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2022 Ring Premiere!

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Every class year at MIT gets their own personalized Brass Rat. What is a Brass Rat? Well, it’s a ring that comes in gold, silver, or stainless steel. It has a beaver on it. And a dog. And an owl. So… there are no rats, and no brass.

Nevertheless, we’ve been calling them Brass Rats for ninety years, and they’re a hugely important part of MIT tradition.  Every freshman class has a Ring Committee, who put in tons of time and effort creating the ring (which has a typical layout, but no specific set design). In February of sophomore year, the design is announced at Ring Premiere; then everyone scrambles to spend their life savings on it. In April, we all dress up fancy for Ring Delivery and poses with our shiny new rings.

The ring buying period has just concluded for the Class of 2022. Here’s how it went for me, and what our ring looks like. For some comparison, check out the 2020 and 2010 rings! (Blogging about ring premiere and delivery is its own smol tradition, although much younger than the ring itself.)

For starters, I wanna say that I got all this information off the website. So if you want to know more, you should actually just go to http://brassrat2022.mit.edu/. (But you like me, so you’ll keep reading <3)

But Shuli, you ask, didn’t you go to Ring Premiere? Wouldn’t they have told you about the ring there?

Well, in fact… Almost the entire sophomore class was crowded into Kresge. We were all sitting and talking with our friends. And I have reason to believe, from what I saw, that *some* of us were r e a l l y drunk. What all of this means is that it was REALLY FRIGGING LOUD in there. People were screaming constantly, and anytime anyone on Ring Committee actually started saying anything, they screamed even louder. I probably heard about 15% of the actual content of the presentation.

However, I don’t regret going at all! Part of this is because I went with friends. Part of it is because it’s actually really fun to see everyone from our class all together, and realize how many of us there are, and how many people exist whose lives I never see although they are so closely parallel with my own. A lot of the reason why, though, is because I won the raffle :0

I guess as an incentive to get people to show up (or perhaps to get people to shut up, and actually listen to the presenters even for just a brief moment), everyone got a raffle ticket when they entered Kresge. Between different sections of the presentation, they raffled off two ultrium rings (the cheaper stainless steel option), one silver ring, and one gold ring. I won the silver ring! It was super cool to hear them read off the numbers one by one and get more and more excited as they kept going. It was also really funny because the vast majority of my friends were also in that auditorium, and by the time I sat down after claiming my prize, I had like ten congratulatory texts.

So, going to Ring Premiere saved me like four hundred dollars! I don’t want to brag too much, especially considering it was literally just luck, but it was a great feeling.  I went to Ring Sales (which are the week following Ring Premiere) in Lobby 13 and walked my way down the line of Herff Jones salespeople, choosing my bezel size, ring size, engraving, finish, box type… and when I got to the accountant at the end, she looked my order form over and said “I guess that will be zero dollars!” MMmmmmm. Good feeling. More of that in 2020, thank you!

So anyway, here’s the ring.

All Brass Rats have a bezel with the beaver on the bridge:

The bezel (front) of the ring. A beaver is on the Harvard Bridge, and MIT, the river, and Boston are all visible behind it.

Two shanks, one with Athena and one with the MIT seal:

One side (shank) of the ring, with a big 2022 and Athena and Cerberus in front of the Great Dome.One side (shank) of the ring, featuring the MIT seal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two skylines, one of MIT/Cambridge and one of Boston:

The MIT skyline, as seen on the side of the ring.The Boston skyline, as seen on the side of the ring.

 

 

 

 

and a hacker’s map:

The hacker's map showing MIT's basement tunnels. It is on the inside of the ring, behind the bezel.

 

Aren’t these mockups so pretty? Personally, I think it’s a really nice ring. I like that the beaver is cute (sometimes they are Ugly, which is always a controversy). I also like that they got some diversity on the shanks; replacing one of the two men with a woman has been a thing for a few years now, but they also made them look less white, and gave Athena a robotic arm. There are a lot of small touches and little memes all over this ring (which, again, you can read all about at http://brassrat2022.mit.edu/).

I’m very excited to get my own copy of this ring in April. It might just be a tiny piece of jewellery, but I think what’s special about it is the memories that it will hold for us down the line.

 

Oh, and here. There’s always a joke bezel before the real one. I’ll just leave you with this shot of the projector screen when they announced it, photo credit to Maxwell Y. ’21:

The joke bezel. It is noticeably uglier than the real one and mostly has memes on it.


Springing into Junior Year

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We’re already a month into the semester, and Add Date01 the last day students can add a class to their schedule without a fee/petition, coming up on march 9th quickly approaches. My schedule has been pretty set in stone since the first week of classes, but looking back at old blogs, I quickly realized that I’ve never posted my semester-ly schedules, or really talked about my major at all, and that maybe I should start as the only blogger in Course 1.02 civil and environmental engineering So, here’s what I’ve been up to for the past month:

a screenshot of my class calendarAnd, before you ask, yes, I refuse to use Google Calendar and instead choose to spend an hour every semester making a silly spreadsheet. It is my equivalent of decorating a bullet journal or buying fancy face wash. It’s called living a little.

1.035: Mechanics of Materials

This class is a lab class, and a direct successor to 1.050: Solid Mechanics, which I took in the fall. Last semester, I learned all about stresses and strains, Beam Theory, what a fourth order tensor03 actually, i still don’t fully get this one is, how to draw a Mohr Circle, and the beauty of making assumptions in engineering in order to simplify all your required math. Solid Mechanics is a bit of a simplification for how engineering works, because much of its teaching relies on the assumption that your materials are mostly homogenous and continuous. Think, a solid slab of incredibly smooth concrete or a beam made of wood. And while this works often for general calculations, it’s not a perfect or accurate representation of much of our real world.

1.035 serves as a continuation of the material with more depth, and a lab component where we actually get to see the magic behind the theory. Mostly throwing the assumption of homogenous materials aside, we’ve focused on how different components with different properties work together in a single material. So far, we’ve covered mixing and transporting of materials, elasticity, and some thermodynamics. In lab, we’ve made grain size distribution curves, mixed concrete by hand,04 a truly laborious task. think of making homemade shortcrust, but instead of flour you have 22 kilograms of sand and gravel and stretched out metal rods for tensile tests (not by hand). Plus, the same professor who taught 1.050 is continuing this one, and he makes lectures pretty engaging through sheer enthusiasm alone. 

a photo of 10 different rods, all recently broken during testing

To be honest, I kind of miss the PSet structure of the last class. Although it is nice to not have a looming deadline and a difficult set of problems every single week, I worry that material is slipping away from the confines of my brain. This is not a popular opinion amongst MIT students, I know, but I find it much easier to grasp material when I’m forced to do it for a grade every week. We have a quiz coming up for this soon, so we’ll see how that goes.

1.037: Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Design

Apparently, this class and 1.035 used to be a single, 18 unit class, so there’s a fair amount of overlap between the material, which is nice for me. This class, much like the name states, really focuses on soils05 which is not just the brown soil you think of, but also sands and gravels and clays and how they’re a bit unique in engineering. Much like 1.035, this expands on 1.050, which focuses on Solids. Soils, while not typically thought of as a building material in present day, are vitally important for most engineering across the globe. 

Firstly, basically everything is built on top of soil. It’d be a bad look if your newly constructed home sank a few inches and everything was out of line. Second, soils, unlike other materials like concrete and masonry, are very susceptible to changing different properties, like how much water is present, how compressed it is, how much space there is between particles, and so on. It’s important to know how these different factors affect engineering performance, because if your structure suddenly fails because it rained very hard one day and can no longer support itself, that’s very bad.

I’ve been enjoying this class more than I expected, to be honest. There are just 4 people in the class, and the size makes it really easy to ask the questions you want to try to learn. Although I don’t feel particularly invested in soils, it’s nice to learn just for the sake of learning, in a class environment that allows that. The pace feels reasonable,06 a blessing for any MIT class, tbh and our professor is so genuinely interested in the subject that it’s hard not to get a bit interested, too. I feel like I’m using knowledge from last semester and expanding on it, instead of just forgetting it as soon as the class is over. Plus, now I can watch movies that use quicksand as a plot point and actually understand how it works.07 and how exaggerated it is in film

a gif of a person sinking into quicksand

don’t worry, it’s not real!

1.073: Intro to Environmental Data Analysis

This class is a statistics course that expands on 1.010: Probability and Causal Inference, a class required by all Course 1 majors. So far, I find myself getting lost at the speed in which we learn material, and all the greek letters we use.08 and their overlap with my other classes. <em>sigma</em> is both stress and standard deviation, <em>rho</em> both density and autocorrelation, it never ends I must admit, I am bad at statistics. But, I keep trying to channel my knowledge from taking AP Statistics in high school more than four years ago, hoping it will keep me afloat. I think it’s working, so far.

One good thing is that this class is just 6 units, which is half the units of an average class at MIT, and thus, half the amount of time. Sometimes, that just means you have a “half” class the entire semester. Other times, as in this case, it just means you have a full 12 unit class, for half of the semester. So, right now, it’s as if I’m taking 5 full classes, which is not something I’d ever recommend anyone do by choice. Luckily though, it’s just for the first half, so by the time my other classes start ramping up and final projects loom over me, it’ll be over. I just need to hang in until Spring Break.

CMS.619: Gender and Media Studies

As much as I’ve become a crotchety old09 only metaphorically student who hates working past 10pm, this 7pm to 10pm humanities course has been really interesting so far.10 even if it makes me extend my tuesday night no-work limit Our class is entirely based around readings and discussions (both during class and in a dedicated Slack channel) centering the portrayal of gender in the media, though that often intersects with portrayal of race, class, sexuality, and other facets of identity. We’ve watched presidential campaign ads and talked about targeted audiences, read about the concept of an Oppositional Gaze coined by black women when engaging with media, and went to a special screening of Carol at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square, where my professor gave a talk. This week’s discussion centers around women in presidential campaigns throughout history (though it only extends as far as 2008), which feels relevant with Super Tuesday happening just yesterday.

