blog

We’re now three weeks into the semester at MIT where I just started a PhD program in linguistics. The Linguistics and Philosophy department is housed in The Ray and Maria Stata Center, also known as building 32. It’s a Frank Gehry building and thus crazy looking.¹

We see photographers on the street from time to time taking pictures of the building. In fact, the first day I got to Boston this fall, I walked into my hotel room and there was a framed photo of Stata on the wall.

The department basically occupies the eighth and ninth floors of the Dreyfoos tower side. There’s a nice common space with some red couches and a spiral staircase.

All of us first years share an office together on the ninth floor (32-D976). The room is elliptical, with our desks along the side with windows and the other “wall” being a series of wooden bookshelves. It’s great to share an office with the cohort, as we all take all the same classes the first year as well.

Here’s the room for “Meg Data” just across the hall from our office. I was really hoping it was a woman named “Meg Data”… marrying her would get me one step closer to becoming “Dr. Data.” Alas, “Meg Data” or “MEG Data” apparently is simply a label for some data store—possibly some servers.

The majority of the building is the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) so there are posters up for fun-looking talks that I’m too busy for.

Here’s my desk (with Foxkeh!) and my new bike which I’ve been bringing up to the office. The final photo is a photo of me with an “I ♥ The Web” poster in commemoration of OneWebDay.

We’ve been getting pretty busy with the readings and work for our classes, as well as occasionally hanging out. I hope to write some more posts both linguistic and non-linguistic in the coming days on life at MIT.

Related posts:

1. I’m Busy to Die

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags: linguistics, MIT, Stata Center

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed (optionally with tweets from my Twitter)!

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 2:49 pm and is filed under life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.