While his classmates spend their time crunching probability equations, MIT senior Erik Snowberg is playing with some odds of his own.

With one more semester left to finish at MIT, he's decided to run for Cambridge City Council.

"The whole point of this campaign is to get students to vote," Snowberg said. "Basically I have ten volunteers here, and we're going to go door to door."

Snowberg said he is running for the council to give a voice to his peers in a city made up of one-quarter students.

"I basically started out at the beginning of last year trying to get students to vote," he said. "Myself and another student did some research and found out that the only way to get students to vote was to give them something to vote for."

At that time, Snowberg said that he had no intention of running for the spot himself. But when no one stepped forward, Snowberg decided to give it a try.

Still, City Councillor Sheila T. Russell said that though students have run in the past, they do not have the same impact on the campaign as do incumbents or other more politically active candidates.

"This has happened before. One student ran for mayor many years ago," she said. "He got maybe three hundred votes."

Russell said that though students may have good intentions, they do not have the breadth of knowledge about Cambridge issues that other citizens might.