I usually look forward to this class every week. Personally, I love discussion based classes,11 especially more now that i no longer feel too nervous to participate and the material so far has been both informational, and centering topics I already enjoy reading about. Plus, I think everyone in my class is invested in the material, too, so we have really productive and engaging discussions.

4.507: Introduction to Building Information Modeling

Building Information Modeling, also known as BIM, is a way to model structures, in a way that differs from traditional CAD or 3D modeling. It’s sort of an industry standard in a lot of engineering practices, so it’s important to know the ins and outs of the software. One of these, and the one we’re focusing on in this class, is called Revit.

To get a grasp of it, on the first day of class, our professor showed us various slides containing a few questions. Like, what is a wall? It may seem obvious to you, when you imagine this question in your head, what a wall is. But truly, what is a wall? To a structural engineer, it can be a structural element that supports a load from above. To an architect, it can mean a physical separation between a space. To a psychologist, it can be a metaphysical representation of separation. To a traditional 3D modeling software, a wall is a rectangle, extruded to a certain thickness.12 unless it’s curved, or has a different silhouette, but for simplicity’s sake let’s say rectangle It exists simply as a collection of lines and points and planes, and nothing more. It knows nothing of space or separation or loads.

In BIM, a wall is a wall. Or, what engineers and architects and contractors decided what a wall is. To them, a wall is a partition used to separate rooms. It is a space to put pipes and wiring. It’s a surface for a window, or a door. When you place a wall, the software knows it’s a wall, and will treat it accordingly. Using this method, the software can show different representations of a wall that are in line with common practices. So, when you model a wall in 3D, you can also see it represented as a floor plan, exactly how a wall would look. Or, when you put a wall, it also knows that that indicates a separation, and knows that now there are two separate rooms, rather than one large shape with a division. For a clearer picture of how it works, I like to think of the Sims’ house building tools. It works similar to that, as in, everything is in categories, walls can be placed on the ground, and then windows, ceilings, roofs, and doors can be placed on those. 

Right now, we’ve been tasked with modeling buildings by Alvar Aalto, an architect who designed one of the undergraduate dorms here, Baker House. Mostly, I’ve been trying to learn to use Revit for complex design, which can be incredibly frustrating at times. I’ve never been a huge fan of 3D modeling in general, but I sure do miss traditional modeling in Rhino whenever I have to work on my assignment. I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to make simple figures, like a non-traditional roof or a mezzanine, googling desperately and hoping someone else on the Internet has run into the same problem. Despite my inability to work efficiently in this class, my model doesn’t look too bad so far.

some drawings of a church from different angles

revit can make models look like drawings

Outside of Class

Besides classes, I tend to focus more on my personal life—lifting four times a week, writing for fun, cooking at least once every other day (but mostly every day), keeping my living space clean, walking to and from home multiple times a day because I love being inefficient with time and enjoy the simple pleasure of being Home, sleeping, and generally hanging out with friends. I can’t say I don’t miss the thrill of having a jam packed schedule of extracurriculars and meetings to go to, but it’s also nice to have balance and separation. Just look at all that free space!13 unfortunately, this does not translate to having a lot of free time

That’s all I have planned for this semester, so here’s to manifesting some good energy for the rest of it.

New York Trips

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One of the groups we are a part of is Arts Scholars. This is a group for undergrad and grad students who are passionate about or practice any sort of art. The group hosts various art-related speakers, outings, and events and is a great way to join an artistic community at MIT! 

One of the biggest perks of being an Arts Scholar is getting to go on an all-expenses paid day trip to New York every February! Each year, the events of the trip vary, but the day always finishes with an amazing dinner at Rosa Mexicano. We joined the Arts Scholars at the end of our freshman year so we didn’t get to go on the New York trip that year, but we did every year after. We never blogged about any of them, so that’s what we wanted to do now! 

2018 Trip

This was our first Arts Scholars trip and probably the most unique. We got to see two “experiences”, Flight and Sleep No More, and they were both incredible! Flight is an experience that is very difficult to describe, but essentially it was a very moving, for lack of a better word, “puppet show” about Afghan refugee brothers. Imagine a large rotating cylinder the size of a carousel essentially. Then imagine seats that go around the whole circumference, separated by dividers, so that everyone is sitting in a small booth, inches away from the rotating cylinder. Now imagine the cylinder has carved out dioramas with gorgeously crafted and realistically detailed characters, environments, and lighting. And imagine that you are hearing narration with sound effects from noise cancelling headphones. This is what Flight is. You are in your small booth, watching these dioramas pass by your face as you are listening to this narration and sound effects, and you are immediately immersed into this captivating story. We had never experienced anything like it before, and two years later, can say that hasn’t changed.

Sleep No More was just as, if not more, unique. Imagine that you are in a huge dimly lit multi-story house. Imagine that you are given a white mask with a beak that obscures your face, and suddenly you don’t really recognize who is who and where any of the people you entered with are. Imagine the actors are anywhere from feet to inches away from you, not speaking any lines and only expressing their characters and intentions through dance and occasional indecipherable noises. And imagine yourself running from room to room, up and down stairs, from floor to floor, trying to follow the actors, losing them as they out-chase you, finding new actors in new rooms and corridors, trying but failing to decipher any semblance of a plot. That is what Sleep No More is. We had never experienced anything like it before, and two years later, can say that hasn’t changed.

creepy picture of us wearing the Sleep No More masks

creepy

2019 Trip 

For this Art Scholars trip, we went to see an opera for the first time ever! Specifically, we went to see Don Giovani. After the experience we realized that we are not really opera people 😅. We still really enjoyed the day, and are very grateful for it because, when else do you get to take a day trip to see a famous opera for FREE? With that said, if we are watching actors on stage telling a story through song, we realized, we prefer musicals to operas. Something that was extremely impressive though, is that none of the opera singers had microphones, but sounded as if they did. We were honestly shook when we found that out. 

2020 Trip

This was probably our favorite art scholars trip thus far! It started out by going to the Whitney Art Museum. We got to see three of the floors of the museum, which each had their own theme. The first floor we saw was literally just VEGETABLES. Yes, you heard that right, vegetables. Because, art. Next, was a more standard art museum floor, with lots of beautiful paintings. Last, was a room with lots of crafts! This had so many unique and cool pieces, from teeny-tiny pottery, to a 3D entirely bedazzled room, to a piece entirely made of rag dolls sewed together!

After we left the museum, we went to see a musical!!!! We absolutely love musicals, and this was going to be our second time01 The first time was when we saw Natasha, Pierre, and The Great Comet of 1812, which was absolutely spectacular and incredible and words cannot describe it, but we have considered attempting to put words to it in a very belated blog post seeing one on Broadway in NYC!!! We saw Come From Away! It was, as expected, AMAZING! The subject matter of this musical is heavy, because it deals with the repercussions of 9/11. But despite the tragic backdrop of the story, it is still uplifting, because it focuses on how the community of Gander, Canada comes together to take in the hundreds of passengers from planes that had to be detoured to their city’s airport in the days proceeding the event, when the US air space was closed. Our favorite song is Me and the Sky

After the musical, we went to see an outdoor exhibit called The Vessel. It was cool to walk up all the stairs and get some pictures with friends (who we met actually when we were counselors for Freshman Arts Program)! It was SO cold this day, and even colder the higher up we went on the stairs!

 

MIT’s COVID-19 precautions and its impact on admissions

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March 6th, 2020

Last night, MIT announced new policies and procedures in response to the international spread of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). As President Reif wrote in an email to the community, “the current risk level [to the campus] associated with COVID-19 is low,” but the Institute has made “prudent choices to protect the health of our own community and the broader communities we belong to” and placed precautionary restrictions on travel, visitors, and events

This situation is developing very rapidly and our office, like the rest of MIT, is following along at the MIT Medical dedicated site to learn more. Our office has received an influx of questions from admitted, current, and prospective students, as well as other partners and programs, about what we will be doing and how we will be implementing these policies. We are still figuring things out as quickly, but also as carefully, as we can, to make alternative arrangements consistent with these constraints and with regard for the health of our community and constituents. 

I’m writing this blog post to address some specific questions and concerns we’ve heard, tell you what we know, what we’re thinking about, and where we collectively go from here. Given how rapidly the situation is developing, this post is a living document and we’ll update it — with timestamps as relevant — as we learn more. 

For admitted students

Each spring we traditionally host a number of campus events — most prominently Campus Preview Weekend (CPW) — to help introduce admitted students to the MIT culture and community. Based on these restrictions, we will not be hosting any programming for K-12 students, including admitted students and their families, between now and May 15th, regardless of the size of the event. In the next few days, we will be emailing admitted students and families with more information. 

In the coming weeks, we will also be connecting with our admitted students, current students, and campus partners to discuss what we do instead of a conventional CPW (and other complementary spring programs). A number of you have already emailed us with great ideas, and even if we haven’t responded yet (as you can imagine, our inboxes are a bit busy right now, and we still have decisions to make!), please know that we are reading them and saving them for later. Indeed, one of the silver linings of this coronaviral cloud is the reminder that our admitted and current students are creative, enthusiastic problem solvers who have never met a challenge they couldn’t conquer. 

For prospective students

As I wrote above in the section for admitted students, based on these restrictions, we will not be hosting any programming for K-12 students, including prospective students and their families, between now and May 15th, regardless of the size or kind of event. 

As a result, we have cancelled all scheduled information sessions and tours between now and May 15th, and will be emailing all registrants to let them know in addition to this blog post. We will also be cancelling all scheduled admissions officer travel to domestic and international events in that time window as well. 

