Monthly Archives: October 2011

Looking Back on SP Orientation 2011

The SP Orientation 2011 concluded with the Boston Aquarium tour on September 17th. We had fun dancing to the tunes of Beyonce and Lady Gaga, munching freshly grilled burgers with a chilled beer in hand, brunching on the best Sunday breakfast ever and roaming around Boston. In the Orientation Newsletter, we, the SP orientation committee, promised to bring you a series of fun and fabulous events and that is exactly what we did.  Let’s take a moment to review some of the fun we have had.

The Orientation Dance Party with the raised dance floor and a superb DJ performace (Photo courtesy of SP Photofile Committee)

The Orientation Dance Party was on the evening of September 2nd and what a party it was! With over four hundred people, this must had been the best orientation party in town. I am not the only person saying that. A couple of my friends from Sloan, who have organized spectacular parties in places like Seattle and DC, joined the party that night and were like “awesome party, dude!” Students who attended almost all the parties during this orientation season still remember Sidney-Pacific’s as the best one. I seriously hope you didn’t miss it. With the weather in our favor and the mood in the air, it was all-a-tapping for guys and girls on the dance floor. Interestingly, the raised dancing platform was actually not part of the original plan. Although it took a while to set it up, I’m glad we did it. We had an absolutely superb DJ performance. They really amazed everyone with the screen setup in front of the dance floor showing the music video of the song. It was pure joy to see so many of the new residents come and enjoy the dance party. We ended the party with a birthday celebration for George Lan, President of Sidney-Pacific.

The Orientation Brunch attracted more than 400 students. (Photo courtesy of SP Photofile Committee)

The Orientation Brunch on September 4th was an outstanding event in its own right. Over four hundred students attended, with a lot of first year students from all of the graduate houses on campus. We started the preparation at 7 AM in the SP kitchen. From cooking scrambled eggs, baked potatoes, baked beans, sausage, and bacon to cutting all sorts of fresh fruit, it was a heroic task that was accomplished in a record time by a group of fifty-some dedicated SP volunteers. Ozge, our beloved brunch chair, worked really hard and did an excellent job of managing all the enthusiastic volunteers. Three serving queues were opened simultaneously to reduce the wait time. In about twenty minutes, we served around four hundred students. They were out in the courtyard eating, chatting, mingling or just plainly enjoying the sunshine. Many residents liked the fact that the brunch menu was advertised on the corridor walls next to the queue. Seeing it in advance added to the gourmet pleasure.

The Rock ‘n Roast Orientation BBQ was held on the evening of September 10th. Every year Sidney-Pacific has a tradition of organizing the best BBQ on the campus, be it in terms of food, fun, or friends. It just runs in the SP blood and we can’t help it! A tremendous amount of preparation had to be done in advance because of the scale of the event. Fortunately, we had many volunteers showing up right from the start and many of them were new residents of SP. This was one of those “see it to believe it” type of event. Volunteers showed up, took a task and the job got done. Whether it was husking three hundred corn ears, chopping up thirty pounds of onions and forty pounds of tomatoes, grilling one thousand burgers or raising a mammoth screen for our outdoor movie screening pleasure, it was all accomplished with lots of fun. The whole event went smoothly and efficiently, thanks to all the volunteers. I sometimes wonder if these are some extraordinary people I am living with or if SP is just a unique place that makes it all happen! Perhaps it is both!

Every year Sidney-Pacific has a tradition of organizing the best BBQ on the campus. (Photo courtesy of SP Photofile Committee)

During the BBQ, residents enjoyed fresh juicy burgers, wholesome fruits, and cold beverages while being entertained by the music. Keeping in line with the international culture of SP, we served vegetarian, turkey and braided chicken burgers, besides the usual beef burgers. Was that all? Well, there was Tim the Beaver, our school’s mascot, going around shaking hands with his fellow classmates. We also had representatives from Zipcar at a table in the courtyard and they were very impressed by the turnout. After sunset, an outdoor movie was screened and many of us watched it with friends while sipping on hot coffee.

Getting to know your Housemasters in the Housemaster's Welcome Dinner. (Photo courtesy of SP Photofile Committee)

Housemaster’s Welcome Dinner, Bike Auction Coffee Hour, French Dessert Outing, and Art Crawl were all very successful events and were well-attended by the residents. All of the organizers collected good memories along the way that we will cherish for time to come.  We hope that you also had your share. We are interested to hear your feedback on these events. We’ve already heard that almost everyone could find an event that suited his or her interest. Also, many new residents appreciated the fact that we used composting in almost all of the SP orientation events, but we want to know how we can do better next year, so take a moment to fill out the Orientation survey later in the newsletter.

