IAP is a concept I didn’t really understand until last month, oops. The way that MIT’s academic calendar works is that the Fall semester is from September to December, while the Spring semester is from February to May. In between the two semesters, during January, is Independent Activities Period—this glorious month of fun classes and activities.

It’s kind of hard to describe IAP because people are just doing wildly different things during it. Some of my friends chose to have an extended winter break and spend more time at home, or travelling. Some of my friends are doing an externship, which is the term for an internship that happens over IAP. Some of my friends are doing GTL, where you go to another country to teach high school students.

I applied for externships and GTL, but didn’t really get accepted anywhere. But that’s fine, because there are lots of cool things happening here on campus too! Like:

Classes

Many of my friends on campus are taking classes! While there are classes, they aren’t really normal classes. Some differences between normal classes and IAP classes include:

• Scheduling. IAP classes are a month long, or less. So the classes happen over a shorter time frame. The scheduling of classes are also different. Some classes meet at a certain time two or three days of the week, for the whole month, like normal classes. One example is 6.S087, which I’ll talk about more later, which meets MWF 2-3.30⁠01 which is MIT Catalog notation for Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM .  But other classes meet for longer each day, but for shorter periods of time, like 15.6721 Negotiation Analysis, which meets for 8.30-4.30 for three days in a row towards the end of IAP.
• Instructors. There’s a lot of variety among people who teach IAP classes. They range from several faculty members teaching a lecture series (18.095 Mathematics Lecture Series) to a team of undergrads coming together and running a huge class (6.147 Battlecode) to a student organization (6.S817 Code for Good).
• Content. And probably the biggest difference is what the classes are actually about. The format of IAP allows lots of non-standard classes. I’ve already mentioned a three-day negotiation workshop, a math lecture series, a competition with thousands of dollars in prizes, and an opportunity to work on software-related projects with nonprofits. But there’s also a non-standard treatment of classical mechanics (8.223 Classical Mechanics II), and a Chinese calligraphy class (21G.111 Chinese Calligraphy).

So the classes are pretty hype, and I’m really excited about the two classes I’m taking. The first class is 6.S087 Mathematical Methods for Multidimensional Statistics, which is about… matrices, and statistics, apparently. I’m taking the class because I looked at last year’s problem sets,⁠02 so MIT uses a class management system called Stellar, and for some classes, you can access course material from previous years! it’s really cool :) and they felt really well-written. It’s been a cool class so far; I was really hyped when we learned about random vectors on our first lesson. (They’re like random variables, but they’re vectors—and they have their own nice properties beyond just being a collection of random variables!)

The other class I’m taking is 6.148 web.lab. Like 6.147 Battlecode or 6.176 Pokerbots, it’s a programming competition with thousands of dollars in sponsor-backed prizes. While Battlecode is about writing an AI to play a game, and Pokerbots is about writing an AI to play poker, web.lab is about making a website. The cool thing about these classes is that students from all levels of programming experience are welcome, because they teach all the material necessary to get started.

web.lab is a pretty intense class. We have lectures from 11 to 3 from Mondays to Fridays for the first two weeks of IAP. The first week alone was really intense, as we covered the basics of HTML, CSS, Javascript, React, APIs, Node, MongoDB, and authentication, all in one week! For this second week, we’ve been having sponsors give lectures in the mornings, while covering more advanced topics in the afternoons. Then the next two weeks will be for us to work on our website, with the intent of finishing before the end of IAP.

I’ve always wanted to learn more web development, but I was just really scared by the dozens and dozens of web technologies and libraries that sprouted seemingly out of nowhere. There’s lots and lots of fancy names, like Redux or Django or Typescript or Rails or Angular. It’s been pretty clear that the first three things you learn are HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and I did have some experience with these, but I didn’t have any sense of direction after that.

The class was a good excuse to pick up web development again, and I’ve been learning a lot! I’m making a website with two other people,⁠03 hi Dylan and Emma! oops sorry i’m writing this instead of working on the website and I’m really excited to see how it’ll turn out.

Non-credit activities

It wouldn’t be called Independent Activities Period if there weren’t a lot of… activities? There are over a hundred different non-credit activities over IAP, which you can view on the IAP listings. While a lot of them sounded interesting, like a Japanese woodworking workshop or a poetry discussion series, I couldn’t really make space a lot of them on my schedule.

One of them, I guess, is a waltz class. I joined the class through Tech Squares, though, so it doesn’t really count. But I did go to an event that I only knew existed through the listings.

I signed up for a bacterial photography workshop, because I did manage to fit it in my schedule. I didn’t really read the description that carefully, other than the title, the date and time, and “No biological laboratory experience necessary!” So I signed up and I went.

It was pretty cool! It, in fact, was not a workshop about taking pictures of bacteria, but using bacteria to make pictures. We did it in a room called the BioMakerspace, which was a wet lab. I saw two of my friends who were doing their own projects in the makerspace, and were surprised to see me there.⁠04 “I didn’t know you were a bio person!” “I’m not.”

The first part was learning to use micropipettes, which are pipettes but for very small, precise amounts of liquid. Then we used electrophoresis (big word!) to insert plasmids that had the DNA we wanted into the E. coli. In practice, this involved mixing tiny amounts of liquid, putting it in a cuvette (like, this tiny plastic box), putting the cuvette in a machine, and pressing a button. But it felt really cool that we were inserting DNA in bacteria by running electricity through it.

Then we put this… electrocuted bacteria… on an agar plate for it to grow. Since this would take a day in real time, we used a culture that was already prepared for the next step, which was picking out a culture of E. coli, putting it on this specially prepared agar plate, and then putting it in an incubator that projected an image on it. It would again take a day to see the final results, but we were shown results of previous experiments, and it looked really cool.

I don’t think I particularly want to work in any kind of wet lab in the future. But that’s the fun part, you know? I have absolutely no plans to do anything involving biology, but I loved that I could still sign up for events like these anyway. There are so many things I want to try, but not necessarily commit to, just because I want to try it, and I love how MIT has space for me to do this.

Extracurriculars

Two of my clubs are in full swing now that IAP is starting. Tech Squares, MIT’s square dancing club, has continued its regular Tuesday meetings again! I missed square dancing so much over the break. It was one of the few times I got exercise in the week, and it was a way to catch up with other friends in the club. Next Tuesday night at 8, Tech Squares is hosting an intro night in Morss Hall, and I’m really excited to just drag some of my friends and show them what square dancing is, so they could understand why I’m so hyped about it.⁠05 i should write a blog post dedicated to squares one day to explain my love for it

Tech Squares is not only a square dancing club, but a round dancing club. Rounds, like squares, is also a kind of dancing where someone gives instructions in real-time to tell dancers what to do. There are lots of kinds of rounds, like rumba, two step, or foxtrot. A waltz rounds class started this IAP on Monday nights, and I’m enjoying it so far. We’ll see if I can continue joining the class through Spring.

The other club I’m in that’s active is ESP. I talked about Splash, a program that ESP runs, at length on “Two thousand high schoolers walk into MIT”. We’re getting ready for Spring HSSP, a program open to students from 7th to 12th grade, where teachers teach a class every Saturday for six Saturdays. So it’s a longer program, unlike Splash. Tonight, I did some chalking⁠06 writing things on sidewalks with chalk, typically to publicize an event along sidewalks to publicize teacher registration, which will close soon.

Another program we’re getting for is Spark. Like Splash, it’s a one-weekend program, but Spark is open for students in 7th and 8th grades. Teacher registration is ongoing, but the deadline is much later, so we’re not doing much for Spark yet. I’m part of ESP Art, so I sent out a proposal for the shirt design recently, and I’m waiting on feedback.

Mystery Hunt

The one thing I’m hands-down most excited for this IAP, though, is MIT Mystery Hunt. AND IT’S HAPPENING IN THIRTY-FIVE HOURS AAAAAAHHHHH I’M SO HYPED!!!

The Mystery Hunt is the first time I heard about MIT, ever. For the longest time, the only thing I knew about MIT was that it was the university that ran the Mystery Hunt, nevermind the fact that it’s famous or whatever.⁠07 in my defense, i grew up in the Philippines I remember browsing the internet when I was eleven or twelve, and somehow I ended up on the Wikipedia page for puzzlehunts, and then I ended up on the Wikipedia page for the MIT Mystery Hunt. And I remember being awestruck by the whole thing.

Maybe it’s the scale. It’s a huge event: dozens of teams and thousands of contestants solving hundreds of puzzles over a single weekend. Maybe it’s the thought of having so many puzzles that I can work on them for a whole weekend and not have to worry about anything else. Or maybe it’s the realization that there were other people out there who wanted to do this. That out there were people who also wanted to do puzzles for a whole weekend, and there are thousands of them, and it’s not just me.

And that was the first time I ever wanted to go to MIT. Not to study or anything, but to participate in Mystery Hunt. I wanted to be on campus and do runarounds and work on puzzles with a bunch of people who liked puzzles too.

Well, twelve-year-old CJ, I’m doing it.

And I can’t wait.

This past week and a half I’ve been slowly adjusting to life at MIT again. I spent the two whole weeks of break just complaining about California and practically begging my mother to send me back to the cold hellhole that is Massachusetts.

In this time, I’ve been trying to keep myself busy and attempt to be an actual college student.

I made a lot of promises in the beginning of the year that I have not kept. I said I would cook. Instead, I’ve been mooching off of Raymond and Aiden for their cooking and practically anyone else who is willing to give me pitiful scraps here and there, like the stray rodent of Loop kitchen that vacuums trash with her mouth.

I said I’d be more diligent and better at coding. This is false. 6.145 is singlehandedly destroying my self esteem, and, despite enjoying liking coding and writing it out and basking in the satisfaction of finally understanding something, it’s been relatively disheartening watching my friends easily get solutions to problems it takes me significantly much more time to figure out.

Regardless, I’ve been keeping busy with my two classes and three jobs. I realize I don’t really talk about my academics that much, so here’s some brief insight on how things have been going.

8.01L

8.01L is the bane of my existence. I’m pretty sure I’m ridiculously close to NR’ing it.

For the past semester and a half, I’ve been meticulously calculating each of my grades to see what I need on each assignment to make sure I get at least a 60% in the class. This is truly PNR in action. I suggest every incoming frosh do this with their PNR classes.

I am genuinely, wholly afraid that 8.01L is going to beat my ass and shred me into pieces. I am a fool who doesn’t understand physics. It is terrifying.

Luckily, my smart physics friends (see: Aidan and Mariia) have been helping me a lot with 8.01L. Please send me good vibes in the comments to make sure I actually pass 8.01L.

8.01L is the longer alternative to 8.01. Instead of being in TEAL format like 8.01 with teams and solving questions on the board, 8.01L features a traditional lecture style class and a slower pace. It’s actually very nice and I’ve learned a lot more physics in this class than I ever have in my life, I just am very bad at physics.

If I were to fail 8.01L, I’d have to take 8.011, a class designated for students who have taken some version of 8.01 in the past but have failed/NR’d it. I honestly wouldn’t mind taking it, but I’d really like to get physics out of the way this year. Thus, I need to pass 8.01L so I can take 8.02 in the spring so I never, ever have to touch another physics class ever again.

6.145

This is MIT’s expedited version of the ever-so-famous 6.0001, commonly referred to as “triple oh one”. In 6.0001, students typically spend half a semester learning the basics to Python. IAP, however, offers this three week course on Python held completely online. I’ve blocked out times on my schedule to dedicate time to it, however, this has not gone to plan.

I am a fool who procrastinates and doesn’t apportion time properly. 6.145 is fun, but also makes me Sad for reasons stated above. One day, hopefully, my smooth, small brain will develop bumps and I can evolve into the true Course 6 big brain I yearn to be.

The class is held entirely online via a website they give us. When we log in, we are given readings and coding assignments due every Monday and Thursday at 5pm. It’s reasonable, but I’ve just asked for a lot of help. Like, a lot of help.

Overall, very fun. Enjoying my time. Just struggling a tad bit.

UROP

I recently got a UROP at MIT’s Education Arcade! I think it’s actually the perfect combination of everything I’ve wanted in a UROP. It perfectly melds my interest in video games with comparative media studies and interest in education and psychology which is really, really cool. I’ve been working on doing research to help improve a study based on our VR game, Cellverse, which aims to help high school students learn the layout of a cell. This is one of the first times I’ve ever actually enjoyed research. I find myself genuinely intrigued by the articles I’m assigned and excited to go into my UROP every day to read.

This UROP also confirmed that I am most definitely a CMS major. I’d been contemplating for a bit if I wanted to do lab research for the longest time, but after getting a UROP in a lab setting, I realized that I really despised how cold it felt. There was such a distinct difference between the UROP I have now and the UROP I had before.

The UROP I had before felt very detached, hours of switching between an empty cubicle and an isolated lab. The first day of my new UROP in the MIT Education Arcade, I sat down for lunch in the common area and was greeted by practically every staff member that worked on that floor. Together they talked about raising kids, playing Pokemon Go, and traveling. There was such warmth and kindness in the air that it made me feel very safe and at home. Not to mention the fact that the kitchen is always fully stacked with snacks, my two favorites being m&ms and dried mango slices.

I love the work I’m doing and honestly it doesn’t even feel like work.

I’ve also been working on my other two jobs, a web-based research intern for the Massachusetts Science and Engineering Fair and, of course, this one.

I’ve been a bit blocked in terms of what to write. Right now I’m trying to assemble a pageant experience post to talk about my experience as an MIT student in a pageant setting since it definitely was an experience like any other, but for now, it’s pretty taxing to write about especially since I have to give so much background and context.

Anyway, update done. More to come~

Alright, here goes.

I’m a Burton Third Bomber. For the uninformed, this means that I 1) live on the third floor of the Burton side of the dorm Burton-Conner, and 2), am lowkey part of a cult—a rowdy, hilarious, and very orange cult that throws the best parties on campus and manages to make MIT an incredible place even when it feels like everything is going to hell.

When I tell people that I’m a Bomber, especially people I talked to in high school, they usually either look appalled or do this:

Which makes sense—we have quite a reputation.⁠01 as indicated by the slew of MIT confessions about us lmao BC is known for its floors with varying intensities of floor culture, and our chaotic orange family certainly skews the spectrum. 

But who are the Bombers? Well, we were founded in the 60s by a ragtag band of hockey players that has since evolved into a diverse group of tight-knit individuals who are absolute trash at intramural hockey.⁠02 not that we were ever good at hockey...we’ve been in the D-D+ league for IM sports ever since the beginning The Bombers, however, remain united by our love of mischief, laughter, and a good time. We truly are a lifelong family—very few Bombers move off the floor in their four years at MIT, and all of them continue to uphold the 33rd+ years of traditions that shaped their freshman year experiences. 

Bombers also have a strong network; 50+ alumni of classes ranging from 1969 to 2018 were at the 50th anniversary of our annual party, DTYD, and nearly 200 attended that year’s Bomber Formal. Also, dozens of Bombers gathered for a Bomber wedding last summer in Kentucky and an engagement party last fall in New York. Both events were like mini DTYD’s :) Some alumni came back to Burton-Conner for a post Fall Career Fair barbeque as well, which was super cool.

One of the things that drew me to MIT, and Burton-Conner in particular, is the fact that it allows floor culture to flourish; Burton Third is just one of many floors that have numerous traditions that have been upheld for decades. The best way to illustrate our culture is by what we do, so here’s a glimpse of just a few of the approximately 3333333rd traditions we maintain each year.

Traditions:

DTYD (Dance ‘Til You Drop):

Our biggest party and most long-standing tradition. It’s so deeply ingrained in our floor history that when I visited some alumni from the classes of 1974 and 1976 and asked them if they had participated in DTYD, they almost seemed surprised that I’d asked: “Of course!”

DTYD itself is held in mid-April, but the weeks leading up to it are full of auxiliary events. Things get crazy since lots of alumni come back and participate in events like the alumni brunch, alumni hockey game, and Bomber Formal. Last year, literally hundreds of alumni helped celebrate the 50th anniversary of the party, some of whom were participants of DTYD 1! 

DTYD L hype

a Bomber Formal pic as blurry as the night probably was for everyone involved

DTYD births some cool projects and endeavors every year; a few bombers who built sound-reactive lights for their rooms last year decided to make a huge project out of it for DTYD L. The end product was really cool:

Freshman DTYD Hacks:

Each year, freshman class gets to promote the party with a hack. This tradition is a great opportunity for the freshmen to bond over creating something unique. Last year, the frosh made a 3rd.3rd meter tall orange 3rd, filled it with 1000 pounds of loose sand, and put it in Lobby 10.⁠03 clearly, my class has a lot to live up to... Other hacks include a fake concrete bomb in Kresge in 2008 (the Cambridge bomb squad was called, oops) and a giant orange shirt on The Alchemist in 2011. 

Origins of DTYD:

DTYD started in 1969 when two Bombers (Classes of ’70 and ’71) wanted to celebrate their 21st birthdays and decided to indulge in a party that lasted four whole days. Burton Third had always held a floor party on Patriot’s Day, so the next year, the two parties were combined into an event that lasted from Saturday night until Thursday. This took place in Hamilton House, the place where the Bombers were exiled to when Burton House was closed down during the 1970-71 academic year. When Burton House reopened, the party, which was now known as DTYD, returned to MIT in full force. DTYD III featured a massive $1,000 budget, fireworks on Briggs Field, and even more debauchery than that of its forebearers.

Throughout the years, DTYD expanded to include more semi-official traditions such as canoe trips, Red Sox game outings etc. Most of these, unfortunately, have died out, but the fact remains that DTYD and all its auxiliary events provide a “great oasis in the middle of the academic year,” as a Burton Third alum once said.

DTYD has evolved over time, but it’s still our most well-established tradition and main claim to fame around the MIT community. I can’t wait to experience my first DTYD this April!!

Shirts/Shirt Names:

The easiest way to recognize Bombers is by our iconic orange shirts, which we wear for occasions like REX and DTYD, or when we decide to crash parties as one united screaming orange horde. Each shirt has a bomber plane on the front and a name and number on the back. Each person’s name is decided by the rest of the floor—from September to November, we brainstorm names that are usually witty plays on things you’ve done in the past. In December, we have a meeting to decide shirt names, and it’s a lot of fun since you get to learn a lot about members of the floor. 

we’ve been taking class pictures like this for decades and have an archive of pictures going back to 1980

We’ve been getting shirts for the past 50 years, although they were hockey jerseys in the past. For an interesting bit of trivia, the production team of Ocean’s 8 reached out to us asking if Rihanna could wear an old Bomber shirt they discovered at a thrift store. It unfortunately didn’t make the final cut, but we were pretty close to making the big screen!!

Shirt names tend to stick with you. One of the alumni I visited told me that he still receives letters addressed to the nickname that was on his Bomber hockey jersey.

In case you’re wondering about my shirt name…

pictured: medium right tiddy, 31DD. there is a truly profound and witty story behind this name, i promise

ABC (Anything But Clothes):

Our other big party of the year, which takes place in October. As the name suggests, you have to create costumes out of anything that’s not clothes (underwear is acceptable). In past years, we’ve seen people work magic with periodic tables, plates, and pepperoni. This year, we had someone show up in a suitcase:

Jett Wang, an absolute icon

I made my costume out of Yugioh cards and it lasted a good 3rd hours before falling apart all over the dance floor. rip

Camping Trip:

The freshmen and sophomores venture into the woods for some good, wholesome bonding. While they’re gone, the upperclassmen girls make sorority letters for the freshmen girls and put them up on their doors. 

the door to my triple post-camping trip

I have nothing but fond memories from this year’s camping trip. We managed to fit all 12 freshmen in a single four-person tent…yeah, we go to MIT

Bombergiving:

A wonderful potluck event where we all make delicious food, dress fancy, and eat together in Burton-Conner’s Porter Room like one big happy family. The floor chairs give speeches about how much they love us and we thank them for putting up with our antics. Wholesome vibes all around!!

Frosh Cookies:

Disclaimer: not a tradition (yet)

This year, all the Bomber Frosh got together to bake an absurd number of cookies for every floor in Burton-Conner. It was a great bonding experience and a lot of fun!