While our office will not be hosting any programming for K-12 students and their families, the MIT campus currently remains open. However, in keeping with suggested best practices for public health, visitors from countries which the CDC finds have “widespread sustained (ongoing) transmission” of COVID-19 cannot join us on campus until they have successfully completed 14 days of self-quarantine. 

We don’t know yet how we will ‘replace’ our information sessions and tours between now and May 15th. In the short term, the best way to learn about MIT, we humbly submit, is our website, particularly our student blogs. As soon as we can — realistically, probably after Pi Day — we will try to think of other things we can do to help prospective visitors experience MIT from a distance. 

For the subset of prospective students who are current applicants awaiting their Regular Action decisions, we do not currently anticipate that this situation will impact our committee process or timeline. 

For current students

If you’ve gotten this far, you already know we have had to cancel our spring events (including CPW), the tours you might be leading, and other on-campus activities you might be involved with. Look for more information (in this blog post, and elsewhere) in the coming days and weeks as we make our plans and seek your feedback. A number of you have sent emails, stopped by the office, posted on Facebook, and so on, offering your ideas, your energy, and your time. We are grateful and want to work with you, but at this immediate moment, we are honestly too hosed to do anything with your suggestions. Very soon, however, we will be reaching out to engage you on how we should best work together moving forward. 

We also want to acknowledge the emotional pain of not being able to gather on campus for CPW. We recognize that CPW is incredibly important for many of the communities on campus to connect with the next generation of students and bond over their shared interests and perspectives. However, we also appreciate that it is the prudent thing to do from a public health perspective, and that, as sad as we are about its cancellation, we are very excited about working actively with you all to collaboratively design whatever our version of CPW this year will be. Nothing can replace 3.14 days on campus, but by working together, we look forward to helping you show off everything that makes MIT such a special place to be (which, mostly, is all of you). 


As stated earlier, I will update this blog post with more information (likely in reverse chronological order, newest information at top) as it becomes relevant, so please feel free to check back here. 

yet i maintain composure

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tuesday night. it’s a phase three waltz, and i’m dancing as the follow. my partner is lead, but so far, i can hold my own; he doesn’t need to lead me through any steps. i was taking a phase two waltz class, at the time, so i knew most of the basics. the cuer’s voice tells us the steps. two right turns, which is one two three, one two three; then twirl vine three, spin step behind; thru face close, one two three; whisk, one two behind; forward forward lock forward,

which, in my mind, is step step cross step. that’s four steps, i know that. i just learned that, yes, we just did that call last night. my mind says step step cross step, but my feet do step step step. one step less than i should have. the next call is pickup. one tw—wait,

that starts with the left foot, but it’s my right foot that’s free. i realize the mistake, putting down my right foot, lifting my left, as my partner nudges me in front of him. i shuffle my feet into place, finishing the count. right foot free, i tell myself. the cue is forward waltz, and i’m on the correct foot again. one two three, one two three.

the tricky thing, you see, about forward forward lock forward, is that it’s a call with four steps. waltz music is in three-fourths, which is one two three, one two three. you have to fit four steps in three beats, unlike almost all other figures.

the rest of the dance had footwork i was used to, so i thought about my form. two right turns. keep my back straight, as if my head was stacked on it. twirl vine three. elbows up, shoulders relaxed. thru face closed. pressure on my partner’s shoulder, but not too much. whisk. bend knees on one, back up on two. down up three, down up three. forward forward lock forward,

and i step,

step,

cross,

and then it’s pickup, and i missed a step, and i switch feet, and my partner nudges me, and i get into position, and i switch feet, and i switched too much, and i switch feet again, and it’s forward waltz, and it’s on the two beat, and i haven’t moved, and i take two quick steps back, and—one two three, one two three. i’m on the beat again.

we dance for a couple more measures before the song ends. the ending is step apart and acknowledge: take a step back, point up and away, make eye contact, and smile. after the dance, my partner tells me i did a great job.

“good form,” he says.

and i say, “sorry. that was pretty bad,” before correcting myself, and saying “thanks.”


sometimes life throws shit at you that you’re not prepared for.

last thursday, a little past 5 pm, i got an email about new policies on mit events. the restrictions all seemed reasonable, even expected. suspending all international travel. “weigh whether any domestic travel… is essential”. quarantine. and then,

Effective immediately, if you are planning any in-person MIT event with more than 150 attendees that will take place between now and Friday, May 15, on campus or off campus, you must postpone, cancel or “virtualize” it.

i stopped reading the rest of the email, and forwarded it to esp. it looked like the email was rolling; not everyone has received the email yet. spring hssp, our six-weekend program for seventh through twelfth graders, just started the weekend before. it was set to happen that saturday, and then for the next month. spark, a one-weekend program where a thousand middle schoolers come to campus, was scheduled to happen on march 14, the next week. presumably, both would be canceled. other events that would be affected were cpw, senior ball, ring delivery.

the next few hours were a blur. my phone constantly vibrates through the evening as i got email after email. i go to an advanced class for squares, and we dance for two hours or so. we talk about the new policy, but almost as if it wasn’t entirely clear what the new policy meant, as if in disbelief that it could even happen. by the time i’m back in my room, i have twenty unread emails, all of which i ignored. i work on my 18.702 pset, which i needed to finish by that night.

by the end of the night, it was clear that esp had to cancel spring hssp and spark. an email was drafted, and edited, and edited, and edited. “We’re very sorry to inform you that we will not be running Spark this year.” or “We’re very sorry to inform you that we will not be running the remainder of Spring HSSP this year.”

how do you tell a thousand students, in a clear, kind, and professional way, that a program is canceled? how do you acknowledge their disappointment, and how do you communicate that we too, as organizers, are heartbroken? and how do you say that, despite all of this, we appreciate that mit is taking steps to keep everyone safe and healthy?

perhaps the strangest thing about it was how weird it felt, at least, to me. i’ve seen members of the esp team put in hours upon hours of planning and effort to get the programs running this far. stacks and stacks of signs and stanchions, stacks of student schedules and liability waivers; dozens of teacher interviews for spring hssp, and dozens of hours designing art; hundreds of posters and postcards, and hundreds upon hundreds of emails. and somehow, although it felt bad that the programs were canceled, it didn’t feel like the end of the world.

all this coming from someone who didn’t even spend a lot of time helping prepare these programs. the email about mit’s new policy had taken me aback so badly, i was in awe that others in esp had the strength to write the announcement email at all. and i haven’t even begun thinking about the effort already put into preparing for cpw—


on friday, i go to an interview, and then i go to class. i ate lunch with professor bucci, organized by the office of the first year, and we talk about nuclear reactors and course 22. i pack clothes, and head to another class, and ride a van up to new hampshire, because this weekend was tech squares weekend. we dance friday night, and all day saturday, and sunday morning.

i remember the last rounds dance on sunday morning. it’s a phase four cha cha, and i’m dancing as the follow again. since i’ve never actually taken a cha cha class, i knew how to do some of the moves, but i didn’t have any technique. i didn’t know anything about the right form, or the right handholds, or anything like that.

my partner, who was leading, was gracious and patient enough to put up with my cluelessness. we danced the first few measures, which were mostly figures i knew. cucaracha twice, which was like stepping in place but to the rhythm. full chase, first the lead turns around, then the follow turns around. basic, new yorker, underarm turn.

the tricky part, which probably earned the dance its phase four, was new yorker to fan, hockey stick. i didn’t know what to do, and it looked like my partner didn’t know either. they swiveled me around, and they stepped in place, and i looked at the other people and i guessed that i should be walking forward or something. we fudged the next two measures until we got new yorker, underarm turn, and we were dancing familiar figures again.

i sure as heck didn’t know what i was doing. but i was moving to the beat, and i knew enough of the dance that it felt like i was actually dancing. i smiled. the dance ends with through to aida and hold, which i didn’t really knew how to do, but i posed and pretended like i knew it anyway.

my partner smiles at me. “that was a lot of fun,” i say.

it’s strange, i guess. dance follows form, but form follows function, and the function is to dance. sometimes you just gotta keep moving and maintain form. sometimes, the cuer’s gonna throw a move you don’t know how to dance to, and you just have to roll with it. it’s gonna happen, and it’ll look smoother if you act like you know what you’re doing.

we leave after sunday lunch, and take the van back to campus. i take a nap. i catch up on my email, do a practice exam, head to office hours. i’m moving. tomorrow, i will wake up, and head to class, and head to lunch, and i’ll keep moving. i’ll head to class, and head to a meeting, and then i’ll dance again.

it’s hard. yet i’ll maintain composure.

i don’t know how to do this next bit, but i’ll keep going until i know the moves again.

A blast from the past

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I was browsing some of my old blog idea Google docs the other day when I came across a list titled “Things I would do if I had more time”.

I had written this list freshman spring, when I REALLY didn’t have time to do anything because I was taking 66 units01 this was a mistake, fyi . I had probably hoped that in a future semester, when I made more reasonable choices, I would have more time to do some of these things.

Since freshman spring, I only ever taken as many as 60 units a semester, but still haven’t really had much time. So when I looked over the list, it sort of struck me at how few of those things I’d actually managed to do.

I sort of wonder if there’ll ever be a time when I ever have free time to use as I please. Right now, there’s always a sneaking feeling whenever I take a break that I could be using this free time to do more work. That’s not the most healthy mindset, I know. But it’s one that I think a lot of MIT students share.

But the reality is that I still don’t physically have enough time to do all the interesting things that I wanted to explore while at MIT. So I thought that I’d go over them in this blog post and see which subset of them I’ve actually managed to check off this list.

