The Masochist's Institute of Technologyanecdotes of an ambitious MIT student

Residents in MIT’s dining dormitories (McCormick, Baker, Next, and Simmons) are required to pay a mandatory $300 for a “house dining” plan. As compensation, all meals at these four dining halls are half-off. Students who do not live in a dormitory with a dining hall are not required to pay this mandatory $300. Currently, the dining system is subsidized by MIT funds. However, it was revealed earlier this year that MIT has run up quite a large deficit ($600k, I believe) from keeping up with these dining halls, and there has been quite a bit of talk about revamping the dining plans on campus.

Well, that change has come, and it’s not pretty.

Proposed revision of dining plan

That’s actually a misnomer. It’s not proposed; it has passed, and we’re going to be dealing with it whether we like it or not.

Under the new dining plan, all current dining halls will move from 5-day (Sunday-Thursday) dinner hours to 7-day breakfast + dinner hours. That gives us a total of 9 extra meals (7 breakfast + 2 extra dinner). In the future, there may also be late-night and lunch options (which will probably require us to pay even more). According to the report, the dining halls will seek to improve their facilities, offering a wider range of foods and healthier choices.

That all sounds fine and dandy, but then the price was revealed.

$1900 per semester.

My literally stood up and screamed when I saw the price. Any ounce of dignity and objectivity I possessed up to that point immediately went out the window. So this entry is dedicated solely to ranting about this atrocity.

An email thread immediately started up on next-forum, the Next House mailing list (we’re one of the dining dorms). Under the new plan, not only would we have to pay over $3600 a semester for housing (for a single room; those in doubles pay $3200 or so), but we would also be required to pay this $1900 a semester on top. That totals about $10,000 a year in living/dining expenses alone. That is equivalent to about 6 credit hours of tuition at my state college (UT Austin). It’s horrendous. My family is not dirt poor (although in that case, MIT would give you a full ride anyways so it wouldn’t matter), but they certainly don’t have money to throw around. I’m severely disappointed that such a significant portion of only working parent’s salary has to go towards feeding other people.

That’s right; all of the residents of dining-hall dorms are required to pay this $1900, even if they choose to not eat at the dining hall at all. Essentially, if I didn’t eat at the dining hall, I would be paying $1900 a semester so that other people could eat.

I’m sorry if it sounds really selfish, but I am not going to sit around and pay for other people’s meals.

“Okay,” you say. “So you don’t want to pay for other people. Why don’t you just eat more often at Next Dining, then?” The simple answer?

I don’t eat that much.

When I visit Next Dining, I spend a maximum of $2.00 on a dinner. It’s usually a salad + a drink. Let’s assume that, under the old plan, I decide to eat:

• One salad + one drink every day of the week dining is open (5 days a week)
• Every single day of the month (around 20 days)
• Every month that it is open (Sept-Dec, Jan-May; total of 9 months, or 180 days). That’s a total of $360 that I spend in Next Dining.
• Let’s also add in the cost of eating out-of-dorm and groceries. I spend probably $50 in TechCash every month eating from random places (LaVerde’s, Lobdell, Sloan, etc.) That’s $450. Toss in $30 a month from groceries. That’s $270.
• That brings me to a total of $450 + $270 + $360. That’s $1080. And I don’t actually eat in dining every day. I eat there maybe twice a week. So you can actually remove $200 from that above sum, if you want accuracy.

“Okay”, you say. “But that’s under the old meal plan. You get 7 breakfasts and 7 dinners! Isn’t that enough for the $1900 to be worth it?”

Simple answer: no.

Complicated answer: the new meal plan works as an all-you-can-eat, so I can’t use the above numbers as a metric. However, I can use an alternative comparison.

My family used to go out grocery shopping as a family every week, back when my siblings were younger and couldn’t be left at home alone. So we would go out, all seven of us, and purchase groceries from the Chinese market and H-E-B (a grocery store in Texas similar to Shaw’s up here in Boston). I remember looking at the receipt and gasping. We were spending about $200 a week on groceries! That mean that over the course of 9 months, we spent $7200 on food. That’s a lot.

• However, my family had eight members.
• Dividing $7200 by 8 gives you $900 for 9 months of food.
• That food included breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and midnight munchies.

And now here I am, in college, paying over twice as much for food… food that I don’t even eat. Where is the rationality in this?

Summary of my complaints

1. No matter how you look at it, I will never eat enough to cover the cost of that $1900 payment. For one thing, I am a very light eater (as I said before, my dinners usually consist of a salad and a drink). I’m sorry, MIT, if you expect your students to eat that much, but I would like to remain thin and healthy. I’m not going to eat more just to make your ridiculously overpriced dining plan worth it.
2. I keep strange hours. Dining halls (in aggregate) will span the hours of 5-9pm, but looking at my schedule for next semester, I will be out of the dorm until at least 6pm every day. I have student group meetings, Asian Dance Team rehearsals, office hours to attend, and labs that need to be completed. I will most likely not be anywhere near a dining hall during those hours. I can’t eat if I’m not there.
3. I’m very miffed that, in addition to paying full tuition (since MIT refuses to give any financial aid to middle-class families), I now have to pay a mandatory $1900 against my will. That is ridiculous. Ignoring the obvious infraction of freedom of choice, the numbers themselves are ridiculous. In short, I don’t eat enough to warrant that amount.