Murals/Crests/Insignia:

We have some incredible works of art on this floor that we hope to preserve during Burton-Conner’s renovation:

The Persistence of Burton Third by Heather Nelson (’20), 2017

sick wood carving by Colin Sidoti (’13) and David Wise (’14), 2014

This was made from two reclaimed Burton-Conner tables and carved on a shopbot in N52. The design is from our seal, which is painted outside B3rd on the stairwell wall…

Son of Bomber by Karen Dubbin (’12) and Ian Rust (’10), 2012

that apple lookin juicy

This work survived the tragedy of 2013, in which a good number of murals were painted over. Murals are an integral part of floor culture, so it’s really sad that so many works were erased.

another Dali that was outside center suite

Here’s one mural by Marguerite Siboni (’10) that, sadly, no longer exists since it was painted over.

My Experience Joining the Floor:

Coming into MIT, knew that I wanted to live in a dorm with culture. Since I didn’t vibe with East Campus much and also because I wanted to separate myself from my sister (going to the same school as your older sibling your whole life gets tiring), I chose Burton-Conner. I resolved to move into BC despite its upcoming renovation because after watching the i3 video (which was made by a Bomber!), I was convinced that I would fit in perfectly there.

When I arrived on campus for my FPOP,⁠04 First Year Pre-Orientation Program I was temporarily housed on Burton 2. I absolutely loved the people there,⁠05 i'll never forget my weeb brethren but thought it was too quiet. After spending a good portion of REX hanging out with the Bombers at their events, however, I was certain that I had found a home with a meme-y, hilarious, close-knit group of people who would make my year in Burton-Conner fun and fulfilling. We’d be moving out for the dorm renovations anyway, so I wanted to have a good experience while the floor was still intact.

And I haven’t regretted my decisions once! I love everyone on the floor with all my heart and couldn’t ask for a better community to live with. 

the Bomber Frosh Class of 2023rd aka the funniest and most incredible group of individuals I know. this was taken after our class picture, which we’ve been at the front of for the past 33rd years ;)

There are so many things that are great about being a Bomber. Being able to feel at home anywhere on the floor and having someone to accompany you with what you’re doing no matter what it is is absolutely amazing. Also, the Bombers support and look out for each other; there’s always someone to offer me helpful insight and remind me to not take anything too seriously. 

MAINE DAY TWO

I love the Bombers. I love how I can be completely and unabashedly myself around them, how I know I can come home to a supportive group of people to laugh and cry with, to dance on kitchen tabletops and run barefoot through the halls of Burton-Conner at 5 am with, and to talk about my insecurities and passions and hopes and dreams with. Every night I spend with my friends on Burton Third is a reminder of how lucky I am to live with such a wonderful community. It’s even crazier to think of how active and close-knit⁠06 shoutout to all the alumni who helped me out with this post!! the Bomber alumni group is; I truly feel as if I’ve joined a family. MIT is a hard school that can be difficult to survive without a good support system, but since I have so many close relationships with the people on my floor, I feel equipped to tackle my next 3rd years at this school.

me and one of my roommates at breast fest

Burton-Conner is being renovated next year, so the Bombers will be split up until 2022. But I’ll be returning to the dorm as a senior—hopefully—and helping with the process of recruiting new members in the same way I was this year. We may be losing our home, but we’ll still be maintaining our traditions, hanging out as much as possible, and preparing for our return to the floor.

Burton-Conner might house the culture and friendships we’ve cultivated in our years at MIT, but it certainly isn’t what holds them together. The Bombers have survived exile before and we’ll survive it again!

sometime after 10:07 on 10/07

a btb “deliberate 2033rd-word ploy to get you to join us” comm.prod

It’s been a hot second since I last blogged- about ten weeks, to be precise. There are all sorts of random reasons I could give for my disappearance, drawn from the same set of valid reasons I give to my friends or family for going three weeks before replying to a text. ‘School is crazy!’ is always a good one- an honest and unquestionable summation of what it means to be an MIT student. ‘My classes this past semester were brutal’- another frank excuse. I was taking discrete math and fundamentals of programming last semester which are known to both be consuming classes in their own right, and I was also taking solid-state chemistry in an effort to slowly chip away at my GIRs. My World Music class served as a welcome and wonderful escape from crunching code and wrapping my head around proofs-based math, and it culminated in a project where I got the chance to listen to lots of East African classics in line with my project theme which was the timeline of East African music in the past half-century or so.

This was the semester I realized how precarious it is to strike a balance between being a good student, a good friend, a good daughter, a good sister, a good aunt, a good cousin, a good house manager. I had to re-define what balance means for me; trying to get seven hours of sleep, eat at least two healthy, balanced meals daily, exercise, finish my assignments on time, study for tests and score decently in them, make my bed, do laundry, check up on my friends, fix things in my house promptly, study for interviews and apply to research positions, make it for my library shift, smile at every dog I walk past on the Infinite and call my parents is a tall order to do even in the space of a week. I was constantly overwhelmed, and yearning for the semester to be over even in its earliest stages. Eventually, I perfected the skill of prioritizing; knowing what was doable and what was not, and learning when it was time to ask for help on something I was stuck on. I’m glad I hung on to the end. After finals, surrounded by my friends who had held me up during the semester, and talking over our hopes and fears, I realized that I continually miss the forest for the trees. I spend so much time obsessed with my stress points on a daily basis that I sometimes forget to stop and appreciate where I am, and the curious mixture of delights and troubles that life hands me. Yes, academic pressure is real, but so is having friends-turned-family who set you back on your path and remind you who you are, what you’re set on doing.

This was also the semester of rejections! So many rejections, left, right and centre. It gets discouraging, being in a position to access these amazing opportunities then falling short a step away, especially when you’re not honest with yourself about why you’re so keen on those opportunities in the first place. You start to miss the forest for the trees, again. Imposter syndrome has been a constant in my life for as long as I can remember, and added external rejection is like feeding fuel to this monster. Being in an environment where everyone around me is doing amazing things compounds this diminishing feeling where it looks like I’m doing too little, and I punish myself for it. This isn’t going to go away soon, and all I can do is keep going, and learn from positive critique to make myself better.

Being a sophomore is different, and not just academically. I didn’t even notice the winter creep in this time. I unconsciously transitioned into insulated jackets and furry boots from the light parkas and easy leggings of fall time in line with the changing weather, whereas as a freshman I was excited for every new day to come so I could point out to myself the new barren tree or the fresh coat of snow that had accumulated overnight. I walk easy in a hoodie in 45F weather, whereas freshman me would have been layered in cardigans and coats and scarves in similar temperatures. Acclimatization- the bittersweet process of fitting in but also falling into a state of normalcy where things aren’t as bright and shiny anymore, and I have to put extra effort to make magic happen when I want it to. I saw it in other areas, too- the waning of excitement about things that a year ago were incredibly captivating. Last year’s turkey was heavily featured on my Instagram story. This thanksgiving, I stared blankly at the poor turkey and passively bit into a piece without second thought.

Sophomore me is a minimalist. Last semester, I began practicing what I knew I should have been doing for a long time in the interest of my academics- picking and choosing what I really wanted to invest my energy and time in, and resisting the urge to fill my plate with every interesting activity that came my way. I left my acapella group partly for this reason, and I decided to let my writing be my one creative outlet. But even that became hard to do, maybe because I didn’t really have time to process my thoughts at all, let alone write them down.

So, I just wanted to put it out there that I’m still here, quiet, learning, recharging, garnering content. (Do I sound like Joe in this line?). I’m figuring stuff out, shifting my mindset from trying to sort the quickly changing facets of my life into neatly labelled drawers and shelves, to forging some stability and sense of surety of who and where I am, and what I am becoming. Wish me luck.

It snowed on Saturday. Here’s what I woke up to on Sunday.

needs more l o o m i n g  s h a d o w and weather-dirtied window

And here’s a screenshot from the Neri Oxman episode of “Abstract: The Art of Design.”

computer: enhance

Ain’t that neat.

this is the third IAP i’ve spent on MIT. trust me, i really tried to get away, but my research called to me and i decided to forego a bunch of cool things i had applied to (externships, GTL) in order to go hard mode on my research project. i also expected to be really fucking lonely, because my boyfriend is doing GTL and SO MANY of my friends are gone as well. tl;dr i wasn’t *super* looking forward to this IAP.

but HOLY crap, this IAP really hits different. i forgot what it was like to not have to fill my day with psets and project deadlines. let’s do a comparison – here are, respectively, my firehose from the semester and my current IAP calendar.

a screenshot of hell

a screenshot of HEAVEN

look at all that white space! look at all that unstructured time!

granted, i am spending a lot of that on my UROP⁠01 when i'm feeling motivated, i go in to lab at around noon, leave at 4:45 for fencing, and then sometimes go back at night to squeeze some more work in , but that’s work i want to be doing, and not another soul-sucking pset that i have to complete in 12 hours.

here’s a list of all the fun things i’m doing / have done this IAP (and WOW, there are SO MANY OF THEM):

• my UROP!!! – i think i talk about how much i love my UROP in like, every blog post i make, so i won’t talk about it much more here. basically i’m just chugging out a ton of work so i can get my actual project closer to completion, and maybe even start running studies by the beginning of next semester!
• fencing – fencing is kind of intense over IAP because we have meets almost every weekend starting on the 25th, and practice every day of the week, and also no excuse to skip practice because it’s IAP and there’s lots of free time. but i love my sport and practicing without the looming pressure of fifteen million different assignments to complete is exceedingly fun.
• unhealthy amounts of super smash ultimate – i swear i played for five hours straight the other day. and the best part is that other people are also willing to play for five hours straight as well. truly a vicious cycle
• cultivating a singstagram – my friend and i started a singstagram and a soundcloud! we love music and he has recording hardware that we can make *professional* covers of our favorite songs with. over IAP, we’ve had a lot more time to do this because we always have to do like a million takes of a song before we’re satisfied. shameless plug: you can follow our singstagram here and our soundcloud here :,). i also blew a lot of money on a gorgeous new guitar, which was totally worth it

LOOK HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS

• doing fun things with my friends – i commented on this a lot last semester, but i really didn’t see ANY of my friends at all last semester. i only saw the people i was in classes with, my hallmates occasionally, and my boyfriend. but IAP is the time to catch up on all of these mistakes. i went to NYC and went on a ~15 hour bender with a bunch of alum friends, and have gone out to dinner more times in the last week than i probably did in the entire semester. i’m also going to bar trivia
• the cocktail class – MIT offers a cocktail making class for students who are over 21 during IAP! an MIT alum teaches it and i now know way more science about alcohol than i ever expected to.
• THE BOJACK FINALE – i’m so excited jesus christ

We didn’t blog about the cool classes we took last semester yet, so we are blogging about them now. This is the second semester when we decided to take 36 units, because we knew that senior fall would be busy with job applications. Looking back, it was definitely the right decision. Anyways, here are the three classes we took!

6.837: Computer Graphics

One of the big reasons we decided to take course 6 classes in the first place was just to work our way up to this class. And after taking it, we can confidently say that the struggle was very worth it! This class covers 5 main areas of computer graphics – splines, character rigging, physically based simulation, ray tracing, and real-time rendering. There is a two-week pset associated with each of these topics, and an open-ended final project where you can choose to focus on any computer graphics related topic! Every assignment was challenging but very rewarding, because it resulted in some sort of 3D art! Here are some of the things we worked on:

Splines

Splines are basically curves. For this assignment we had to write code with a lot of math, that would create splines given a set of points. The next part of the assignment was to write a function that rotated the curve around a vertical axis to a create a 3D model with rotational symmetry like a wine glass or pottery, and another function to rotate a circular spline around another spline to create 3D models that look like puffy outlines. Here are our puffy outlines of the nerdy things we like.

Danny's cookie cat (from Steven Universe) 3D model made from spline

Allan's water tribe symbol (from Avatar: The Last Airbender) 3D model made from spline

Previous Next

Character Rigging and Mesh Deformation

To create a character, first we had to write code that could create a skeleton out of spheres (for the joints) and cylinders (for the bones), given a set of points defining the location of the joints. Then, we had to hook up the joints to a user interface to get them to move with sliders. Finally, we had to create the mesh by parsing through a file that defined all the vertices, and another file that defined the contribution of motion from all the joints for each vertex.  This assignment was probably one of the most challenging for us, but we got animatable characters out of it! Here is one of them.

Physically Based Simulation

This assignment was probably one of our favorites, which was actually really surprising to us because of how much physics was involved! We had to create a grid of spheres and keep track of all the forces on each sphere. To simulate the cloth, we had to connect the spheres with 3 different grids of springs, and then add gravity, drag, and a wind force. This physics actually made sense, very unlike 8.01L and 8.02, and it was really cool to see the force equations translated into the animation!

Ray Tracing

Ray tracing is a technique to render 3D scenes by shooting out rays of light from the camera that bounce around (if the materials in the scene are reflective) and keeping track of where they intersect objects. The assignment let us create some really cool results!

Danny's ray traced scene

Allan's ray traced scene

Previous Next

Non-Photorealistic Rendering

Non-Photorealistic Rendering or NPR is a technique in computer graphics used to render 3D models to look as thought they are 2D drawings. There are a lot different techniques out there, so for our final project, we surveyed a few of them, namely toon shading, outlines, and hatching. Toon shading is a way to get discrete bands of shading on a model, like you see in 2D animated cartoons. Outlines(not shown in the video) is exactly what it sounds like. And hatching is a way to get a model to look as though it was drawn with hatch marks. We actually did not fully implement the hatch marks technique, because it would have been very difficult and outside of the scope of the project, so it does not look as good as it did in the paper we based the implementation on. Instead, we combined the techniques we implemented in different ways. So here is a video showing toon shading, hatching, and the ways we combined them.

Overall, this class was super informative, rewarding, and worthwhile!

21A.502: Fun and Games: Cross-Cultural Perspectives

We had been procrastinating taking a HASS-S for sooo loongg. Every semester we would look at the listings, and would never see any HASS-S that seemed very interesting to us. But because taking at least one HASS-S is a requirement to graduate, we decided that, one way or another, we would take one during senior fall semester, since we really didn’t want to leave it for our final semester at MIT. We signed up for three, attended all three for the first week, and chose the one we liked most! But boy, oh boy, were we wrong to dread taking a HASS-S. This class was honestly one of the most fun classes we had ever taken here! And not just because the class was literally about fun, although that was a factor lol. The class focused on different forms of “fun” and “play” and their role in different cultures, which was really interesting, especially because of how engaging the professor was! On top of that, every lecture, our professor would bring in really amazing speakers to class, ranging from a comedian to an owner of a puzzle shop. Also, every lecture, a different student would present the week’s readings in a 30 minute presentation. But not a normal presentation! We had to somehow turn our presentations into games! The games people incorporated into their presentations ranged from jeopardy, poker, mancala (but us students were the stones), and even scootah hockey, a sport that is very popular in Simmon’s Hall! Scootah hockey is like ice hockey, but instead of skating on ice, you are sitting on a “scootah” (basically, a plastic board with 4 wheels) and using your feet to roll around. And yes, we did have a full on scootah hockey tournament ~during lecture time~ and ~with the professor~. That class was so much fun and definitely one of the highlights of the semester. One of the other highlights of the class was when we went to an escape room in the week we were learning about the concept of immersion in play! We went to Boxaroo, a local Boston escape room company (that actually has some MIT alumni working there!), and it was so fun! One of the reasons we went on this field trip, was to get experience doing field work and being anthropologists of play. We then used our experiences in the escape room to write our first ethnographies in the class, in preparation for our final projects. For the final project, we had to do participatory action research on a form of fun or play that you are not familiar with and write an ethnographic report on it. Allan wrote about Next Quest, a D&D group in Next House, and I wrote about Singing for Service, a community-service focused acapella group. So towards the end of the semester we were participating in D&D games and going on service outings ~for class~. And honestly, all the writing we did (for the final project, and shorter papers throughout the semester) was really enjoyable because we were writing and reflecting on games, play, and fun! Overall, it was an amazing HASS! 20/10 would recommend, and honestly any class with Graham Jones (we heard that the class he co-taught last semester, Paranormal Machines, was very good too!)

MAS.URG: Undergraduate Research in Media Arts and Science

One of our goals before graduating was to UROP in the Media Lab at least once. And this semester we finally did it. ⁠01 well, we did make animations for the Social Machine’s group perviously, but that was technically a job, not a UROP. Plus, we did everything remotely that semester, so we actually only spent a total of 2 hours in the actual lab just to meet with our supervisor. ! We uroped in the Fluid Interfaces group on the project PaperDreams! The project is an interactive AI-enhanced drawing application! Essentially, the user draws anything they want on the digital canvas, and through a sketch recognition neural network, the application will know what the user drew, and display that word, along with related or unrelated words, in the Inspiration bar. This is meant to enhance the creativity of the user, and assist them in the visual art/storytelling process! Additionally, the application also has the ability to color in the user’s drawings for them, and provide pre-made sketches that the user can drag onto the canvas. When we joined, there were two variations of the current functionality of the application that our supervisor wanted to implement: a chemistry PaperDreams and a 3D PaperDreams. For the chemistry version, which Allan worked on, we wanted the application to recognize user-drawn chemical compounds, and then provide suggestions of functional groups that they can add onto the canvas, in order to create a derivative of that compound. The application of this would be to enhance creativity/workflow in the drug discovery process. For the 3D version, which Danny worked on, we wanted the application to be able to convert user drawn sketches into 3D models. This would hopefully lower the barrier of entry (i.e. learning how to use 3D modeling software) for people interested in creating 3D art. This involved running a variety of neural networks that convert drawings into their corresponding normal maps, bump maps, or models. We worked a lot on getting prototypes of these functionalities implemented in time for the Media Lab Member’s Week, which is when the sponsors of the lab see the latest work. It was many hours of work leading up to that week, but we got the prototypes finished, and then got to present! After member’s week, we switched gears into working on the original PaperDreams application by improving the way it saves user-drawn sketches. Instead of saving them locally, we integrated PaperDreams with Firebase, and by the end of the semester, PaperDreams could store user-drawn sketches remotely! We learned a ton during this project, from working with neural networks to JavaScript to Firebase to web development. 

Senior fall was a really busy semester, but also one of the most fun and rewarding! We are looking forward to our 8th and final semester!!! Also, how did time move so quickly that we are about to enter our 8th and final semester

I had a breakthrough the other day.

I was sitting in my favorite Kendall Square restaurant, Clover. When I say favorite, I mean F.A.V.O.R.I.T.E. In a busy week, I’m there at least once a day: The prices are reasonable, I can order on my phone, all the food is vegetarian, and it’s one of the only nearby places open until 11:00 PM. This place is freakin’ perfect (which is why I don’t mind shamelessly plugging it on the blog). BUT ANYWAYS I was just eating my breakfast bowl, minding my own business, when one of the guys working there comes up to me and says.

“Caroline, right?”

I look up and he’s holding this cup. So I’m like “Yeah, that’s me.”

And then he’s like “Yeah, you’re in here all the time. Well, we accidentally made this extra cup of coffee, and you order coffee a lot so I thought you might want it.”

So I got a free cup of coffee. But the coffee isn’t the point, it’s what the coffee represents. They know my name. They know that I order coffee a lot… I think I might finally be a regular at a restaurant here in Cambridge!

This might not be a big deal for some people, but it means a lot to me. Back home, I was a “regular” at a few establishments: a coffee shop by my house, another one right on Lake Michigan, a diner/grocery store with an amazing tofu scrambler. I knew the people who worked in these places. My ex-girlfriend and I would always hope to get this one waitress when we went out for breakfast, and I sometimes ran late to work in the morning just because I wanted to talk to my favorite baristo about the date he went on last night. When I moved out to Boston, I knew not to expect midwest-levels of friendliness. I frequented a few places because, y’know, I’m a lazy bean who doesn’t always cook and would probably sell her soul for coffee. But I didn’t become a regular, a true regular, until that guy handed me that paper cup. I’m a part of the Cambridge ecosystem now. People outside of MIT know my name.