“All good things must come to an end” and so the orientation season has come to an end. But wait, that doesn’t mean the fun is over! We just had our ice cream outing and SPICE Coffee Hour and we have various interesting events coming up too. Please see the SP announcement and the website for the schedule of these upcoming social events.

Sidney-Pacific, Make it Yours!

By Birendra Jha and Hussam Zebian, SP Orientation Chairs

Tell Us What You Think About The SP Orientation

Now that SP orientation is over, please take a moment to tell us what things went well and what could be improved. This orientation survey takes only 5 minutes to complete, and your feedback and suggestions will help us make future SP orientations even better.

The link to the SP Orientation Survey 2011:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGQtdXlhaEM3bnpuX2g3cEx6c3FGYVE6MQ

All survey respondents will have the chance to be entered into a random drawing for 5 SP mugs. Just indicate that you would like to enter the raffle at the end of the survey. Thank you for participating in the survey, and we hope you had lots of fun during SP orientation this year!

By Steven Chang, SP Newsletter Chair

SP Visit to the Recycling Center

On August 31st, residents from Sidney-Pacific and Ashdown House visited the Casella recycling facility in Charlestown. The facility collects raw, unprocessed recyclable material from collectors, sorts the material by type, and then sends the sorted materials to plants, both domestic and abroad, for processing. We received a personal tour of the facility, an overview of the recycling industry, and an inside look at how the plant operates.

Thousands of tons of new recyclable material are brought into the facility every day. (Photo courtesy of Sunny)

Some interesting facts:

  • Casella Recycling is a publicly traded company and receives no incentives from the government.
  • The Charlestown plant, which is largest recycling plant east of the Mississippi River, sorts material from Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, as well as the Boston metro area. The facility has over 140 conveyor belts and employs 150 people.
  • The plant exports 50% of all sorted material to China, mostly comprised of paper and cardboard, as well as all Plastics 3-7.
  • In 2010 alone, the facility sorted 1.5 million tons of recyclables.
  • It costs $70 for one ton of trash to be disposed of at a landfill. Cities and municipalities receive $10 back for one ton of recyclable material sent to the facility.
  • The facility uses “single stream” technology, which means that a mixture of all recyclable material is put on the same line. This also means that at home, we don’t have to pre-sort our recyclables.
  • The facility uses the physical and optical properties of materials to physically separate them to a minimum purity of 95%, with tools like magnets, eddy current machines, and optical sorters.

Casella employees pre-sort out material that may damage equipment, like plastic bags and large metal objects. (Photo courtesy of Sunny)

The visit followed an environmental discussion dinner that took place earlier this August with participants from SP, Ashdown and Edgerton. The theme of the discussion was the export of plastics 3 through 7 to China, and it touched on related topics such as the health effects on Chinese workers. The discussion concluded with an open question on why these plastics are not processed here in America. On the trip to the Casella recycling facility, the head manager confirmed that Casella does export all plastics 3-7 unsorted together to China, where low-cost labor manually sorts through it. He noted the lack of demand for these plastics in America.

The visit confirmed that recycling is not just a theoretical sustainability goal, but a real and growing industry that supports local jobs and an international industry, saving millions of tons of waste in the process. The recycling center collects thousands of tons of material every day, material that would otherwise end up in a landfill. With Casella’s zero-sort policy, recycling is now easier than ever. Please do your part to recycle!

If you missed the visit, you can go on one of the following tours organized by the City of Cambridge (email recycle@cambridgema.gov for more info): September 21st 1:30pm, October 19th 1:30pm and November 15th 8:30am. You can also take the virtual tour here: http://zero-sort.com/

By Sunny Vanderboll and Jean-Philippe Coutu

Explore Boston with Your Bike

Bike trip to Concord organized by SP Bikes Chair and SP bike interest group (Photo courtesy of SP Photofile Committee)

In the busy life of an MIT grad student, exploring the Boston area usually means a quick trip just across the river.  However, the country-side surrounding Boston is one of the things I have enjoyed most since coming to MIT, and is usually overlooked. Cycling is one way to fill in this gap.  In the words of Hemingway,

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”