 

READ MORE

I currently have four books sitting on my shelf – part one of Haruki Murakami’s new book, two Final Fantasy 7 novellas, and I Am A Cat by Natsume Souseki. The only problem is that they’re all in Japanese and take me eons to read…

  • Ready Player One 
  • Reread Song of Ice and Fire properly

Other than Ready Player One, I never got around to reading or rereading any of these books (although I did get around to reading some other books). And since I’ve been out of practice with my Japanese for a while, the Japanese books get progressively harder to read :(

Maybe after I graduate02 from undergrad or from grad school, who knows , I’ll have the time to sit down and actually catch up on my Japanese and plow through these books. But while the school year is going on, I guess they’ll still be collecting dust on my shelves.

WATCH SHOWS

  • Walking Dead
  • Parks and Rec

I wasn’t very creative in the shows that I wanted to watch…I did binge watch Parks and Rec this summer, but I still haven’t gotten around to watching the Walking Dead. I’m over it, though, because I’ve watched many amazing shows03 usually around finals season, in which I choose a show to binge watch my stress away since freshman spring. Some of the more significant ones are:

  • BoJack Horseman04 which is now my actual new favorite show
  • Sex Education05 the cliffhanger at the end of the second season REALLY KILLED ME
  • The Witcher06 this show was awful but everybody was so attractive. i cannot wait for the second season
  • Big Mouth07 this show really hits

…and that was just a subset of the shows within junior year. I should really do a blog post about my Netflix watch history…

LEARN THINGS

  • Unreal engine/Unity (by extension, more C++)
  • More guitar songs – finger plucking08 it's *fingerstyle*, me from the past stuff
  • MORE PIANO SONGS

So through my UROP, I’ve actually gotten pretty solid at Unity, but it was out of necessity and not necessarily because I had enough time to learn it on my own. I still haven’t gotten around to learning Unreal Engine – and probably never will, because the learning curve for it is too damn high.

I have gotten slightly better at guitar in the past two years, but I definitely haven’t made a significant amount of improvement. My repertoire09 probably not comprehensive of songs hasn’t grown significantly since I started playing, but I do think that I can pick up songs way more easily than I could two years ago. So that’s something, I guess. But I have definitely not learned any more piano songs – in fact, I think I’ve forgotten how to play some of the (very few) songs I used to know. RIP.

DO THINGS IN BOSTON

  • Escape rooms!
  • Walk around enough to get around without a map

I have been to *one* escape room in Boston since freshman spring – and won! I’ve also been to Boda Borg10 this really dope place in Malden that basically has a series of mini escape rooms instead of one big one twice. So I guess I actually achieved that oddly specific goal, lol. And I can walk to *some* places in Boston without a map…but probably as not as many as I should be able to walk to. I have an okay sense of direction, but very low confidence in it.

CLUBS AT MIT HOLY SHIT

This is a long list. I wanted to (and still want to) join a whole bunch of clubs that I literally could not have physically fit into my schedule.

  • Game dev – I really wanted to join GDDC11 game design and development club , but after I got a UROP in game design, I figured that I didn’t really *need* to join in order to make games. I did tell myself that I should go to their game jams, though, and I still have never gotten around to that…
  • Karate – I’ve wanted to learn martial arts for more than half of my life. However, I’ve wanted to learn fencing for literally my whole life, so joining the fencing team sort of superseded joining a martial arts group. RIP. 
  • Quiz bowl – Some of you may or may not know that I was REALLY into quiz bowl in high school. Honestly, the extent to which I was into quiz bowl in high school merits its own blog post, so I won’t talk about it too much here. But there are many videos of me very aggressively quizbowling on a show called Granite State Challenge out there on the Internet…anyways, I thought that I would definitely continue with quiz bowl when I got to college, but I realized that not participating in the national quiz bowl circuits in high school had really disadvantaged me for college quiz bowl, which is a million times more obscure than high school quiz bowl. So I did decide to discontinue quiz bowl, which broke my heart, because I REALLY love it. My ex-quiz bowl friends and I still go on Protobowl sometimes though…
  • Student government – I did actually manage to wiggle my way into student government – I’m currently in my second term as hall chair for my living group, and was CPW chair last year when CPW wasn’t cancelled :( 
  • Fire spinning – Out of all of these clubs, I think I regret not joining MIT Spinning Arts the most. A LOT of my friends firespin, and it looks so cool, and ahh I wish I had learned how to spin. I probably still could, but this is definitely a club that you sink a lot of time into freshman year to get good, and I unfortunately am old now. If you don’t know what firespinning is, let me just say that it makes you look like a firebender and also you should check out their website. 
  • SWE12 Society for Women Engineers and WICS13 Women in Computer Science – I think I wanted to join these clubs before I realized that I didn’t like computer science very much. No regrets here, lol. 
  • Figure skating – I used to be really into figure skating in high school, and was solidly intermediate at it at my peak. I really wanted to join the figure skating club to learn some more advanced techniques14 the jumps mostly , but joining fencing superseded joining this club as well.

I do sometimes think about how joining the fencing team really sucked up the time I have to do extracurriculars, but honestly, I have very minimal regrets. I love fencing and think I’ve gotten significantly better at it over the two seasons that I’ve been on the team. I do actually want to continue fencing after college, and if coronavirus doesn’t cancel my internship this summer, I plan to fence at a club over the summer as well!

 

Hope y’all enjoyed that blast from the past. It’s sort of sad that I never got around to doing/learning most of these things, and I’m sure freshman me would be pretty upset about that. But I guess in the end, I’m pretty happy with what I wound up doing at MIT, given that the amount of free time I have every day is extremely minimal.

Maybe after college, I’ll actually get around to exploring new hobbies and learning new skills. Maybe I’m just saying that now and will be as much of a workaholic as a working adult as I am as a college student, or maybe the working life will just be exhausting and I’ll never get around to doing anything. But I really hope that neither of those things happen. Fingers crossed, I guess.

This is the way…to check your decisions

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I — the small adorable telekinetic green alien child writing this blog post — want to let you know that MIT Regular Action decisions will be available online Saturday, March 14 at 1:59PM Eastern Time.

When decisions are made available, you will need to access decisions.mit.edu and log in using the same username and password that you use to sign into your MyMIT account. There will be no interim screens, so you should be sure you are ready to receive your decision before signing in to decisions.mit.edu.

In order to verify that you will receive a decision on the 14th, you should visit decisions.mit.edu and log in with your MyMIT username and password. We recommend you do this now to make sure everything works for you. Strange things happen to people who don’t verify they will receive their decision!

If you’ve forgotten your MyMIT username and/or password, you may use our automated system to reset it. Visit MyMIT and click on the forgotten username or password links beneath the login box on the left.

Admissions decisions will be available exclusively online. Decisions will not be released via email, snail mail, carrier pigeon, carrier dragon, or intergalactic radio broadcast. However, following the release of admissions decisions, we will be mailing admitted students additional, cylindrical information.

force open childcare door
baby yoda reveal xwing hero shot
xwing barrel roll under bridge

 

what’s happening on campus

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Yesterday afternoon, President Reif announced that MIT undergraduates will not be allowed to return to campus after Spring Break. Classes are continuing this week; classes next week are cancelled; classes after spring break will all be online. We’ve been instructed to move out, packing as if we aren’t coming back until the fall, by this upcoming Tuesday, March 17th.

I typically try to keep swearing to a minimum on the blogs, but I think I speak for every undergraduate when I say: holy fuck

The decision is completely understandable, considering that coronavirus cases are increasing exponentially in MA every day (not hyperbole: the numbers literally follow the path of an exponential function, info here) and research into the 1918 flu epidemic suggests that closing schools and cancelling large events helped prevent its spread. In a situation like this, even the “best” actions to take from a health standpoint can still be extremely difficult. And yet this throws a wrench into so many things — into everything, small and large.

All large events planned to be held on campus through May 15th are cancelled, including concerts and shows into which people had already put enormous amounts of time and effort. All the national competitions that are typically held in spring; ring delivery; senior class events.01 According to President Reif's announcement on 3/10, 'No decision has yet been made about this year’s Commencement ceremonies.' There are so many people here whom I love, and whom I have no clue when I will see again. There’s barely any time for real goodbyes, for send-off parties, for thank-you cards, for savouring the moment…

Even at the best of times, when you’re not frantically trying to say a too-early goodbye to your friends and pick up the pieces of your cancelled events, moving out is an incredibly stressful process. We are still figuring out how storage will work, when usually boxes are ordered and storage containers are booked weeks (or months) in advance. Many of us, especially in EC, are very worried about our stuff:02 Of course, 'stuff' is not as important as people's lives and health. But many of my items are sentimental, important, and/or expensive (and, to be honest, I think that many of us are so stressed about the big stuff that the little stuff is just that much harder to take). what we can store, what we can take home, and what falls in between.

And yet, while I stress about what I can and can’t take home, other people are stressed about going home itself. President Reif’s letter says that students will be able to petition to remain on campus (particularly international students who have visa issues, whose home countries are hard hit by the virus, or those who otherwise do not have a home that is safe to go to). And MIT has offered financial assistance with travel (although details are still forthcoming, which, while totally understandable, also unfortunately makes it more difficult for students to make plans). But even so, MIT is home to us, and I am worried about all the people whose whose parents/regions are inhospitable to their wellbeing (e.g. homophobic), as well as those who are concerned about bringing the virus back with them and infecting their parents or other older family members who are most at risk.

So, to sum up…

People are freaking the fuck out. The atmosphere on campus is unlike any I’ve ever seen before. We are depressed and anxious and terrified, and it feels almost unreal. Who could have predicted that something like this would happen? How can we believe that it is occurring?

But we are also trying to find joy where we can. Spending time with our friends, making our last memories… People are gathering in groups everywhere to talk and scream and stand in silence.

