Chris Peterson

No, this entry is not about Kelly Clarkson. It's about FIRST Robotics. This past weekend, I attended the Founder's Reception and Kickoff Event on behalf of MIT Admissions. I'll explain how FIRST and KC are connected in a moment. But first, let me explain...FIRST.

FIRST (which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) was founded by inventor Dean Kamen and MIT professor Woodie Flowers back in 1989, before most students now applying to MIT were even born. The goal of FIRST, broadly speaking, is to inspire students towards a lifelong devotion to science, technology, and engineering.

FIRST works something like this: every year, in January, a star-studded team of engineers on the Game Design Committee unveil that year's game to the 37,000+ students on 3,000+ teams in 12 countries worldwide. The games change every year, but always certain things remain the same: two alliances of three robots each compete against each other on a small, enclosed field, roughly the size of a small basketball court. The robots are based off of common kits to which teams add their own modifications and designs (subject to a sort of "salary cap" meant to mitigate economic, rather than engineering, advantages). Teams then have six weeks to conceive, design, and build their robots, which are then sent out to at least one of 57 Regionals across the world. Then, at Regionals, they'll compete against a field of dozens for the chance to qualify for the Championship Event in Atlanta.

But the competition isn't the point of FIRST, or rather, it's a means, not an end. The point of FIRST is, in the words of Wikipedia, to "promote a philosophy of teamwork and collaboration among engineers and encourages competing teams to remain friendly, helping each other out when necessary", in addition to getting students excited about science and technology.

And boy, do they get excited. Trust me, you haven't seen excited until you've seen 6,000 students in an arena, dressed and painted in their team colors, banging away on noisemakers, screaming themselves hoarse with chants, with every emotion they have riding on the backs of the robots they've built. I'm not posting a competition video here because a grainy 480x360 video can't do it justice - you need to go to a regional event and see for yourself.

FIRST might just be the best opportunity for aspiring techies to learn not just how to wield a soldering iron but how to interact with others in the spirit of "gracious professionalism." The spirit of "coopertition" that FIRST inculcates among its participants characterizes the MIT campus spirit too - students working hard, working smart, collaborating well, and tempering their technical, interpersonal, and leadership skills under a healthy, educational, and beneficent duress.

Perhaps that's why - as Woodie said at Kickoff - 1 in 9 MIT students participated in FIRST in high school. That's not to say that FIRST is a prerequisite for admission, or that it gives you a dispositive advantage in admissions (after all, invert that statistic and you'll see that 8 of 9 MIT students didn't participate in FIRST). What FIRST does is help inspire students to pursue careers in engineering, science, and technology; to endow them with the time-management and prioritization skills that will make them successful competitors in any field; and to develop in them the collaborative spirit that will make them a success in any interpersonal endeavor.

These characteristics are shared by many great students, and thus many great MIT applicants, and so the subset of students who participate in FIRST and those who enroll at MIT intersect comparatively often. To use the language of formal logic, FIRST is not a necessary condition for admission to MIT, but excellence in FIRST (as demonstrated best by letters of recommendation from mentors and/or examples of engineering work) may be sufficient to show us some of what you've got to offer.

So what does FIRST have to do with this Kelly Clarkson song?

First, when it dropped in 2004, I was a subteam captain and the spirit leader (which is sort of like cheerleader, only much geekier) of Team 1073 during my personal favorite FIRST game. After graduating, I continued to mentor the team throughout college. Now, I am, to the best of my knowledge, the first FIRST alumnus to be an MIT Admissions Officer. So the date on this song makes me more than a little nostalgic. I did a lot in high school - football, newspaper, theater, skiing - but all these years later FIRST remains the best thing I ever did, because it taught me all the skills I outlined above. I didn't even pursue science or engineering in college, but I am far and away the better for my FIRST experience.

Second, and more importantly, the song shares the title of this year's game: Breakaway. Here's the animation describing the game, created by NASA's Dave Lavery, posted to YouTube by Team 801:

To read more about the game, you can read this great article in Popular Mechanics about FIRST, this year's game, what went into its design (sneak preview: the lead engineer of Cirque de Soleil was brought in to help this year!), etc.

For those of you who are seniors, I know the excitement and stress of applications season has been inexorably followed by the excitement and stress of FIRST season. Let me give you some advice, bad news first. Bad: your college application season will not go perfectly. No matter how good of a student you are, no matter how polished your application, some irreconcilable tension will remain. Good: your FIRST season CAN go perfectly, because the point of FIRST is not to win or lose, the point of FIRST is to develop all the skills I mentioned above, because they will help you be successful no matter where you go and no matter what you do.