Lately, I’ve been feeling emotionally homeless. I returned to the place I grew up over winter break, and I just… don’t belong there anymore. That kind of hurt. For my entire life I’ve had this vision of myself: Graduate high school, attend my state school’s honors program, become an electrical engineer, move back to Milwaukee, send my kids to the same high school. Never leave the Midwest. Never leave Wisconsin? Maybe move to Chicago (only two hours away) if I’m feeling adventurous. This was the way my life was always going to be… until I found MIT. Only a year and a half after discovering what MIT even was, this institution has dramatically and irreversibly changed the trajectory of my life. I wrote an email to one of my acting mentors in high school after Wisconsin’s admitted students meet-and-greet in April, and I compared that tiny get-together to “seeing color for the first time”. Imagine how black-and-white things felt at home after living on East Campus for a semester.

But then I came back to MIT, and as much as I absolutely love it here, I realized I still have a lot of adjusting to do; it’s going to take a long time to re-imagine 19 years of expectations. For now, I’m kinda just existing wherever the world plops me. At least I’ve been plopped in nice places, right? But anyways, revisiting my old haunts in Milwaukee was the first thing in awhile that reminded me of what “home” can feel like. Home is feeling a sense of belonging even in a nameless crowd. Home is where your absence would be noticed. Home is having an internalized map of a place: a favorite table or spot on the couch, that one menu item or home-made meal you treat yourself to every once in awhile, that place you always walk to when nothing makes sense and you just need to be somewhere else. I chose the road I didn’t have a map to. Even on my worst days I don’t regret that choice, but sometimes I can’t help but think about how much simpler life would’ve been if I’d never decided to leave.

So when that dude addressed me by name and asked me if I wanted a free coffee, I stayed for four more hours to do my homework. I felt comfortable, the kind of comfortable I once felt studying at Colectivo Coffee Roasters on Hampton Ave. Afterwards, I took a walk along the Charles river and ended up in this little park I’ve been to a few times. It’s right on the water, the way *my* park was back in Wisconsin. The more of these little habits I build, the more places I start “regular-ing”, the more I feel like my existence in Cambridge is actually my life, not just some hazy dream.

So thanks for the coffee, Clover. You’ve won a repeat customer.

I’ve been hesitant to write things since my mind has been a bit of a mess lately. Aidan described IAP as some strange purgatory, where there’s a feeling of too much and not enough going on. During the days where I have things to do, I feel happy and fulfilled. IAP is truly what I make of it and the power rests in my hands.

On days where I had my 10am 8.01L lecture, I would wake up at a crisp 8:30AM, wash up, eat some breakfast, mess around for a bit, and embark on my journey to 6-120, my favorite lecture hall.

I maintained a pretty solid routine for the first half of IAP, going to the gym consistently and eating food I got off of Raymond and Aiden, two absolute saints who are basically the reason I didn’t starve to death this IAP.

Once it hit 11am, I would walk to the MIT Education Arcade where I met with my UROP advisor and my other fellow UROPS to work on research for our project or plan and design a couple of things we needed for our research experiment. There, I would sit with the other employees in the lab, or just simply observe as they played fun games like Dungeons and Dragons or Codenames. It was absolutely surreal to me that I was getting paid to sit in a place that generated so much joy. I love my UROP with my whole heart — it made me realize that I did make the correct decision in leaving my old UROP and come here instead.

But then there were days of IAP where I felt a little less than human. I would wake up at 2, and while I didn’t mind this that much because it was nice and cozy and warm and good, I would feel all sense of motivation lose my body. I would somehow will myself to trudge over to Stud5 to try and get some semblance of work done, before it was already 6 and I’d head back to Random to eat, watch some movies with some friends, and stay up until some ungodly hour, just to repeat the whole cycle all over again.

I think IAP for me hasn’t been as nice because I have too much time alone. There’s not enough hustle and bustle to keep my mind occupied. I was once told that I wasn’t “intellectually stimulating” enough, which has, frankly, stuck with me for a bit. And so there are times where I ask myself: Am I doing enough?

It’s a common dilemma we find ourselves. When we have things to do, we are stressed and constantly occupied. The moment those stressors disappear, we’re still distressed because we now don’t know what to even do with ourselves.

Every moment feels like such a waste. But I’ve been getting a bit better with just sitting with my thoughts. A couple nights ago, I just sat on the couch of Loop lounge and listened to Aiden try and learn piano. The blaring of jumbled, frustrated notes was the soundtrack to my overwhelming amount of thoughts.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately. I guess that’s what IAP is for. I’ve had a few good cries this IAP, which is good character development for our developing sitcom⁠01 It's a running joke in our friend group that we're in a TV show because of the sitcom-like development of events that have happened in these coming months. It'll be on air one day. I'll make it happen. For now, I share our stupid journeys and quirks through here in hopes that someone will gain some interest and pick us up for a full 8 seasons. .

Every time I hear the word “internship” I spiral into a mess, almost drowning in all my anxieties that have been building for the past semester and a half. I’ve been rejected from a lot of places. I’ve been ghosted by a lot of places. I’ve got so many more places to apply to. And I’m just very exhausted and drained. I’ve probably applied to at least thirty or so places and haven’t gotten an offer from a single one. All I really want for this summer is to not end up back home. I know I could always get a UROP, but for me, getting an internship represents a lot more than just something to do over the summer.

I’ve been struggling a lot with imposter syndrome lately, especially taking 6.145. I found that I’m probably the least qualified to be a CS major out of my friends. The solutions just don’t come all that easily to me and though friends offer to help me, I can’t help but feel embarrassed every time someone even watches me or reads over my code. I tell myself that I’m a computer science major and that you just have to like what you’re studying to do it, not be good at it. And I try and repeat these affirmations every day but these past few weeks, as I watch my friends easily get solutions that I struggled for hours with.  I’ve been purposely avoiding asking for Raymond for help since he’s this bigbrained CS person in my head and I really don’t want to waste his time or brainpower on my code. He obviously noticed that I haven’t been asking for his help and asked why and all I could give was a weak shrug. Anyway, there’s obviously a lot here to unpack. Imposter syndrome, big doubts, fear of asking for help.

Along the lines of asking for help, I have an actual fear I’m going to NR 8.01L. The final is tomorrow. I’ve touched a little bit of the materials but have not been consistently studying. This class truly is the bane of my existence. I’ve been telling myself I’m not going to NR but honestly 8.011 isn’t looking too bad now honestly. I think I know physics but I don’t know how I’m going to do tomorrow. I’m terrified. I really just want physics done and over with. But I also need to remind myself that if I do NR, it doesn’t reflect poorly on me or who I am or my intelligence. But that’s hard. A lot of this is hard.

And finally on this long list of things that have been ailing me: body image! Really have been hating the way I look lately. I’ve been consistently working out, but here and there I skip cardio, and it makes me feel like, to be completely frank, shit. When I lack a routine, my gym routine also suffers and as a result, I’ve been slacking a bit. It’s not nice.

So these thoughts have been combining all together to make IAP a bit…off. I’m given the freedom to do whatever I please. I get to be with all my friends who are all using their IAP to do great things. Emma has her UROP. Mariia has her holography class and has been working nonstop on MTG (The Wedding Singer! You should come out and see it.) Caroline has been working tirelessly at BMC. Melissa has been studying day and night for her IAP EMT class. Aiden has been working on his UROP and 6.145 with me. Raymond has been doing his UROP and 6.117. Aidan has been working on his UROP as well and doing 6.145 and 8.20. So everyone’s been making good money and good progress. It’s really exciting.

I’ve recently reworked my FireRoad schedules, planning it for a double major CMS/6-3 with a minor in 4. I’m still not completely happy with it though. I want to try and squeeze in a language in there somewhere.

For now, I’m going to try and pass 8.01L, secure this spring UROP I’ve had my eyes on, and write the other 10 internship applications I have in line.

For now, I’ll leave off with this meme that’s been really describing how I’ve been feeling this past IAP. The two States.

yeah so i guess i’m joining the “what i’m doing this IAP” bandwagon—in the month-long lull that is IAP, there isn’t much to talk about besides what you’re doing with your time

i actually had no idea what i was doing this IAP until the day it began. this was because i was planning on taking a class to satisfy the culture course requirement for MISTI Israel, but since i had no idea if i had been accepted to the program or not (and was supposed to find out before i left for Christmas break), i couldn’t register for the class. as a backup, i signed up for web.lab, a web development class/programming competition. i thought the class sounded cool, but i wasn’t that motivated to do it since i knew it wouldn’t be the best use of my time.

thankfully, on the way to my first day of web.lab, i received an email letting me know that i had been accepted to MISTI Israel! yay!!! i immediately registered for the culture class and dropped web.lab.

so everything worked out in the end! i feel adequately busy this IAP, but i still have enough time to hang out with the people i care about. #thriving

17.567 — Israel: History, Politics, Culture, and Identity

the culture course for MISTI Israel! it’s 10-1 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and although classes go by quickly, a grueling three hours of class so early in the morning is difficult to handle. all things considered, though, i really enjoy this class; the professor makes lectures engaging and thought-provoking, and the content is fascinating. we have a significant amount of reading to do for each class, but it’s all so informative that i enjoy doing it. i’ve already learned so much history from a variety of different perspectives, which is new for me—my prior history classes were fairly limited in their scope of narratives. 

this class is just one of the many options available for satisfying the MISTI Israel requirements. i chose to take it since it was one of the two recommended courses and because i wanted to get it out of the way during IAP so i can focus on more technical classes in the spring.

Mocha Moves

i thought six hours of dance a week was bad…yeah, no. i’ve been dancing 1-4 hours a day. a DAY. i have 20 hours of dance this week and i’m only doing seven of the 12 dances!!

…which means that i’m usually occupied with dance between 6 and 10 every night. i also am choreographing two dances, so i work on those during the day. that’s a lot of dance fam

i’m really grateful that i get the chance to do this, though! every dance i’m in is a lot of fun, and the thought of performing them at Mocha Show in February is super exciting. also, this month is a great opportunity to grow as a dancer—chances to dance in so many different styles in such a short period of time are pretty scarce. 

UROP

i have a UROP in the political science department that involves using natural language processing methods to analyze a hUge archive of documents from the Brazilian dictatorship between 1964 and 85. it’s a really cool project and i’m glad i was able to find it last-minute at the start of IAP–it’s possible, guys

Cooking

i unfortunately didn’t cook much during my first semester, but i’m a new woman this IAP. cooking is so enjoyable tbh. it’s therapeutic and fun and satisfying since you get to EAT the food you make!!

i feel like the typical college student experience is googling things like “kimchi omelet” and “asparagus goat cheese” because at some point, you end up stockpiling a lot of random ingredients that you need to use all at once. well, it works…i made some dope broccoli soup by throwing together a lot of ingredients that were about to go bad. we stan

IAP’s almost over now, but i’m super super excited for spring semester!! see you then :)

Last week, I was lucky enough to get to see something very unique: the view from on top of Cambridge’s tallest building. The MIT Radio Society is raising awareness about the upcoming Green Building renovations, and they took me on a tour so that I could tell you about all the super-cool things they’re doing up there.

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi le:Green_Building,_MIT,_Cambridge,_M assachusetts.JPG

You probably recognize the Green Building’s weird silhouette, but maybe, like me, hadn’t thought about why it looks that way. The Radio Society taught me about the various antennae and took me inside the two radomes (yes, that giant sphere is a thing you can stand inside !!!). We also spent a good deal of time taking in the view of Boston and Cambridge from 21 floors up (we had to take TWO elevators).

The radomes (short for “radar dome”) are actually just fibreglass shells, built to keep out the wind and rain but be permeable to radio waves. They protect two big satellite dishes, which are used to communicate with people around the world as well as for radio astronomy. With the power turned off, these radomes are safe to enter to do maintenance… or just look around. (All the beautiful photos in the rest of this blog post are by Leif C. ’23.)

The fibreglass itself is in good condition, but the paint on top of it is old and peeling, which creates this beautiful mottled flamey look. On the roof itself, it’s often very windy, and that day it was about -8 degrees C. But inside the dome (once you’ve hauled yourself up the extremely cold metal ladder, anyway), it’s quiet and much warmer. Although much of the electrical equipment is very recent, the dishes themselves are older, and you can tell: they have history written right on them! Take a look at those dates, baby.

We spent some time in the domes, as well as inside the “shack” (the headquarters of the society), while I learned about all the projects going on on the roof. Here are just a few:

-A physics undergraduate recently used the big radome dish to map out the rotation of our galaxy by finding the Doppler shift in the frequencies of hydrogen emission spectra at various points, and using that to calculate the velocity of the matter (star, etc.) at those points.

-EME, or Earth-Moon-Earth communication. Bouncing radio signals off of the moon, rather than aiming them directly at the earth, allows the radio operator to talk to anyone anywhere on the planet. Past Radio Society connections have included Texas, California, Europe, and Australia. Recently, they communicated with the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico after the earthquakes in the beginning of January, and received the news that the Observatory was a bit shaken up, but safe from the worst of the damage. (A system like this could be very useful in the case of a large-scale natural disaster in the US, when more commonly-used lines of communications like telephones might be out of service.)

-An APRS (automated packet reporting system) antenna. The APRS antenna works as a repeater: it collects packets of data being emitted nearby, like GPS signals from a computer, information from a weather station, or a packet from another repeater, and sends them out to further repeaters to help them reach their destination. For a long time, the Radio Society didn’t think that their APRS antenna was doing much — and then it went down, and they found out just how useful it was to everyone else. Today, they have a system set up to raise an alert after even just a few minutes of downtime, and the antenna handles thousands of packets per day, helping everyone in the Cambridge area get their data where it needs to be.

-An ADS-B (Automatic dependent surveillance – broadcast) receiver. ADS-B is the system that airplanes use to broadcast their position automatically. These broadcasts are very useful to other planes and to air traffic controllers, of course, but anyone else with a receiver can also pick them up. In the future, the Radio Society is hoping to develop a couple really interesting projects based around ADS-B. One is actually a machine learning program: can a computer be taught to predict the future location of an airplane based on past data? The other involves bouncing other radio signals off the airplane. This would require being able to accurately calculate the plane’s future location, but could greatly increase the range of the radio waves.

There are even more projects planned for the future, but things have been moving more slowly lately as club efforts focus on the renovations. The roof continues to be in use, though, as other groups, labs, and classes use it for research and learning. The Society’s ultimate dream would be to use these renovations as a chance to increase these other uses even more. The Green Building’s roof is one of the only rooftop radio/signal lab spaces on campus open to students — and it is the only handicap accessible rooftop lab space at MIT. It could be a fantastic space, open to all parts of the MIT community, where research of all types is done.

Of course, I went on this tour with the express purpose of writing about it on the blogs. But beyond the research being done here (which is very, very cool), I was struck by just how much this lab space, and the Radio Society, embody some of what is so special about MIT. We are a place where students teach other students; where you can learn skills you can’t learn anywhere else; where anyone is happy to teach you anything, if you only show up and ask. “Engineering for social good” and “learning by doing” have become buzzwords of late, but here at MIT they have always been in the water, powering so much of what we do.

The Radio Society is currently fundraising to support the continued existence of their antennae, the two radomes, and their “shack” headquarters. They are already partway to their goal of $300,000 to retain the shack. Unfortunately, administration has set much higher fundraising targets in order to keep the elevator to the roof (so that everyone can see the view I saw yesterday, no matter their level of mobility) and the equipment (needed for all these amazing research projects); the Society is still in talks with them to set the exact amount. If you’d like to make a donation to help them preserve this space, or want to get involved with their campaign, information on how to do so is available at their website: http://w1mx.mit.edu. And thanks for listening :)

I felt the sudden urge to write something tonight. I wasn’t sure what it would be, or what exactly to say, but I guess it’s always good to start at the beginning.

Now that I think about it, the beginning makes a lot of sense considering I’m in the middle of reading applications for students who are about to start a new chapter in their lives.

So, where’s my beginning? I guess it would be May 2010. I finished graduate school the semester before and had just completed my graduate assistantship, so it was high time for me to find a job and start my life. There was one problem: no one would hire me. Every response to my resume started with an apology chased by “Naah. We’re good around here. Keep it moving,” or something along those lines. I can’t remember the exact wording, because I was too busy drowning my sorrow and leftover stipend money in milkshakes from McDonald’s. These, my friends, were dark times.

It’s a bit unfair to say no one would hire me, because by August I had two job offers: part-time sales associate at Best Buy and part time building manager at a nursing home. Now, I was in no position to be picky. I took both.

There I was, me and my degrees, pouring coffee for the elderly and selling landline phones to the masses⁠01 I'm old . I wasn’t the only one who noticed either. I remember during one particular dinner at the nursing home, I was pouring a “nice” lady’s coffee when she yelled to her friends, “HEY! This guy has a master’s degree and he’s pouring my coffee! Can you believe it?!” She must have noticed that the light in my eyes had started to diminish, so she patted me on the arm and said, “Don’t worry, son. I was talking to my sister and she said the person who mows the lawn at her facility also has a master’s degree.” That moment was the dark night of my soul.

While working those two jobs, I received several dozen rejection calls and emails for other jobs that I had applied for. The idea of failure was crushing and at times it felt like I couldn’t breathe. Add that to the fact that every time I went online I saw my peers living their absolute best lives. “How can they afford to do that?” I would ask myself. Every new Facebook photo felt like a million arrows to my heart.

My shift at the nursing home was 4:00 p.m.—midnight every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The interesting thing about the second shift was that most of the guests were asleep by 8:00 p.m., so, outside of the occasional lap around the building to make sure everything was okay, I had nothing to do.

Quick aside: The next revelation I had is why I think the question of “what do you do for fun?” is one of the most important things we ask on your application.

All right, back to what I was saying. As I was starting to figure out that I really didn’t have much to do at work, the kitchen chef said that after they closed, I could take anything that I wanted from the fridge. With this new greenlight, I developed a routine that would eventually guide me through those dark times:

1. Get to work
2. Check in with the director.
3. Check in with co-workers.
4. Help residents with dinner.
5. Sit at the front desk and wait for everyone to retire to their rooms.
6. Take a lap around the building to make sure everything was ok.
7. Stop at the kitchen and grab some sort of cake or pie.
8. Go back to the front desk, go to Hulu, and turn on…

That’s right! NARUTO! Ok, so I watched Naruto a bit in undergrad, but then I kind of fell out of touch once I started graduate school. A few months before this, my brother told me that the show had changed its name and skipped ahead several years. With this in mind, I decided to see what I had missed, and lo and behold, I was 150 episodes behind. As I said before, it’s always good to start at the beginning. Episode one. Play.

At that point I was hooked. Every work shift was the same: watch two episodes, go on a walk, watch two more episodes, go on another walk, watch two more episodes, go home, apply for eight jobs, go to sleep. This went on for months. As time passed, I witnessed Akatsuki stealing tailed beasts, taught myself to code, saw the beginning of the fourth great ninja war, learned more about graphic design, and saw the reformation of team 7. The best part was that I was no longer consumed by the fact that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I just wanted to see Naruto become Hokage.

And then, almost out of nowhere, I got a call back. The Boston University Alumni Association was looking for a temp to run their social media, website content, and email marketing. I did a phone interview and it went well. I did a Skype interview and that went well too. Actually, it went so well that they said they would give me an answer soon!

“Soon” came. My phone rang. The voice on the other end said, “We thought you were great, but I don’t feel comfortable making you move to Boston for a temporary position. Sorry, but we are going with a different candidate.” I don’t remember what was said after that, but I do remember everything going dark.

A few days passed, and I started thinking about Naruto and how he would have reacted in my situation. It would have been with positivity and belief in himself and belief in other people and screaming about his ninja way and how he would be Hokage someday. My version of this was sending a follow up email to the person who interviewed me at BU. I thanked them and asked them to keep me in mind for future positions. A few days later, I got a response. I had been invited to Boston to interview again because things hadn’t worked out with their previous hire.

WAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

I’m already at 1000 words, so I’m going to do my own time skip past this part. Long story short, I got the job! It actually hinged on the time I spent teaching myself how to code. I guess looking back at it, the time between the end of my assistantship and when I started at BU wasn’t that long. It was about eight months, give or take. But, in the middle of it, it seemed to last forever.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but I’m not a good enough writer to put that lesson into words. Maybe one of the other bloggers can do that for you in the comments. For now, I’ll just tell you that everything matters. Music, games, books, movies, shows, hobbies, whatever— they’re all important. Embrace them and embrace how they make you feel.

I’m not really good at endings, but I think I do remember hearing a certain blonde-haired ninja say that “failing doesn’t give you a reason to give up, as long as you believe.” I know. It’s a bit cheesy, but as someone who just told you that he spent most of his 20s watching Naruto, I can’t think of a better way to end this

Ben O. ’19 and I decided to team up to talk about all the dance teams here at MIT.  We’re both active members of the dance community; we joined Mocha Moves in Fall ‘19 and are members of Dance Troupe, but I’ve done it only one semester and Ben’s done it for years. He obviously has been dancing at MIT a lot longer than I have, but since we’re both pretty involved in dance, we thought we’d talk about all the opportunities to explore here, as well as our own dance journeys. I know that as a prefrosh, I didn’t know anything about these groups, so I hope this helps! :) 

Overview

All Styles/Levels:

Dance Troupe — biggest dance organization, has styles like contemporary, urban, African/Caribbean, fusion, jazz, Latin, tap, step, and more!

Urban:

Mocha Moves —  advanced urban dance team, hosts two shows each year: Ring the Alarm and Mocha Show

Ridonkulous — advanced urban dance team, hosts annual showcase called Footwork

Movementality — an all-male hip hop dance team that’s memey and lots of fun

MissBehavior — an all-female urban dance team; has dancers from a diverse range of teams that represent styles like hip-hop, contemporary, African, Bollywood, etc

Cultural:

MIT Bhangra — Bhangra is a super high-energy folk dance that originates from the Indian state Punjab; it’s lit and so is this team!

MIT Mirchi — a Bollywood fusion dance team that incorporates styles from Indian classical dance, Bollywood, Bhangra, contemporary, and hip-hop

Asian Dance Team — focuses on East Asian dance, from traditional Asian dance to K-Pop; members perform at a biannual showcase and also can participate in ADT dance cover videos

Sakata Afrique — African-Caribbean dance group that aims to introduce Afro-Carribean dance to the MIT community; members dance to afrobeats, dancehall, soca, reggaeton, and more!

MIT Lion Dance — lion dancing is a distinctive Chinese cultural art that this group aims to celebrate; the team performs at lots of events all over campus!

Miscellaneous:

Imobilare — a Bboy crew that teaches breakdance workshops and performs at various campus events

Ballroom Dance Team — a no-experience-required, competitive ballroom dance team with MIT/Wellesley affiliates

MIT Fixation — a competitive contemporary dance team; they’re SO GRACEFUL AND AMAZING AHHH

Our Dance Journeys

(Color-coded orange for Ankita and purple for Ben)

How did you start dancing? 

I honestly can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t dancing—I remember learning the dances in the movie Another Cinderella Story as a seven-year-old and busting it down to All Star by Smash Mouth when I was even younger. Dance was the best means of channeling all my energy and excitement into a cohesive format, so I would pretty much always be moving in some shape or form.

I started learning choreographed dances when I discovered K-Pop in 4th grade (it was actually because of a Ke$ha phase…Run Devil Run really opened doors for me lmao). I realized that countless choreography videos for K-Pop songs were available on YouTube for me to learn, so I started mirroring and slowing videos so I could mimic them. 

A few years later, I started learning dances from the choreography videos of legit dance studios (namely 1Million and Millennium). Learning these dances became my favorite hobby, and eventually, I started filming videos of myself for my Instagram. I would learn a few dances a week since creating my own dance videos was so fun for me. Over the years, I’ve learned over 250 dances! 

As far back as I can remember I have been dancing. Family gatherings were incomplete without everyone coming to the dance floor and moving through the “electric slide” and hopping to the beats of “wobble.” I spent hours watching and re-watching Moose embody Michael Jackson in the rainy closing scene of Step Up 2. I would walk around the house trying to copy the robotic movements of the infamous Madd Chadd, and a trip to Sparkles roller-skating was incomplete unless I tried, at least once, to join in on the dance line that seemed to move effortlessly around the rink.

 I have always loved to dance. Music and motion have always had a direct link to each other, and in all honestly I cannot go back to a moment in my life when that link formed, but I must have been a very different person without it. Now, let me be straight, loving to dance and being good at dancing are two very very different things. I still think of myself as very much a beginner in the world of dance, and only started training and taking dance seriously within the last couple of years, but to answer the question “how did I start dancing” the only answer I have for you guys is… the first time I heard a song I started to move to the beat and the rest is history.

What’s your prior experience? 

Besides learning dances off YouTube, none. I didn’t know what a ball change or pas de bourree (literally thought it was potpourri for a while) was before starting dance at MIT. 

I’d say that I had exposure to a lot of urban dance because I’d learn choreography from a wide range of dancers, but I definitely never had any legitimate training. Workshops weren’t very accessible for me either; the only ones I attended before the Mocha Moves one at CPW were two 1Million Dance Studio ones all the way in NYC.

My prior dance experience before coming to MIT include, trying to impress a girl doing a baby freeze and scratching my face my freshman year of high school. The Dougie during my eighth-grade dance was a vibe. Umm, my 5th-grade class did the dance to crank that by soulja boy. My little brother, and sister would go out in the grass with me sometimes and we would practice the worm back in like 2nd grade, that was always fun. And then of course, as mentioned before the electric slide and wobble at any family gathering. 

What got you involved in dance at MIT? 

I always knew I was going to be active in the dance community in college—I’d been dancing alone in my room for so long that I couldn’t imagine not joining at least one dance group at MIT. I was pretty sure that I wanted to join Mocha Moves since they seemed badass and I really liked the set they performed at CPW, but I was also interested in Ridonkulous, the other main urban group.

When I got to MIT, I was really excited to discover that the dance community extends far beyond just Mocha and Donk. I heard about Dance Troupe from its president, who lives on my floor, and decided to join since it seemed like a low commitment yet fun way to meet lots of dancers. I also was interested in Mirchi since I’d never really done Bollywood fusion before, but eventually decided that I wanted to focus on urban dance for my first year in college. I ended up getting into both Mocha and Donk, but chose to just do Mocha since I didn’t think I’d have the time for both. I’m really happy that I decided to do Mocha and one DT dance my first semester since it was just enough to introduce me to dancing/performing with a team without being too intense. 

Like a lot of students when I first got MIT I was kind of overwhelmed by just the sheer amount of stuff that I could do when I got on campus. I knew I wanted to do something outside of academics, just so I had a hobby of some sort, but in all honesty I was very unsure of what exactly I wanted to get involved with.

Thankfully, I had a few friends that were pretty set on what they wanted to. My boys David Onyemelukwe and Bryan Chen got to campus and were determined to hop right into the dance scene so I more or less just followed them. Through their influence and the guidance of an MIT junior Tim Nguyen who was already pretty involved in the dance community here, we found ourselves at Dance Troupe auditions, MIT Mocha Moves auditions, and MIT Ridonkulous auditions.

I, of course, made neither Mocha Moves nor Ridonkulous my first go around, because I had never actually done choreographed dancing before, but I did manage to get a spot on an intermediate dance in Dance Troupe and thus started my journey as a dancer at MIT!

What groups are you a part of? 

I’m a part of Mocha Moves and Dance Troupe.

I am currently a member of MIT Mocha Moves and MIT Movementality, and I have choreographed and danced for MIT Dance Troupe.

mocha! <3

What was getting into Mocha Moves like for you? 

I got into Mocha in my freshman fall. It was my second dance audition ever, the first being the Donk audition that was right before it, so it was out of my comfort zone since I was so used to dancing for fun. Honestly, though, the freestyle section of the audition was the only part that could’ve been considered stressful. Looking back, I came into MIT pretty confident that I’d get onto any hip hop/urban team I auditioned for, which is hilarious to me now that I’ve been on the other side of the audition process. Being a member of a team has taught me how little I know about all the facets of dance, from choreo retention and musicality to technique and body control. Dancing alongside people who have trained and grown so much in their time at MIT has completely expanded my view of dance, and now I’m only excited for how much I’ll improve in the next three years. 

Getting into Mocha was a very long process for me. I tried out the first time my freshman fall when I first got to MIT. However, I had never really tried choreographed dancing before and I just ended remembering almost none of the choreo by the end of the audition.

Needless to say, I didn’t make the team my freshman fall but it did give me… perspective, for lack of a better word. I had always enjoyed dancing in very casual settings but it became very clear to me very quickly that freestyling with my friends and being able to perform choreography were two completely different skills. So from there, I joined Dance Troupe.

I joined an intermediate dance and started to learn the basics of choreographed dancing. I learned words like textures, choreo retention, speed change, hitting pictures, and so much more. I was able to perform in two sets at the end of that semester, but after all of that dancing, I slowly began to learn how much there was that I didn’t know. So rather than auditioning again the next semester, I decided to continue to learn more about dance, and this is when I made a very crucial discovery to my dance career…. dance exists outside of MIT!

Over the next year I started spending time going to workshops around Boston and asking the more experienced dancers at MIT where I could go to improve my dancing ability. Moving my dancing to outside of MIT gave me even more perspective about how much growing I had to do as a dancers. Outside of MIT there are people who really focus on dance as their entire life. Watching these individuals dance really put a passion in me to improve and hopefully become half as good as they are.

At the end of my sophomore year I had an opportunity to move to shanghai and there my dancing kind of slowed down a bit. I did join two amazing dance teams in Shanghai where I learned about how different dance was in different parts of the world; however, I did not focus as much on the individual training and getting better. Because of that, when I did come back and auditioned for Mocha my second time I did not make the team yet again, but I was not discouraged. My focus had moved from getting onto Mocha, to trying to become a better dancer, and with getting better would become more opportunities to join teams.

 I spent the next year on personal growth, and really improving through more workshops and really watching those that I admired to see what it was that made them different. After that year of training I tried out for Mocha one more time my senior fall, and I MADE IT. I say all of that to say, if you start dancing in college don’t give up if you don’t start off on a competition team right out the gate. Getting better takes time and dedication, but if you do put in that time and are very critical about your improvement, you can do anything you put your mind to. 

us performing at Funktion

How are Mocha Moves and Dance Troupe? 

I LOVE Mocha. Initially, I thought the six hours of practice a week of practice were kind of tedious; after we learned all the sections of our first set and moved onto cleaning and drilling the choreography, I felt as if dancing on the team wasn’t exciting anymore. Those feelings only lasted a week or two, though; once we performed at World of Dance and Funktion, I realized how gratifying being a member of a team is. Also, spending long days at performances only brought me closer to my team, and I’m really close to everyone on it now. 

Mocha has different commitments throughout the year. In Fall, we focus on World of Dance, a competition where teams and individuals from all over the Boston area perform, as well as Ring the Alarm (RTA), our own intercollegiate dance competition that we host on campus. I really enjoy the 4-5 minute sets we learn for each event—especially RTA (Gas Pedal cameoooo)—and love how every section is so different because it has different pairs of choreographers.

In December, we perform at DT shows, which is a blast (looking at you, Friday 10pm). After that, we don’t really have any commitments until after the holiday break, but we do have Mocha Formal, an event where we all dress fancy, eat a ton of food, and discuss our choreography ideas for the upcoming Mocha Show. Mocha Show is an event in February that’s entirely choreographed and performed by us. It has 10-13 dances and is around 2 hours long, so it’s like a mini DT show. (People can choose as many or few dances as they want. If you’re gone for IAP, you can still participate, but you’ll be in fewer dances/sections.)

…And if you consider how we had six hours of practice a week for two sets in Fall, then the amount of time we spend preparing for Mocha Show seems pretty daunting.

Well, yeah, it definitely is. We all dance up to 5 hours a day, sometimes more on weekends (yes, we have practice every single day). I usually have 2-4 hours a day, for an average of about 20 hours a week. And to think I thought six hours a week was too much…

Honestly, Mocha Show seems like a lot, but I’m so grateful for the opportunity to participate in it. I’ve choreographed before, but it’s been more of a “string moves together and hope for the best” situation since it was mostly for myself. For Mocha Show, though, I choreographed two pieces, staging and all, for the first time. Choreographing and teaching is new to me, and I struggle a lot, but seeing the team perform my pieces is really gratifying. 

Mocha Show is in a few weeks (2/14 and 2/15), so we haven’t gotten over that particular hurdle yet, but when Spring comes around, we’re back on the performance grind. We create a new set that’s comprised of Mocha Show pieces and perform it at various shows, including CPW! 

As for DT, I love it and I’m so glad I decided to join! I did only the advanced urban dance last aka my first semester, but it was super fun and rewarding. Next semester, I’m planning on choreographing, and I literally can’t wait

Dance Troupe is where dancing started for me. Dance troupe spans from absolute beginner to advanced dancers and really has room for you to learn and experiment with any kind of dance you would like.

Dance Troupe is less of a single team and more like a group of teams. Every semester people who would like to choreograph and make a set (4-5 one-ish minute songs normally makes up one set). These individuals or groups of people then get to audition their set and have it be selected for a spot in the DT show at the end of the semester. In the past, there has been urban, contemporary, step, breaking, tap, ballroom, etc. all of which have been featured at the end of the semester.

the junior spring advanced dance section, Ben’s last time dancing with the class of 2019

After the sets have been chosen, the choreographers who are in charge of each set have a day of giving a sneak peek to their piece and anyone who is hoping to be in the show at the end of the semester comes to watch and decide which sets they would like to be in. The next day there is an audition in which the choreographers choose which dancers they would like to have in their set. As said before the potential pieces span all genres and all skill levels, so there is honestly a place for anyone.

Practices are held once a week per set you have chosen to be in, and throughout the semester there are showings in which each set performs in front of everyone else in DT to show how the pieces are coming together.

At the end of the semester there is a weekend of shows in which all of the sets perform. There are lights, costumes, and a ton of dancing, making it one of my favorite times of the year.

DT means family

For me DT is where I started dancing at MIT and will always have a special place in my heart. I have been in DT every semester of MIT, and choreographed a set this last semester. If you are ever trying to find a place to start dancing at MIT, to grow as a dancer, or to show off your growth and choreography there is no better place than DT.

How do you practice dancing? 

I’d like to say that I attend workshops frequently, but I really don’t…when I’m not dancing for Mocha or DT, I’m learning dances off YouTube like how I did in the past. I don’t keep up with new choreography videos as much as I used to, but when I come across really good ones, I’m sure to save them for a time when I’m not too hosed with my other dance commitments. 

I try to set dancing challenges and goals for myself. I have standard training practice, these include things like going to some number of workshops a month, or making some number of pieces. My other practice normally includes working on a piece of my dancing I want to improve on. I may be working on my bounce and spend some amount of time a day working on bouncing drills, or wave drills, or chest drills, and trying to incorporate these different parts of dance into my normal freestyling and choreo making. Lastly, I have my standard practice and this includes going to Mocha, MMT, and DT practices during the week.

Other Dance Teams

We asked representatives from other teams to answer the following questions:

1. What kind of dance does this team primarily pursue?
2. What kinds of events do you participate in throughout the year?
3. What does this team mean to you?

Here are their responses!

What kind of dance does this team primarily pursue? 

(Nathan Liang, Lion Dance Team)

The MIT Lion Dance team primarily practices hok san lion dancing, which is a more relaxed, less traditional style of lion dancing. Though more recently we have been trying to learn more fut san style, which has a stronger focus on kung fu style, choreographed movements.
2. We do a lot of lunar new year performances for corporate events or other festive college events. We also usually guest perform at ADT’s showcase every semester, Nightmarket in the fall, CSC’s banquet, and any other on-campus events that we’re invited to perform at.

(Claudia Chen, Fixation)

Fixation is MIT’s contemporary dance team. Contemporary dance is defined as a fusion of “classical, modern, and jazz styles,” but members of Fixation come from all different types of dance backgrounds. We like to experiment with a wide range of sets, from stronger and powerful pieces to softer, more lyrical dances. The coolest part about the team is how much we all learn from each other; because we all have different strengths and weaknesses in our dancing, we all have room to grow here.

(Orisa Zari Coombs, Sakata Afrique)

Sakata is MIT’s premier Afro-Carribean dance team created to increase the presence of Afro-Carribean art on campus and create a space for students to learn and partake in its culture. We dance to afrobeats, dancehall, soca, reggaeton, and anything else that falls into the African Diaspora. We incorporate traditional as well as contemporary and trendy dance moves from the cultures we represent.

(Yun Gu, Ridonkulous)

Donk primarily does urban dance, which means we make choreography that is influenced by many different dance styles, the most prominent being hip hop. Everyone on our team comes from varied backgrounds in dance as well, so we try to play to people’s strengths while encouraging each person to grow in styles they are less familiar with.

(Kristy Chang, Asian Dance Team)

MIT Asian Dance Team primarily performs traditional Chinese dances and modern Asian pop dances, mostly K-pop dances. ADT also films and dances in K-pop covers that are released on our YouTube channel.

(Avital Weinberg, MissBehavior)

MissBehavior, founded in Spring 2019, is MIT’s first all-female urban dance team. We created the team to support female dancers at MIT and provide a space for us to grow and learn from each other through urban dance. Our specific urban style varies each semester based on the diverse group of dancers and choreographers on our team. This semester we have members that dance with almost every other dance group on campus spanning all different genres from hip-hop to contemporary, and even African and Bollywood! Overall, we aim to explore beyond our comfort zones and create entertaining urban pieces for MIT and the broader Boston dance community.

(Brent Samuels, Movementality)

MoveMentality primarily does urban dance. Within the urban dance style we predominantly pursue commercial hip-hop and street jazz.

(Lauren Cooper, Imobilare)

Breaking is a highly athletic and acrobatic form of dance commonly known as breakdancing. MIT Imobilare is a breaking group that consists of undergrads, grad students, and/or post docs who share a love of freestyle and movement.

(Pranav Murugan and Anisha Agarwal, Mirchi)

As a fusion team, we pursue tons of different styles, including hip hop, Bollywood, contemporary, Indian classical, bhangra and more.

What kinds of events do you participate in throughout the year?

(Nathan Liang, Lion Dance Team)

We do a lot of lunar new year performances for corporate events or other festive college events. We also usually guest perform at ADT’s showcase every semester, Nightmarket in the fall, CSC’s banquet, and any other on-campus events that we’re invited to perform at.

(Claudia Chen, Fixation)

Even though we’re a contemporary team, we get to perform at events that are heavily dominated by urban dance groups such as World of Dance, Mocha’s Ring The Alarm, and Donk’s Footwork. We also perform at events that are not just focused around dance; for example, we’ve opened for acapella groups on campus, performed for various student group events, and danced at Harvard and BU.

(Orisa Zari Coombs, Sakata Afrique)

We perform at many African culture events at universities across the boston area, as well as cultural events hosted on campus such as those hosted by the OME, OMP, SPXCE, and Sloan. We also host our own showcase in April called AfroShake. This year we will compete for the first time in a local afrobeats competition.

(Yun Gu, Ridonkulous)

We get to perform throughout the year at various showcases and competitions all over the Boston area, including several hosted by other colleges. Ridonkulous also hosts our own showcase in April called Footwork, and this year (2020) is actually our 15th anniversary of the show (come thru)!

(Kristy Chang, Asian Dance Team)

At the end of every semester, ADT presents a showcase of around twenty dances of various styles. We also perform at a few external performances throughout the semester for different cultural events.

(Avital Weinberg, MissBehavior)

In the past year, MissBehavior has performed in numerous on-campus performances such as Relay for Life, DanceTroupe, and CSC Nightmarket. We hope to add more MIT and Boston area performances as our team gains traction in the coming semesters. This is only our third semester after all!

