Violinist Paula M. Te ’11 of Supa Dupa plays at the WMBR and EC ConcertComm joint production Fred Fest ’08 in the East Campus courtyard on Saturday evening.

Trumpeter Martin W. Skelton ’08 of Supa Dupa plays at the WMBR and EC ConcertComm joint production Fred Fest ’08 in the East Campus courtyard on Saturday evening.

Kresge Auditorium’s lobby, a polling place, glows with the bright lights over the voting booths at the very end of Election Day 2008.

A group of East Campus Third East residents crowd into a room to watch Barack Obama’s victory speech. With the race close enough that Obama’s victory was far from clear early in the evening, many students spent Nov. 4, 2008 watching election results come in. See more photos on page 8.

As a means of commenting on what they saw as the banal nature of the art film playing on the MIT Media Test Wall, a group of students brought out chairs and popcorn around noon on Nov. 25 and played the part of a mainstream cinema audience being shown the art film.

MITbeef went “beef caroling” around campus on the evening of December 16, singing beef-flavored versions of well-known carols and handing out beef jerky to passersby.

On the morning of December 9, hackers turned the Mechanical Engineering Lounge in Building 3 into an “aquarium” featuring a sea-monster with scales made of old final exams, a sandcastle, Tim the Beaver in a scuba outfit swimming away from the sea-monster, seashells, and bubbles in the windows. The hack was presumably a commentary on the state of MIT students being chased by final exams.

Hackers placed a bed and accompanying sign marked “Save Point: You may rest your party here” in the student lounge adjacent to Lobby 10 in the Infinite Corridor on the morning of December 17. The bed was a reference to video game “save points,” as well as the approaching end of the Fall 2008 term and final exams.

MIT hackers illuminated the Green Building with a bat signal on the night of July 17, in honor of the midnight opening of the 2008 Batman film The Dark Knight.

Traders@MIT hosted an intercollegiate trading competition in the Stata Center on Nov. 15. Participants from MIT, Harvard University, Dartmouth College, Princeton University, Columbia University, and Wellesley College worked in teams of two to buy and sell securities in hopes of winning a trip to the Rotman International Trading Competition in Toronto and a trip to the J.P. Morgan trading floor.