MIT Visitation
On April 3, I attended MIT’s visitation day for prospective students in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. After a breakfast for all students visiting the department, those of us who were accepted into the Master of Science in Transportation program, about twenty of us, were taken by Dr. Joseph Sussman to go through our day of activities. Various research groups presented what their current research is about before we headed to lunch. In the afternoon we were provided time to visit the two research groups we were most interested in so we could ask questions, in which I chose to hear from Dr. Joseph Ferreira in Urban Planning and then John Attanucci and Mikel Murga from Transit.
One interesting aspect of this visit was a chance to listen to a talk by James A. Aloisi, Massachusett’s Secretary of Transportation. As part of a speaker series at MIT, he was discussing the issues facing the Commonwealth and the ways he is hoping to take progressive steps to solve them. I was glad the department allowed us to sit on this talk, it made the visit unique. In considering all my potential schools, I had already evaluated the lecture series they have running, and I applaud MIT for showcasing it to us.
After a Q&A session with current students, we were brought to a reception to interact with them as we pleased. The evening ended with them taking us out in Boston to eat, drink, bowl, and shoot pool. I enjoyed the visit because it had the most variety of events throughout the day of schools I have been to so far. Boston of course is a great city, and I relished the chance to go up for the weekend. I also got to take Amtrak’s Northeast Regional train there and back.