On the way to the ice cream shop (Photo courtesy of SP Photofile Committee)

The first weekend in September was the first bike trip of the term, organized by the SP bikes chair and the SP bike interest group.  Fourteen of us set off after the SP orientation brunch and several were using SP zip-bikes.  Our goal was Kimball Farms, a well-known ice cream stand near Concord.  We traveled up the river past Harvard and joined the Minute-Man trail, a converted rail-way line that travels straight to Bedford.  After a quick break, we continued on and made it to the ice cream shop, only to discover that there was already a substantial line (at only 4pm!).  Most residents ordered a “small” ice cream, about twice the size of a large at Tosci’s, in a variety of flavors including chocolate raspberry swirl and black raspberry chocolate chip.  However, our Athletics chair declared that he could handle a large but gave up halfway through.  Satisfied and filled with sugar, we made the final trip to Concord where we took the commuter rail back to Boston, arriving back at SP just five hours after we left.

Ice cream from Kimball Farms (Photo courtesy of SP Photofile Committee)

In summary, and in the spirit of MIT and completely unnecessary quantification, I present the ice cream ride in numbers:

People 14 (13 SidPac)
Total Ice  Cream 20 pints
Cycling Energy 11,300 Cal
Ice Cream Energy 11,200 Cal
Distance 33.6 miles
Advertised Distance 15 miles
Avg. Speed 12.5 mph
Max. Speed 33 mph
Speed Limit 25 mph

By Zachary Ulissi, SP Bikes Chair

Junior Housemasters Corner

Samuel and Joshua, Junior Housemasters

Q: I’m hungry – where can I get good food?

A:  Well, we mostly like pizza and chicken nuggets.  But here are some places our parents go on “date nights” without us…

Budget:

Clover food truck – Chickpea sandwich for $5

Good value: 

Helmand – Afghani food (http://www.yelp.com/biz/the-helmand-cambridge)

Top of the Hub – Prix fixe lunch ($22). Great food and view without having to pay for the observatory (http://www.yelp.com/biz/top-of-the-hub-boston)

Special occasion:

Oleana – Fantastic fusion Middle Eastern food.  Book online, or show up early to grab a table. (http://www.yelp.com/biz/oleana-restaurant-cambridge)

Note: Junior Housemasters’ an­swers have kindly been translated by their parents Annette and Roland

SP Writing Contest – Write and Win BIG Money!

What do you do for fun during your free time at MIT? The Sidney-Pacific SPeaker is holding its first ever writing contest! Write an article describing one fun activity that you do and would recommend to your fellow SP residents. It can be any activity, indoors or outdoors, that you have done in Cambridge or Boston. Some potential examples include: a fun board game that you played, a ski trip that you went to, a bike trail that you explored or a Salem ghost tour that made you scream! Submit your article to the Sidney-Pacific SPeaker and you could win a $50 of Amazon gift card! A three-member judging committee comprising Housemasters and SPEC officers will rate each submission based on content, style and creativity. Be creative to impress the judges! The winner and the runner-up will receive $50 and $25 of Amazon gift cards, respectively. In addition, we will also have a “popular vote” prize – the article with the highest number of Facebook “likes” on the newsletter website will receive a $10 Amazon gift card. So what do you say? Are you ready to share your favorite activity on the newsletter?

The details of the writing contest are listed below:

  • The writing contest is limited to the SP residents
  • The deadline of submitting your article is 10/24
  • Your article should be on one activity that you have done during your free time at MIT
  • Choose an appropriate title for your article
  • The length of the article is limited to 700 words (excluding title and captions)
  • Attach up to 3 photos (with captions) that go with your article for one bonus point (these photos will not be shown to the judging committee, but should your article be chosen to be published, they will be used)
  • The writing committee will receive your article anonymously
  • Your article will be rated based on content, style and creativity
  • The winner and the runner-up will receive $50 and $25 of Amazon gift card respectively
  • The top two rated articles will be published on paper
  • The top five rated articles will be published on the newsletter website and enter the contest for the “popular vote” prize
  • The winner for the popular vote prize ($10) will be decided based on the number of Facebook “likes” on the newsletter website two weeks after the chosen articles are published online
  • Submit your article and photos to sp-newsletter-chair@mit.edu

More questions and concerns about the writing contest? Contact the newsletter chair at sp-newsletter-chair@mit.edu

By Steven Chang, SP Newsletter Chair