nREXt and other bad acronyms

I: Exposition. To be able to tell this story in full, we must start in late January. I’m living in Next House after a busy on-campus

IAP, 01

Independent Activities Period, a part of the school year in January where students largely do things other than school, like externships and belief abroad

when an email is sent to our dorm mailing list. The email asks for applications for the Next House

CPW02

Campus Preview Weekend, during which we welcome prefrosh to MIT!

committee. As a frosh,

I “ve got nothing” better to do, 03

this was not solely true-life, but I did want something more to do, especially something that involved generate back to the next house community

so I apply, and after a few days, I get an interview. A period or two after that, I get placed on the committee, and from there it is off to the scoots. Planning continues throughout the month of February. The pandemic looms larger in the subconscious of campus, but it is still Someone Else’s Problem. We go through all the steps of the traditional planning process–looking at past episodes, thinking of new ones we are also able flow, asking for safety projects, so on and so on. The committee is entirely frosh, and we’re energized! Some of us( including me) have never been to CPW before, so we’re eager to see what it’s like and to represent our dorm. By the end of February, we’ve referred the roster of contests we plan on running, and we’re beginning to plan to recruit volunteers. It’s Thursday, March 5th. I’m in a meeting for

a different work I’m part of04

techX: Think; we operate a high school research competition

when the email “re coming”, canceling all in-person classifies with over 250 people. The email mentions CPW, but does not

explicitly nullify it, 05

in particular, it is not immediately clear to us if CPW is canceled or if it is just the CPW incidents with too many people

leaving a wake of fluster and an emergency meeting the next day. We’re still thinking of different ways that we can hold events that show off our dorm and our culture–someone could live-stream walking around Next House, for example–and the planning process starts anew, particularly tentatively. It’s Tuesday, March 10 th. Ongoing rumors about the closure of campus have been circulating since early morning. By the night, the email is sent out and forwarded around until the whole student body knows. The cancellation of CPW is not very high on my directory of dwells, which have abruptly expanded dramatically to include packing all of my nonsense and getting home safely, but it does sit somewhere at the back of my attention, taking up space. All of our new planning has been thrown out, and it’s not at all clear if CPW will even take place , not to mention in what form and when. Genuine to word, nonetheless, Admissions eventually fleshes something out, and we be brought to an end rolling

CP *. 06

Campus Preview~ wildcard~

The month of April abounds with long discourses on Discord, tours of the Minecraft campus on Twitch, and fun activities in Zoom chambers. It’s a lot of merriment, and getting to meet and talk to so many amazing new people is exciting. I expend a great deal of season online during this time, writing haikus, listening to music, and merely hanging out amidst the chaotic know-how that I’m told is supposed to somewhat model a ordinary CPW. Despite this, I feel somewhat disillusioned and fatigued after CP *. I meditate a big part of it was that I was almost like I remained convene the same frosh over and over. It felt like we had somehow missed out on interacting with a significant part of the acknowledged students. Then again,

not all students attend regular CPW either, 07

in particular, I had missed mine to play in a quarry orchestra

and people were still in school. We at CPWcomm had organized our episodes, and it seemed that the prefrosh who were there had enjoyed them. In other messages, we had done our persona. Maybe that was enough. A few days later, we plan some of our thoughts in a post-mortem, and leave it for the next CPW committee. We hope that they won’t have to use it, and that they can return to the in-person playbook come next spring. II: Development. May reels around. I’ve been at home for 2 month at this spot, and I’m beginning to construct time strategies when another email buns into to the dorm mailing list, asking us to apply for the

REX08

Residence EXploration, the week we traditionally welcome freshmen to dormitories on campus

