Barker renovation is the beginning
If you think the Barker Reading Room is the last you’ll see of changes in the MIT Libraries, think again. The renovation of the Barker Reading Room is the first step of a longer process to better serve students’ study needs.
Technology exposition or career fair?
Photography startup Lytro came to Techfair this year to show off its new 3D camera, whose pictures can be refocused after the shot. They invited students for a hands-on demo of the unreleased product — what they didn’t expect was the deluge of resumes.
Rainn Wilson comes to MIT to discuss Bahá’í film
Last Friday, Nov. 11, the MIT community welcomed Rainn Wilson, popularly known as Dwight Schrute from NBC’s The Office, as a panelist for Amnesty International’s screening and discussion of the documentary Education Under Fire.
Chen wins Lemelson Student Prize
Alice A. Chen G is the winner of this year’s Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for her innovative contributions to biotechnology, most notably the “humanized mouse” — a mouse with a tissue-engineered human liver. Chen is a PhD student at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The $30,000 student prize is awarded annually to an MIT senior or graduate student who has displayed a “portfolio of inventiveness.”
Future of the ATO house is unclear
For the better part of the winter, a couch and two mattresses have marked the location of 405 Memorial Drive, the fenced-in property sandwiched in-between Kappa Sigma and Delta Kappa Epsilon. Upperclassmen will remember this now-shuttered house as the former house of Alpha Tau Omega (ATO) — the fraternity expelled from MIT in September 2009 — but new plans are being developed for a possible fall opening. Before anything happens, the house will require extensive renovations that are not expected to be completed until after this summer.
Walker tenants talk ahead of overhaul
The administration continues to explore the option of renovating Walker Memorial into an academic building. The tentative plan is for Walker to become the new home of the Music and Theater Arts department, which may displace some of the clubs that currently occupy space in Walker.
Business clubs join together
On October 4, the two largest business clubs on campus, SEBC (Science & Engineering Business Club) and SUMA (Sloan Undergraduate Management Association), merged into one new organization called SBC (Sloan Business Club). The new club will serve the same purpose as the two previous clubs, which club members say had confused students and companies with similar events.
To improve Simmons culture, some talk of dorm revolution
On September 11, Simmons’s discussion mailing list, sponge-talk, went aflame after the release of Proposition 10, a GRT’s effort to expedite the development of dorm culture within Simmons. Proposition 10, an unofficial document, calls for the division of the Simmons government into ten autonomous sections, each responsible for its own budget, constitution, freshman recruitment, and GRT placement. The proposition reflects the dissatisfaction among residents about the lack of dorm culture in Simmons Hall.