natalie p.
Yelp
Spending a variety of summer and winter weeks at my grandparents' home in the little town of Wellesley, Massachusetts, I quickly learned the indisputable value of knowledge. With three libraries serving a "municipality" of 25,000 people, and frequent trips to the landfill (which makes La Jolla look like a 19th century Industrial Revolution London slum) I became quite familiar with learning to take apart and rebuild electric equipment, while garnering the early appreciation for the heady and equally tumultuous Dostoevsky. While my friend's grandparents were taking them to baseball games and baking them cookies, mine were figuring out ways to rewire vintage televisions and trying quicker methods to pickle herring.
Fast forward a couple years, and one of my grandfather's typical phone call-turned-into-lecture conversations brings up the fact that the Boston Herald has reported on something called "MIT OpenCourseWare". Free online courses, you say?
For those of you that are unaware, MIT offers online lecture notes, exams, videos, and other learning supplements COMPLETELY FREE of charge. So, if you're looking to learn a couple things from world-renowned professors and scholars about a plethora of different subjects/topics, grab a computer with some available hard drive space, and you are completely welcome (to do so).
Over 1800 courses are available online, ranging from the "Advanced Igneous Petrology" to a business course simply entitled "Pricing", taught through the Sloan School of Management. Upon clicking Download, a zipfile appears on your desktop, and you can go through each lecture, etc. from there. Sometimes tricky to maneuver, files are not always appropriately named so you may need to sleuth through...But, seriously:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
A couple days before midterms and/or finals I like to download a course just to put my (hopeful) knowledge against a different, although similar perspective. It's worked out great so far.
So, thanks Grandpa for opening my eyes to MIT OpenCourseWare. And to those NINE different cardiologists (alumni of the Harvard-MIT medical school program no less) to whom he wrote the 6 page scraggly, handwritten letter refuting each and every one of your diagnoses, he didn't mean any harm...especially when he called you "easy" and even went out of his way to draw and diagram the human heart for you...just in case your Ivy League education left anything out. Maybe you could stand to gain a refresher from OpenCourseWare also? Kidddding. See you in 70 years.