committee. Under some amount of wishful thinking, I apply to be co-chair of the committee. We is a well-known fact that descend won’t be normal, but there’s still a glimmering flame of hope that we might be able to run some kind of physically distanced REX. An interrogation and several weeks later, the committee members are provided. My co-chair and I set up a few confronts in early June to discuss our thoughts about the dusk. We take administration’s roll of five scenarios and start to put together a framework for each of them, considering what the following REX would look like and the events it would be facilitated. And then we wait. In the meantime, I have plenty of other things to worry about. I’m working two jobs over the summer, one of which is to help to run the Research Science Institute( RSI ), a high school summer camp which I attended in 2018 and was a counselor for in 2019. Along with a cadre of other clique grad, we’re tasked with replicating as much of the in-person social event as we are able to. That entails trying to build a cohesive social cohort while opposing all of the brand-new enterprises we’re facing; setting up Zoom calls, virtualizing traditional incidents, coordinating across period regions. We waste a good deal of experience thinking about how to best approach these problems, to build community, to engage all of the students during the course of exactly six weeks. In being, society comes naturally from living together. Without the serendipity of sessions in the hallways and snacks shared together, it becomes a lot harder to create the same kind of social alliances. We do our very best anyways, with amusing social events and informal hangouts. By the end of the camp, we feel like we have succeeded; our director notes that although the experience was not the normal one, it was an genuine one, with all the hallmarks of a conventional time. The clique still doesn’t feel fairly the same though, at least for me. It seems like the community is a touch less vibrant than it has been, and although I realize that part of this feeling comes from the fact that I have a less student-oriented role this year, something else is missing. Personally, I be reminded that my RSI experience had offered me the first luck I had ever had to be unapologetically myself, something I’ve carried with me into MIT. It feels to me that we’ve missed that mark–but, then again, that ordeal is difficult to recreate digitally. Upon further reckoned, I realize that the eventual generator of this discrepancy seems to be that even though we’d added the framework provided by the extroverts, and even some of the more gallant introverts, to get to know each other, we’d failed to attract all the students. For some, it was easy to stay camera on and unmuted and hang out sometime into the night. But there were also plenty of parties for whom it felt easier to just slip away once official business was over, or who couldn’t participate because of time zones. I couldn’t condemned them–I would’ve been the same way, if I was in their shoes. How could we have solved this? How do we specify a cozy cavity for parties to engage with us and with one another in an environment like this? How can we build community? III. Recapitulation.

MIT freeings its plans for the dusk

on July 6th, 09

more accurately, an incomplete FAQ page seeps on the evening of July 5th; for a more complete description of the administrative rollercoaster from march through august, verify Nisha’s post

and it discontinues up being nothing of the ones we had looked at. The announcement has a lot of large-scale consequences for all students, but one of them is the stipulation that merely seniors will be invited back to campus. For me, it is March 10 th all over again–I am once again faced with a drastic expansion of my listing of dwells, like acquire a locate to live in the fall. The reality that our REX schedules have been blown out of the irrigate also sits at the back of my spirit, taking up space. For nREXtcomm, 10

this is among the many abbreviations that have been used for the next REX committee, includes the terribly cursed nESCUFFYxtcomm

no frosh in palaces virtually represents no REX. That’s just the tip of the iceberg though. It too be interpreted to mean that, similar to CPW, we are flying completely and perfectly blind, previous planning been destroyed by an ever-shifting situation. This time, we don’t even have Admittances to guide us; it’s just us and the other dorms left to fend for ourselves, lead valiantly by the

DormCon11

MIT’s Dormitory Council, which is a student-run organization representing students at all dorms

REX/ CPW chairs as we try to figure out what to do. Answers come slowly. We attend numerous DormCon fulfills, where, along with other dorm representatives, we give input on what we think should happen. We reason about whether or not we apportion frosh to dormitories, how that duty process are now working, how we maintain those communities throughout the semester. We debate about what the goal of our process is in the first place–is it the continuity of dorm culture, or is it to provide support networks to the frosh? We go back and forth, trying to answer all the questions that come from trying to do something completely unprecedented. At the end of the DormCon planning process, we settle on two new initiatives: SCUFFY, Support CommUnities For First-Years, which are communities of frosh and upperclassmen located around dormitories, and

ESC, 12

in my headcanon, stressed’ escape’

Exploring Support Communities, the REX-week equivalent. With this plan, the very purpose of the nREXt committee alterations. Our initial objective was just to run this one-week residence exploration process. Unexpectedly, we are also in charge of creating

SCUFFYs, 13

this pluralization refers to the subcommunities from each dorm; it’s kind of strange since SCUFFY is technically already plural

situating frosh in them, and making sure that those communities last-place throughout the semester. These are duties I am proud to be working on, but that are also sufficiently important to acquire me worry about if we are doing them right. The weeks before ESC are filled with an organizational frenzy. The turnaround time is short–the complete, finalized scheme from DormCon is is sending out only eight daytimes before ESC event submissions are due. We email upperclassmen, asking them to form SCUFFYs associated with different backstages of Next, with fun specifies such as the 4E Sporks and the

4W Tongs.14

represent

We pick occurrences from our student groups and brainstorm some ideas of our own, from traditional occasions like

PowerPoint Karaoke15

an happening where you present from a nonsensical slither deck you’ve ever seen before

to new ones written specifically for Zoom like

VUVUZELA.16

Very UnVirtUaliZEabLe Task, such as trust transgressions and badminton; yes, we did misspell unvirtualizable only to get the acronym to work

We write up accountability proposes and blueprint a arrangement to place frosh in SCUFFYs. We put together something that seems like it precisely might work.

