New to campus
With the first few weeks of classes now under their belts, first-year students are settling into the busy, challenging, and often exciting new life of the MIT student. In these early days, MIT freshmen will no doubt be taking in new experiences at a breathless clip — an initiation that many at MIT equate with “drinking from the fire hose.” But for first-year students like Abishkar Chhetri, the flood of education may feel more like a welcome rain after a long drought. Chhetri — one of 1,109 members of the Class of 2019 — says his admittance to MIT had a “one in a million chance of happening.” Chhetri was born in a refugee camp in eastern Nepal, where he lived for the first seven years of his life, with little opportunity for a quality education. As he wrote in his application to MIT, “I opened my eyes to a world that promised...