Med is dead
The Dead Sea, the Ocean that wasn't one
Mediterranean Gannet.
Now, to anyone outside of the close-knit community of MIT Sloan, that phrase makes almost no sense. Gannets live nowhere near the Mediterranean!
At Sloan, a regular conversation among new students goes as follows:
What ocean are you?
Oh! I’m Caribbean (or one of the 5 other “oceans”)
What’s your bird group?
Penguin! (as if penguins lived in the Caribbean)
This dialogue is one of the many quirks of MIT Sloan. You see, cohorts are a pivotal part of the business school experience. Different business schools handle the cohort process differently. At HBS or Wharton, sections are denoted by numbers or letters. Here, students are divided into Oceans (cohorts) and then further into bird groups (study groups). These groups become our first friends and support networks at school.
It’s worth noting that although this is MIT and precision is important, Oceans have a unique quirk: half of them aren’t oceans. There are six “oceans”: Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, Caribbean, Baltic, and Indian (of the world’s true oceans, the Southern and Arctic don’t make the cut).
Naturally, at the beginning of the school year, students try to determine, on gut feeling alone, which Ocean is the most academic, social, close-knit, etc.
From this process, my Ocean – the Mediterranean – was established as the least lively with the quirky tagline, Med is dead.
Now if you knew the Meds, you’d know this is not true. Med is arguably the funniest ocean of them all. Rather than hide from the joke, the Meds leaned in. The group chat name was updated from “Mediterranean 2023” to “The Dead Sea”.
And rather than stop there…
We held a funeral.
To honor the death of our Ocean of course. For the funeral, our Ocean donned head-to-toe in black came to Accounting. At the end of Accounting, a formal procession and speech was made.
This was not the end of the Meds’ antics. Next was MedTricks – a game invented to keep students and professors on their toes by embedding silly phrases and activities into the classroom. Disruptive? Maybe. But fun nonetheless.
All in all, the Meds have a common thread – a great sense of humor and willingness to play along. That is one of the many reasons I’m proud to be a Med, even if that results in the new Sloanies remarking, without thinking… Isn’t Med dead?
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