There was a party on Killian yesterday that got a little bit out of hand. You might have seen pictures, but if not, here you go. I think it represents very well how we are all feeling about things. This is going to be the defining picture of this school year, for certain:

Killian Court as viewed from Lobby 10. In the bottom foreground are lots of students. The center of the photo is the tall Purell dispenser one student is holding high.

Killian Court as viewed from Lobby 10. Many students have gathered; one is holding a Purell dispenser high. It is one of the dispensers that have appeared everywhere on campus over the past two weeks.

Credit for this incredible photo goes to Zidane A. 20’.

And here is a video from @MITstudents’ instagram. (For context: “cathartic screaming” is a popular tradition at MIT, often heard on campus the day before classes or finals start. Lydia mentioned it once.)

One last thing I want to say is that, as always, it is in bad times that we truly see the strength of our community. So many MIT staff and alumni have reached out to help, and their efforts have been organized incredibly fast. If any student is struggling and feels like they cannot surmount their obstacles themselves — please reach out, and we can connect you to someone who can help. And, from the students, thank you to everyone who is helping us now.

 

Note: I barely edited this blog post at all, as, like the rest of the student body, I am also currently freaking out in every possible way right now. I don’t mean to speak for every single student and I’m sure that, as things calm down somewhat, we will be able to share more people’s perspectives on the blogs. I also want to acknowledge that similar situations are occurring at many universities, and that there are far more serious situations happening as well. I hope that everyone can stay safe and well. <3


hello applicants,

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i guess this would usually be the time of year that there’d be blog posts about waiting for decisions and that kind of stuff. personally, i wouldn’t know. as soon as i got deferred the thought of reading the blogs felt so painful that i just stopped reading any of them until decision day. things are so crazy here at mit right now. i guess i’m lucky that i have things settled for at least the next week, and i know i’ll spend a lot of time thinking about you over the next few days.

i wonder how all of you are doing amidst all the chaos. maybe some of you won’t be going to classes for a while. maybe some of you are far away from any confirmed cases and are worried. maybe some of you have loved ones who are sick. thinking about all of these things makes me feel very sad and very powerless. i wish love was the kind of thing i could package in a box and deliver. if love was the kind of thing i could wrap up in words and send through the air, i’d stand by my window all day and whisper comfort to everyone.

around this time last year, when college decisions were all coming out, i remember being pretty stressed out about it. and it makes me feel sad to think that, if i added all the stress i feel right now to the stress i felt last year, it would be a lot of stress. it’d be bordering on too much for me to handle. and i’m hoping, how i’m hoping, that you can find ways to take care of yourself and ease the stress, whatever that means for you.

i wish i really knew what to say. i wish i had something nice or poetic or comforting, but the best i could come up with is this. i’m just really bad at this sort of thing, so maybe read what other people have to say instead:

if you comment tonight i promise i’ll read it. i’ll reply if i can.

Open Thread: Not Admitted

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There were many wonderful applicants to MIT this year, which unfortunately means that we had to turn down some great students. For those of you who fall into this category, this is an open forum for you to talk, shake it off, and remember that you will survive, even thrive, wherever you go; whatever you do. Stove-cook your oatmeal and never look back.


We understand that this may be a difficult time for you, but we ask that you converse civilly and with the best of intentions, as that is the spirit of our process.

Open Thread: Waitlisted

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Many people applied to MIT this year, and unfortunately we could not accept all of them. We have placed a small number of students on the waitlist. If you would like to be considered for the waitlist, or you want to learn more about it, you can read more here.


Some of you may feel happy to be waitlisted. Some of you may feel sad. Some of you may have complicated feelings that you don’t know what to call; that’s okay too. For right now, we just ask that you have a little patience.

Open Thread: Admitted

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YOU GOT IN!

Feel free to drop a note yelling in the comments below, but also, and more importantly, to go celebrate with your loved ones.

MIT Regular Action Decisions Now Available Online

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MIT Regular Action admissions decisions for the Class of 2024 are now available at

> > > decisions.mit.edu < < <

 

You can log in using the same username and password that you use to log in to your MyMIT account. There are no interim screens, so you should be sure you are ready to receive your decision online before logging in to decisions.mit.edu.

Update: we have learned that, given public health concerns, one of our decision servers has decided to self-isolate from the rest of the Internet out of an abundance of caution. If you are getting redirected away from the decisions site, please try a different browser, or clear your cache, or try a different internet connection. We are happy to report the rest of the decision servers are healthy and well.  


Between Early and Regular Action, 20,075 students applied to join the MIT Class of 2024. As of today (inclusive of Early Action), we have offered admission to 1,457 students.

The Class of 2024 has been curated with care to collectively climb the mountain that is MIT. They represent all 50 states, 64 countries, and nearly 1,000 high schools all across the world. Though they all do different things — geology and gymnastics, journalism and jujitsu, cross-stitch and combinatorics — they are united by a shared standard of rigorous academics, high character, and a strong match with MIT’s mission to use science, technology, and the useful arts to make the world a better place. We can’t wait to welcome them to our campus to join the 4,516 outstanding undergraduates who already call MIT home.

There are also students who may be climbing other mountains, with other mountaineers, next fall. Of the students to whom we do not offer admission today, we have placed a small number on our waitlist and informed the balance that we will not be able to admit them to the Class of 2024. Turning away so many kind, generous, and super-smart students has left us bleary-eyed and reminded us that what we do is more than a job, but a privilege and an honor. Thank you for sharing your aspirations and inspirations with us in the application process.

If you are among the many stellar students to whom we are not offering admissions, then all I can remind you is that success is not always a straight line. That your path isn’t something MIT sets you on, it’s something you make yourself. And if you spend the next few years trying to make wherever you are as amazing as you can (as you already are), then someday you’ll look back on this Pi Day and realize it all worked out okay.

I’m closing comments on this blog post to concentrate conversation in the open threads for admitted, waitlisted, and not admitted students. Answers to frequently asked questions for waitlisted students can be found here, with more information about next steps to come in early April.

Congratulations to the Class of 2024, and best wishes to all of our applicants. No matter where you enroll next fall, please make it a better place. I know you can. I hope you will.

 

Love In the Time of Corona

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I remember exactly where I was when the email got sent out. There was this sense of nervousness and uncertainty in the air. I had woken up to my phone exploding with notifications. Harvard’s decision was out, students were being asked to leave campus. No one had expected that. No one. If Harvard was closing down, MIT was probably going to do the same, right? Rumors and ‘leaks’ had been circulating all morning. We knew that our email was coming too. MIT was going to follow suit.

When the email came out, I was sitting in the McCormick lobby, with our Head of House sitting to my left, GRAs and some close friends scattered around. And so began what is easily the most demanding of days I have lived through. What was really a week feels like one incredibly never-ending day. Falling asleep at the end of the day was hard and waking up in the morning was even harder as I realized all over again that this was really happening. We were living through a pandemic. And we were being forced off campus. With absolute good reason, but still everything was coming to an end. And there simply wasn’t enough time to come to terms with it. 

It was hard. All of it. From long phone calls with airlines to making sure everyone in our dorm had free storage to rushed pack ups to running around helping people carry boxes to fighting for our friends who weren’t being granted exceptions to simply trying to spend as much time with one another as possible, it was really really hard. But, when it was time to leave campus there was this surreal sense of joy in the air. If you ask any student on campus why they chose to come to MIT, they’ll tell you that it was because of the people. And this very long never-ending day is a testimony to that. There was a sense of joy because the MIT community had really come together in an unprecedented way to be there for one another, to take care of one another. And in the face of everything that’s happening, it really did feel joyful. I could have been in a lot of different places when the email came out, I’m really grateful I was at MIT. 

It’s a scary time and the impact COVID-19 is having on communities is unimaginable, but I’d like to take some time to shed a different light on the situation. That even at a time of social distancing and fear, humanity is real: 

MIT Professors & Staff

From department heads to professors to office staff, I’ve received so many emails offering support and help. It’s just a really good feeling to know that you’re not alone and that there are so many people thinking about you: 

Email from Biological Engineering Head:

Email from my advisor: 

email from advisor

Email from AeroAstro staff: email from aeroastro staff

-Joyce

McCormick Hall’s House Team 

I really don’ t know where to start with these guys. I’m truly blessed to have such a great second-family who has spent the past week supporting us in any and every way possible, from helping pack to helping load PODS to planning as many regulation-friendly events as possible to really just making people smile. Our Heads of House and GRAs have spent so many hours sitting around in the McCormick lobby to lighten the mood and help students in any way possible. I spent a majority of the past week with these guys and they’ve made eviction so much more bearable. 

Our Head of House, Raul posing with the infamous Purell stand:

head of house with purell stand

(PC: Amber Z.)

Some of our GRAs (Margaret, Ashley, Samir) posing in their assigned storage PODS: GRAs posing in their assigned PODSAmidst a late night of packing, our dorm ran out of packaging tape. One of our GRTs, Al, ran over to the local Target at literally 10:30 PM to buy a crap ton of tape:lots of tape

Alumni 

Since the very first email went out, an immense amount of support has come pouring in from MIT Alumni, offering to help with housing, storage and transportation: 

Our very own blogger alumni Selam and Vera, among others, have reached out:

Various other emails/messages that have come through:messages/emails from alumni

Student Leaders 

During times of crises, an easy option is to focus solely on yourself. You could very easily focus on your own plane tickets, your own storage, your own plan of action. But that’s just not the MIT way. Student leaders at every single level used their platforms to advocate for others and to make sure as many people as possible were taken care of.

