It’s difficult to separate the concept of nerdiness from MIT. The Coop sells stickers that say Nerd Pride, our mascot is the beaver (nature’s engineer), and Conan O’Brien pokes fun at MIT’s nerdiness on his Twitter.

30 percent of MIT students who responded to The Tech’s survey (427 people) have dressed up as a character from Harry Potter, Firefly, Star Trek, Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings. While many of this number are very likely casual fans who threw on a Gryffindor scarf to see the premiere of The Deathly Hallows, hidden within this statistic is a number of devoted MIT students who take costumes to the next level — cosplayers.

If you could meet one fictional character, who would it be?

Favorite TV show?

Flourish M. Klink, a lecturer in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program, has built a life around fandoms. After running her own Harry Potter fansite and being on staff at Fanfiction.net, at age 13, Klink co-founded the Harry Potter fanfiction website FictionAlley with nine others. FictionAlley was “incorporated as an educational non-profit with the mission of helping people learn to write through fanfiction,” said Klink, and it was one of the first fanfiction forums on the Internet that made writing improvement a site-wide mission.

Fandoms come in all shapes and sizes, and MIT has a smattering of several groups dedicated to different aspects of pop culture. The Tech sat with a few groups on campus to examine where fandoms fit in at the Institute. Not all groups we wished to interview were available for comment.