What do you do when you get into MIT at the age of 17? You shoot your acceptance letter up to the edge of space, with a camera attached to film the whole thing.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology educates some pretty smart cookies. 17-year-old Erin King’s managed to earn this particular honor, and was an early admission student to boot. Now, the young woman’s posted a video of how she launched the tube carrying her acceptance letter up into the stratosphere.
You see, MIT sends out its early acceptance letters in cardboard tubes. Students are encouraged to “hack” these tubes in any creative way possible. Some of these hacks are pretty impressive, ranging from turning the tube into a flamethrower to dressing it up like R2-D2. However, King’s project clearly takes the cake, as noted by a tipster who contacted BoingBoing:
“My name is Chris Peterson. I run web communications for MIT Admissions and have been a loyal BB reader for years. For the last several years we have been sending our admitted students their acceptance letters in cardboard tubes. First because we sent a poster, but now it’s its own thing. 2012 is the anniversary of an old MIT balloon hack, so we put a letter in all of the Early Action admit tubes telling them we wanted them to hack the tubes somehow, and set up http://hackthetubes.mitadmissions.org to collect responses. Lots of them are great, but this one, from Erin King (MIT ’16) in Georgia, is the best.”
Erin King’s YouTube page actually details all the steps and tools she used for the launch, as well as how far and how high it traveled.
Now, if you need me, I’ll just be sitting in the corner feeling like a dumb old man.
Source: YouTube via BoingBoing