Come to think of it - why are you still reading this blog? Isn't there a robot that needs building? That crate won't pack itself! Good luck, and see you at the championship!

Though born in Massachusetts, I grew up in the wintry hinterlands of Vermont and New Hampshire. In Vermont, for instance, I lived in the Burlington area, which averages a bit over five feet of snow every year. While that number isn't actually that high by comparison to the coastal cities, the difference between Burlington and Boston is that in Boston the snow will melt, whereas in Burlington it never does, so towards the end of the year you actually have several feet of snow that serves as a sort of composite history of the year's blizzards. In New Hampshire, up in the White Mountains, we spent every New Years outside by a 64 square foot bonfire, usually on couches carved out in the snowdrifts, with the champagne freezing in the bottle on several occasions.

Cambridge is more or less the furthest south I've ever lived (except for one year I spent as an undergrad at the College of William and Mary before swiftly transferring) so when other people are freezing I'm basking in the comparative mildness of the winter. You have to know how to dress for the cold. A few simple rules - cover your head (tons of heat escapes off your scalp); clog your collar (ditto for your core); and cotton kills (NEVER wear cotton in the cold - opt for wool or fleece instead) and you'll be fine. One day, during my junior year of high school, class was cancelled on account of a -60F (that's -51C) wind chill. A few friends and I bundled up and traipsed around the woods shooting fireworks at Jewel Trolls.

Ah, youth.

Why am I posting about all of this?

Well, winter's finally come to Cambridge, along with the rest of the East Coast, with the Blizzard of 2009. This snowstorm dumped up to 20" of snow all up and down the seaboard, including record totals of 30"+ in some areas of New York. Boston was the storm's last stand before it spun off to the sea. A cold, dry air mass from Canada blanketed northern New England and insulated it from the ravages of the storm. It's pretty wild actually. I spent last weekend in Boston and Northampton MA and the Nashua area of NH. Despite being very close to one another, the totals were tremendously different:

View Snowfall, MA in a larger map

Most students are home for the holidays, but a few sent me photos of campus the night they left, and I took some on my way into work this morning. They're just cellphone photos, nothing particularly beautiful or exciting, but if you're from the lower latitudes or an international student, and thus unfamiliar with a snowy campus, here's a little bit of the weekend for you:

(You can find more posts about MIT in the snow and winter here)

On Wednesday, I'll be leaving on my winter break from work, spending a few precious days with family and friends before devoting the next four months of my life to reading regular action applicants. I can't wait to get back up north and start skiing with my family at my favorite ski mountain where I once worked in high school. And if you find yourself here next winter, and in need of some ways to stay warm or the best places to carve some powder, just drop me a line, an ol' Papa Petey will fix you right up.

I remember the first time I ever heard of Facebook. I was donning my cap and gown and preparing to walk at my high school graduation. Pomp and Circumstance bellowed off the bricks nearby. Over the din, a friend shouted that his older brother had something called The Face Book, and that "everyone was in it."

His brother was a meaty metalhead (and consequently a personal hero of mine) so I figured it was some sort of creepy cultish leather tome with yellowed pages and predictions about how each one of us would inevitably meet our untimely, grisly demise. I was wrong - that was Craigslist. But, like so many cripplingly insecure and regularly unwashed college freshman boys, I joined it anyway, and it soon changed - even became - my life.

This was ages ago - long before the first Rick had ever been Rolled - and it was a very different website then. There were no photos, no groups, and no messages - just a profile picture, interests, and a wall. Students could not friend students at other colleges. In fact, most colleges weren't on Facebook. In retrospect, it was a primitive and dim space to socialize, not unlike a hipster bar in an NYC bomb shelter, or Olympic Stadium in Montreal (poor Youppi!).

It's been a little over four years since then. And though I still can't grow a decent beard, oh how the times have changed!

Facebook now has over 300 million members. Over 80 billion photos have been uploaded, and over 600,000 are viewed every minute. Brody Ruckus has given way to Billabong. Like a scruffy college graduate who has somehow managed to bluff his way into a real job, Facebook has hit the big time, and now actually gets taken seriously.

