| A yearly publication of the Technology Community Association at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Also known as How to Get Around MIT. It is a guide to life at the Institute, and is offered free to freshmen every fall.
For the past thirty years, the book has tried to include all of the useful knowledge about MIT that its
editors can think of, but it has tended to suffer from periodic staffing problems.
Normally, the book includes listings of local restuarants, stores that students might find convenient and useful, phone numbers and contact information for the assorted departments, procedures for contacting MIT Facilities, Medical,
and Campus Police, and the ever-useful section on MIT Culture. Perhaps
the most useful of all of the information in the book, this section includes a listing
of MIT songs and a glossary of vocabulary for freshmen to refer to.
Perhaps due to its thirty-year history, How To GaMIT includes pieces of MIT
culture that haven't been active in years. Along with the well-known MIT Fight Song and the Engineers' Drinking Song, the song section includes The Ballad of 5.60, Arise Ye Sons of MIT, and Take Me Back to Tech, none of which
you are likely to hear except from an MIT history buff or the occaisional a capella concert. (The last song may even date back to the late 1800s and Boston Tech, when MIT was located in Boston instead of Cambridge.) Unfortunately, recent editions have eliminated the classic and well-known Drinking Song in the fuss over underage drinking after the death of Scott Krueger.
The glossary also offers an interesting view into MIT culture, since some
editions merely add definitions without removing any. This varies dramatically
from year to year, but an old copy of How to GAMIT provides some remarkably interesting insights. For a freshman, it is most useful for the TLAs, and
a (hopefully) decent explanation of hack, tool, punt, eit, and hose. Of course, E2 contains definitions of many of these as well.
Sections in the Fall 1998 edition of How to GaMIT include:
All information gleaned from an (fall '98) copy of How to GaMIT and the online version, findable by searching for "How To Get Around MIT" on http://web.mit.edu.
Corrections and comments welcome. | 