The Undergraduate Association has been working non stop to advocate for students, demanding flexibility and arrangement from administration. One of the many things they’ve set up is a process for student groups to donate unused budgets to help students with financial needs get home: emails from UAMIT’s First Generation Program (FGP), Class Support, Awareness and Equality (CASE) and Quest Scholars Network (QSN) coordinated with all of the different student groups and resources available to put together a 20-page document of all pertinent information students may need access to: When international students with vulnerable/difficult situations were not granted exceptions to stay on campus during the first round, the community came together to protest and put on a fight until permissions were granted: 

protest organization

Underclassmen did what they could to celebrate the graduating seniors. McCormick handed out these MIT pennants signed by friends:

Others have not forgotten about community members that are less fortunate and have been organizing food drives and donation collections for the homeless and refugee populations:

A group at CSAIL is coming together to build ventilators before a shortage. As one of my friend says “STEM is the closest thing to superpowers we’ve got!”: 

Some are using their DJ-skills to keep the morale high:

And many have rose to the occasion to make sure that MIT’s sense of humor and memery continues through these trying times: 

 

                  (Meme Credit : Vik T. ‘ 22)                                        (Updates on Facebook) 

(Is that a purell stand? On top of Kresge? PC: Samir W.)

 

I’m high-key emotional rn. While that was a lot, compared to the amount of information/emails/messages I’ve received over the past few days it’s really just a small fraction. The people at MIT are freaking amazing y’all and I really couldn’t ask for a better place to be kicked out of. On behalf of the entire student body, a wholehearted thank you to every individual that has helped in even the smallest of ways. Thank you for being selfless, resilient and kind. To the graduating seniors, thank you for all you have done in the past four years to make MIT my home. To the recent admits, congratulations and I hope you decide to come join this ridiculously unreal group of people. I’m sorry that this wasn’t the Spring Semester any of you were expecting. But in the most unexpected of ways, we somehow managed to end with something beautiful. Stay safe, keep on purelling those hands and practice responsible social distancing. Fingers-crossed for returning to a much healthier Cambridge soon.

 

 

when apocalypse strikes…

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This week, hands down, has been the most chaotic one of my life. I feel like I’ve lived so much in such a short span of time, which makes sense, I guess; I DID manage to cram two months worth of memories into less than five days. I screamed in anguish with my friends on Killian Court,01 the lawn in front of the big dome got a spontaneous tattoo of a bomber plane on my arm, perfected the art of making last-minute plans with people, attended a ton of floor events, cried dozens of times, and partied like the world was ending—because hey, maybe it really is.  

I don’t know about what it was like at other colleges, but it felt like utter madness at MIT. People went fucking insane. There were parties on Killian Court and in lecture halls; there was music playing at 4 am on Dorm Row and people screaming as they bolted down the Infinite hallway. Everyone just didn’t give a damn about anything anymore.

The morning before the email about us having to leave campus was released, screenshots with rumors about the details of MIT’s potential shutdown were circulated around group chats. We all put on our conspiracy theorist hats and started to rapidly oscillate between wanting to wait until official confirmation of everything we were hearing and wanting to fucking panic about our living situations for the next few months. My perspective may have been colored by this chaos, but when I stepped outside, I felt as if the air was rife with tension and an impending sense of doom. Everything seemed strained, as if we could sense how much the upcoming email could change our lives.

It’s crazy how quickly people can come together once shit hits the fan. As soon as the email came out, all our internal clocks started ticking. I burst into tears when I finally processed the fact that my time with my living community would be cut short, that I would be robbed of all the things I had been looking forward to and maybe even the relationships I could have built given a little more time. As I literally wept in the center suite of my floor, a senior took my hand and told me that she wished we could have spent more time together, which was crushingly sad but also inspiring; I resolved to make the most of my remaining days so that I’d have no regrets.

For context, I live in Burton-Conner, a dorm that’s closing down until my senior year for renovations. For floors like mine with strong communities, being split up for two years—preemptively, at that—is nothing but painful. The seniors got to experience four-ish years on the floor, but the sophomores and juniors are being wrenched from their homes with no possibility of return. It’s truly heart-rending.

But given the extenuating circumstances, we all RALLIED. The floor chairs called a meeting the night The Email was sent out, and we put together an impromptu schedule for the next few days that would enable us to spend as much time as possible together. 

And damn, did we manage to do it. On Wednesday, we elected our new floor chairs and spent a lot of time together as a floor. The freshman girls also painted records for the senior girls; I decided to paint mine for the senior who had comforted me when the news broke the previous day. I didn’t have much time to spend with her, but I sure as hell could channel my heart and soul into painting her a cool galaxy thing!!@!@! 

people holding painted records

catch yo girl WEEPING in the bottom left

 

But saying goodbye to the first person to leave broke all of our hearts. We crowded by the elevators to hug him, and when he left, someone said “and now we have to do this 30 more times!” Cue an 18th round of tears…

On Thursday, we had a barbeque bonding with another floor and then our floor formal. Formal is something I’ve been looking forward to for a while, so I’m really glad I was able to experience it. Afterward, I  y e e t e d to my last dance practice in my heels and got to dance with my team one last time :’) That night, though, we received an email telling us to get the hell out of Dodge by Sunday. I thought it was optional, so I didn’t think much of it, but a lot of my friends started moving up their plans. The chaos only intensified.

The next day, which would be my final full day at MIT, I woke up at 2 pm and spent a few hours packing. The whole time, I felt numb; my mind kept flashing back to too-recent memories of moving in, and I could only feel a conviction that what I was doing wasn’t right. I started to document some parts of my floor, including my room, kitchen, hallway, all of which were spaces I had taken for granted but now ones I desperately wanted to preserve in my mind forever.

In the evening, I found out that Nisha and I were leaving on Saturday morning instead of Monday afternoon in accordance with MIT’s push for accelerated move-out plans. When the realization that I had even less time than anticipated set in, I felt wracked with a convulsive pain; this truly was the final blow. I was determined to stay for the last two floor events, and knowing that I’d be leaving earlier than most of the people on the floor hurt like hell

So I proceeded to get a tattoo and then party until 3 am! #endoftheworldthings

my tattoo!

zoomer ways of coping with trauma 101

We managed to get our final events together before I had to leave on Saturday morning, for which I am eternally grateful. And honestly, I have no more regrets. It’s taken a lot of time for me to process my emotions, but I’m ready to stop focusing on how my community will no longer be living on our floor and to start embracing my new situation. Sure, I’m not going to live on my floor for the next two and a half years, but the culture and friendships built there will last. Being home in New Hampshire will definitely be lonely, and I’ll miss my friend groups and activities, but I have so many people to support me through this period—and so many people to help support.

Even a day ago, thinking about all the good memories I’ve had on my floor and how I won’t be able to be around my friends anymore made me tear up. Now, I’m just really freaking happy that I was able to experience it all. I have no idea what the rest of the semester will be like, or what I’m doing this summer (rip my MISTI plans), but knowing that some of my closest friends, who are staying near campus, are just a bus ride away is really reassuring. Everything’s going to be ok!!

Isn’t it scary how a few weeks ago, COVID-19 seemed like nothing but a distant threat? All the plans that have been dashed in a matter of days are crazy to think about. But hey, life goes on. We’re kind of on Pass No Record now,02 more specifically, we have <a href="https://facultygovernance.mit.edu/rules-and-regulations#2-64">alternate emergency grades</a> of PE, NE, and IE, PE being an A, B, or C level performance, NE being a D or F level one, for which there will be no record on your transcript, and IE indicating an incomplete subject so the burden of enduring all this has been slightly alleviated, and we’ll be back in Fall ‘20 in full force.

Admits, congrats and welcome to the MIT community! I hope, for all of your sakes, that your time at MIT isn’t ever as chaotic as this. It’s been a wild, wild ride, and I’ve forged countless strong friendships along the way, but god, would I appreciate some semblance of normalcy. 

pic of bombers

<3

I don’t know what I’m going to miss most. Will it be the sense of community and family of living on my floor, or the little things, like the ability to waltz into any suite at 3 a.m. and share profound thoughts with my friends over a pint of ice cream? Or the giant beanbag on which my roommates and I have slept on more times than we’ve all slept in our beds? Or the slightly sticky floor of the lounge that never ceases to alarm me, but also reminds me of the day I was initiated as a member of my floor? Or maybe the orange and black tiles of the hallway that I was once pushed down in a laundry cart, or the beautiful murals that I researched to write this post, or the midnight tabletop dance parties and pounding music and feelings of pure liberation.

I don’t know what I’ll miss most, I really don’t. And everything is painful and bittersweet, but I’m at peace knowing that I’ve already made enough memories this year to last me a lifetime.

 


24 Things I Learned in My First Semester and a Half

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Disclaimer: I actually wrote this on my flight to California back in December, when EA decisions were first released. As a result, some of these are only relevant to my first semester. I’m going through them now (3/16/2020) to see if there’s anything I should remove or add :)

MIT has been incredibly life-changing. I am most definitely not the same person I was when I first walked down the Infinite. I knew college changed you, but I didn’t expect to be this different. Anyway, in my time here, I’ve learned a lot in terms of what to do and what not to do, what works best for me and for the majority of my friends, and how to essentially survive my first year at MIT.

1. Live and breathe PNR.

Don’t stay up until 3 in the morning to finish that one pset. Don’t skip meals to study longer. Don’t miss out on your extracurriculars because you’re hosed by your classes. MIT implements pass/no record for this first semester for a reason and that’s so students can build a strong support group, find extracurriculars that will keep them sane, and have less stress.

By “living and breathing PNR” I mean learn to optimize. Is it worth an all nighter to turn in a pset that’s only .75% of your grade when you only need a 40% to pass the class? Should you really be striving for all 100%’s at the cost of your mental health just for a “P” to show up? It’s learning to look at how the grade is weighted and putting your effort into what matters. Don’t beat yourself up over one bad pset.

But at the same time…

2. Don’t abuse PNR.

PNR is the time to experiment socially, extracurricularly, and academically. Use this time to test out different study habits to figure out which works best for you, so yes, you’ll actually have to study for your midterms. Do your psets so you can get into a habit of knowing how early you need to start psets for classes. Form study groups to see if that helps you best, or make study sheets. Learn how you learn best!

