| MIT tends to breed a certain twisted sense of humor in its students, which
can be seen fairly clearly in the songs that are written
about the Institute. Some of these songs go back decades, and the oldest may even date back to the era
when MIT was still Boston Tech, prior to 1916.
There are a few mostly-serious songs still around, including Arise, oh Sons of MIT (the closest thing MIT has to
an official alma mater).
Far more of them, however, are humorous, making fun
of the Institute or its students. These include:
- The Engineers' Drinking Song, the best-known of the MIT songs. It has almost as many verses as there have been MIT students, although many have been lost. The unofficial alma mater, it is now being suppressed by the administration. It is one of the trademark songs of the MIT Chorallaries, and they usually add a verse or two every year.
- The M.I.T. Fight Song, chanted by the cheerleaders (yes, MIT does have cheerleaders) at football games and other sporting events. People outside of MIT have often heard of it, but few believe that it really exists. It does.
- Take Me Back to Tech is perhaps the oldest of the MIT songs still in circulation. Today, it is one of the
trademarks of the MIT Logarhythms, the main male a capella group on campus.
- The Ballad of 5.60 is a parody song based on the notorious thermodynamics class. Not very well known, but it has made it into How to GaMIT for several years.
- MIT (Let it Be) is another nicely-done but mostly unknown parody. Apologies to the Beatles.
- The MIT Chorallaries, one of the good a capella groups on campus, introduce a few new parodies every year at their Concert in Bad Taste. This has included creations such as MIT is Easy When You Study Biology, to the tune of Karma Chameleon, and Fiends, an MIT version of the Friends theme song.
To the tune of the Log Song:
What's fun to write? What's fun to say?
We learned it in 18.01 today!
It's really cool, we learned it in school,
it's ln, ln, ln!
It's ln, it's ln, it's integral 1/x dx
it's ln, it's ln, it's MIT's version of sex (dx)
-- Anonymous (and a good thing, too!)
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