Pie Day

At 1:59 on Pi Day, prospective students find out if they’ve earned a spot at MIT. This year, Admissions blogger Ellie Feng ’28 marked the occasion by orchestrating the baking of 30 MIT-themed pies. Managing the logistics—which included gathering themes, making concept art, finding recipes, creating ingredient lists, rounding up volunteer bakers, baking, and hosting a pie party for bakers to sample each other’s creations—took eight spreadsheets, seven dormspams, three Google Forms, and plenty of legwork. (Feng logged more than 46,000 steps racing between kitchens over the pie-baking weekend.) Some pies required patience. Feng got an anxious text from the New House bakers when their chocolate filling refused to solidify, and Random Hall’s milk pie (memorializing the carton of milk that resided at the dorm from 1994 to 2022) needed nearly four hours in the oven.

Find Feng’s Pie Day blog post—which noted that “the Institute Has The Finest Pastries on 3/14 at 1:59 PM ET in the year ’26”—and a behind-the-scenes look at what went into the making of all those pies at technologyreview.com/Pie-Day.