[If I Went to MIT[1]](#ftnt1) I would…
[Contribute (at the bottom) and comment![2]](#ftnt2)
Any moment I spend at college not totally inspired I start to think about the thousands of kids who would love to have my spot. What if we as students could tap into the ideas they, and wise older people looking back wishing they could be in college now, have? Current students would get awesome inspiration/creativity piped in 24/7, and those on the outside could have dreams they really care about achieved even if they can’t be here themselves. -
At the same time those applying to college, by making clear their dreams, will gain a sense of what they actually want to do, from which can flow meaningful college essay content. Maybe they could even help current college students achieve those dreams, in the process doing something fun, productive, and worthwhile.
Economics is the art of satisfying “unlimited demands with limited resources.” But if we list out our dreams, I think we might find that in a fundamental sense at least, they aren’t necessarily all that difficult to achieve, and that the harder problem is actually finding dreams that are inspiring and worthwhile to the first place. Here’s to creating systems that enable the brushfire-fluid of inspiration to flow through the veins of the Internet! Your ideas -- responses -- will be the sparks that ignite the blaze! Contribute(at the bottom) and comment! Phrased a different way, what would you do if you were me? ~jcole (mit) and nealwu (harvard)
This doc is the beginning of an app that will suggest what you should do...it is a database of dreams and ideas, threads of inspiration, human intentions.
Which is, incidentally, the key ingredient AIs are lacking -- as human motivation is rooted in human experience.
+3
“Tell us what activities you are presently or hope to become involved with at MIT.”
Breakdancing, cross-country ski, martial arts, rock climbing, surfing*, snowboarding, hiking, yoga, debate, acting, SIPB, high-tech entrepreneurship/Web development business, juggling/yoyoing, Rubik's cubing, blogging**, gaming, MIT hacking, playing RPG's, reading science fiction and fantasy and classic literature, cooking my way to the gustatory frontier of the universe, having late-night philosophical discussions, lucid dreaming, meeting incredible people at and around MIT, eating lunch each weekend with friends going to college elsewhere in Boston, living with my best friend of 12 years as a roommate, coding late on Saturday nights with my high school programming buddy and others I'm sure to meet, forging within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my species (sorry James Joyce), and most importantly, sleeping enough on top of this. Lucid dreaming hopefully will help with this latter goal. For the rest, I'll have to rely on Pareto's law (the idea that statistically speaking, 20% of your resources produced 80% of the yield in real economic systems).
*surfing is without a doubt my favorite activity on the list, though ironically, the only one that's actually impractical to do in Boston. (UPDATE: founded the MIT surf club). There's nothing like it -- Dropping into a 7 foot barreling wave is like riding a standup, liquid roller coaster that I control (or if I fall it's like being a cockroach in a trash compactor).
**whether or not I become an admissions blogger :)
Comments:
+5