(Brent Samuels, Movementality)

We participate mainly in large dance showcases on campus and at nearby colleges including Mocha Moves’ Ring the Alarm, Ridonkulous’ Footwork, and Dancetroupe Showcase on campus and WAVES at Boston College and Jam On It at Wellesley off-campus. 

(Lauren Cooper, Imobilare)

Most of the time, we self-coordinate times to practice together or session. We occasionally host free workshops to the student body or participate in DT with a choreographed routine so more people can become exposed to breaking.

(Pranav Murugan and Anisha Agarwal, Mirchi)

Throughout the year, we perform for some on-campus showcases (such as DT, Ring the Alarm, Footwork, etc). However, our main performances are national competitions for the fusion dance circuit across America.

What does this team mean to you?

(Nathan Liang, Lion Dance Team)

The MIT Lion Dance Team is like a close-knit family to me. We dance, learn, struggle, get sore, and get swole together. Whenever someone on the team is having a bad time, other teammates will always fill in to check on that someone and make sure they’re doing okay and if they need anything to make their day better. I really appreciate that social aspect of the team. I guess this team also has a special place in my heart because Andison and I literally built it back from the ground up after the 2018 seniors graduated our freshmen year and left us as basically the only two active members left our sophomore fall. The team has been improving and thriving and growing since, and I really hope it keeps getting better and better long after I’m gone.

(Claudia Chen, Fixation)

I grew up doing ballet and I’ve always loved to dance, but I wasn’t sure how much dancing I would do when I got to MIT. I joined Fixation during my freshman fall, and it taught me a whole new style and way of moving. This team also gave me some of my closest friends who want nothing more than the best for me- both in dancing and in life. As I’m approaching my last semester at MIT, the question of how much dance I’ll have in my future arises again, but the relationships I’ve formed with my teammates are something I’ll have forever.

(Orisa Zari Coombs, Sakata Afrique)

To me, Sakata is a chance to connect to my Caribbean heritage as well as to learn about and explore African culture. As someone who is half American Black, I don’t know where my ancestors came from, and Sakata Afrique gives me a sense of belonging and peace knowing that people across the world from all kinds of cultures with many similarities and many differences can trace their roots back to Africa the motherland. I love that we can unite and celebrate the diversity through dance. I have also found community and friends in the members of my team. One of the most important things to me about Sakata is that we are open to people of all backgrounds, regardless of dance experience or ethnicity. There is a misconception that Sakata is only for people who identify as black, but what we value most is being able to share culture with whoever is interested!

(Yun Gu, Ridonkulous)

This team means the world to me. Dancing with and leading a group of peers in doing something we love to do has been one of the most rewarding endeavors I’ve taken on at MIT. It has given me a space to move, create, and explore. I spend time with people I plan on being friends with for life, and it has allowed me to continue to meet people, both at MIT and in the greater Boston dance community, who inspire me endlessly.

(Kristy Chang, Asian Dance Team)

To me, ADT was a great way to get to know many people in the dance community at MIT. I tried out many different styles of dance, and the choreographers I had were always willing to help me improve. I enjoyed participating in the covers, and directed two of my own. I had a lot of fun with helping with the production of ADT covers, which were some of the best times I’ve had in ADT.

(Avital Weinberg, MissBehavior)

MissBehavior honestly means the world to me! It has truly been the most challenging and rewarding experience for me at MIT. To me, MissBehavior is a bridge between female dancers from different backgrounds, styles, and experiences. We are a diverse group of personalities woven together by our passion for growth, female empowerment, and dance. For many team members, including myself, MissBehavior gave us our first shot at choreographing advanced pieces and training as part of a team. I am so grateful to have witnessed the determination and support of every member in their own dance journey. I love my MissBehavior fam and can’t wait to see how the team progresses in the coming years!

(Brent Samuels, Movementality)

Just like in a lot of other sports and activities, it’s possible to lose sight of fun when you train to be competitive. MMT focuses on growth in performance and helps me reconnect with my passion for dance and the fun that I see in it while sharing that with audiences with our humorous sets. Additionally, MMT gives me a sense of community and brotherhood among male dancers. I particularly value this bond with men being in the minority in the MIT dance community.

(Lauren Cooper, Imobilare)

Breaking is a fun way to get connected with the local community while learning sick moves.  I’ve enjoyed my time on the team, have made friends through the process, and hope to inspire more people to join in the future.

(Pranav Murugan and Anisha Agarwal, Mirchi)

Above anything else, Mirchi is a family! We spend so much time dancing together, but we manage to spend even more hanging out. It’s a group where everyone is welcomed and loved and encouraged to grow, both as dancers and people.

We hope this blog offered some insight into what being a dancer at MIT is like! There are so many options to explore here, so you should definitely give dance a try; no prior experience is required! We both know so many individuals who came to MIT with no experience whatsoever and are now some of the most established dancers in the community. But if you already have experience, Dance Troupe is a great place to try out a variety of new styles.

Good luck with your dance journey!

I’m still working on my post about Mystery Hunt, and I realized it’s been quite some time since I last posted, so here’s a quick blog post.

For web.lab, which is an IAP class I said I was taking, we made a website! I teamed up with Dylan L. ’23 and Emma Q. ’23 to make em7.io. You input the melody to a song, and then it automatically generates a harmony.

Clicking the Compose button links you to a page where you can record a piece using the piano keyboard. You can mess with the song’s key, time signature, and tempo; you can snap the notes to the beat, and you can drag notes around to edit them.

Once you’ve recorded a song, clicking the Harmonize button shows you the completed harmony, generated through our magical algorithm. You can adjust the chords paired with each note by clicking on the dropdown.

After that, you can save your composition to your profile, and from there you can share your work with others. I thought that the harmony it generated for Tong Hua was pretty good, as well as for this piece that one of my friends wrote.

You can look at the web.lab schedule here. The way it works is that the first week is a bunch of lectures, starting from HTML and CSS and going all the way to JavaScript, React, NodeJS, and MongoDB, and some lectures about designing websites and stuff. The second week goes into sockets and more info about CSS and JavaScript and MongoDB and design, and has lectures from sponsors, ending with a lecture on deployment and coding best practices.

This goes in parallel with actually making a website. By the end of week 1, we formed teams and submitted ideas for feedback. Work on the website began in the middle of week 2. A hackathon happened in the end of week 2, and a minimum viable product was due near the start of week 3. Then another hackathon, and then the final submission was due in the middle of week 4. So really, web.lab just feels like this long hackathon.

my github commit history: a visual representation of web.lab

At the end of week 4 is the awards ceremony, because web.lab isn’t just a class, but also a competition.⁠01 just like a hackathon! Teams can compete for over $20,000 in total prizes. We were lucky enough to win fourth prize, which means that we get some nice prize money, a sweet plaque, and a fancy lunch with the sponsors. I imagine the winners page on the web.lab site will get updated soon, so make sure to check out other websites too!⁠02 of the semifinalists, i really liked <a href="http://day-ly.herokuapp.com/">day.ly</a> and <a href="http://h2gro.herokuapp.com/">h2gro</a>

that programing with a single m weirds me out but it turns out that some people still spell it that way and it’s totally fine

Here are four things I learned while making this website:

1. Having good code habits are important. I only realized how important having readable code was when I needed to build upon other people’s. And I only realized how important good commit messages are when I wanted to figure out what happened when I wasn’t working on the project.
2. Finding harmonies for songs involves a bit of grunt work. I thought that musicians just magically knew which chords work well with which notes. While some musicians do have this superpower, it’s also just possible to apply chord progressions and music theory knowledge to find a harmony given a sequence of notes, and that’s how we automated it.

3. My laptop is dying. My Thinkpad E560 could not handle running Sublime, a Node server, a hotloader, and my browser, at the same time. This isn’t supposed to be a lot. I had no other applications open, and the only tab I had open on my browser was the website we were working on. This frustrated me to no end throughout the month, and we resorted to a cycle of me pushing commits and testing on a separate device.

   After running diagnostics, it looks like one of the my RAM chips is broken, so I’ll probably use some of the prize money to replace it. It might also just be the case that I need to buy a new laptop. I do hope that my laptop can last me at least through the end of spring.

4. There’s no better feeling than deleting node_modules. I am done working on this website and I never want to touch its hacky codebase ever again.

And here are four slightly deeper things I learned:

1. A lot can happen in one month. I didn’t have any experience with web development beyond HTML or CSS, so I learned a lot about JavaScript and React and MongoDB. My two teammates didn’t have any web development experience at all. Looking back, I guess it’s pretty amazing how we managed to go from knowing very little to making this website, in only a month.⁠03 in retrospect, most hackathons happen over a weekend

2. Sometimes it’s okay not to be perfect.⁠04 strong version that’s probably even more true: <em>often</em>, it’s okay not to be perfect It’s a far cry from a perfect website. There’s no privacy controls so all of the compositions are public, if you’ve ever logged into the site then it shows everyone that you’ve logged into the site, the note editor doesn’t allow you to add or remove notes, the harmonizing algorithm works on a note level which gives bad results, and sometimes there are issues when you edit a piece and then harmonize it.

   But while we were working on the project, I learned that we really couldn’t have everything. We only really had two-and-a-half weeks to work on it, and that it would be best if we focused on making the core features of the site as good as we could have, rather than adding half-baked feature after half-baked feature. All of a sudden, the lots and lots of advice I read started coming back.

3. External things work great for motivating me.

   Although I theoretically could have learned all of this on my own, having external motivation just makes it so much easier. I did try learning more about web development before, but I eventually stopped because I learned enough to make my personal website, and didn’t really have more motivation to continue beyond that.

   Going to web.lab lectures, building a website I’m actually excited about, and being accountable to my teammates really motivated me in actually learning more web stuff. It’s not just that I learned directly from the lectures, because I also learned a lot looking stuff up, but it’s more of having a reason to look stuff up and learn things in the first place. I think I’ve seen the same pattern with, say, machine learning; while I could have learned it on my own, taking a class on it gave me really good motivation for doing so.

4. Web development probably isn’t for me.

   I’m not entirely excluding the possibility. JSX and ES6 and React make writing stuff for the web so much nicer than when I first started learning about web development. But JavaScript really doesn’t vibe with me, and thinking about asynchronicity and promises is kind of annoying, and I enjoyed programming more when I’m not doing it in JavaScript.

   Okay, this isn’t really about web development and more about JavaScript,⁠05 and maybe this isn’t about javascript but more about how we used javascript but I think the point is that I’m learning about what I like and what I dislike, and about what I enjoy and what I don’t. Maybe I’ll give web development another shot in the future, and take a different route that doesn’t involve the things I disliked.

   So, you know what, scratch that. Maybe the lesson for this one should be I tried things out, and I learned what I liked, and I learned what I disliked. And isn’t that the greatest lesson of all?

Finally, a huge shout out to the web.lab team for making the class possible, which probably involved looking for sponsors, preparing material, giving lectures, providing food, running hackathons, and maintaining a blazing fast three-minute average response time on Piazza. The class is run entirely by students, and I can’t even imagine the effort that goes into running a class of this size. Thank you so much!

One of the strange things about being 10,000 years old is that, while I’ve been tooling away judging teens, some of my classmates/labmates from when I was in my master’s program have gone on to build careers in academia. Some are even professors! And, as of this term, one of them, Catherine D’Ignazio, is even a professor at MIT! Oh god I’m old. 

Earlier today, Catherine circulated an announcement (and syllabus) for a new class she is teaching this term that I thought sounded totally rad:

11.S01 – 3 credits
Urban Science for Public Good: Gender and Racial Equity in Artificial Intelligence
Meets Mon 1:30 – 3pm
First-year Discovery class

Gender and racial equity are often central goals of urban planning. But what are gender and race? What happens when we start to measure and model these dimensions of identity? Conversely, what happens when we ignore gender and race in urban computation? This course introduces students to some of the leading scientists, theorists and practitioners who are working to challenge bias in AI and to use data and computation to work towards gender and racial equity in cities. Along the way, we will reflect on our own identities and learn critical concepts to navigate gender and race from fields such as Urban Planning, Women’s & Gender Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Computer Science.

It’s been a few weeks since many of you have submitted your applications (and a few months for many others), and I know right now you may be wondering what’s happening to your applications.

The honest truth is, we’re working pretty hard to read each and every one of them. I know the wait is long and hard, and I totally remember being in your shoes in turmoil about where I’d end up in just a few months. The only way to give each and every one of you a fair chance is to read what you’ve presented to us, and we’re trying our hardest to get through the thousands of applications you’ve all submitted.

Just like many of you have written us beautiful descriptions of the food and drinks you make with your families around cultural holidays, or submitted art portfolios to show us how you visually express yourself, we wanted to give you a little insight into what we’re doing while reading about your passions and achievements. I polled my colleagues about what reading applications looks like for them!

Yi, Fearless Leader of the Educational Council

What’re you listening to? Background Bloomberg news

What’re you eating/drinking? Hot tea; Taiwan’s Ali Shan has been a new favorite

Where are you reading? I have read on subways (corner seat hidden); Bolt Bus; Time Square cafe; home MA; home NJ; if I get a few hours of blocked time, I will try to do some reading

Ariel, The One who Actually Hits the “Release Decisions” Button

What’re you listening to? I’ve been listening to this album on repeat (I also have calm music I listen to).

What’re you eating/drinking? I have to start my morning with a coffee! After that, I’m pretty much snacking on hi-chew for the day.

Where are you reading? I’m lucky I live in the suburbs and have a dedicated home office space. I always read in my office so I can have a little “work life” balance even when I’m working from home. I do have an office-mate but he is ALWAYS falling asleep on the job!

Trinidad, The Empress of CPW

What’re you listening to? Sigur Ros, 90s/early 2000s European Electro, Student Music Portfolios (yes, really. My go to actually – I love the piano and cello submissions). I also have Great British Bake Off running constantly in the background.

What’re you eating/drinking? SO. MUCH. BUTTER.

After listening to hours of Great British Bake Off I am inevitably inspired to try bake my own treats during reading breaks. As such, I end up with copious amounts of butter-filled pastries and my partner gains a few lbs every reading season.

Where are you reading? In the living room on the couch or in the kitchen at the dining table. Pros and Cons to each. The couch is comfortable, and the living room is well lit and good sound system… but dogs can get to me easily (see video). Kitchen can be a bit chilly but I have better posture at the table… but dogs can still get to me lol. Last 3 years all I had was cat – who was a much less-assuming but still a pain – that is no longer the case as I am now the proud owner of 3 pups and an 18 yr old toothless cat.

Leah, Polar Seltzer’s #1 Fan

What’re you listening to? I mostly listen to nothing, but the deeper into reading season I get, the more likely I am to put something on. I mostly listen to music with no words I like a solid movie or TV score, ballet score, or something that reminds me of happy times. Even better is when I find things I know from TV *and* the remind me of happy times, such as, ‘Recomposed By Max Richter: Vivaldi, The Fours Seasons,’ which reminds me of dance recitals and Princess Margaret from The Crown. Listening to music with words is so very rare for me, so this year it’s been limited to The Beatles–currently getting reacquainted with Beatles For Sale–and Beach House.

What’re you eating/drinking? A Dunkin’ coffee I make at home in my favorite mug is all I need. My favorite vessel is my ‘With the Beatles’ mug because it makes me snicker like I’m drinking coffee with the Beatles. I also must drink lots of water and Polar Seltzer, of course.

Where are you reading? My favorite place to read is in my IKEA Poang Arm chair because it’s so comfortable and ergonomic–Scandinavian design for the win!–and I have a great view out of my windows. I can’t sit forever, though, and appreciate dual monitors, so I’ve turned my kitchen cart into a standing desk. The downside with the standing set-up is I’m looking at a wall and have almost zero counter space, but worth it for my comfort and happiness while reading :)

Tim, (not the Beaver)

What’re you listening to? I love to read mostly to instrumental music or songs with lyrics in languages other than English. It makes it a little easier to focus. That means lots of Zoe Keating, Gustav Mahler, and movie soundtracks. But Right now, I’ve been listening on repeat to Ile’s, Almadura, and Ari Lennox’s Shea Butter Baby.

What’re you eating/drinking? I drink an entire pot of coffee slowly throughout the day. Usually, I brew it with a Chemex pitcher. The pitchers are made in my hometown in Western Massachusetts, so I have to show a little 413 love. But it really is a superior.

Where are you reading? I read in my living room. I’m a little bit of a botany nerd, so I’ve crammed my apartment full of cacti, bromeliads, and orchids. My living room has a low-key jungle vibe.

Danielle, My work wife <3

What’re you listening to? I love listening to jazz when I’m in reading mode. I listen to CD 101.9, which always reminds me of my childhood and car rides around New York with my parents. When I’m feeling energized and edgy I listen to Hot 97.

What’re you eating/drinking? I don’t do well with a lot of caffeine but I’ll try to start my day with Earl Grey tea (with milk :)). Smoothies are nice too!

Where are you reading? I try to get outside of my home to avoid distractions. Either my local public library or Rotch Library on campus. When I’m home, I’m either at my dining table or cuddled up on my couch in front of my tv.

Kris, The Queen of Communications

What’re you listening to? During EA I had spotify play Chet Baker on repeat all day

What’re you eating/drinking? Coffee

Where are you reading? I read at home in my home office or sometimes in my living room, often in full view of the birdfeeder and a lot of time from the couch! I know it’s terrible for proper ergonomics but I get up a lot and walk around. My dog sees to that!

Kellen, our brave hero who blogs directly from Valhalla

What’re you listening to? So much. There’s a combination of things that I listen to and watch while I read. I’ve been watching a lot of cartoons/anime during reads lately. Ducktales, Carole & Tuesday, My Hero Academia, Fruit Baskets, and the Chillhop/ChilledCow YouTube channels have all been in rotation visually. As far as listening it’s been a lot of Teyana Taylor, Summer Walker, Jay Z, Da Baby, Snoh Aalegra, Lupe, OutKast, Nipsey Hussle, Tyler the Creator, Denzel Curry, Nujabes, Burna Boy, Big KRIT, Tory Lanez, Ella Mai…actually I’ll just stop there. Here’s a link if you want a better idea.

What’re you eating/drinking? Some combination of eggs, potatoes, pepper/vegetable, and bacon/chicken/sausage for breakfast. Then I follow that up with copious amounts of candy and water throughout the rest of the day.

Where are you reading? There are actually two rooms. One is sitting on the floor of my living room and the other is sitting at the desk in our spare bedroom/library room/where my wife keeps her witch broom and mask.

Petey, The King of the Internet

What’re you listening to? My blood is now mostly this by volume.

What’re you eating/drinking? I drink a minimum of a half-gallon of iced green tea day. I brew it in mason jars in my fridge overnight following the gospel of our lord and saviour kenji-lopez alt

Where are you reading? I only read at home, in my room, next to a window that overlooks a venerable evergreen and Allan K. ’17‘s house. I am alone except for my proliferating houseplants and a tiny icon silhouette of AOC that watches over them and me benevolently. During the day, my desk is lit by indirect sunlight; at night, by a simple LED desk lamp set to the lowest, warmest setting. No one tells you that your thirties will mostly be about developing parasocial attachments to plants and strong opinions about artificial lighting. There is a mildly scented candle that smells like a childhood memory of clean sheets pulled fresh from the dryer by a loving mother. My standing desk has a bamboo top that complements the wood-paneled speakers I bought on the recommendation of Wirecutter. I typically alternate sitting and standing by the hour, but it depends. I have spent thousands of hours doing that – alternating between sitting and standing while I read essay after essay after essay The monstera is potted in an inverted square pyramid; at this point in my life, I will *only* pot plants in well-drained clay, preferably grey and German-made. The Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose son used to run the Center for Civic Media, is broadly credited with inventing the idea of ‘flow,’ a space beyond time located between the candle and the lighting and the metalcore, where all applications that have ever been, and will ever be, submitted to MIT exist simultaneously before me. Ecclesiastes 1:9: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” So it goes.