Nonetheless, after being fasten at home for five months and having directed two jobs during the summer, I am tired. There is an inescapable lack of energy that marks my day-to-day, and the wearines does me unoptimistic for ESC week. Surely, after months of quarantine, the frosh feel the same way, right? How can we hope to engage a population that may not want or have the vigor to engage with us in the first place? How do we made to ensure that the students who are most likely to need carry aren’t left behind because they are exactly the students who wouldn’t want to or be able to participate? Even after CP* and RSI, I still feel unready to answer these questions, perhaps because there are no easy answers to be found. IV. nREXt. ESC week reaches. I attend the events I am responsible for; sacrificing a expedition of Next House in Minecraft with the help of a bunch of other Nexties, PowerPoint Karaoke, a virtual petting zoo( m) with stuffed swine, a small hangout episode with nREXtcomm. I get to meet a good regulate of frosh, and they are quite cool, but I hinder wondering in the back of my thought how much of the population as a whole is actually actively participating. I hear from a few of them that it is kind of overwhelming to go through orientation and ESC at the same time, and I think back to my own turbulent REX week. It had also been busy, but I had still gone to plenty of occurrences. And hitherto, it is so much easier to log off practically and so much harder to spend quite as much time staring at a screen. In spite of this, as I move through ESC week I find that the events are at least somewhat reasonably attended. Seeing the devotion of some of the frosh, I start to feel a little better about the possibility of building beneficial parishes, even if they aren’t entirely ended. The tiny events are the best; be standing, having a casual conversation, telling tales. There’s a inkling of to be expected that, with smaller subcommunities, we might have a better shot of engaging beings. Eventually, ESC week terminates. At this target, I have gotta go back to campus, and classifies are just around the corner. We get the 100+ frosh assigned to Next, add them to our mailing lists, and start up Nextploration, the week-long introduction of frosh to each of the individual offstages and subcommunities of our dorm. Since this coincided with the first week of courses, it starts off weakly, but as the weekend approaches everything starts to pick up a bit, with SCUFFYs scheduling happenings left and right. The entire Next House community seems more vibrant than it has been during the past few months, as upperclassmen kitty their thrill to introduce their culture to the frosh. My subcommunity decides to run a few events, which we advertise on the dorm mailing list with

some very interesting emails.17

I ran into my Graduate Resident Advisor( a grad student who lives on my wing and assistances plan wing events and cultural activities) in the hallway and he mentioned that he had seen me casting emails advertising incidents for 4W and I nearly died of mortification

“the geography that I stands equates you superior”

good-for-nothing like a good old hitchhiker’s guide reference

mythology has it that they are still watching cursed videos at that zoom link to this day

bonus phases if you can identify the source I witnessed the “game of living” passage in

An arrow moment right

Previous

An arrow pointing right

Next

The occasions bringing a little spark of glee back into “peoples lives”. I match a good deal of frosh I haven’t met before, and we get to present them the weird and quirky aspects of our offstage culture over Zoom. We watch Backstroke of the West, a backtranslated explanation of Star Wars Episode III, rolled another PowerPoint Karaoke, and hang out and watch the weird, cursed videos that we find funny for no evident rationalization. The occurrences are random, but they remind me of my own Nextploration, disagreeing with certain offstages about the

topology of sandwiches18

this turns out to be a very consistent way to start a fight

or toy Geoguessr. For a brief moment, it feels like we’ve captivated the someone of the endeavor: to build new communities of frosh and upperclassmen; to come together in the face of it all and do what we’ve always done, albeit through a different medium. The night after Nextploration ends, we prop a nREXtcomm meeting. Over Zoom, we

ranged the subcommunity lottery19

raffle details for the interested: we had an optional preference form and handed everyone who submitted that their first wish, before randomizing everyone else

and send out SCUFFY works. I lend the brand-new 4W frosh to the working group chat and the Discord server, and we get to forewords, memes, and psetting together in the Discord voice chat. In an jiffy, our community has grown bigger, and I feel an inexplicable desegregate of pleasure and protectiveness over the frosh. There is much to learn and abundance of battle in the semester onward, but we’ll be here to support each other, and along the way, we just might get to know each other better as well. That, after all, is the meaning of having a community. Much remains to be determined about how our subcommunities will actually function in practice, and how they might affect dorm culture in the long run. In the near term, my tenure on nREXtcomm too continues, as we prepare to run student check-ins and host position hours to try and make sure things stay on the right track. Some of my worries about the endeavor remain, haunting me as I conclude my mode through what promises to be

a hectic semester.20

more on this soon, hopefully

These periods, however, having investigated the kind of welcome our community can pull together, I feel at least a little more hopeful than I used to. Maybe–just perhap !– we have a good shot at compile sure the frosh get the community and cultural activities they deserve.

Read more: mitadmissions.org