Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Spring Time Adventures: Sloan A Cappella



In college I sang in an all-female a cappella group, Nothin’ but Treble. In fact I met my husband Brad through a cappella! He was in the guys group Sympathetic Vibrations. I haven’t had a chance to sing a cappella since but awesome Aditya Nag decided to start a group at MIT for grad students. Brad was the director last year and Aditya was the business manager. They made a killer pair, which resulted in a fantastic year of casual, fun a cappella. We got to perform at a couple Sloan town halls, an art gala, and Sloan Follies. 

(I'm the second soloist...and if you watch through to the second song I actually rap too.) :-)

Spring Time Adventures: Sloan Gala

The beautiful LGO ladies- we can do math AND look this good!

Brad loves any excuse to wear his tux so when the tickets for Spring Gala came available we jumped on it! I’m so glad we did too because it was a stinking blast! We went to Newport, RI in the fall but this time we got to do the Cliff Walk, which was beautiful. Sloan rented one of the beautiful Newport mansions and had a delicious dinner followed by dancing. I didn’t want the night to be over!
Outside the mansion

Any excuse to wear a tux...

The Crails looking lovely as always
(I think they always look so good because they are from Texas.) :-)
Check out Nish's sweet white shoes
Beautiful day the morning after






 Cliff Walk!




Spring Time Adventures: Camp Sloan

Some of my favorite folks at Sloan sporting the Camp Counselor shirts
Another highlight from the spring semester was Camp Sloan. 100 Sloanies went over two weekends to cabins in New Hampshire. I volunteered to be a camp counselor and had a blast! The cabins were deep in the woods not near car-accessible roads so we hiked all our gear up the mountain. ‘Campers’ were selected to create a good mix of 1st and 2nd years, and other Sloan programs (SDM, LGO, MFin, etc). 

The outdoors environment seemed to break down walls that seem to exist normally on campus. We had a late-night dance party, some of the more daring counselors set off fireworks, and some even more daring others actually got in the freezing cold lake! The next day we took a 3 or 4 hour hike up to the top of a mountain that had great views of the surrounding area.

Killer hike
('killer' literally, I was pretty scared at this point when we were climbing this ladder!!)
We made it to the top!
The best part of the trip though had to be seeing Sunish Gupta, a (now graduated) SDM student, hike up to the cabins. Sunish started losing his vision about 10 years ago and is now legally blind. The hike was not easy for many of the campers with sight so you can imagine what a daunting task this was for Sunish. Chengran Chai and I had the opportunity to help him step-by-step up that mountain. Chengran held his hand to steady him and we warned him of each rock/tree/root along the way. I talked or sang in front as it helped for him to follow my voice. I ran out of songs by the end of our three-hour journey! Sunish is so incredibly brave. I had the honor of getting to have dinner with his family several months afterward and got to meet his three daughters (13, 2, and a newborn) and his wife (who is also blind). They are SO inspiring!!!
Sunish and Chengran
Check out his story HERE

Spring Time Adventures: Dancing


My Sloanie Semester

My first fall semester at Sloan I didn’t have much time to get involved in many Sloan activities (8 classes/71 units will do that to you!).  In the spring however, my internship at MGH was so close to campus that I could come back for lunch meetings and with zero homework to complete, I could make nighttime meet-ups. The next few posts will highlight all the fun I had last spring!

C-Function Group Dances

"I hate you like I love you" dance
One of my favorite things I did spring semester was dance in essentially all of the C-function dances. Sloan clubs throw a “cultural” (or ‘C’) function almost every Thursday night during the school year. It is a chance for clubs to share their national pride with the rest of the class. I danced in the European, Israeli, Brazilian, Indian C-functions and the Sloan Follies variety show. My favorite has to be the Indian dances. I had the chance to learn Bollywood style dance from the amazing teachers Rashi Gupta and Asha Parekh. I think the Indian C-Function show was definitely the best one of the year (in my opinion). The show ended with me doing the splits (!!) front and center. It was crazy and SO much fun! I loved getting to know more Sloanies through the hours and hours of practices.

Still able to do the splits? check!
Check out the video HERE (I'm the reflectively white one in the middle) :-)
Sloan Follies Dance - "Who rules the world? GIRLS!"