It's Orientation here this week.  This mostly means that there are zillions of identically-t-shirted young people chanting out slogans and being forced to learn synchronized dance routines.

I hate it.

When I was a freshman, 23 years ago, MIT's orientation week was combined with the period when you picked your housing.  You were assigned a temporary dorm (mine was MacGregor, which is entirely made up of singles), and then there was a four-day frenzy of fraternity rush, sorority rush, "independent living group" [aka ex-frats that had gone co-ed, largely] rush, alongside a more low-key period to check out the dorms and rank them, if you decided not to join a frat/sorority/ILG.  And there was also Orientation. 

It was confusing.  By the time we got to the Orientation part of the week, most of us were exhausted.  I'd decided ultimately to live in the dorms (I think 30% of people, most of them men, joined FSILGs, which meant that the gender ratio in the dorms might even have been more women than men?), in part because I had met someone who was one class ahead of me who eventually became one of my closest friends.  (We're not as close nowadays, but really, who of us is as close nowadays to the people we met in our first week of college?)  Sharon had run an event at Random Hall (yes, that's its name) where we made gnocchi, and it seemed far more authentically fun than most of the BS that was happening at all of the other dorms/FSILGs.  (Unfortunately, I still can't make gnocchi that don't fall apart.  Perhaps I should email her and get her recipe.)

After all of that, Orientation was just exhausting.  We'd not slept for days.  Many of us (including me) had been told "no" by an FSILG.  (This is a really terrible thing to happen during your first week of college, I should note.)  And then they wanted us to get into groups of strangers and do trust falls and learn about cultural diversity and do physical activities and Make Friends.  They called it MOYA, for Move Off Your Assumptions (God, I want those brain cells back.)

I fled. 

See, there's nothing stopping you from just...walking away.  And while lots of Orientation was "mandatory", it's not as though it's, you know, mandatory.  So I left.  I wandered Boston.  I went shopping.  I read along the Esplanade on the Charles River. 

I did bits and pieces here and there of Orientation, and I remember my MOYA group leader being really frustrated with me.  But I thought then, and still think now, that Orientation is fundamentally misguided, because it presumes that by taking a group of culturally diverse (and neurodiverse!) people and pretending that they're all extroverts with lots of common ground, everyone will have fun and make friends.

What is actually true is that for some people, including me, it's basically the psychological equivalent to having people shout at them for four days.  And I didn't sign up for Boot Camp, I went to nerd college.

At times, I have tried to improve Orientation here, but the other big problem with it is that Orientation reproduces itself.  The people who lead Orientation are the people who love Orientation, and who see nothing wrong with acting as though our class of Math and CS students, which is roughly 60% non-Canadian-born, is actually made up of a bunch of culturally unified extroverts.  Year after year, this structure reproduces itself.

I hate Orientation.