Mikey, Formerly of The Logs Fame & Now Everyone’s Boss

What’re you listening to? I work best with music without lyrics, usually repetitive electronic stuff, so on my regular rotation are these Spotify playlists: Brain Food, Deep Focus, as well as Bonobo’s “Black Sands,” suggestion courtesy of Ariel. On the classical side of things, I generally love post-romantic and/or programmatic stuff, usually from Eastern European composers. Some of my favorite works are by composers like Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Smetana, Berlioz, Mahler, Dvorak, Vaughan Williams, and Respighi.

What’re you eating/drinking? A variety of coffee (usually Starbucks – soy caramel macchiato is my go-to drink) and tea (black, green, or chai, depending on my mood).

Where are you reading? At home, it’s usually on the couch or in bed. Outside of the house, it’s usually the coffee shop with the best wifi, which (begrudgingly) is often Starbucks, but sometimes I try to spend time at local places (until I can’t take the slow wifi).

Tiffany, Transfer Goddess By Day & Tarot Reader By Night

What’re you listening to? Lots of smooth jazz, with an occasional 90’s hiphop interlude!

What’re you eating/drinking? Coffee (preferably dark roast, cold brew!), popcorn, string cheese, crackers

Where are you reading? Either at home, or at the local library!

Crissy, Analytics Extraordinaire

What’re you listening to? I watch a lot of HGTV while I read. I find that you don’t actually have to watch 80% of the show to enjoy it. I tune in to see the ‘before’, turn to my reading, and then tune back in for the final ta-da moment.

What’re you eating/drinking? So much tea. Lately I’ve been obsessed with S’Mores Chai and Movie Night from David’s Tea and the Hot Cinnamon Spice from Harney & Sons.

Where are you reading? I read applications at home. I have a desk setup in a home office that I NEVER use. I seem to always gravitate towards the couch where my cat, Meeko, will usually curl up next to me. Unless he’s decided I’ve been paying too much attention to the applicants and not enough to him…then he’s on my keyboard.

Maura, Captain of Training & Style Icon

What’re you listening to? Film scores by Thomas Newman and Hans Zimmer; Mumford and Sons

What’re you eating/drinking? English Breakfast tea with milk

Where are you reading? If reading at home, I like to read at my desk which is in a corner near my apartment’s front door. It’s also right near the kitchen so I can keep refilling the kettle!

DJ, Astrology Nerd

What’re you listening to? A vast majority of the time, I put this 120-hour “Instrumental Hip Hop Study” playlist on, which feels incredibly calming and allows me to focus. If I’m really stressed or in a loud public space, I may turn to another favorite – 9 hours of rain of a tent. There are a number of albums that I’m able to put on and still stay focused if I’m at home. Recently that’s been Kaytranada’s Bubba, The Internet’s Hive Mind,  and anything by Noname.

What’re you eating/drinking? Like Crissy, I’m a HUGE fan of David’s Tea. Chocholate Chilli Chai and Forever Nuts are my favorite flavors. I’m usually back and forth between sips of tea and sips of seltzer water (I may or may not be a member of a seltzer fan club on Facebook).

Where are you reading? I have a desk in my bedroom that I usually sit at. I typically have my leo mug in sight (I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but I love astrology). I also have one of my favorite photos by my side, which is of my great-great-grandfather in a negro baseball league, reminding me of my values and family. I have two roommates – one is an actor and the other is a graduate student – so sometimes we work together in our living room. I also try to get out of the city as much as possible. Sometimes I read from my parent’s home in NJ, and I’m currently at my sister’s apartment in Elkhart, Indiana because it’s nice to get out of the city and the stress of my daily life and just focus in on the applications I’m reading!

My freshman winter break and IAP were very nice, nothing to complain about. I got to fly home and spend two weeks with my family; I came back to campus, learned lots of different things, and had some free time. But the break felt so short, and once I was back at MIT, I was in an awkward middle spot: life wasn’t quite full enough to feel that the semester was really happening, but not so empty that I could relax and forget entirely about psets and class start times and all those responsible-person things.

This IAP, I tried something different — something I don’t think I’ve tried in I don’t know how many years. I did… nothing. (But of course, in between the kerning of those letters, everything is hiding.)

I only had a Monday exam⁠01 I am extremely lucky, and my apologies to everyone else at the end of fall semester, and I stayed at home an extra week into January, which gave me almost four weeks with my family. Then I flew back to campus for three weeks of IAP, which I filled in exactly whichever way I desired at exactly any moment. It. Was. Glorious!

In the past few years of my life, any real breaks have been spent recuperating. And I did that, too, in the first couple weeks: slept twelve hours at a stretch at home, laid on the couch all day, caught up on the entirety of The Internet. But then, because my break wasn’t over yet, I got to learn about what it’s like to have free time when you’re not burned out. To follow my whims and have them lead me other places than my couch. To get interesting things done, and go interesting places, solely because I truly wanted to (as opposed to “ugh, I’m tired, but I need to do this/I want to want to do it/I know I’ll enjoy having done it once it’s over”). I can’t overstate how wonderful it was — like a third way of living I didn’t realize existed before this month.

Here are some of the things I did, with photos where available (although I really didn’t take enough!):

• Stayed in bed staring at the ceiling, thinking about life, for like two hours after waking up
• Participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt (blog post to come, hopefully, but it might be a while )

• Toured the Green Building roof
•  Visited the Boston Public Library with a friend, got a card and took out books, and explored the Central Branch’s incredibly beautiful 19th-century architecture
• Actually read books! Ones I hadn’t read before!
• Coded for fun, in languages I already knew and languages I didn’t (and also coded not-for-fun, aka for a technical interview… more on that later :3)
• Walked around lots of parts of Boston and thought about cities
• Cooked with friends, went places with friends, had aimless fun with friends
• Started a habit of writing down something, anything every day (I am 42 days in! More to come on this if I can keep it up.)
• Put up some things (hooks, whiteboard, etc.) that have been lying on my floor since mid-October, re-organized some shelves that have been a mess since August, and generally made my room a nicer place to be
  

• Felt many different and uniquely delightful kinds of joy, some of which I had long forgotten in the depths of a difficult semester

Now another semester is coming. I’m alternately scared and excited.

Excited because I’m always excited for a chance to learn new things; scared because last semester was just a little bit traumatizing, and although I hope that I’ve scaled back, I can’t know for sure if I’ve overcommitted myself again.

Scared because every new semester takes me closer to the unknown, to the realization that all along my choices have mattered and my future has been being shaped and now adulthood is already upon me; excited because this IAP has confirmed for me, more strongly than any of my other recent life experiences, that to be alive, and energized, and to get to experience nature and feelings and places and people, is absolutely as good as it gets. There are a lot of things I’d like to accomplish and do and see and become in the future, but even if I never get around to any of them, just living is enough.

Classes

Is this what it’s like to be an upperclassman and only take classes you enjoy? 

I’m taking just four (4) classes this semester, and I’m excited for all of them! Today I had two of them, and tomorrow I’ll get to see what the other two are like. Best of all, I am finally free of 9ams, and have no class at all on Fridays!

First, there’s 17.303/11.003: Methods of Policy Analysis. I need this class for my humanities concentration, which is public policy. I was slightly skeptical of 17.303 at first, because I thought it would be mostly political theory, but I was assured that we’ll do lots of case studies this semester too. Even in the first lecture, we (briefly) covered some MIT policy regarding graduation and housing.⁠01 rip Bexley, Senior Haus, and now maybe Burton-Conner? It was really nice to see that the professor cares about (a) making the class relevant to students’ daily lives, and (b) how MIT policy affects students as well as faculty, staff, and administrators. Bonus blogger crossover: Kathleen was also there.

Next, there’s 16.09: Statistics and Probability. I need this class for my major. On day 1, the professor said this would be more of a math class than an engineering class, but that’s okay! I like math! I’m excited to understand more about probability and statistics, because I’m very interested in satellites, satellite networks, and satellite communications, so I need to understand randomness and how random noise affects signals and communications.

That brings me to the next class, which is……16.36: Communication Systems and Networks! I haven’t actually had this class yet, but I’m very excited for the first lecture tomorrow. I am finally going to get to learn about satellite communications!

Finally, that brings to my last class, 16.831/12.431: Space Systems Development. I am going to help build a satellite! It is going to space! I am going to help build something going to space! This is a capstone class for course 16, and the project, BeaverCube, is currently scheduled to launch (literally) in October 2020. I am super excited for this, but the first lecture isn’t until tomorrow.

Jobs

In addition to my four (4) classes, I also technically have four (4) jobs this semester. The first is blogging (obviously). It’s a pretty good gig.

My second job is working front desk in my dorm. I’ve done this since freshman fall and it’s a pretty chill way to earn some grocery money while also getting homework done in the many hours of monotony between deliveries. Sometimes, I even mix it up and blog from desk.

Thirdly, I will be grading for Unified, now that I’m finally done with it. I’ve graded before for a different class, and it was also pretty easy; the head TA provided grading rubrics for each problem, so I pretty much just checked to see what parts of the problem were correct, which parts were incorrect, and which parts were missing. I think this grading job will be pretty similar to the last one.

Finally, I have acquired a UROP!⁠02 or as I like to call it, an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program It’s in the Space Systems Lab. The project is called WaferSat, and it’s basically an attempt to make a really, really small satellite. The goal is to ultimately make many tiny satellites, which can network together to perform like a larger traditional satellite. One main benefit of this approach is the ability to iterate more quickly, shortening the design cycle and launching more frequently. Also, with a network of satellites, you can get better coverage for Earth observation or communications with Earth (think more satellites=better cable).

Extracurriculars

Beyond my many jobs, I also will be continuing my main extracurricular: rowing! I am a coxswain⁠03 aka tiny dude who steers the boat and yells on the MIT men’s heavyweight crew team. It’s a whole lot of fun.

I also love making bread,⁠04 need2knead and do so every couple of weeks with MIT Challah for Hunger, a club that’s part of a national organization dedicated to ending hunger and food insecurity, especially food insecurity on college campuses, one bake sale at a time. Our first bake of the semester is probably going to be next week, and I’m excited to see my friends from CfH again and knead some dough.

This post contains minor spoilers for the structure of MIT Mystery Hunt 2020, which are unmarked. This post will contain major spoilers for some puzzles, which will be marked. This paragraph is not a puzzle.

I have no idea how this post ended up being even longer than my Splash post. I’m not sure what people think about this. Do people actually read the whole thing? Should I strive to make my posts shorter? Please let me know; I’m actually interested.

Anyway, here’s the contents. If you’re not interested in reading about puzzles, feel free to skip any sections that talk about puzzles, like On puzzles above and below. There’s a lot of non-puzzle content in this post too.

• Worthwhile puzzlehunt information
  • What is a puzzlehunt?
  • Mystery Hunt teams
  • Galactic Trendsetters
• Hunt begins here
  • Kickoff
  • The first puzzle
• One puzzle down and more to go
  • Even more puzzles
  • Stuck on extraction
  • The robot parade
• On puzzles above and below
• Searching for something new
  • The last puzzle
  • The beginning of the end
  • The final runaround
• Help me because I don’t know
  • Wrapup
  • A puzzle

Worthwhile puzzlehunt information

What is a puzzlehunt?

The MIT Mystery Hunt is a puzzlehunt, the biggest and grandest of its kind. There are lots of ways to view Mystery Hunt. I gave a brief overview in my last post. It’s an event that happens the weekend before Martin Luther King Jr. day, with dozens of teams and thousands of contestants solving hundreds of puzzles.

One way to view the Hunt is from a technical perspective. I’ll give another brief overview of how puzzlehunts works here with the Mystery Hunt in mind. The following discussion is pretty general, but there are lots of exceptions. Brian⁠01 I’m going to break blog convention here and use only the first name of everyone I mention, because I don’t really know everyone’s last initials or graduation years. wrote a more detailed introduction to puzzlehunts if you’re interested in learning more about puzzlehunts and how to solve puzzles in general.

A puzzlehunt is a series of puzzles, but what exactly a puzzle is is kind of hard to define. It’s like a Sudoku or a crossword, but you have to figure out the rules in order to do it. Puzzles have some sort of answer, which is usually a word or a phrase, like “CAUCHY” or “FILM REVIEW”.⁠02 When discussing puzzles, we write answers in capital letters to indicate it's an answer. Solving a puzzle will unlock even more puzzles.

Puzzlehunts have special kinds of puzzles called metapuzzles, or simply metas. After solving several puzzles, you get a series of answers. A meta is a kind of puzzle that uses these answers in order to find a new answer. For example, if you have the answers “FILM REVIEW”, “BACKGROUND NOISE”, “ADAMS APPLE”, “DC WASHINGTON”, “CAUCHY SCHWARZ”, and “EVIL EYE”, you can combine them⁠03 Exercise left for the reader. As a hint, read the first letters. It’s often a good idea to read the first letters! to get the answer “ANSWER”.

A large puzzlehunt like the Mystery Hunt typically consists of several rounds, each with several metas, each combining the answers of several puzzles. Often, these metas are also combined to form an answer to a metametapuzzle, or a metameta. After a team solves the metameta, the Mystery Hunt then ends with a final puzzle called a runaround, which involves going around campus to find the location of a hidden coin.

The winning team then writes the Mystery Hunt the next year. Team Left Out won the 2019 Mystery Hunt, so they wrote this year’s Hunt. This is both considered a huge honor and a huge responsibility. It’s been joked that a team that might have otherwise won could choose to just not take the coin, because they wouldn’t want to write hundreds of puzzles, and organize an event for thousands of people. To my knowledge, though, I don’t think this has happened yet.

Here’s a diagram I made to summarize the (usual) hunt structure of the Mystery Hunt:

i can make diagrams in paint

All of what I’ve previously written should actually be prefaced with “usually”. Usually a puzzle doesn’t have instructions. Usually there are metametas. Usually there is a final runaround. Usually the hidden thing is a coin-like object. All of these rules can be subverted, and often a Mystery Hunt will subvert something, in one way or another.

Mystery Hunt teams

But the cool thing about Mystery Hunt is that we can look at it from a non-technical perspective, and I think this is where it gets interesting. One of the best things about Mystery Hunt is that there’s a very human face to it. The first thing you ask someone who hunts is what team they’re in, because so much of Hunt experience is shaped by who you hunt with, and you learn things about people based on what team they’re in.

While Hunt’s been around for around forty years, the oldest teams I know of⁠04 This entire section is not very well-researched, so read everything with an “I know of”. Also, the easiest way to learn something on the internet is to be wrong and wait for someone to correct you. Please correct me. trace their roots to around twenty or so years ago. Some of these are teams like Palindrome, Setec Astronomy and Manic Sages. Each of these are rather large teams with anywhere from ]70 to 200 people, with most members being hunt veterans in their 30s or 40s. These teams have been hunting for a long time, and the three teams I’ve mentioned have won the Hunt at least once.

I don’t know much about the history of any of these teams, other than they’ve been around for a long time. Quick research shows Manic Sages was formed from Mathcampers and ESG in 2004. Palindrome and Setec have been around since at least 2000. I also think Sages dissolved around five years ago, and some members formed Rage, and maybe other splinters.

Some other teams that have been around for a long time include Death and Mayhem, Codex, Left Out and Luck. Death and Mayhem is another large team with around 70 members, merged from two teams several years ago. I don’t know how long they’ve been around; my best guess is seven or eight years ago, with the two source teams being even older than that. I’m also not sure, but I think Codex, Left Out, and Luck have been around for at least a decade, are mid-sized teams with around 30 to 70 people, have won the hunt at least once, and originated in MIT.⁠05 It’s not clear to me how much association Left Out has with MIT, though.

Mentioning these teams can give the impression that the Hunt is just about winning. While it’s true that there are Hunt teams who want to win, from my understanding, all of these teams are still friends who meet up once a year to solve puzzles and have fun. In a sense, then, Mystery Hunt can function as one big alumni reunion.

But I also don’t want to give the impression that the only people who join Mystery Hunt are alumni, or are competitive teams. For example, the Association of Taiwanese Students has a huge team called Super Team Awesome. They originated in 2007 and have more than a hundred people, with members that include both current students and alumni. There’s also Math Campers Solve Puzzles, a Mathcamp team that only formed two or three years ago,⁠06 I don’t really know, and none of the people I asked knew either. and only has around a dozen people.

Several teams I know are associated with living groups. WaffleHaüs is the Simmons team, and I know Macgregor has teams based on entries. Three big Random teams I know are, from oldest to youngest, Metaphysical Plant, Hunches in Bunches, and Random. Plant and Hunches are mostly alumni, while Random has a lot of current students. Next has NES, a team with around twenty people that only formed this year,⁠07 I think before this year, most people who hunted from Next were associated with Super Team Awesome, though I may be wrong. It may even still be the case this year. and also a bunch of individual floor teams.

East Campus has Putzazoo,⁠08 Wayne, who read a draft, complained: “Putzazoo? I thought we called them Tetaputz.” which originated from Tetazoo, then later Putz, then later Stickman,⁠09 Each of these are names of floors. Tetazoo is Third East, Putz is Second West, and Stickman is First West. and now is just a big East Campus team. Epsilon Theta has ET Phone In Answer, which I don’t know much about.

Although I say Luck, Random, Putzazoo, or Codex, these are all teams that change their name often. I know Luck was Beginner’s Luck and Luck, I Am Your Father, Random was One Fish Two Fish Random Fish Blue Fish,⁠10 Lillian and Cesium point out that this team split into the Random team and <em>Hunches in Bunches</em>. and Codex picks random codices as names. These three teams consistently put the word Luck, Random, or Codex in the team name to make them identifiable. But Putzazoo has no such convention; this year I think they were United States Census, and several years ago, they was also named [the entire text of Atlas Shrugged]:

taken from the 2014 mystery hunt website

Galactic Trendsetters

And this brings me to my team.

I’ve talked about Floor Pi before, which is the floor of East Campus I live on. We like many things, and one thing that Floor Pi likes a lot are puzzles. We like them enough that we have our own big Mystery Hunt team, called Galactic Trendsetters .

The first is read as whoosh, while the last is read as neowww.⁠15 While everyone spells the first plane noise as <em>whoosh</em>, there is considerable controversy as to how the other plane noise should be spelled. And I think this is the correct way to spell it. One of our team’s traditions is that when someone says the first part, whoosh, Galactic Trendsetters, everyone within earshot responds with neowwwwwww. It’s very fun.

The team is named after the Race for the Galaxy card named Galactic Trendsetters, which is supposedly a good card, although I’ve never played the game. Danny tells me that Floor Pi had a Mystery Hunt team at least as early as 2009, when the team was named Low Latent Inhibition. We gained our current name in 2013.

this art is hilarious and i don’t know why

Historically the team had 20 to 40 people, but recently we’ve had more like 80 to 100, who were increasingly generalized residents of Floor Pi. At one point, we were large enough that a team called teammate, a mix of people from CMU and Berkeley, branched out from us into their own team. Galactic and teammate have been sister teams ever since.

The majority of Galactic and teammate members are around the ages of 18 to 30. We’re pretty similar culture-wise, in that we lean towards younger members and are heavy on memes. The two teams considered merging before Mystery Hunt this year, but ultimately decided against it because it would put our team size way above the recommended upper limit.

Alright, enough of the history lesson. How did I end up hunting with Galactic?

I mean, the story isn’t that exciting. Julian, one of the Floor Pi hall chairs sent out an email last October with a pre-hunt survey introducing Galactic. I signed up. Come November, I got added to the Discord server for Mystery Hunt 2020. We started discussion pretty early, having a logistics meeting mid-November about recruitment, tech, management, food, and other pre-hunt stuff. I signed up to design nametags during the meeting, which Lilly helped print out, and they turned out quite well:

front

back

And so November and December came and went, and soon enough it was mid-January and hunt was going to start soon. A bunch of Galactic members flew into Boston, while some were already in the area. There were lots of alumni around Floor Pi the week leading up to Mystery Hunt. It culminated on Thursday, the night before the hunt, where there was a Galactic board game night for people who’ve already arrived, and I got to play a lot of games with people, which was pretty cool.

