T-Shirts @ MIT

As I was trying to pick out something to wear this morning, I realized that more and more of my wardrobe is composed of MIT-themed t-shirts. I was holding one that I had just got this Sunday as I was initiated in Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering Honor Society. The front of the t-shirt said: "There's nothing an engineer can't fix", while the back had an image of a smiling duck-tape and the question "Where's the duck-tape?". I kept looking through my closet and found a Course 5 t-shirt (with Superman's "S" replaced by a "5", which stands for Course 5, Chemistry). Then I found one from MADMEC 2008, a materials for alternative energy competition from this past summer. The shirt was green and had the image of a cow whose tail turned into an electrical plug with lightning bolts coming out of it. That's the one I picked to wear as I headed to work in the lab.

This is one part of MIT culture that I hadn't heard about before I came here, but it's one of my favourites. I'm a big fan of the course t-shirts which let people know what department you're in. And I'm a bigger fan of t-shirts that promote campus groups I otherwise wouldn't hear about, such as the "MIT Laboratory for Chocolate Science".  I'm only saddened by the fact that my major, Course 3, Materials Science and Engineering, doesn't have a t-shirt that's funny enough or clever enough to compete with the other majors. Of course, I'm talking about  the Course 20, Biological Engineering t-shirt: the mooing turtle or the clucking dog.

I hope you enjoyed the image of the Glyoxal Lanthanum Telluride t-shirt!