3. Explore campus thoroughly and identify your favorite spaces.

This is very important! Though MIT isn’t as large as some other college campuses, there are lots of hidden gems around here. I won’t spoil anything, but I do recommend exploring the tunnels at some point or going hacking whether during CPW or REX or even just on a casual Friday night. I personally love going around MIT trying to find new places to study. Some of my favorite places are Hayden library, Stud5, and the group study spaces in Barker. Campus is so beautiful and so big and has so much! There is bound to be a place for you.

4. Join extracurriculars that interest you!

Don’t be that person who regrets not joining X or Y and instead just do it. If you have even a little interest, do it! You’ll meet so many great people through it!

Update: I wholeheartedly agree with this. And even not just extracurriculars, but groups on campus. In my freshman fall, I was afraid to do sorority recruitment. But in spring, I said fuck it and decided to rush. It is one of the best decisions I made and I’m very happy I got to meet so many people through spring recruitment.

5. Don’t be afraid to drop things.

While it’s great to do a kajillion extracurriculars because your interests are so diverse and great, if you find yourself realizing you really, really don’t like that one thing even though you thought it was cool, drop it. Do not force yourself to sit through bad, hoping that it will get better, because if you really don’t like it, it will Not Get Better. Also, just don’t overwhelm yourself! Make sure you save time for yourself to just sit and breathe. MIT is already overwhelming enough as it is. You need to find time for yourself.

Update: Still stand by this. I dropped so many classes in my fall and spring semester combined.

6. Find your outlets for stress relief.

Whether that be going to the gym, painting, guitar, basketball, it is always good to have a nonschool-related thing that is your home and source of comfort. It is something that will really ground you in your time here at MIT and it’ll stop you from going crazy.

7. Prepare for the Elements.

If you’re a foolish southern Californian like me who has never really had to deal with rain or snow, Pack Your Bags, you heathen. Bring boots. Bring heavy jackets. Bring an umbrella. The weather here is actual weather. Like, there are distinct seasons and shit.

8. Go and explore Boston.

This is one of the very few times where you’ll actually have enough time to go to Boston. I recommend going out and exploring the city at least once or twice a month, bringing a good group of friends. Roam, eat, shop. Boston is one of the coolest cities with a great entertainment scene. Go see a concert, go get some Georgetown Cupcakes, or just explore the Prudential. The T is so convenient and easy to use that you literally have no excuse to not go out.

Update: Don’t do this if you’re in a pandemic, obviously. But I still stand by this.

9. Go to events on campus.

MIT is pretty incredible. We’ve had some very notable speakers and figures come to speak here at these extra events that take place throughout the day. We also just have very fun activities on campus. Some of my favorites have included basically every SaveTFP event and also the Digital Anxieties conversation with Bo Burnham and Jonny Sun.

10. Try and make some friends in different living groups.

I’m guilty of actually not doing a very good job of this, but I really want to change this next semester. It’s really easy to just stick within your living group and you will only interact with those people because, well, you live with them and see them basically everyday. But! It’s also great to just explore different dorms and meet lots of new people. I am hoping to do this more. If you’re in a dorm that isn’t Random Hall, please hit me up. Let’s talk.

Update: Guess what? Spring semester Cami did indeed branch out more! I rushed WILG, Delta Phi Epsilon and Pi Beta Phi (and accepted a bid from PiPhi), visited friends in other dorms more (namely Simmons) and overall just had a good time meeting new people.

11. Exercise!

Exercise is a very, very good stress reliever and it is good for you! I know it’s hard to start, but I recommend just taking a PE class to really force yourself to do it. It’ll build good habits and you’ll feel really good about yourself after each class or session and even better when you start to see progress. It’s overall a very rewarding experience.

Update: I worked out 4-6 times a week consistently for the duration of the spring semester and it was SO NICE. Highly recommend.

12. Please heed the November Rule…

If you don’t know what the November Rule is, Nisha wrote a really good blogpost on it. You do not want to start the year off by fucking up your relationships. Just try and refrain from that. Please. And if you’re a frosh, for the love of god please don’t hook up with upperclassmen in your first month. You’re a baby, you need time to grow.

Update: Definitely listen to this.

13. Learn how to cook. No, like, actually.

College is the time to cook! Cook!! There are so many grocery stores around here. There is literally no excuse! Sometimes, you won’t have time to go to dining halls, or you might not even live in a residence with a dining hall. Do not starve. Most dorms have cookbooks in their bookshelves. Grab one and learn.

Update: lol guess i’m a hypocrite. still do this though, even if i didn’t. im suffering because i can’t cook.

14. Join group chats for classes. Alternatively: find one or two people in each class to ask questions and pset with.

Do not spend your entire semester flying solo. MIT is very much an environment that not only encourages collaboration, but frankly, requires it. Your life will be so much harder if you try and tackle every pset alone. It’s just so much better when you can message a friend and asking them for help. I have either a group chat or a really good friend in each of my classes so I know I won’t be left in the dust if I have difficulty understanding a concept.

Update: YES. THIS. DO THIS.

15. For the love of God, please go to Office Hours if you don’t know what’s going on.

Trust me, they’re so helpful. Go to Sunday tutorings for 8.01. Go to 6.0001 office hours if you’ve been staring at your code for 6 hours and it’s still not compiling. Please, just go. It’ll do you wonders.

16. Plan your classes wisely.

ASE if you think you’re ready/can handle it/the class poses no real benefit to you and you know the material really well and you want to take an exploratory class. Free up your schedule so you can take more exploratory classes in majors you think you might be interested in, and put off that GIR if you want to. Personally I wasn’t able to get credit for 18.01 and 8.01, which I’m grateful for since I had a really bad basis in physics and math. But, if you have a good foundation, then work hard to ASE out of GIRs. Feel free to use the summer to study for them, but don’t feel pressured to do so.

Don’t schedule shitty 9ams and don’t overestimate your abilities to wake up for those 9ams. Be smart and reasonable about your schedule.

17. Do not compare yourself to your classmates.

You are at MIT. There are going to be crazy smart talented kids in your year. That does not make you any less crazy smart talented. You are here for a reason. They accepted your application for a reason. You are here because you deserve to be here.

Update: this is easier said than done. it’s hard. i know it’s hard. i know this firsthand.

18. Don’t be afraid to take mental health days.

I think one of the weirder things about being in college is that you literally can just get up and leave your class and go home, whereas in high school you were awkwardly stranded in this building in the middle of your town and if you felt bad, you had to ask permission to leave.

There was a day where I was incredibly tired and stressed and just overall having a bad time, so I decided to skip my lecture to go to Newbury Street and sit in a cafe and work in there. (There’s actually a blogpost about this that I just never posted.) It was one of the best days of my semester. Very calming, very nice, and very needed.

If you feel like shit, don’t go to class. If you realize you feel like shit in the middle of class, just leave. If you wake up and think to yourself “God, I’m so tired and I’ve felt stressed for the past week and I need a break”, don’t go to class!

Make use of mental health resources on campus, as they’re more than willing to help and give you the assistance you need.

19. Less of a tip, but make sure you have the following items at college, as they are pretty useful:

  • sewing kit – can come handy
  • ironing board and iron – formal events!
  • formal attire – we have lots of fancy events [update: i agree with this EVEN MORE NOW]
  • vitamin D pills – take care of yourself, kids.
  • tampons and pads – regardless of whether or not you have a vagina, this is literally just a general rule of thumb for anyone. you’re going to have friends who get periods. you can be the hero of the story and provide them with equipment if the time ever comes and they don’t have anything on them. i really wish more people would do this, actually. sorry, tangent.
  • air mattress – strange, i know. but you never know when you have to let a friend crash due to some event. mariia and i have two air mattresses and they’ve come in handy. we host people for lots of hackathons and conferences and make some money off of it. it’s cool.

These are more of the lesser known/more easily forgotten items.

20. Take a day to actually clean and organize your room.

Regardless of how much time you spend in your room, it’s just generally good practice to keep your living space clean. Your room is your safe haven and is yours and so you should keep it clean! Also, if you have roommates, it’s probably a good idea to keep your spaces clean so you don’t piss anyone off. Vacuum once in a while. Fold your clothes and sort them. Hang your clothes if they have to be hung. Make your bed (unless it’s a top bunk then like…fuck that.)

21. CHOOSE YOUR CI-H VERY CAREFULLY.

Before you sign up for that CI-H, please ask your upperclassmen friends if it’s a good idea. There are two CI-H’s with finals. I won’t say what they are, but…but bro, it’s literally such a bad idea to choose a CI-H with a final. Don’t do that to yourself. Ask yourself if you can really write 10,000 words about this thing. Don’t make yourself suffer in a shitty CI-H.

22. Make a Venmo if you don’t already have one.

It’s just very convenient to be able to send your friends money if you forget your wallet, or just request someone on the spot rather than risking the chance of forgetting it.

23. If you have the time, get a job.

Whether it’s a UROP or work-study or some part-time job on campus running desk or something, it’s really nice to have a source of income to help you splurge on that extra thing you might want.

24. You are not alone.

Literally every single frosh, and I mean every single frosh, has no fucking clue what’s going on. You were all yeeted to the number one school in America, told to take a bunch of classes, and now are wandering around trying to figure out who you are, what you want to study, and what you want to do with your life. And it’s okay to not know the answer to any of those things right now. Hell, it’s okay to not know the answer to any of those things a year from now either. What’s important is realizing that whatever doubts, concerns, turmoil you’re feeling inside right now is being felt by 1000 other kids with you. And that’s not to minimize your feelings, but encourage you to open up and talk with people. Tell them about your fears. Tell them about your stresses. At CPW, an upperclassmen made sure to stress the importance of friendship and community here, saying that “everyone is going through their own unique ice cream flavor of Hell, but you all bond in that mutual suffering.”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stayed up just having really deep, insightful conversations with friends, as we reflect on our time here and the time we will be spending here. It helps you feel more secure in your place here at MIT, knowing that people are sharing this experience with you.

