The dinner posters are the same design as last year.

If any of you readers are around MIT campus, feel free to stop by for any of our rush events! :) We’d love to have you.

I took a much needed break last weekend and went to visit some friends in the bay area. One day for lunch we went into this tiny little sushi place in Mountain View only to find… (dun, dun, DUNNN) a chain of sushi boats! There’s a moat around the central sushi bar with a ton of wooden boats all chained together that continuously rotate.

The color of the plate indicates the price of the item, so at the end you just stack them all up and they calculate your bill from that. Pretty sweet.

Taken at a bakery in Chinatown. Yes, those ARE cherry tomatoes! :D

Take 1 low-contrast, overly bright desert panorama.

Add a single Curves layer.

BAM. Photoshop, you’re awesome.

…and, naturally, lots of goofing off. :)

Finally, the time came and the teams geared up for their turn at the screen. There was much well wishing and camaraderie all around.

Y2 started off, demonstrating their chat client with 4 nifty plug-ins. Here’s Larisa watching her team Do-Re-Meet (wonderful name, dontchathink?).

Then it was Y3′s turn. Naturally, the 2 business students from my team started it off. :D

They did a bang-up job, and got the audience pumped up for the talks from the individual teams. Afterwards, all Y3 came down and took questions together.

At the end they gathered together for a group hug, chanting “Y3″ and “Okolico.”

I was so incredibly proud of Y3 while watching this presentation. This was one of “those moments” after a long summer of work that brought everything together and made it meaningful. Definitely brought a smile to my face, and almost a tear to my eye. MEET really is an amazing program, and I am so very grateful I could be a part of it. There’s no way now to say if I’ll be coming back next year, what with that whole graduation thing and all, but it is certainly something I would be delighted to do again.

Things I will greatly miss:

• my students
• the food
• the exchange rate
• the nightlife
• the weather (most of the time)

Things I will NOT miss:

• having to turn on the hot water 20 minutes before I take a shower
• not having a microwave or an oven
• sleeping in a twin bed
• the weather (the rest of the time)

I’ve got a pretty large backlog of pictures from MEET events and the weekend trips of the instructors which I’ll be working through once I get home.  For now, I’ll end this post with one big shout-out to my amazing team. You guys made this summer better than I could have possibly imagined. (can’t credit the photographer, I’m not sure who he was)

I remember nervously introducing myself to a crowd full of strangers on the first day, in the worst-designed lecture hall I’d ever seen. A lot of Y3 was near the front, and they made themselves known, though at the time I didn’t know anything about them. Now I can see them in my memory, clear as day. Michael, Roni, Melkar, Adam, Dor, Aalaa, Yahia… I had no idea what I was in for, but now that I’m on the other side I know that I had no reason to be nervous. This has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life, but while I’ll be sad to see it go I’ll be taking a lot of what I’ve learned here back with me.

Q: “What positive things (that he/she does now) should he/she continue doing in the future because they worked well?”

Student’s A: “being great!”

Thanks guys. :) You just MMD.

Jerusalem Post: Can Technology Bring Peace to the Middle East?