Bingo Buzzword: campus-wide community

   Veena Thomas made some good observations in her column, "Campus Unification Theory", and her goals are just and noble, but I feel her explanations for the indifference of MIT students to campus-wide social events are a little misguided. In hopes of making Ms. Thomas's vision of unified socializing a little more attainable, I offer my own observations, formed through 4 years of trying to get MIT students to have more fun. Perhaps starting a dialogue on how we can conspire to make the entire MIT community party more often might be a Bad Idea...but then again, who reads these opinion columns anyway?
   As far as I can tell, students here don't really punt things like Fall Fling primarily because they think such events will suck. That is only one of the explanations they give, if prompted to actually think about it, after they've already decided to do something else that night. The fact is, on any given weekend of the term, the majority of students have multiple things that they would rather do than not do. The problem is compounded during term by the general busyness and no-time-to-think-more-than-2-days-ahead syndrome that afflicts many students during term, which make it very hard to plan ahead and look forward to a big social event down the line. A good portion of what made the Millenium Ball so successful was its placement in IAP, which has relatively few large house events as a whole, and also leaves people lots of time to prepare for a fancy gala and get psyched up for it.
   So the students are hosed, and on top of that there are too many ways to punt. What makes them leave their rooms to party, and how do they pick which parties to go to? Basically, it's the personal touch. An excited individual to act as a catalyst in driving unenergetic student molecules through frenzied social reactions. Say someone wants to organize a paintball trip at his living group. He is encouraged to do so after mentioning it verbally and hearing many people express interest. He sends out excited email, sets a date, figures that will be enough. He wants to leave early that morning to get a full day in, and to his dismay not even a quarter of the people he was expecting shows up. What happened? Many things probably: some people may have decided at the last minute they really needed to tool, some stayed up too late the night before, because the trip wasn't on their mind at the time, some didn't think it would be very fun to play paintball because they suck at it, some just plain forgot. MIT in general is good at sucking the life and energy out of an individual, by him or herself. We get it back from the people around us, sharing the strain of that 8 hour pset and then going out to get doughnuts at 4am. (Would *you* go get doughnuts at 4am after staying up tooling if you were alone?) In this case, we need personal assurance that we are wanted, a personal guarantee of a minimum amount of fun we will have, because there is at least one person going who wants us to go and who we know we can have fun hanging out with. Basically that guy needed to talk to as many people face-to-face as possible and convince them that they *had* to go, because then they could shoot him and shut him up.
   That's why house events are so well attended. You know the people you live with the best usually, and that's where you first advertise anything you might want to do, to get your closest friends to enjoy it with you. With friendship comes a certain level of commitment (a high level at most frats), and there is an obligation to honor it by rooting for your house's Late Night act or 6.270 team. In general, people will not go to an event alone or without knowing someone else who is definitely going; at MIT that tendency is even more pronounced, because just sitting in your lounge talking with 3 good friends is frankly a lot more fun and arguably more worthwhile than going to a play by yourself. Plus there is zero risk and no cost in time or effort involved with sitting in your lounge and waiting for someone you know to happen by, unlike leave-your-home events. The thing MIT students have slowly but firmly become convinced of is not that MIT events will always fail, but that the people going to an event are far more important to one's enjoyment of it than the nature of the event itself.
   So let's look at the successes and failures of certain MIT events in recent memory and see if this analysis makes sense. Things like Late Night or 6.270 get house groups to go to cheer on housemates ("house" in all these cases is applicable to dorm halls or any circle of friends that exists here). They also happen yearly, which helps in planning ahead and building up desire to go. The Autumn Fling did not have anything to attract large groups from individual houses really, and the small groups of people that did poke their heads in saw a lack of people and left, because that sort of event *depends* on a large turnout, without leaving some way to slowly build up to critical crowd mass. The infinite buffet, on the other hand, made it easy to come by in twos or threes and sample the sights, or even come alone and grab some free food. In that way it was like a hack or a good movie...you catch it whenever you can with whoever you can, and then talk about it with lots of people afterwards.
   To sum up, MIT students are hosed and tired. If the choice is to get up enough energy within oneself to actively find some entertainment on a weekend, or just plop on a nearby couch and hang out with the people you live with, the latter will frequently seem like the better investment for the energy price. People need to be prodded and encouraged by their friends or even just acquaintances, because we just don't have the time to spare risking it on something that ends up being lame. (at least if our friends made us do it we can blame it on them). Thus if the choice is between two dances, one at place whose residents you are friends with and the other in Kresge, run by the oh-so-friendly-and-personal MIT <insert committeename here>, you go for the guaranteed payoff.
   Just two final comments: first, I suppose if you agreed with my views you could then ask, "why don't we try to get everyone to make friends outside their living group?" Well it's damn hard to make friends with people you don't have some other excuse to meet, like living by them, but a lot of people do manage to make many many friend through classes and activities already. Also, even if it were easy to meet *everybody*, having 500 "friends" would make the title of "friend" in one's life seem rather unspecial. You just can't be good friends with everyone on campus :(. Second, MIT on the collective administrative side does not give the impression of being student-friendly. Even when they do something right, like the infinite buffet, it's hard not to point at good PR or just plain damage control as the real motivation. Alumni don't want to give money to the MIT administration because of this image.