2023-2024 IAP Update
Apologies for neglecting the blog this IAP!
IAP (independent activities period) at MIT is always an interesting time. For the month of January each year, students are invited to optionally return to campus after the holidays. During this time of year, many special events, seminars, workshops, and classes are held around campus. The knowledge offerred during IAP is usually not your normal semester class content, but can still be fascinating and explore subjects you may not have even heard of before.
That being said, not everyone returns to campus. As such, the wrestling room has still been buzzing this IAP, but a few of the usual suspects are missing. Regardless of whether the Engineers are in the DuPont wrestling room or at their hometown gyms, though, they have all still been hard at work in their winter training!
Practice has been going along as usual, and we’ve had a few special guest appearances by wrestlers from UMass, Northeastern, and Harvard who wanted to train with MIT, making the MIT wrestling practices a sort of hub for various club wrestlers in the area.
IAP is also a time when many students pick up new hobbies, so we’ve been seeing a good handful of new faces in the room as well! Luckily, MIT students are diligent learners, so the new guys are picking up things pretty quickly and may consider competing for the team either in February or next year.
I know I assumed I’d resume weekly updates during IAP, but this IAP has been surprisingly busy, and there haven’t been too many changes since the end of the fall, so your weekly scheduled(-ish) broadcast should resume when the spring semester starts up.
A Preview for the Spring
Coming this spring semester is the last stretch of the 2023-2024 wrestling season!
The first competition of the spring will be the Henry Marsh Invitational on February 11 at the University of New Hampshire! The Engineers will face tough opponents from all over the New England area here.
The next meet will also be at UNH; it will be the Wildcat Invitational on February 18. This will mark the last meet of the season before the Engineers enter the qualifiers to nationals!
March 3 will be the NCWA Northeast Conference Championships at RPI. At conferences, the wrestlers will get a chance to qualify for nationals, facing off against competitors from all over our conference, including schools such as UNH, RPI, UMass, Northeastern, and STCC.
To cap off the season, those who qualify will wrestle at the NCWA National Championships from March 14 to March 17 (how fitting, nationals starts on Pi Day this year!) in Shreveport, Louisiana. As this year has seemed to be a large step up from last year for the Engineers, we’ll see how MIT performs at in Louisiana!
For those of you following the MIT ladies, there is one last competition on the women’s side in April: the USA Wrestling Women’s Nationals in Spokane, Washington on April 12 to April 14. This is also the weekend of CPW, so new admittees will get to meet the team then too!
