sábado, 5 de novembro de 2011

Happy Birthday Chris

Chris turned 25 years old today, and he made this great post, read it, it's great.

"Sometimes something hasn't been tried because it's a bad idea. Sometimes something hasn't been tried because it's a good idea but no one knows it yet. The important thing is to know how to recognize the difference. "
Chris post

quinta-feira, 29 de setembro de 2011

Reasons #3 - Passion Over Academics

You know, wen you thinks of MIT you thinks of grades, well I'm kind of worried about that, will I get enough at my SAT? I don't know, but this essay gave me the guts to keep trying, it showed me that passion is important and I've got the passion, and some grades.

"There will come a moment when you will decide what you want to do for the rest of your life. For some, this moment appears organically in the form of a hobby, or perhaps an inspiring book. Others may experience it more synthetically, be it the pressure to earn a living, or living up to another’s expectations. No matter the means of inspiration, there is a goal, the destination to your journey. There is no winning path, and not every path leads to your goal. At times the road will bend and twist and break, doing everything to throw you off its course. A storm will break out, desperately pillaging the earth with electricity and water. Hopeless and drenched to the bone, you’ll take shelter off the road in a wood cabin. As the raindrops patter on the window, you seek guidance, and guidance you’ll receive.
Hope: A Guide for the Hopeless and Drenched
 If you are reading this, you are lost on the path to MIT. Your grades are sub-par, your classmates are winning gold, your teachers are unimpressed, your essays are underwhelming, and your extra-curriculars are all but one. You begin to doubt your once powerful feelings of belonging at MIT, for what chances do you stand against tens of thousands of competent students with excellent grades, gold medals, impressed teachers, inspirational stories, and never-ending lists of extra-curriculars? Hopeless and unmotivated, you naively contemplate your odds. Before you call it quits, allow me to interrupt the biggest mistake of your life. Take a deep breath, slowly count to ten, and open up your mind as wide as you can. You are about to be given a couple guidelines you may have thought never existed. Not only do they exist, they hold true for getting into MIT. While following each guideline does not guarantee your acceptance, it may give you the best chance you got.

Guideline #1: There is more to you than numbers and letters.

Scores and grades do a fairly reasonable job of representing your academic competence on an objective scale; however, they can be fairly incompetent in determining who you are or what you are capable of achieving. Those who excel academically tend to hide behind the ink, exposing their success solely through exams. This is not to degrade the students who study and work hard to do well in school. It definitely isn’t easy and the high marks are well deserved, but there is more to being successful than succeeding academically. If baking cookies is your passion, or photographing the cities of the world is your dream, or writing code that affects millions of people is your drive, do it! Dedicate a significant amount of time to your hobbies as frequently as possible, even if it means skipping out on studying for a quiz. I cannot stress enough how fortunate you are to be applying to MIT, for you will not be judged entirely by the contents of your transcript, rather by the quality and depth of what you bring to the table. Bring the cookies, bring the photos, and bring the code. They will convey more about you than the grades everyone else has. People apply to MIT, not numbers and letters.
Guideline #2: B yourself, not As someone else

Don’t try to be the perfect pre-med student your parents want you to be, or the genius your calc teacher always wanted. If you’re going to become the perfect pre-med student or math genius, do so because it is what you want. In the long run, passion is more meaningful than academic competence. Students who tend to stay true to their passions even if it means sacrificing scores face just as equal, if not greater, chances of acceptance. Each year, thousands of brilliant students with dazzling transcripts get rejected while others with less satisfying numbers do not. This is not the admissions department perpetuating unjust evil. This is passion prevailing over academia, dreams over acquiescence, who you are over who someone wants."

This is from this post.

It was written by Mark F. '15

domingo, 25 de setembro de 2011

MIT OpenCourseWare

I found MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) the other day on YouTube.
I was watching the Tetris wall made by some MIT "bored" students, and I then saw some movies of lectures on MIT, since then I've been watching lectures from "MIT 6.00 Introduction to Computer Science and Programming", it's pretty cool, despite not being at MIT (yet) I can take some lectures, and the OCW's website as lots of free materials.

Here is the first video lesson from 6.00 (class not the number of videos xD).

And the Tetris is HERE.

quinta-feira, 8 de setembro de 2011

Reasons #2 - "We start giving you nicknames"

I've been reading some blog posts at MIT's admissions page, and there are lots of different posts (I'm  going to talk about some latter).
Some of them really make me remember of my old school, I read about the way they read student's applications, and they simply say amazing things, I remembered how my ex-teachers were worried about us, they made us feel important, we felt amazing, the relation teacher-student was great and helped me a lot.
I read this sentence "We make that leap from reading words on a page and seeing cold numbers on a screen to getting attached to you as a person. We start giving you nicknames, imagining you on campus, and hypothesizing where you'll live and who you'll hang out with. (We sometimes even consider matchmaking, and then decide that's way too creepy.)" and I though " Wow they really care about us.
Well I'm going to read a little bit more of this posts (is this sentence well written?).

Bye

Post

terça-feira, 6 de setembro de 2011

We admit people, not numbers.

I'm thinking, when should I take the SAT exams, are they hard?
Easy?
I don't know, should I take them right know or just when I finish the 12th grade?
Maybe the 11th grade?
I think I will search for some information on MIT's web site, they have ALL the answers.
I really hope to do it on time.

segunda-feira, 5 de setembro de 2011

I've been really busy

Hi
So many things happening, i've been in WYD in Madrid, it was a great experience, meting young people from all around the world was something simply AMAZING, I've met LifeTeen (I'm part of LifeTeen Portugal) and they interviewed me and some of my folks.
Yesterday I was surfing around the MIT Admissions site, and I found a great  group, the Laboratory for Chocolate Science (LCS) they're great, they really study the science of chocolate, did you knew that chocolate has 6 different crystallization points? I didn't.

quinta-feira, 23 de junho de 2011

Facts #2 - Mascot: The Beaver

"Of all the animals of the world, the beaver is noted for his
engineering and mechanical skill and habits of industry.
His habits are nocturnal, he does his best work in the dark."
By Mr. Hornaday

TIM, MIT's Mascot.
In 1914  a group of alumni presented the beaver to MIT's President, Richard Maclaurin, they choose  the beaver because he was (and is) an American animal and he is a nature engineer.
The mascot appears in the brass rat (I'll talk about it in a future post), and It's called TIM and normally appears at important events.


See You next Post