The Year in Review

The Year in Review I love the holiday season, but not for its parties and food, its celebration and decorations, or its gift-giving and well wishing. I love it more for its signal of the year coming to an end and the promise of the new one to begin. I prefer the days right after the holidays, taking ornaments off the tree to pack them away while drinking cocoa and listening to my Christmas CDs for the last time. I like recycling wrapping paper, cleaning out closets of last year’s coats and donating them, filing paperwork, going through old emails and cleaning up all of my computer desktops. And I especially love all the year in review lists. Because this was my first year in the Admissions office at MIT, I thought I would post 10 highlights of my year in review. And what an awesome year it was! 1. This is a view of  the Charles River during the Fast Light Festival and it also happens to be my nightly walk over the Charles River to my commuter train at Ruggles. Need I say more? 2. The 150th exhibit and all the year-long festivities. The exhibit is only up until December 31 but you can still check it out online. 3.  Bhangra dancing.    It’s everywhere at MIT… at CPW, in our upcoming videos, in lobby 7… and its pretty great. 4. The List Visual Art Center and all the public art on campus. I’m looking forward to the next exhibit in February of the work of New York-based artist Cheyney Thompson. 5. Blogs and more blogs. I love the new look of our admission website with the hand drawn  avatars. And here are a few of my favorite blog posts of the year. Elizabeth singing, Chris doing his Chris thing as only Chris can do  and Lydia’s words of wisdom. 6. The Ivy Plus Conference with my colleagues. Here we are stopping for lunch on the way in Mystic, Connecticut. 7. Fireworks from Killian Court. 8. CPW and eating liquid nitrogen ice cream with Kirsten 9. The Rainbow Lounge. 10. Committee. Long days, hard work, and plenty of laughs. Baby Monkey was sent in someone’s application for fun and it became a theme song for the winter (at least in my head it did.) Warning! The crazy song is addictive. Happy Holidays to all and best wishes for the New Year.