And for good reason too. All organizations - profit or nonprofit, private or public - require human capital to produce their goods or spread their message. We're all people powered, and sites like Facebook are our cold fusion. When asked why he robbed banks, diminutive miscreant Willie Sutton replied "because that's where the money is." Well, organizations love Facebook (and other social network sites) because that's where the people are.

So starting today, you'll see a "Share on Facebook" link at the bottom of every blog entry. By clicking this link, you may choose to publish the article to the News Feed of your five thousand closest Friends on Facebook. Everybody wins. Your Friends will see cool content they may have never stumbled across otherwise. You get to be the dude or dudette who provides the hook-up. And we get to spread our message to people who might otherwise never have seen it.

That's why they call it "social media" - because it is animated by and conducted within our preexisting social circles. But within this promise of social media lies its peril.

We know that even if you love MIT, you may not want MIT to be where your friends are, jumping in where it is isn't wanted like that awkward kid in high school who invited himself over to your house and would let himself in and begin eating your Cheetos while loudly criticizing your Tekken techniques. And we want to respect your wishes, even if you ARE a certifiable moron for going with the Armor King over Ganryu.

But it's not that simple, because we don't know what your wishes are. Some studies show that prospective students prefer for school to contact them via Facebook. Others suggest that students prefer email for these sorts of inquiries, and would like for Spam U. to let them Farmville in peace. We also know that different students use different social spaces online, and that no one site represents all the students we might like to speak with.

The best way for MIT to achieve the potential of these social sites is for y'all to guide us around their pitfalls. Our new "Share" links are relatively unproblematic and uncontroversial, and I hope you will use them (perhaps even on this post!) However, as we move forward, we'll be looking to you (collectively) for guidance. What social spaces do you use when you're thinking about, researching, or discussing college applications? What social activities or practices (apps, chats, pages, etc) would you like to see more of? Would you play an MIT Farmville or Mafia Wars, and would you share it with your friends who'd never thought of MIT because they'd find it fun too?

I actually do believe in viral marketing, which is to say that I believe promotions can be as fun to experience as they are effective at messaging. But here at the Admissions Office, we're all (sadly, even myself) old fogeys, and the only "hip" thing for us is the prosthetic kind. So tell me, what could we create in the crowdsourced Web 2.0 blogosphere networked public buzzword universe that would be fun, educational, and social for you?

My name is Chris Peterson. My title - all Serious People have titles, and I am nothing if not Serious - is Admissions Counselor for Web Communications at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. However, like Dave, perhaps it is simpler to introduce myself as part of the team of people that have joined together like a Megazord to become the new Ben. I don't recall much about the process, but I seem to remember it as going something like this:

(dramatic simulation - actual results may vary)

As one of the constitutive elements of this new borg-Ben newly arisen from the digital ooze, my job is to help make the Internet go for the Admissions Office. If I wanted to be "professional" - which is to say, if I wanted to obscure my individual unimportance behind interlocking bulkheads of buzzwords, like a pufferfish wrapped in chain mail and festooned with mines - I would say that I leverage social software to facilitate digital conversations between MIT and its latent global community. If I wanted to be truthful, I'd say I try to use cool technology to help MIT and prospective students talk to each other.

This blog is a huge part of that effort. It's fairly incredible that MIT allows both current and prospective students to converse openly as they do on this site. It is perhaps unsurprising that MIT jumped aboard the cluetrain in this regard - to paraphrase Matt McGann, Tim Berners-Lee does work upstairs, and if we didn't use the web as a way to freely share information he'd probably whack us upside the head - but it is no less unique for that. The fact of the matter is that MIT could survive without this blog and avoid a lot of potential headaches and most of my salary. However, the Institvte recognizes that conversations bring communities together, and so here we are, sharing our hopes and dreams through wires and screens and it's awesome enough that I'll even put up with Dave's lolcats to be a part of that vision.

One thing I'd like to do is figure out some shiny new toys to add to the already shiny site we have here. Dave and I are working on some Top Secret web projects that we'll be rolling out in the indefinite future, projects that will help the entire MIT community (past, current, and prospective) share its considerable collective intelligence and enrich all involved. In the tradition of a true webitocracy, if anyone has any ideas about cool tools or features they'd like to see incorporated into the website, please post something about it and why you think it rocks. Time permitting and FSM willing, we'll see if we can work it in.

I can't wait to work with all of you to continue to build what Ben began: an intergalactic space empire run by an alien witch living in a dumpster on the moon a first-class online community for some of the best and brightest students in the world.