Hunt begins here

Kickoff

Friday was the Hunt kickoff, which happened in Kresge at noon. Teams were sent wedding invitations a couple of days before for the wedding of “M & G”, which one Galactic member pointed out was similar to the wedding invitations sent out to teams in 2011:

the 2011 invite sent out to teams

the 2020 invite sent to teams

Of course, as is tradition, the Hunt probably wouldn’t actually be themed around the wedding. In 2011, the letters M & P stood for Mario and Peach, and the hunt was themed around video games. Often, there’s a fake theme that is quickly replaced by the actual theme, which is revealed in the kickoff.

But that didn’t stop the wedding from being real. Yep, that’s right. It was a wedding invitation because the kickoff began with an actual wedding. You can watch the video of the kickoff here. The ceremonies begin around 2 minutes in:

The wedding was between Mark Gottlieb and Gaby Weidling, both game and puzzle designers. Apparently, Mark wrote one of the really old Mystery Hunts entirely on his own, back when it was much smaller. During the ceremonies, we found out that time-travelling ninjas stole an artifact known as the Cardiac Omniscient Interdimensional Nexus (COIN) and hid it somewhere in the MIT campus, giving puzzles leading to the COIN’s location. Oh no! It’s then quickly found by Gaby, and then the real theme of the hunt is revealed. If you haven’t, you should watch the intro; it’s funny and sweet.

The hunt is actually themed around saving a dying theme park. Here’s the promotional video shown to us in the beginning of the hunt:

The park is dying due to a lack of popularity, and us puzzlers were tasked to help save the park by generating buzz, which apparently can be done through solving puzzles.⁠16 Yeah, I don’t get this part either. And with that, we were given the hunt website, pennypark.fun, got a safety orientation, and were told that the puzzles would get released at 1:30 PM.

We head back to the two classrooms assigned to Galactic for the weekend, and have a short meeting about logistics. It was a brief introduction to our tech, people in charge of various things, and some reminders. After the meeting, I also picked up a really sweet shirt, which Jakob helped order:

there were like six choices for the colors of shirts. this is in fact jeffery’s shirt and not mine because mine was brown

The first puzzle

After the meeting ended, the website opened, and I started looking at the puzzles available to us. Initially, we were opened to a few puzzles in Storybook Forest and The Grand Castle. The puzzle I tried first was Penny Park Guide, which I started working on as soon as we received copies of the brochure.

I worked on it for a little bit, helping collect data from the brochure, but not really providing any of the ahas, or the insights needed to solve the puzzle. After that, it was just before 2 PM, so I decided to go to the lecture of one of the classes I’m taking this semester, 6.S087 Mathematical Methods for Multidimensional Statistics. During lecture, though, I found my attention divided between the lecture and the Hunt. Let me explain why.

Galactic is a pretty big team, with a lot of remote solvers, which are people who aren’t solving in MIT with us. Because we’re a big team, coordination is pretty important. The way Galactic coordinated this year’s solving is through Galackboard, which Rob, Nathan, Jason, and a bunch of other people helped build. It’s a website built on the Codex Blackboard. I wish I had a screenshot to show you, but I don’t, so have this poor drawing instead:

more diagrams in paint

The way it works is that it makes a Google Sheet, from a template, in a Google Drive for each puzzle. When you click on a puzzle, it brings up the spreadsheet and a persistent puzzle-specific chat on the right. So at a base level, Galackboard acts as an easy way to access several spreadsheets, and a way to view the previous messages people have sent about the puzzle.

more diagrams made in paint

It also allows you to add tags and set the status of a puzzle, which also turned out to be really helpful. The status shows up on the main screen, so you can look at the list of puzzles and view how far people are in solving it, and where their physical location is, if any. Puzzles can also be tagged with categories like “logic puzzle” or “pop culture”, and this will notify people who are interested in solving puzzles with these tags. Puzzles can also be marked as stuck, which will color it red in the main screen, and as solved, which will mark it green.

In addition to the livestream and the voice chat, I thought this actually made the remote solving experience tenable. It also just made our solving way more organized, which was a huge part of my hunt experience. Despite not being in the same room as people solving the puzzle, I still felt like I could actually contribute.

Of course, because my attention was divided between paying attention to the lecture and watching people’s progress on the puzzle, I again didn’t feel like I contributed a lot. After a couple minutes, I stopped following Galackboard and started paying attention to the lecture.

One puzzle down and more to go

Even more puzzles

This subsection has spoilers for the puzzle Magic 8-Ball. It only really talks about that puzzle and nothing else, so feel free to skip this subsection if you’re not interested in reading about the actual puzzles.

When I came back from class, I learned that we had already solved our first meta, which was Storybook Pals. I think solving this meta unlocked the next location, which was Spaceopolis.

The other thing I learned was that people were making progress on Penny Park Guide, but still haven’t solved it. They’ve gotten to the point where they have all these instructions and are figuring out what to do next. I decided to work on a different puzzle instead.

I looked briefly at Stress Test, a puzzle in Spaceopolis. But it looked like people were almost finished solving the puzzle. Solving that puzzle unlocked another puzzle—Magic 8-Ball, in a new area, Wizard’s Hollow. So I got to work:

yep, we had to cut and fold and paste these

I saw through this puzzle from the beginning to the end, so I’ll explain how it was solved here, as a good example of what solving a puzzle is like.

Reading the text in the beginning of the puzzle hints at putting together the triangular pieces to construct something, from this one requires a bit of assembly. The first instinct was to match up the 8s that were the same, and put them on top of each other in some way. At first, we thought there were three or four copies of each of the different styles of 8s.

exactly two of the four are the same and everything else is different

But we soon noticed that they were actually different, in extremely subtle ways, and that there were only two copies of each 8. As the puzzle text hinted, an eye for detail was needed.

While my roommate Jeffery, who was hunting with us, printed and cut the pieces, I think it was Rob, Laura, and I who were pairing the 8s up and gluing them together. Since there were twenty pieces, we guessed that the finished shape would be an icosahedron. It was a bit of a timesink to match the 8s up together, and a couple of times I had to pull out Photoshop and overlay 8s to make sure they were identical, but in the end, we formed this beautiful polyhedron:

i got to keep our assembled icosahedron

The next step was to do something about the Morse code that went around the icosahedron. We correctly interpreted it as reading it starting from the 8 face and going around, interpreting the vertical bars as letter dividers. Then Rob, or at least, I think it was Rob, knew Morse code by heart and started decoding. This gave us the good phrases “CHESSEX D20”, “START AT 1 WITH” and “SORCERERS STONE”. Except for a long while, we didn’t read the final 0, so we thought the first phrase was “CHESS EXD2” and were very confused, trying a lot of different things that didn’t work out.

Chessex, apparently, was a brand that sold D20s, which are dice with 20 sides. By searching up pictures of Chessex dice on Google, we were able to map the 20 sides of the D20 onto the sides of the icosahedron.

observe how the 8 is oriented the same way in both pictures. right photo from amazon

We then took note of what happened when you took these numbers and added it to the number on the bottom of that face. For example, the face with “=4TH STUDIO ALBUM” was face number 12 and had [+6] at the bottom, so we took note of 12+6, or 18.

There was a nice pattern—it almost had all of the numbers from 1 to 20, except it didn’t have 1 and it had two 13s. And then someone, Patrick, I think, came up with the idea of starting with the instructions on face 1 with the phrase Sorcerer’s Stone, and then following it to the next face.

For example, the instruction on the first face was “3 ITEMS LATER”, and 3 items later after Sorcerer’s Stone is Goblet of Fire. That face had [+1] at the bottom, so we went to the second face, which had the instruction “BIG COMPETITION”, and the big competition in Goblet of Fire is the Triwizard Tournament. Continuing like this gave the final answer, CORNUCOPIA.

Stuck on extraction

This subsection has spoilers for the puzzle Charming.

Many puzzles are kind of divided into two parts. Roughly, there’s a phase where you collect data, like doing all of the puzzles in Penny Park Guide, or making the icosahedron and reading the Morse code for Magic 8-Ball.

Then, there’s a phase where you use this data to find the final answer. Most people will call this latter phrase extraction. There are lots of ways to extract the final answer, like checking the first letters of everything to see if they spell a phrase, or if you have a list of answers and numbers, indexing into each answer to get a letter.

Often these two phases feel distinct. So it’s somewhat common for a group of solvers to have all the data, and then get stuck on extraction. I’ve identified all of these places, but now what? I’ve filled out all of these crosswords, and then what?

That’s where we were stuck on after working on the puzzle Charming. After a quick inspection of the puzzle, we feel each clue has two parts. For example, Charms 101, which says “In this course you will learn the subtle art of sending your colleague flying backwards if he tries to put marinara sauce on soba,” clues two things: “sending your colleage flying backwards” and “marinara sauce on soba”.

The first parts were all Harry Potter spells. For this one, it’s flipendo. The second part, which was the aha moment, was realizing it described a class from the 2010 MIT Charm School. This one was describing Pasta vs. Noodles. So we went through the list and identified all the charms and the classes, but then we couldn’t figure out what to do next—we were stuck on extraction.

I left shortly after getting stuck on Charming to work on our web.lab project. I came back later that night, a bit past 1 AM, to briefly check on how Hunt was going. When I arrived, people were already unlocked a new area, Big Top Carnival, and were working on the puzzle The Aerialist. After solving it, we unlocked a puzzle called Domino Maze, where we were given a whole copy of Domino Maze:

“is it okay if i take a picture” “only if you use it in a blog post”

Think about it. Left Out provided teams with an entire copy of this logic puzzle,⁠17 This used to say board game, and then Brian disputed this, so I checked <a href="https://www.boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Game_Criteria">BoardGameGeek standards</a> and realized <em>logic puzzle</em> would be a better phrase. and gave us a 44-puzzle expansion pack, printed by the game’s manufacturer, that was meant for Mystery Hunt. That’s insane production value. But the puzzles in the expansion pack already had solutions to them on the back. And so it lead to the natural question: how were we going to extract an answer out of this puzzle?

but it already has a solution!!

I left that night a little past 2:30 AM with someone else from hall, and we talked a bit in the Floor Pi lounge before heading to sleep.

The robot parade

I woke up the next morning to find out that not only have we solved Domino Maze (which was incredible), but that we’ve finished all of the inner lands and have unlocked outer lands. The initial map that showed us only seven areas expanded to show four more areas in each corner. Our first outer land was Creative Pictures Studios, where, I was informed, the answers were all emoji.

I guess that’s what it feels to be hunting with a big team—you don’t really get to see a lot of the puzzles, you have to get updated with what happened if you’re away for some time, entire areas can get unlocked and solved when you’re gone. But it also feels as if we’re making progress together, in such a fast rate, and it also happens that a lot of my friends are on Galactic. Such is the tradeoff.

One of the things that happen during Hunt are events, which are just cool events that (usually) are linked to a puzzle of some sort. For example, one huge high-production value event was the Midway, which was a full fledged carnival midway! (All the information needed to solve the puzzle is on that page too.)

The team was looking for someone to volunteer for the Robot Parade. We were assigned to get someone to dress up as Angelyne. And if you’re a Zoomer like me, you might not know who Angelyne is. She’s a lesser-known robot from Futurama, who’s uh, very sexualized:

taken from futurama wiki

Jakob and Justine made my costume, which they did while I was thinking about the puzzle Sightseeing. I was standing in front of my laptop staring at the puzzle while they put boxes around my torso and checked my measurements. We talked a bit about Floor Pi and its history, which was pretty interesting—apparently, we could have been called Pi West as recently as 2008. They put a lot of work into making my beautiful costume:

i could barely see with that hair

Come 2 PM or so, we gathered in a room to get our briefing for the parade. There were five different kinds of robots: Bender, Crushinator, Malfunctioning Eddie, Angelyne, and Calcutron. There were ten or so of us Angelynes standing in a corner, and we were given instructions on how to parade. We were to sing a song that consisted of a bunch of boops and beeps. And then we paraded!

by shifting my hair up, i could now see

Lots of people came out to watch as I strode down the Infinite Corridor in my beautiful costume. The path went through the Infinite, into Lobby 10 where lots of people were watching, then turned around at Lobby 7 and went back. Left Out posted a video of the parade here, and it’s pretty hype:

Of course, the parade is still a puzzle. We were given a sheet of paper with the complete lyrics to the beep boop song, which we used to get the answer to the puzzle.

On puzzles above and below

This section contains spoilers for the puzzles Rabbit, “Tech’s Adventure” Walkthrough, Pay It Forward, Breakfast Menu, Old West Revue, Wild West Recipes, Tall Tales, and the Safari Adventure meta and submetas. It is entirely puzzles. If you only read one part, read Breakfast Menu.

From when I came back at around 4 PM after the Robot Parade, until I slept at 1 or 2 AM that night, I worked on nothing but puzzles. And I thought many of the puzzles I solved were rather nice. So think of this section as a love letter to Left Out, where I talk about all of the puzzles I enjoyed working on, and the little contributions⁠18 Well, I <em>hope</em> I contributed, rather than, you know, anti-contributed. I made to help solving them.

Rabbit

Creative Pictures Studios represented an innovation in making the answers emoji, and the second outer land, Safari Adventure, represented another innovation in making the puzles have multiple answers.

The only Safari puzzle I really helped solving was Rabbit. I helped in filling in all the clues and answering them. Reading the first letters⁠19 Always a good idea. down the left column gave “TAKE MOD TWENTY SIX”. Then the aha that led to the extraction step was realizing that the carrots should be read as carets, and realizing this led to our collective groaning, and this gave two different answers to the puzzle.

The other cool thing about Safari Adventure, other than the puzzles having multiple answers, was realizing that the puzzles fed into multiple metas. People realized this when two metas opened up that both used the same animal, but different answers of the same animal. The meta squad⁠20 There are people on Galactic who <em>really like</em> working on metas. then estimated that there would be around nine metas, and that they fed into a metameta for Safari Adventure. So that’s the innovation for Safari Adventure: its puzzles went into multiple metas.

“Tech’s Adventure” Walkthrough

After Rabbit, the next puzzle I worked on was “Tech’s Adventure” Walkthrough. Several people were disappointed when the puzzle wasn’t an actual text adventure, because some people on our team really liked text adventures.

Initially, it looked like a runaround starting in some unspecified place in MIT, which we were supposed to figure out. We started drawing this huge map on a chalkboard, and used clues like “float through space for the length of one room” or “snuck into the back of the lecture hall” to try to figure out where it could be in MIT. The clues suggested a lecture hall that spanned two floors, but trying each of these lecture halls didn’t match up with the rest of the puzzle.

So we thought that it wasn’t actually MIT rooms, but something else. But what? We were stuck on this for so long that I worked on something else, and a few hours later someone realized that it was the four panels in Building 56, as clued by “The original versions of your game maps have been on display in the halls of MIT for over ten years, ever since they were installed in the 50s.” I’ll admit it: the puzzle tricked us.

Pay It Forward

The Mystery Hunt always includes a scavenger hunt of some kind, and this year’s hunt had Pay It Forward, a “scavenger hunt” where we did charitable tasks to earn points. For example, teams could get 4 points per each small bird house made, 10 points per each pet security blanket knitted, 1 point per two books donated, and so on. Galactic needed 95 points to complete the hunt, because our registered team size was 95. That was a lot.

Rob helped me film a video for the It Gets Better project, which is a collection of videos of people telling stories aimed at inspiring LGBTQ youth. I felt drawn to that task; the project was something I wish I knew about when I needed it. I also helped fold about fifty paper cranes, which provided a good distraction while thinking about Tech’s Adventure.

Breakfast Menu

If I had to pick one favorite puzzle throughout the hunt, it has to be Breakfast Menu. As soon as I heard someone say the words heraldry in the back of the room, I was instantly interested, and behold—there was a puzzle about heraldry!

In particular, the puzzle included blazons, which are formal ways to describe a coat of arms. They’re described in such a way that a reader can reconstruct the coat of arms, given just the blazon. Wikipedia gives the example of the arms of Östergötland, Sweden: Gules a griffin with dragon wings tail and tongue rampant or armed beaked langued and membered azure between four roses argent.

taken from wikipedia

The first word, gules, described the background of the shield, which is red. The next phrase is a griffin with dragon wings tail and tongue rampant or. This describes the main charge, a griffin, and its color, or, gold. The next phrase is armed beaked langued and membered azure, which meant certain parts of the griffin were azure, blue. Finally, between four roses argent described the four roses, and their color, argent, silver.

I was really into blazons when I was around fourteen, and spent all the free time I had for a month looking into them and how they worked. And finally, finally, the esoteric knowledge I’d built up through a streak of nerdiness in eighth grade paid off! Each of the blazons described a coat of arms that looked like this:

the first two blazons described in the problem

Lilly then made the connection that the Splashdown Diner logo looked like the Waffle House logo, and someone else realized that these were all codes Waffle House uses to communicate specific orders:

taken from this article

Describing the orders filled in the blanks, and the circled letters spelled out the answer, TELEGRAPH STATION. That puzzle felt really good. There’s nothing like using oddly specific knowledge to solve a puzzle.

Cactus Canyon

Cactus Canyon was the last of the outer lands. There wasn’t anything odd about the land, just that it had a lot of feeder puzzles. I thought that three of the puzzles I looked at were rather amusing, so I wanted to share them with you.

The first is Old West Revue, of which the data collection step consisted of reading a bunch of non-Latin scripts. I pinged one of my Thai friends to read the Thai script for me, who pointed out that it read something like this is my (house) I have to defend it. It didn’t read that in Thai, it read that in English—it was the English sentence written phonetically in the Thai script. So yeah, I thought it was pretty cool how I pinged my friend to help out with the puzzle.

The other one is Wild West Recipes, which is twenty-five videos of “recipes”. They range from seemingly normal ones like this, to crazier ones like this. They were pretty fun to watch and collect data for, which is a good thing for a puzzle that involves data collection.

And finally, there’s Tall Tales. Left Out got Oliver Smoot, yes, that Oliver Smoot, to read out the story for this puzzle. Here’s a video of him saying who he is.

Safari Adventure

The other thing that really excited me that night, other than the blazonry puzzle, was the Safari Adventure meta. It would turn out to be the only meta I helped solve throughout the entire hunt, which is totally fine, considering how I thought it was, by far, the best meta.

To recap, each of the puzzles in Safari Adventure had multiple answers, and the different answers fed into different submetas, which all fed into the Safari meta. When I jumped in to watch, the meta squad had solved seven out of the ten submetas they’d unlocked.

Each of the submetas required the answers to a subset of the animals in the round. The Trainer, for example, required the answers to the twelve animals in the Chinese Zodiac: Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, and so on. Sam required the answers to five striped animals: Dragon, Snake, Hyena, Tiger, Zebra.

All of the submetas required a Tiger answer, but there wasn’t any Tiger puzzle. The aha was to realize that each of the Tiger answers were from William Blake’s poem The Tyger. And like the Safari Adventure meta suggested, the way to extract the meta answer was to take which lines of the poem the answer came from, and convert them into letters using A=1, B=2, and so on.

I helped with solving the Anne, The Captain, and Jack submetas, which led us to the meta answer. This then led us to an incredible chain of backsolving, which is one thing that Galactic loves.

Normally, we find the answer to a meta by using the answers from the puzzle, which is forward solving. But if you happened to answer the meta first, you could then use this to find the answers of the feeder puzzles, which is backsolving. All the metas in Safari Adventure were designed to be backsolvable, because you needed to find the answer for the Tiger puzzle, but this also helped us solve many other puzzles as well. So that was pretty cool.

Searching for something new

The last puzzle

This section contains spoilers for the Workshop metameta. Brian has a more exciting retelling of this on his blog.

After my puzzle solving spree that whole afternoon, stretching into the evening, I found myself thinking about Hunt. Not about puzzles, but about the Hunt itself. Why do it? What was the point?

Was it to socialize? It’s true that I did get to talk to some of the Floor Pi alumni, and I got to listen to a story or two, and I loved hearing about the history of the floor. But even when I had dinner that night, when I walked to Saloniki and back with some of the older team members, most of what we talked about were puzzles. We talked about good puzzles and cracked jokes about puzzles and mentioned previous years’ puzzles. And while that was good, it wasn’t exactly what I looked for.

