One of the coolest things about MIT is the wide range of opportunities to work on awesome projects outside of class. I'm on the executive board of a fairly new student group called Next Make . Next Make is a collection of motivated engineers in my dorm - Next House - with a mission of furthering Mens et Manus at MIT. We want to practice and teach hands-on engineering skills that build upon our collective past experience in order to learn and build really cool stuff! Over the past semester, and especially culminating at the beginning of February, I helped organize the design and construction of an amazing LED party lighting system for our dorm with Next Make. At the beginning, our goal was exactly that statement: "we want to build a really awesome LED party lighting system for our dorm." This was an admittedly broad goal, so during the semester we refined the idea into a detailed design that could actually be implemented. (On a sidenote, another cool thing about MIT...