MIT Nerd Pride
How to live the Compsci Dream
Apart from the mathematical skills of a certain janitor, MIT must be most famous for the technological wizardry performed within its walls.  Perhaps not so well known are the magical efforts of the students, which are encapsulated in all sorts of contraptions littering various dorms and labs.  In the dress-down oasis of MIT, this spirit is most obviously expressed in the huge number of t-shirts proclaiming 'Nerd Pride'; "Don't drink and derive" is still my personal favourite, but I dare not mention the rest.
As you might expect from this, MIT is nearly a totally wired community (if not utopia).  Every academic course, association, and living group, typically has all numbers of mailing lists, which provide as much information as you can possibly want (and valuable exercise clicking that delete key).  Among the MIT-wide mailing lists, reuse@mit is particularly useful for picking up items (from computers to cars) that other people are throwing away.
To help you keep in touch with this massive side of MIT, there is a wealth of computers (over 1,300) run under MIT's Project Athena (which sadly may not be as deathless as the famous daughter).  The machines (Dells, Suns, and much-beloved SGIs) are grouped in more than 40 clusters scattered throughout all the major buildings and are available to all 24 hours a day all through term.  It may seem scary now, but you can practically be guaranteed that someone will be working away in most clusters every one of those hours.
You need not worry if you are not too hot on your UNIX commands or GNOME menus; there is an abundance of resources to help you.  Athena Consulting is the official MIT computer advisory service, which offers personal and online assistance with operating Athena and any of the supported software.  Student Information Processing Board (SIPB) situated just outside the W20 Athena cluster (by far the best cluster, especially machine W20-575-69) is a student-run group that will give you help with any of your computational problems, especially the applications not supported by Athena Consulting.  They are only human, however, so when you stagger there at 2am shaking after just deleting your lab report due the next day, they can only smirk and point to the “rm is forever” poster; nevertheless, at least they do try to help people as stupid as, well … OK, me.  
If you are bringing your own computer (only really recommended if it is a laptop) or buying one in America, then every dorm and most FSILGs have network connections in the rooms.  The Residential Computing @ MIT (RCC), a student run advisory group, will help you with all the relevant technical details and setting up the connection to the MIT network, MITNet.  RCC have representatives in practically every dorm and FSILG and will happily help you choose some ‘wacky’ hostname for your beloved machine.
Inc, zwrite, and a whole host of other UNIX commands may be unknown to you now, but given time, the experience of using the Athena UNIX environment will be a useful one for the CV.  Furthermore, in your various courses you may also come to use any number of applications, from MatLab to LaTeX (sadly not as kinky as it sounds), all of which can only add to your Athena fun.  Instant messaging programs must be the most popular applications (and biggest distractions) on Athena, and are often the best way nowadays to keep in touch with folks back home.  Also, I heartily recommend the Athena courses offered during the week before classes for a good introduction into the computing environment.    
Useful links:
Computing Resources Index http://web.mit.edu/cwis/computing.html   
Athena Consulting Home Page http://web.mit.edu/consult/www/       
SIPB Home Page http://www.mit.edu/sipb/       
Residential Computing @ MIT (RCC) http://web.mit.edu/rescomp/    
If your laptop or computer gets a nasty virus or throws a wobbly do not hesitate to take it to the Computer Services department in building N52 and they can generally sort it out free of charge.
 

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