Okay, so I made a mistake.

Not four weeks into the fall semester of my first year, I sat in calculus lecture with 599 of my best friends and listened as the professor wrapped up the first unit of the course.

"Now that we have finished," he said, "with all the preliminary material about vectors and projections and curves, we will now embark upon a study of a topic which is very important in science and engineering, and that topic is multivariable calculus proper."

Brief silence. An instant later, at least twothirds of the class whispered breathily, emphatically--erotically--and in union, "Yes!"

I didn't understand the pathos that lay within said math professor's nerdy pronouncement, but I guess a few hundred other first-year students did ("Yes!"). I liked calculus, too, but not enough to whip myself into a hot-and-bothered frenzy over partial differentiation.

I thought for a few minutes about this quick professor-student exchange and then added it to my growing laundry list of reasons why enrolling at MIT was the dumbest thing I'd ever done.

The decisions that you make--or at least the biggest decisions I made--at the age of 17 may seem ill-advised later on.

Unlike eighty percent of those high-school seniors who find fat envelopes from Byerly Hall in their mailboxes in May, I spurned my first offer of Harvard admission. I headed instead for the tech school two miles down the Charles.

I don't know why. My hosts during my pre-frosh visit to MIT belonged to a fraternity that bragged about its basement computer cluster. "Four VAX stations! Yes!" People referred to academic departments by their numbers not their names. "What's your major?" Three." "Really? I'm six. and meet Fred here. He's ten."

Individual classes had numbers, too. My first four college courses were 1802, 3.091, 8.01 and 9.00. Though stereotypes generally mislead, don't disbelieve all the nasty stuff you hear about MIT.

A social-science geek at heart, I nonetheless felt taken in by the MIT recruiters' fauxacademic-diversity rhetoric. No, you don't have to sell you soul to the physical sciences, they said. I believed them. Later, I realized that just because it's in the promotional literature doesn't mean it's true.

Yet I couldn't blame the spiel for my (irrational) decision to study engineering. That's right, folks, I settled upon engineering at the wizened old age of--you guessed it--17. brief lesson: if you're 17 and you think you know anything about life, you're wrong. Period.

Pragmatism required, I thought, that I attend a technical college. My hand quivered a little when it wrote a checkmark in the yesbox on the MIT reply card. I dreamt in July that I'd move into Harvard Yard in the fall. Pleasant thoughts about wrought-iron gates, about pointless but titillating intellectual arguments and about a huge, well-financed library danced about in my brain, but disappeared when I woke up and remembered which school I'd chosen. It didn't mater. Prospective engineers go to MIT.

MIT wasn't universally horrible. First-year bonding works the same way at every university. You'll meet some randomize whose names you will instantly forget. You'll converse with others for ten minutes during orientation week and then say nothing but passing hellos to them for the rest of the semester before you begin to ignore each other in the spring. And then you'll find some people who matter a lot to you.

I met the Various Other Posers. Actually, we all met each other and then became the Posers. I don't remember the origin or the purpose of the name.