So was it to solve puzzles? It’s not something that I could do alone; I enjoy solving puzzles with others way more than I enjoy solving them alone. But do I really enjoy puzzles if I don’t feel like I’m doing a major contribution? Are puzzles really fun if you’re just constantly stuck?

I went to sleep that night at around 1 AM, expecting to be woken up some time in the morning, when we reach the metameta. I was woken up around 5:30 AM, and was told that we had solved the Cactus Canyon meta and unlocked the metameta puzzle. I headed to Galactic HQ with some other people from Floor Pi who were sleeping.

After we solved each meta, we got pressed pennies. People went to the Workshop, where the Tinkerer took a penny and pressed a pattern on it. There were arrows on the border, as well as three pictures:

taken from this page; check it out for more cool pictures of pennies and how they were pressed

Inner lands provided us one pressed penny, and outer lands provided us two, and we got one more penny from doing all the events. This gave us sixteen pennies in total, which each came on cards with a description.

And then we started solving. We took pictures and uploaded it to help the remote solvers. We started calling people who were asleep and wanted to see the metameta get solved, because we knew that after this metameta was the runaround, and that after the runaround we would find the coin. We knew we were under contention for winning the hunt, because we haven’t gotten the email telling us that someone’s won yet, so we still had a chance.

And an hour passed. And another hour passed. Then another hour. We put the coins in so many different patterns, and tried so many different ways to combine the clue text and the pictures and the puzzles and the answers. We replaced the solvers playing with the coins with solvers who’ve heard every old idea, and then replaced them with solvers who weren’t exposed to any of the ideas.

I head outside to watch the sun rise.

a very pretty morning

If there are two things that characterize how Galactic does puzzlehunts, based on what I’ve heard, then it’s that we really love backsolving, and that we tend to get stuck on metas.

They told me the story of the 2018 hunt. We were stuck on one of the metas, on the Hacking Island, which we needed to solve in order to get the metameta for that island, or something like that. It was unlocked at around 2 PM, and people worked on it for six hours, during which people started giving up, and during which the coin was found. Death and Mayhem, the team running the hunt, even sent two people to answer yes-or-no questions to give hints. And then when people started leaving the room for dinner,⁠21 Anderson recounts the story slightly differently. Per him, he was “sitting in a location that blocked Brain’s view of the blackboard”, so his contribution to the meta was leaving the room. He also says that there were two separate metas in 2019 that were stuck but then solved right after he left for meals. Brian has his <a href="https://blog.vero.site/post/2018-hunt">own writeup of that hunt</a>. Brian was left alone, started staring at the puzzle, and then found the insight needed to solve the meta.

And we also got stuck on a meta this hunt, for Spaceopolis. On Friday night, we had relatively few puzzles open, with the main bottleneck being that we hadn’t solved the Spaceopolis meta, and we were stuck on it for such a long time. So I wasn’t optimistic about this meta. But it felt like we were so close to victory—we had all the pennies, and all the information, and all we needed was to put them together.

Another hour passed. We have a good way to place the coins, that we thought was really good. We couldn’t figure out what to do with it.

they’re arranged such that the arrows point to each other

There was one person, Anderson, who just arrived after having to solve remotely. I made the joke that if this was fiction, then Anderson’s arrival would be the cruicial piece needed to solve the puzzle, and that we’d quickly solve it after this. Someone else pointed out that it would be more thematic if someone had a character change which would lead to the solution. But it didn’t seem like tropes were going to save us now.

It’s noon. Still no email announcement. Some of the members of Left Out came to our room to watch us.

And then, and then, and then, and then—

The beginning of the end

This section contains spoilers for the Workshop metameta and Heart of the Park.

Earlier, someone pointed out that each card had three sentences. And then someone pointed out that the three sentences loosely corresponded with the pictures on the pennies. The key realization was that they did correspond, if you added a word to the pictures to make a two-word phrase. For example, the picture of the castle corresponded to the phrase a temporary structure, cluing SAND CASTLE. Or relied on it to help them navigate with star, to make STAR CHART.

We started filling them out on a spreadsheet. And then someone noticed that adjacent words differed by exactly one letter. And all of a sudden, the room was alive again—this was the idea, this was the right idea, and the whole room started filling in the phrases, and everyone was so excited.

frantically filling in the spreadsheet

The letters started falling into place. ?ORTH… maybe, was this FOR THE, or was it FOR THIS? We got SCENTI?????…, so was that SCIENTIFIC? No, is it SCENTIMENTAL, a pun? More and more letters popped out. FOR THE SCENTIMENTAL VALUE? No, that was wrong. FOR THIS CENTIMENTAL VALUE? Still wrong. More letters got changed.

And then, someone submitted it. FOR THIS CENT I MINT ALL VALUE.

And that was it. The room was full of energy. We unlocked Heart of the Park, which was the final runaround. Not a single runaround, but ten runarounds, which could be completed in parallel. We split up into teams and started doing them.

I did the Safari Adventure runaround, which I picked at random. It was a rather funny one. After identifying the painting as being next to room 2-190, which I passed by every morning during the Fall semester for one of my classes, we followed the instructions. There was, as the instructions said, a large viewing window with a river, the Charles river, and a majestic Mountain range, which was the Boston skyline.

a “large viewing window”, a river, and a “mountain range”

The rest of the walkaround was more comparisons. There was a reference to a large brown Eagle, which was a sculpture outside Walker, and a Firefly, which was a lamppost. Some of them are pretty funny. If you’re on campus, then you should definitely give the runaround a try. At the end of the runaround was a sheet of paper that we used to find the answer.

We were the first team to get back to Galactic HQ and submit an answer, probably because we had one of the easier runarounds. We waited, while helping out the team solving the Wizard’s Hollow runaround, which wasn’t a physical runaround, but was a runaround somewhere. Someone eventually realized that it was a runaround on the symbols of The Alchemist sculpture, one of the more iconic MIT sculptures, and eventually we had all the answers.

The ten answers were all instructions. The Safari one was POSE YOGA, for example, while the Grand Castle one was PLAN REGICIDE. Typing in the answers gave us instructions. For Safari, we had to perform three animal-named yoga poses, and for Castle, we need to recreate our favorite fictional regicide. We were told to assemble in Lobby 10 with our collected pennies, and to get the ten performers ready for each task.

The final runaround

We had twenty minutes to prepare for the tasks. And then we went to Lobby 10, and there waiting for us were the Left Out staff. They led us down the tunnels, with Penny asking us questions at certain intersections to determine where to go, whose answers depended on the history of Penny Park.

We were eventually led into this room with a really cool looking machine, which Penny introduced to us was the Heart of the Park. She made the pun that it was her grandmother’s creation—or, you know, nana technology.

yeah there’s a lot of us

Some people fiddled with the pennies and the machine, and then we were asked to do the tasks we were assigned. So someone did yoga poses, two people enacted a scene from Macbeth, someone recited the first few lines of Jabberwocky. It was pretty good.

We were then told that the machine wasn’t working right—the parts weren’t in sync with each other. And to make them synchronize, we needed to combine the tasks together. So for example, someone did yoga poses during the scene from Macbeth. And these tasks were even funnier.

In the end, we all sat down around the machine and watched it change color. It filled the room with all these beautiful lights and sounds. And then 3 4 4 1 4 3 5 appeared on its surface, and we were all asked what it meant. It was the number of letters of each word in the phrase FOR THIS CENT I MINT ALL VALUE. We all said the phrase together, and then the cover popped open, and out came the coin.

it looks way cooler in real life

Then twelve(!) projector screens in the room rolled down, and a final history video was shown. These videos only really make sense in a series, and if you want to see them, you can look at this page and scroll down to watch the six history videos.

And that’s it. We won. We take a group picture⁠22 Which, sadly, didn’t have everyone on Galactic because some of them were asleep. before heading back to HQ to clean up.

this is like, what, 80% of the team? photo from left out

Help me because I don’t know

Wrapup

That night, people chilled around Floor Pi, and I got to play more board games. On Monday noon was the wrapup. You can watch a video of it here:

We headed back to HQ, where Charles gave each of us commemorative coins, each replicas of the actual coin:

the coin! the coin!!

There was discussion about whether Galactic Puzzle Hunt, a puzzlehunt that Galactic helps run, will happen this year. It was eventually decided that it wouldn’t. A new Discord server was made for people who wanted to help run the hunt, and another Discord server was made for people who wanted to hunt. I decided to join the former.

People split off to have lunch. I went to eat at Flour Bakery + Cafe, a restaurant that holds a place in Floor Pi culture. That afternoon, we played some Jackbox games. That evening, we played more board games. People started leaving that night. By Wednesday, pretty much everyone who flew in for Hunt left.

It’s been two weeks,⁠23 And so much has happened in these two weeks, that my mind asks: <em>only</em> two weeks? but I still have a lot of feelings about Hunt. It feels weird, in a sense, to be part of a big group. It reminds me of how I felt when I contributed to Splash. Small enough that it’s hard to notice, or to feel like I’ve done anything of worth, while being big enough that it felt like I actually did something, but I’m not sure whether someone could have replaced me.

And like Splash, I felt a void in my life for the next week or so. The high-energy buzz that was Hunt was now over. I directed some of that energy into thinking about next year’s Hunt, but it wasn’t enough to cover up the lack that I felt. Days after the Hunt ended, I found myself still talking about puzzles.

I remember one conversation I had, talking to someone on Floor Pi, when I jokingly compared my life to a puzzle, and that I needed help with extraction. After I thought about it for a little, it made a lot of sense with how I felt about my life in general. I had already collected a lot of the data I needed, but I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know how to piece everything I know about myself to figure out the next step.

I know what I enjoy, and I find myself doing these things, and it’s great. It feels like I’ve put the pieces of the jigsaw together, or that I’ve solved the crossword, or that I’ve assembled whatever I need to assemble. But now I find myself asking what happens next? Now that I know what I enjoy, and that I’m starting to get an idea of what I want with my life, what do I do with this information?

Sometimes I find myself wishing that I could mark myself as stuck on extraction, and that someone would come by, look at all the info I’ve gathered so far, and just give that crucial insight needed to extract the answer. And you know, it doesn’t even have to be one person. Maybe if multiple people come by, and all give me their own ideas, then maybe I can come up with the solution myself. And then I’d solve this puzzle, and I’d do another puzzle, and another, and maybe when I have enough answers I can start working on the metapuzzle.

Because puzzles are more fun when you do them with other people, right?

A puzzle

Of course, being a blog post about puzzles, I couldn’t resist embedding a puzzle in this blog post too. You’ll find a six-letter sound if you read the first thing that comes to mind, and you’ll find another six-letter sound if you read the last. The two-word answer belongs between these two six-letter sounds.

The first word of the two-word answer has 8 letters, and the second word has 12. This blog post is all you need; you don’t need to solve any of the linked puzzles or anything to find the answer. Happy puzzling!

Thanks to Galactic Trendsetters for testsolving the puzzle, reading and giving comments on drafts of this post, and for making my Hunt experience great. And thanks to Left Out for making this year’s Hunt possible in the first place.

Everything’s going just fine! I’m registered for classes, the grad school admission process is almost done, and I’m on track to graduate and enter the adult world. And yet the past three weeks have been the most stressful experience of my whole time at MIT. It turns out that there’s more to this place than just doing classes.

Here’s the blog post where I vent.

A while back when I was asking people for recommendation letters, my PI of three years made a suggestion. He wanted to nominate me for a UROP research symposium in January, so he could add that to my letter. I said of course, even though I can’t stand because I absolutely love doing scientific presentations. Furthermore, it would be impossible incredibly easy to condense three years worth of research into a 10-12 minute talk.  How could you tell the person who is writing your most important recommendation that you don’t want to do a little presentation? I said sure. And then that January 30th symposium date hung over my head for almost two months, as I tried my hardest to ignore it.

By the middle of December, I started getting interview invites from a handful of the places I applied to. Very exciting. Then I saw that a couple of the places had interview weekends scheduled for January. One was incredibly close to that January 30th date. I had assumed that these took place in like February or March, but I really had one place that wanted me there on January 9th. I guess this (predicting interview schedules) is the one time you should check the “The GradCafe.”⁠01 not a big fan of college confidential part 2 so I refuse to even hyperlink there So then my priority became preparing for interviews. The symposium cast a shadow from behind me, like when you’re walking in the evening and someone who walks faster starts to overtake you.

I shopped for interview clothes at a department store when I was home in December. I’d never owned dress pants before. Everything is expensive. During my first round of interviews, I found that the patent leather heels I bought were a terribly uncomfortable choice, but since I hadn’t had time to get my pants hemmed,⁠02 five foot tall people are simply not able to have clothes that just fit I had to power through it. All nine hours of it, from interviews to post-interview faculty dinner. Oh yeah, I also lost my credit card during this trip and immediately deactivated it and ordered a new one, only to find it in my backpack less than an hour later.

Great news! My PI is one of the hosts of this year’s symposium! Better not embarrass him with a terrible presentation!

As soon as I got off the plane in Boston, I rushed to prepare my symposium slides to a reasonable enough extent that my postdoc mentor wouldn’t be disappointed with the lack of progress. She’s been doing interviews for faculty positions at all kinds of places, so the overlap of our OoO times made it difficult to meet and practice. I met with her the next day and once again got to work, this time with a slightly better idea of what the presentation should look like. It took me an embarrassing amount of time to parse the structural/chemical bio done by our collaborators that was so essential to explaining the point of my project. And I had another interview weekend around the corner to worry about.

I checked the status of my pre-registration and found that one of the classes I pre-reg’d for was cancelled. This made me really sad at first. It was a CMS class called “Designing Active Archives.” It sounded really cool. For context, my experience with this field includes volunteer Ancestry.com data entry⁠03 essentially reading handwritten documents and typing out what they say so people can then search for their ancestors' records and running a Twitter account where I find reaction images and repost them⁠04 there are some rare reaction pics out there that you just can't find on Google image search with a text description of the photo so that people can search for them. The pictures in this post come from there. The sadness at losing the opportunity to take this class faded away into anxiety once I remembered that I needed that class to fulfill an elective for my CMS degree. I had to find another CMS elective if I wanted to finish that degree by this semester. If you don’t go here, you might not understand that  CMS classes, especially the fun elective ones with minimal or no prereqs, are consistently overenrolled. I have a major edge⁠05 my main plug for majoring in CMS is that you won't get kicked out of the super popular fun classes since I’m a CMS major, but I still had a brief⁠06 I'm in CMS.301 (Intro to Game Design Methods) now headache over it.

I went in for the next place’s interviews with a slightly better understanding of what the people were going to ask me and a symposium slide deck that was in shambles considering my talk was in six days. My first “30 minute” interview went over by !!!25 minutes!!!, eating into 15 minutes of the next “30 minute” interview, which ultimately made me late to the third interview by at least 10 minutes, partially due to the fact that I ran up eight flights of stairs to get to her office since I didn’t know where the elevators were. My interviewers were all great, and my feet hurt much less, but I didn’t think I made a great impression by being late to all of my interviews, including the one that happened in the afternoon after an hour-long break. For that one, I had walked back to the hotel to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling for a bit, left with enough time to make it to the next interview location, found out that it was in an active hospital, buzzed the doorbell in the left side of the hospital lobby to be let into the area that was clearly labelled with the name of the place on my interview schedule sheet, was let in and encountered a flustered receptionist who had no idea what I was doing buzzing into “the executive suite,” headed down the hall in shame, went through a metal detector and got in line with a bunch of other people, had someone passing by tell me that I didn’t need to stand in that line and that I could just go around to the elevator, took the elevator to what I assumed was the correct location, found that the office listed on my interview schedule did not exist, asked someone in the closest office where I was supposed to go, was told “uhh, I’m not sure. Try around the corner,” still couldn’t find that office, asked some guy with his door open who told me it was next door, and found my interviewer, all with negative ten minutes left to spare. He was pretty cool about it but I almost just took a knee and left.

Once back home, I got to work on the symposium stuff. I wrote a script and finalized the slides. I met with my postdoc over phone, over FaceTime, at her house, at a conference she was attending in Boston. I spent four entire days doing nothing but working on this presentation. I have it memorized still, but at significant cost to my mental state. My brain felt… itchy. I’m someone who is usually very quick to memorize things, but for some reason, this time it didn’t stick. Even when I forced it to stick, I kept coming in about two minutes over time. Truly a mess. I had looked at my slides so many times that they had started to lose meaning. My itchy brain was unfolding, becoming smooth.

I’ve known for a while that I want to go to grad school in New York.⁠07 despite my ethical qualms about going to schools named after sketchy billionaires i.e. basically all of the NYC biosciences grad programs I applied to four programs in NYC. I got interview invites from two, I got rejected by the other two. The first interview went well, or so I thought, but I was so exhausted by the process that I think I put off an irritated vibe that they didn’t appreciate. My feet hurt. I got waitlisted. Suddenly my NYC prospects shrank from four to one. I got an email saying that the second interview program would release decisions by January 30th at 4 pm eastern time. Right in the middle of the symposium. So I had to continue practicing this presentation despite most of my mental energy being devoted to the what-if⁠08 spoiler: the decision did in fact come right in the middle of my presentation and I got in :) of admissions gone bad.

During our reg day meeting, my advisor handed me a degree progress sheet that showed I was four electives short of the CMS degree. That would mean I would have to take six classes⁠09 hell no this semester instead of four or else abandon that degree. I recounted everything and showed the administrator my math. I’m all set now, but this was anxiety-inducing in a major way.

I’ve been keeping up with politics recently as well. Probably the worst thing to feed my brain. I requested an absentee ballot for the primaries in my home state of Alabama. Go figure, that’s kind of hard to do. There’s a form you have to fill out, you have to scan a copy of your ID, you have to print all of it and mail it somewhere with a questionable amount of postage. I received my ballot recently and found that there are a lot of judges running that I don’t know anything about. I’ve been questioning whether I should even have a say in the Jefferson County circuit court judge races, considering I’m choosing judges who will oversee courts in a place that I visit maybe twice a year. Nonetheless, I read up on the candidates and chose the ones I thought seemed most appropriate. Next came the weird business of figuring out how many stamps to put on the return envelope, which simply says “additional postage required.” Turns out that there’s truly no way of knowing unless I physically go to a post office. But I’m not going to let that stop me. (And neither should you! If you’re a citizen and 18 or older go vote! Please!)

do it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

I’ve got interviews happening in California from Thursday through Tuesday of next week. It’s the first week of classes, so this is terrible timing, as a lot of classes require you to be at the first session and will kick you out of the class if you don’t show up. Therefore, I’ve made the prudent(?) decision to miss the optional activities happening on Thursday in order to make it to my two classes that day. I will be leaving class and heading directly to the airport. I need to pack. I will arrive at SFO at 9:30 pm and dive right into interviews at 8 am the next morning. My dress pants are still too long. I have no time to deal with that.

As I write this, it’s Tuesday night, and I’ve been keeping up with the Iowa caucuses. And by “keeping up with” I mean making sustained throat noises at my laptop screen as the headlines roll out and the numbers don’t. New Hampshire is happening soon.⁠10 and I'm kind of sad that I can't take a daytrip to NH to see the Strokes perform at the Bernie concert because I will be in California AHHHHHHHHHHHH

In hurried, gesticulating, half-baked conclusion, this kind of stuff never ends. You make it through one obstacle just to find the next. You should still take some time to be proud of yourself for clearing each hurdle. You should also recognize that you don’t need to clear every hurdle. Sometimes you don’t have any control over whether or not you can clear the hurdle. Furthermore, to quote Kierkegaard⁠11 my 14 year old sister asked for Camus's The Stranger for Christmas and you bet I bought it for her in a highly “undergrad who doesn’t really understand the context or meanings of philosophers’ quotes” way, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. No, I will not elaborate on that.

Here are some links to YouTube videos that I’ve been watching to calm down (they may also work for the kind of stress that comes with waiting for your damn admissions decisions):

• seahorse birth
• a rat painting a pretty picture
• octopus eggs hatching
• my favorite vocalist of his era, Eric Burdon, performing “Spill the Wine” with War in 1970

Enjoy!