The College Years

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What’s Wrong with This Picture? (age 17) We were living in New York City at the time and I needed to apply to college. I had won a Regents scholarship that was good only in NY state, so I applied to Manhattan College and Cornell. Cornell did not reply to my...

Off on the Right Foot

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My father insisted on coming with me to register at MIT. As we drove in from Logan Airport along Storrow Drive, my father asked the taxi driver, “What are all those factories across the river?” The taxi driver replied, “That’s MIT.” MIT has what might be charitably...

Academia

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MIT was an eye-opener, academically. You showed up as a hot shot Salutorian from your high school and got a rude awakening when you found that all your classmates were Valedictorians and you are graded on a curve. It can be a tough place — if you take it...

Quizmanship

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First term junior year, I was taking Advanced Calculus for Engineers. The only classes I attended were the three quizzes. Since I hadn’t picked up the quizzes, I wasn’t sure where I stood. So I went to one class and after the ending bell I approached the Prof and the...

Getting on with Professors

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In junior year I finally figured out that competing with a gazzillion other physicists in the job market was not a good strategy. (In the ‘50s every high school science nerd wanted to be a physicist and build atomic bombs to nuke the Russkies.) So, I went into the...

Party Time

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Most of our parties were B&Bs (Beer & Broads) that started on Friday night and extended through early Sunday morning. A jazz group would sometimes come in to jam in the wee hours when they got off from work. We had a piano in our basement bar and would sing...

The Great Mail Box Robbery

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We decorated our bar with both street and other interesting signs that we gathered clandestinely. Unfortunately guests sometimes considered them cute and stole them. So the Social Chairman, P11, got the bright idea of offering a fifth of whiskey as the prize for the...

MIT Athletics

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MIT is a very tough school for athletics because the students who take athletics seriously have no time to practice. So MIT does not field a lot of Division 1A teams. However, MIT regards athletics as part of the education. If you can gather enough people to form a...

Paradise cafe

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One cannot talk about attending MIT in the ‘50s and ‘60s without talking about the Paradise Cafe. It was run by Roland “Mac” MacSorley as a classic neighborhood dive. It had only a beer and wine license. It served inedible sandwiches, and there was a bottle of pickled...

College Clubs

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The Ten Year Club. This exclusive club was for students from the late ‘50s who could not bring themselves to leave the MIT womb. Most of us managed to get our BS degrees within 5-6 years. But then we went on to graduate school, so that some of us were still going to...