Dear MIT-

When I first set foot on MIT's campus, when I was merely a high school student with big dreams, I remember feeling for the first time in my life like I was home.  One thing I remember very clearly happened on the campus tour.  See, there was one vital portion of college life missing from the tour, and it stood out in stark contrast to any other college tour I had been on.

"Why aren't you showing us any of the dorms?"

The tour guide looked at all of us very seriously and said, "MIT has so many dorms, and no two of them are the same.  I can't possibly show you one dorm and have it be representative.  You'll have to experience yourself."

So many different dorms, all with different communities, that all need to be experienced before someone can even have an idea of what dorm life at MIT means.  That tour guides words proved true when I stepped on campus as a freshman, ready and willing to throw myself into whatever it meant to be a student at MIT.  And the campus was willing to show me, Daily Confusion documenting it all, from Burton-Connor to East Campus to Next House to Random Hall.  I did things I never thought I would do before, that I'd never had the opportunity to because no one else would do them with me.  REX showed me, wide-eyed and slightly awkward 18-year-old that I was, that not only would I be getting a world-class education, but MIT was someplace I belonged because there were people like me here. 

So imagine my suprise and dismay when I picked up the January 26, 2011 issue of The Tech, and the bold headline of "REX Drastically Shortened".  How could REX, that wonderful, vibriant celebration of MIT communites be limited to a single 24-hour-period?  I read through the article, hoping that I'd interpreted the headline wrong, hoping that maybe it was an alarmist reading of the meeting between the UA and Director Norman and Dean Young.

But it wasn not.  The assertions made by the administrators make it clear that REX would be effectively shortened, as it would during run the last two days of FPOPs, and that students who arrived on Sunday would only get the 24-hours before the readjustment lottery.  And this notion that, since REX still has the full period, just moved around, was unchanged was devestating to me.  Because the students most effected by this change are those like me.

I did not have the opportunity to participate in an FPOP.  I came on the required check-in day.  My parents both work for a public school district that starts in September.  As you are probably aware, the amount of work that must happen before the start of the new school year on the administrative side is huge.  My parents literally could not escape work until that weekend to drive me halfway across the country to MIT.  And if this plan was put in place when I was a freshman, MIT would have done me a massive disservice.

I would not have been able to make some of the deep and lasting friendships that I still have that were first forged in REX.  As an upperclassmen in the following years, I would not have had enough time to meet with the freshman in an unregimented setting and offer advice.  REX is as important to upperclassmen as it is to freshman.  It's a time when we take pride in ourselves and our communities and really do some special things.

And REX is one particular thing that makes MIT special.  Yes, no other college that I know of has something like it, but this is not the case where we should try to be more in line with other institutions.  I remember calling my parents when they dropped my younger brother off at college in Philadelphia.  "It wasn't anything like MIT," my dad said in a funny tone of voice.  "It was so...impersonal.  I didn't understand at first why you guys do it that way, but now?  I like your way better."

REX is something we do better.  It's important, and it's a quirk that makse MIT, well, MIT.  And since I care so much about MIT, its mission, and what it has done for me, I cannot in good conscious support the way decisions are being made that undermine student life.  Not when it is so fundemental to the Institute.  Therefore, I have donated $1 to the Campaign for Students fund, and the rest of my donation, $49, is being given to a high-poverty classroom in the Boston Public School District for science or math education from DonorsChoose.org instead.

Because I just hope the future students of MIT can have the same chance I did.

Sincerely,

Ash Turza
Class of 2010