I’d like to echo all the other eloquent responses here. For me, EC is MIT. I could not have survived MIT without living at EC, and I would not have wanted to stay at MIT if I had not lived at EC. After a high school experience smothered in suburban conformity, EC let me figure myself out. EC let me be wild, let me be the least interesting person in the room. It let me get to know other people equally passionate about a variety of weird hobbies and niche interests. EC let me meet my best friends, my post-college housemates. It let me live with cats instead of cinderblocks. It let me make mistakes and it let me grow up without feeling as terribly out of place as I did in high school. And EC let me paint on the walls.