Joining SIPB

The Student Information Processing Board (SIPB, pronounced sip-bee) is MIT’s volunteer student group dedicated to computing. SIPB has, in one form or another, been working on improving computing at MIT since 1969. Today, SIPB contributes to MIT computing by sponsoring interesting projects that provide additional services or expertise to the MIT community. We have an office just outside the Athena cluster in the MIT Student Center, and you are welcome to come to the office to ask us for help or to hang around and use our computers.

If you are interested in contributing to SIPB’s computing services and in helping users with unusual computing questions, you should consider becoming a member. Full membership in SIPB is granted after sustained contribution to the organization, and confers several benefits:

• A permanent Athena account.

• A key to the SIPB office in W20.

• A storage drawer in the SIPB office.

• A vote at SIPB meetings and (for current students) elections.

Prospective members interested in becoming full members should attend our weekly meetings regularly, participate in SIPB activities like hackathons, cluedumps, and IAP classes, and either create a new SIPB project or help with some existing SIPB projects. This process generally takes about a term of active participation.

Prospective members are encouraged to spend time hanging out in the SIPB office anytime it is open, and we try to make it a fun and comfortable place to work. The office has nice chairs, large monitors, a spacious laptop-land, and a number of Athena machines. The SIPB office has speakers and a TV for playing music off LAMP, as well as a CD player and the sipbmp3 printer queue which plays music “printed” to it. The SIPB office has electrical test equipment such as an oscilloscope, a signal generator, and a power supply available for use in the office. We also have a library of interesting technical books, which you can read in the office, and a soda fridge, where you can buy drinks and candy when working late into the night.

If you have any questions about SIPB or the SIPB membership process, or if you have project ideas, you should feel free to either drop by our office (W20-557) or contact the Chair at sipbchair@mit.edu.