7/24/2012 0 Comments 18.085: My Summer at MIT - Week 2Week 2: A Day in the Life...by Amy Beth Prager My typical day at MIT can be summed up in one word: MATLAB! MATLAB is an enormously powerful and popular software program that performs symbolic algebra and linear algebra. I spend the largest part of my day either running MATLAB (sometimes even successfully!), being lectured about MATLAB, or looking up MATLAB documentation on the web. One interesting application we learned was determining if a structure, such as a treehouse, is stable. Our professor said to always use MATLAB before sending our children up to a treehouse we build! It is really astounding how much computational power has expanded during my lifetime. When I was a little girl I begged my parents for a Timex Sinclair 2K computer with no screen- state of the art for 1980! I am constantly amazed by the advances made in technology and what modern technology is capable of! Despite how much technology changes, what is most important stays the same. The most important aspect of my life here at MIT is the amazing people I am so fortunate to associate with on a daily basis. My classmates are some of the most talented an interesting people I have ever met. A few of them even have children of their own that they raise as single parents, all while being full time MIT students. Wow! That is not only diversity, but an incredible thing to witness! My most frequent hangout on the MIT campus is the Cheney Room, on the third floor of building 3. The most interesting trivia fact about MIT is while all the buildings are numbered, the buildings are not numbered in any discernible order. Anyone who finds a pattern to the numbering scheme, in my opinion, deserves to win the Fields Medal (the equivalent to the Nobel prize in mathematics), at least once. The Cheney room is a room established in the 1800s for women students to study, socialize, and do whatever else we wish to do, with no men allowed. I love it there! It’s not that I have anything against men, but sometimes I wish to be in a woman-only space, and judging by the room’s popularity, so do many other women. It is a fantastic place to study, sleep, or even take a shower. The other quintessential aspect to anyone’s MIT experience is the housing arrangements. I am fortunate to live in an amazing dorm with wonderful people, perhaps the most wonderful of all being my suitemates. It makes me realize now that I have nothing against dorms or suitemates, I just have something against lousy dorms and lousy suitemates. My suitemates are both so excited about what they do, and where they are. They are among the most ambitious and talented women I have ever known in my life, and it is my privilege to live with them and be their friend. About the Blogger
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The Lab JournalWelcome to the summer internship series of 2012! Follow 9 Scientista bloggers through their summer internships to catch a glimpse of what it is like to be a scientista^TM. By Title- India Presents: A "New World Symphony"
- Through The Lens: The Intricacies Of Diabetes - Do Nanoparticles Glow? - Using Unusual Animals to Study Human Disease - Using the Hubble Telescope - You Think What You Eat - Experimenting With the Life of a Scientist(a) - 18.085: My Summer at MIT - Science Heals: A Summer of Global Health Research By BloggerRabeea Ahmed
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