(Potential_Blogger);
if ((input.nextLine()).equals(”Vivian”))
return “Assessment of awesomeness failed.”;
}

For starters, an introduction to the complex creature that is me. Oh, sure you could always read the About Me page, but who wants to do bother to scoot their cursor all the way over -there- when you could always just give your scroll wheel a whirl and read it all -here-?

…… if you don’t own a mouse with a scroll wheel I sincerely apologize.

The name is Vivi. I’ve set up camp in Cedar Park, Texas, where I’ve been happily haunting the surrounding area for nearly 18 long years. They will thankfully be rid of me in a few weeks as I relocate my base for world domination inhabitation up to the beautiful land of Massachusetts. I eat high school freshmen sarcasm for breakfast, dine on satire, and consume the Internet as my drug of choice. My partner in crime is Science, my backup weapon Rhetoric. The one weakness? Failing to act like a normal person. In addition, I’m atheist, possess libertarian ideals (though not affiliated with the party itself) and am EXTREMELY blunt, strongly opinionated, and not afraid to voice my thoughts. You have been warned.

I hope to take up masochism in the coming years by thrusting myself into the elusive course 0110 with absolutely no previous knowledge of engineering… in addition to flitting around like a social butterfly, joining several music groups, trying out for the badminton team, continuing to run my international singing organization, eventually taking classes in quantum physics, and blogging about every step of my exciting MIT life. I’m tempted at Next, and though it may have not been my first choice, I’m actually starting to get attached to it and am naturally ecstatic to finally set foot on campus.

I’ve always compared myself to the Little Engine that Could - my entire life I had been sheltered; convinced that UTSA was a crowning glory of the US college system; never even knowing about AIME until March of senior year; being fed falsehoods in the form of happy, sunflowery, cliche praises for my less-than-stellar scholarly pursuits… By B&W numerical standards, I should not have made it into MIT - my SAT superscore barely scrapes the middle range, my SAT II Math score surfaced as a 640, scores of 2 graced my AP score report, and I can barely integrate a function without the help of a calculator.

Yet I never once gave up my seemingly impossible dream. I trudged through AP Physics C, barely able to finish each night’s assignment in time. Whenever I’d stare enviously at those effortlessly breezing through Calc BC, doing biochemical research in labs, and having conversations about quantum media for negative refraction over dinner, I would shake off the seeds of a growing feeling of inferiority and tell myself to focus not on what I -couldn’t- do, but what I -could-. I refuse to let myself be subject to depression and putting-down of self. Instead, I ended up a quirky combination of realist and optimist, convincing myself day after day that I could persevere (which I eventually did), and that there was no harm in applying to see how far I could go with my little bit of hope.

And lo and behold: by some stroke of luck I was able to express myself with words and passion in a way that no numbers could. By some gracious twist of chance (or some incredibly lucky mistake?) I found myself accepted to institution that I had craved with every fiber of my being since August 2007. As I gaze back at my experiences with the college application system, rereading my heartfelt letter to MIT that I feel more than anything helped my application, I realize that I have matured a lot from the experience - I learned that the sincere, pure emotions and belief in one’s personal abilities can lead to miracles.

There are so many prospective students who simply do not have the self-confidence to pursue their dreams and desires to attend “high-ranked” schools such as MIT, so many who think that the 2200 on their SATs automatically shoves them out of the applicant pool (yes, I’m looking at you, CC!), so many who are discouraged by the fact that they haven’t won national math contests or haven’t worked on curing cancer at a local laboratory. Yet each and every single one of them has the potential to exhibit the ability and the personality that MIT scours the land for each year.

My main hope, then, as an admissions blogger, is to encourage those who lack self-confidence. I want to tell them that miracles do happen, and that the catalyst for such wonders are nothing but their own ambition. I want to show them that even someone like me, with no affinity for mathematics at all, can still chase her dreams of becoming an engineer. I want to share with them my struggles, my pains, my failures, and ultimately (or so I hope!), my successes as I journey into uncharted waters. I want to encourage them to stay optimistic, to believe in their potential, and to never give up upon hitting a wall (something I anticipate to happen on a daily basis once classes start). I want to show them that, more than GPA’s and AP scores and science fairs, the best thing they can do to show they are a match for MIT is to carry the right mindset. As I stated in my letter:

In MIT, I want to feel this same exhilarating sensation… to be astonished by the rigor of the coursework, to meet people who share my passions for the maths and sciences, to pursue the scientific research ideas I haven’t been able to continue due to lack of resources in my area, to learn from world-renown professors, to stay up late working on problem sets together with my fellow classmates… to suffer, to laugh, and to live together in a community that helps itself via common threads and interests.

I’ve told the world what I want to feel; now is the time for me to report back directly from the center of the amazing community we call MIT.

…… oh yeah. And I’m sure the readers would be amused by a Texan dying from the “freezing” 55-degree weather in Boston on a typical October day.

Oh, and as a final thank you to the blogging staff for taking the time from their incredibly exciting life (*cough*unlikemine*cough*) to skim my ramblings, I redirect you to this expression of my gratitute =) Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go read me some xkcd…

Recommended pieces from my “portfolio”:

• “Why I blog” entry
• “Why course 6 [EECS]” entry
• “Dedication to APCS 8th period 2007-08” entry
• any of the selected “Written Works“
• any of the entries categorized as “Rhetoric“
• In the sidebar of my blog you will also find links to many of the communities I frequent =)

** disclaimer: else-leg of Java method toWords() omitted from quotation