CPW !!!!!

OMG ALL THE HAPPY PREFROSH ON CAMPUS their excitement is contagious (i'm literally more excited than some of them). Why study for test when I can talk to prefrosh and write about talking to prefrosh. But seriously though, why is there even class over cpw??? Why do I have a test during cpw???? I want to hang out with the prefrosh and pump them up and get them to comMIT.

Oh yeah, btw, CPW (Campus Preview Weekend) is a weekend lasting 3.14 days where adMITted students come and visit MIT! Over this weekend, campus is bursting with culture and excitement, ready to show off all the cool stuff we do on our campus. There are tons of events, food, and fun stretching from early in the morning to really really late at night!

It was honestly quite odd. This past week has been pretty busy (as all of my weeks have come to be unfortunately), and I was wallowing in stress because of aforementioned upcoming tests. On Tuesday night, I stayed up practicing my clarinet of all things, because I realized that I hadn't had the time to practice my instrument (as someone who has a spring recital coming up in not long, it's probably important that I get to that) and I needed to show up with an improved Stravinsky Three Pieces, instead of playing the same kind of music for the past three weeks. I was blasting away in the MacGregor music room past midnight, trying to get the stupid high G to speak. I returned the key to the music room to the front desk around 1:50am. My friend was at desk. Front desk shifts end at 1. "Why're you still up?" I asked him.

"Dude, I'm one part away from finishing this 001 pset."

It really do be that time of the semester.

I ended up falling asleep at around 3am, only to be awoken at 8:30am by none other than my natural circadian rhythm who surely loves me very much and wants the absolute best for my body. And I suppose it determined that making the next 18 hours of my life hell on earth was the best thing for my body. But yeah, after trudging through the following day, studying for exams that I had coming up on Thursday and Friday, I was definitely not in a good mood. Sleep-deprived and stressed, like your stereotypical MIT student.

And then Thursday, the first day of CPW. After finishing my classes, I was going to walk straight to my dorm to wait for the prefrosh that I was hosting, but I was distracted. As I was walking in front of the stud, I overheard two familiar voices pass by me. They were people from PROMYS 23' !!! I turned around and wanted to say hi to them immediately, but then realized that I didn't remember one of their names. After a quick search on Instagram, I ran towards them and greeted them. We chatted about their journeys to campus while waiting in line in Maseeh to get ice cream, one of the random prefrosh events.

Anyways, after that encounter, I got back to my dorm and waited for my prefrosh to arrive. My prefrosh is such a lovely and sweet soul <3. I excitedly walked her through my entry and did some basic small talk stuff. She expressed interest in going to a dining hall to check it out, and we went another prefrosh getting hosted in my entry and some entrymates. I wasn't really hungry at all (except to learn more about the prefrosh, in a non-predatory way pleaseee) but I went anyways and we chatted.

I think my excitement kind of got curbed after that. I don't remember exactly what I did that night (I might have just been psetting outside), but I ended up coming back at around 11:30pm, to find my prefrosh asleep (I woke her up on accident :( ). Her being asleep inspired me to also go to bed early. Well, that night I kind of read solutions to the practice problems for my test on Friday (during cpw grr), and then fell asleep shortly after.

Friday was spent taking my test, going to classes, getting supplies for our CPW events, and then setting up an event. My entry had two CPW events that I had to set up. Thankfully, they were pretty low effort. Not that many prefrosh showed up, but that was okay because many people in my entry showed up and it was a good bonding experience for us. All the MIT funds that we used to purchase food for prefrosh ended up in our tummies :p. To be honest, I was quite worried during those events, because I really wanted more prefrosh to show up. It makes sense that they didn't, our events did not sound the most enticing. Sigh, I'll join a club next year that has more enticing events and I can help out with those.

Saturday morning, I was awoken by the loud screams of men playing ultimate frisbee, because that weekend was sectionals. I went to check out the field because I happened to know a lot of people on the team. A lot of math majors (and Jews too, apparently) are on the ultimate frisbee team, because all the math summer camps play ultimate frisbee (and so do the Jewish camps, or at least that was what I was told). I chatted with some of my friends on the team before going back and setting up for our second event.

I didn't really have much work that I needed to get done, but I did push off an entire 6.101 lab to do by Monday, and so I mainly worked on that. I spent a lot of time debugging yucky recursion stuff that didn't make sense for me for some reason (backtracking hurts my brain). I was half hanging out with the prefrosh at our event, half trying to code. Understandably, it wasn't really productive. I also wasn't really processing what code I was writing, so it was not good code.

Saturday night was the Spinning Arts show, though. Spinning Arts at MIT is a performance club where the students spin things on fire and also light sticks. It was really cool!!! Shout out to all the performers. Y'all were great. My favorite performance was the one with the song from Chicago. There was a lot of personality in the moves. Very musical theatre :). I remember staring at the lights in the dark, trying to discern exactly what made the show so impressive. I concluded that it was not just that the lights were cool, but that there was a very real aspect of danger and skill involved in the performance. I then wondered during the show how important it was to have a) cool visuals and b) display of skill for a performance like that to be really good.

It was kind of long, though, and it was starting to get cold since it was at night. I brought my stuff with me so I could work on my code in a quiet place (the iHQ center). I didn't want to walk back late at night, I didn't end up staying for nearly as long as I wanted to, but I think I got some good, focused work done. It was kind of late and on a Saturday, so there was nobody there. At one point, the lights turned off because the motion sensor wasn't picking anything up from my poor little self sitting in the corner, coding. It was kind of cool, though, because I had a window seat facing Kendall square. I could see the hundreds of bright boxes of light from the buildings against the dark sky. It was also kind of rainy outside, so that made it extra vibey.

Moments like this, I am extremely grateful for the tunnels. They are the underground network of tunnels that connects the buildings on campus, which means you can get from Lobby 7 to Stata without a droplet of rain touching you. Unfortunately, they don't extend to the dorms (oh God, what I would give for them to connect to every dorm).

CPW officially ends at 12pm on Sunday. My prefrosh left at about 8am to go to Visitas, Harvard's (inferior) version of CPW. On Sunday morning, I woke up early naturally again (ugh), said bye to my prefrosh as she left, and then laid in bed for like an hour. I think I was relishing the feeling of being alone again, but not effectively because I was just watching videos on my phone on bed, feeling unsatisfied in a sense.

Don't get me wrong. I love my prefrosh and she was a really good roommate. There's just a part of me that continues to keep up the persona that I play so to speak. Life's a stage and we're all actors kind of thing. I know a good amount of people don't live like that, but I think a good amount of people also feel this pull to act a certain way around people (and I hear this is especially the case with women?). It was just a little tiring for me solely because there wasn't a private place for me. I also realized that I definitely work better when I'm by myself. None of the worrying about how other people perceive me bullshit.

I didn't end up going to any other CPW events other than the very first one that I went to. I didn't really have the energy to pretend to be a prefrosh that weekend. I also don't have the lanyard that they give the prefrosh to wear. I know a lot of people pretended to be prefrosh, and I definitely should have, given that I didn't have a chance to come to CPW because I was a waitlist admit. I kind of wish that I did, but I also again recognize that I was pretty tired that weekend.

All in all, I thought it was a good weekend. There were definitely more things that I could have been doing, but it's okay. I had fun. I relaxed. I wasn't stressed at all. I didn't feel tired despite not sleeping a whole ton. I got to host a prefrosh and that was a cool experience! I don't have many things to do in the week after, so there is even less to stress about!