What I personally think should happen (but probably won’t)

Problem: MIT dining is running a deficit.

Solution #1. as proposed by P.Iannucci ’11 of Next House

Take the $600,000/yr deficit, divide it by the number of people in dorms with dining, and then charge them that much more. It’s like $250 a term by rough estimate. I would be far more willing to pay $550/semester on top of the housing fee rather than $1900/semester, and it would allow dining to break even.

As for removing further deficit from dining, here are a few points I would like to make:

• Get rid of McCormick Dining. Baker House is right next to McCormick; there is no reason why there should be two dining halls within that close of a walking distance. How many people actually eat in McCormick Dining anyways? I realize that McCormick is a female-only residence, and the girls may prefer to eat with members of their own gender, but seriously? Just get over it and go to Baker. There’s always empty tables at Baker Dining anyways.
• Get rid of Simmons Dining, but keep the Simmons Late-Night Cafe. Simmons is directly across the field from Next House. It takes exactly 3 minutes at a casual walk to make it from Simmons to Next. We also always have empty tables at Next Dining.
• Make dining plans optional. I was lotteried into Next House as my 4th choice dorm (my 1st choice was Macgregor, where there are no dining halls). It’s already bad enough that I had to live at a dorm that was not my initial choice, but forcing me to take a dining plan I never wanted on top of that? It’s just ridiculous.

If I have to pay $1900 a semester for food I won’t eat, I am moving out of this place.
In the “Read More” link: a few quotes and responses from the email thread that cropped up.
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There’s never a dull moment in my life, it seems. Well, besides the fact that I’m sitting at my computer on Veteran’s Day desperately trying to learn Laplace transforms. That’s not exactly dull either; it’s simply something stressful that I would rather not do.

Thankfully, one of the wonders of college life lies in the fact that there always seems to be weekend distractions to alleviate said stress. October 2009 was definitely interesting; I attended a few parties and had a some majorly exciting moments. Here are a few of the highlights:

The night before the launch of Windows 7, the Microsoft Cambridge office held a huge launch party! There were students from Northeastern, Boston University, MIT, Harvard, and more. Although it wasn’t quite as exciting as I had hoped, it was definitely quite an adventure. I gorged myself on chips and salsa and wandered around with Chao and Jason. There was a Microsoft Surface table to sample, Rockband (Beatles version) to play – although I did not, because I’m not a Beatles fan – and free prizes to be had. They must have given away hundreds of dollars in prizes; Tiffany managed to wrestle a copy of Office 2007 out of someone’s hands, even though she managed to slice her thumb open in the process. Props to Tiffany and her dedication to free goods ;)

Late October, instead of accepting my invitation to the Alpha Delta Phi semiformal, I headed out amidst the wind and rain to karaoke with two of my Alpha Chi Omega sisters – Sarah Sprague ’13 and Ingrid Chaires ’11! We managed to sing everything from Broadway musicals (Phantom of the Opera!) to late-90′s pop (Britney Spears) to 80′s pop to the latest hits (Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, etc.) It was a ton of fun, especially since all of us were perfectly content to warble out the songs without caring too much about how on-pitch we happened to be…

“What’s this?” you say. “Vivian, I thought you got out of all that math-sciency stuff, aren’t you an economics major now?” Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but economics majors deal with numbers all the time. Especially at MIT, where the economics is very highly mathematical. This is a piece of my first 14.02 (macroeconomics) problem set, which I nearly aced after only attending class for a week. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself =)

And of course, the obligatory food image. Let’s just say that as of late I’ve gotten quite addicted to Next Dining‘s salad bar. I always get the same – a bunch of greens, topped with a ton of tomatoes (no one seems to like them), eggs, noodles (when available), olives (at times), and the slightest bit of vinaigrette dressing. And the best thing? An entire box of salad (which can fill up my Tupperware bowl) is only worth a jaw-dropping $1.50! Talk about cheap and healthy dinner…

Last but certainly not least, Alpha Chi Omega recently had its pledge class 2009 initiation… That means I’m now a full-fledged sister! After the ceremony, we went back to the student center and had celebratory desserts, serenades, and photo-ops. Shown above are all the sophomores (c/o 2012) currently in the sorority – there were four sophomore initiates this year. Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of the entire 2009 pledge class, but I’m sure the photo above is completely representative of the electric happiness present in the room the entire night =)