Getting Down & Nerdy: Undercover @ MIT’s Prefrosh Weekend

The three of us rolled down Mass. Ave., maps in hand, surrounded by high school seniors. It didn’t matter that we had never applied to MIT and never would. It definitely didn’t matter that we were sophomores at Harvard; nothing was keeping us from MIT’s Campus Prefrosh Weekend, fondly titled CPW. We wanted free shit.

I went by Natalie Goldin, and after disregarding the persona Wolfgang Higginbottom from Luxembourg, my friends settled on the names Maxwell and Alex Vanserg III. We were banking on the assumption that no one would ask us any background information. Figuring out how to spell our names was complicated enough.

The CPW Schedule was literally a book, which is weird, because it wasn’t by Junot Diaz and I didn’t think MIT was too big on humanities. There were events ranging from underground capture the flag to laser parties to edible board games. Needless to say I went straight to the chainmail bracelet-making event.

The Activities Fair was overwhelming; we only had 30 minutes to load up on as much free candy and monogrammed rubber ducks as we could. After passing the pistol club, a group dedicated solely to tapioca, and another club that I assume was dedicated to giving out free lemonade at activities fairs, I somehow ended up at the Republican Club with a free Scott Brown water bottle in hand.

An MIT student cross-registered at Harvard told me he likes going to Harvard because we know more about politics and are “better dressed” than MIT students. He was right; no one reacted at all when I said that if I had been old enough, I would have voted for Obama over Scott Brown. I was also rocking the dinosaur t-shirt and unisex sweatshirt look.

The age gap made hitting on prefrosh awkward. I tried to make small talk with a group of students playing Quidditch on the field, but got distracted by another group of students going to a smoothie event, and then distracted again by a group of half-naked, mud-covered students who took us on a running tour of their residential house.

It was then, while I was sprinting through a room twice the size of my walk-through at Harvard, that I decided that I was transferring. Prefrosh weekend is just so much better at MIT, plus I want to see Macklemore.