One Day at a Time

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Last Thursday morning, I met with my therapist and told him about everything that’s happened since we last met, mostly focused on the developing situation at MIT. He’d already heard (it’s hard not to be constantly plugged in when there’s breaking news every few hours), but I went on anyway, telling him how I felt a mixture of calm and anxiety, and I couldn’t quite tell which one was winning over me.

I’m not afraid, I said to him in our last five minutes, but I’ve been having trouble sleeping.

I said it just to get it out there, to grasp at a solution for anything I could actually have control over. I waited for him to tell me what to do, hoping he’d have a simple answer I could follow.

Maybe you should try not reading the news before bed. I thought about the nightmares I’ve had, ranging from totally unrealistic-but-terrifying to indistinguishable from life. I thought about waking up at 3am in a panic because a fire truck01 or an ambulance, or a police car, i don’t truly know drove by my open window, alarms blazing.

It seemed so simple yet so difficult, the idea of not going down a hole of constant live updates across the globe right before sleeping. I decided to try it, muting the words coronavirus and covid-19 and even just corona02 rip to all the beer tweets i’ll be missing on the Twitter account I frequent before bed, and politely asking my roommates to not constantly update me on the world situation after 9 pm. Even though classes weren’t set to start for another two weeks, I wanted to maintain some semblance of normalcy and keep up my routine of waking up at the same time every morning, showering, eating breakfast, and whatever else I do when I’m normally heading out. Sleeping is a big part of that—how can I feel normal if I can’t even sleep through the night?

That night, I lay in bed, shooing off passing thoughts. I will not visit the New York Times Live Updates page. I will not read and reread the Wikipedia pages. I will not even look at jokes about it. It was an internal mantra that I told myself over and over while I tried to mindlessly scroll. I texted my roommate and sent a link for an adjustable dumbbell set we were thinking of buying, noticing a new unread text from MIT’s alert system. Friday’s classes were cancelled, and the move-out date was being pushed from Tuesday to Sunday, and MIT was at this point, seemingly begging students to please go anywhere, anywhere that’s not here, in a way that felt very much like the hosts of a party trying to get people out at 3am: You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

In truth, I’m one of the lucky ones. As I’ve written before, I live off campus, so I don’t have to worry about packing my life up and heading back to New York. On top of that, I’m a junior, which is quite frankly the most uneventful of the Spring semesters you can have, anyway. That, already, removes so much of the massive stress burdening all my classmates. While my peers fly across the country, I’m texting my mom and assuring her that I’m alive and okay and yes, staying put is probably the best thing I can do. I don’t have Senior Ball outfit I need to figure out when to wear now, and my Brass Rat already sits on my shelf, collecting dust. I feel for my classmates, I do, and I know this could always get worse. Yet still, I can’t help but shake the feeling of anxiety and uncertainty in my head. It’s thick in the air, and even as I go for walks just to be outside I know everyone else feels it, too.03 nearly every stranger i walk by in passing is talking about it

Now, as the dust settles at MIT, the world seems to be getting kicked up further and further. On Monday, I had my first tele-therapy call in my bedroom, sitting on my small armchair while I tried to imagine an office, the light filtering in through the blinds and a cup of water handy. My sister informed me that my parents at home attended an online mass on Sunday, since New York’s stopped Catholic services statewide. Gradually, we adjust, but the lack of control I imagine everyone feels as strongly as I do feels more apparent each day. 

Growing up, whenever I’d have something particularly stressful going on in my life, my mom would always tell me to “leave it in God’s hands”. That’s never been something that’s come easy to me, to just relinquish my role in things and hope it gets better. I think it’s part of the reason I ended up at MIT—that drive to take matters into my own hands and keep pushing forward. Now, I find myself unable to do anything, whether it’s as grand as stopping a pandemic or as small as comforting a friend. All there is to do is wait. Wait inside, spending most of the day on the same plot of land, and hope everyone else does the same. I still struggle with leaving it in someone else’s hands, as much as I wish it came easy to me. But, I’m trying to take it day by day. 

We want to make sure that we are fine owning what we can own, and have full ownership in that which we can master. Those are the words my professor said to us in our last lecture as we ate Hershey’s kisses to try to feel better. It’s a small reminder that it’s not all bad. I’m maintaining calm, as is the rest of my house. To be fair, it’s only been a few days of it for me, and a little over a week for some of my other roommates, so my opinion might change down the road. Here’s how I’ve been holding up, and what my foreseeable future will (probably) look like:

Life

My mornings start mostly the same as before, a small attempt at keeping up with routine—I wake up at 8AM,04 7am on mondays shower, get dressed, and eat breakfast. This time, there are more people around, so I might make it with someone else. If my one specific roommate is awake and ready, we’ll go on a ~15 minute walk to replicate the feeling of our normal commutes. We wash our hands thoroughly and wipe our phones and knobs and remotes with disinfectant wipes when we come back home, repeating this new habit multiple times a day. And then, I’ll try to work like I normally would, stopping for an hour to make lunch at roughly noon. I know it’s supposed to be a break, sort of, but I’ll succumb to my own guilt regarding productivity, and my fear regarding the state of the world if I let the time pass by without trying to do something.

Our dining room has been converted into a home office of sorts, with my school work littering the table, and no less than three computers at a time. Must admit, it’s pretty hard to get actual work done, what with the news constantly breaking and discussion constantly following. On the bright side, we did stock up on snacks, so it truly feels like a developing start-up’s home-converted-office. So far, our chalkboard reads (not pictured): Days in Isolation: IIII I.

a photo of me and three other roommates sitting at the table with our computers

from before everyone cracked on day 3 and started to work in their rooms, featuring a not-yet updated calendar

In theory, I’ll be keeping up with my exercise routine, but I haven’t really. I ordered two twenty pound dumbbells online, so I’m just counting down the days until they arrive so I can not feel like my hard work is withering away. In the meantime, three of us went to the park by our house and did a workout circuit, lunging across the field and hopping up and doing dips on a bench. At least there’s nothing barring us from being outside in the open, just three roommates a few feet apart in a green expanse. At home, we did planks and an ab circuit in our den, which has effectively become a yoga studio for another one of my roommates, who wakes up at 6AM to do it.

a photo of my roommate and i doing lunges at the park

lunge baby lunge

I’ve been watching a lot of television and film with my roommates, naturally, since we’re all stuck. I’ve made it to the last season of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, a Netflix cartoon I started to watch mostly because I’ve been seeing people on Tumblr and Twitter talk about it for a while, and because I want to support obviously queer content.05 and you should all watch it too! I’m a pretty big fan. In addition, we’ve watched Uncut Gems, which has to be one of the most stressful movies I’ve ever seen, and the first episode of Twin Peaks, which I’ve already seen. We’re planning to watch Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a beautiful lesbian French film that I’ve actually already paid to see twice in the last month.06 before everything went to shit

Besides television, we’ve also dabbled in games, both of the video and traditional kind. I’ve been playing more Fire Emblem, slowly working my way through my third run through of the game. Two of my roommates and I started playing Divinity: Original Sin 2, and spent more time creating our characters than actually playing the game. I watched some of them play a board game about energy conglomerates, and I learned how to play Bananagrams and lost every round, while my girlfriend watched via FaceTime.

a photo of my roommates and i hanging out in our living room

a wholesome friday night

I think it’ll be like this for a while before we start to go stir-crazy, just playing board games and video calling and making food three times a day and trying to stay fit. Hopefully, with classes back in late March, things can start to feel a little more normal.


Classes

a screenshot of my daily schedule

looking pretty barren here

1.035: Mechanics of Materials, now on WebEx

This class, which in a normal semester is a Lab class, is probably going to be undergoing the biggest shift in curriculum out of all my classes. Because the students have dispersed and we can’t meet up for class anyway, we’re unable to do the lab component of the class, since it requires specialized machinery and instruction. And, with a week less in the semester, we also have to cut off a week’s worth of material and condense it. So, how’s it going to work?

Like I show in my last post, we normally have traditional lectures Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and a three hour lab on Tuesday afternoons. Our professor proposed something a bit atypical going forward: instead of just hosting the usual MWF lectures online, we (the students) would be put into groups and assigned with teaching the material to the rest of the class for a week. A few days before an assigned week, the group would get the lecture notes to review. On Monday, they would meet with the professor via WebEx07 everyone in the class can attend, if they want and get a tutorial lecture, in a sense. On Wednesday, the group would give the presentation to the rest of the class, and on Friday there would be a Q&A and Problem Solving session of sorts, coupled with an anonymous peer evaluation.

The idea is, if you can teach a subject, even just a small part of it, you learn it more fully.  Then, for the lab component, we would have scheduled WebEx seminars where our professor and TA would do a deep dive on their research. With a shortened semester and an entire component that has to be scrapped, it’s hard to fully capture the material we were supposed to learn, but it’s a start. Again, we haven’t actually started any of this, and won’t for two weeks, but this is the tentative plan. 

1.037: Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Design, new location TBD

We haven’t quite figured this one out yet! The original plan was a midterm, final, a few PSets, and three group projects, and some of that has been nixed already. Our midterm, originally scheduled for this week, is no longer happening as far as I know, and we might have one less project to do. I presume that we will just move the lectures online and try to proceed as normal, minus a few things here and there. 

CMS.619: Gender and Media Studies, now on Slack and WebEx

This class already lends itself the most to being online, since half of our discussion takes place on a dedicated Slack channel, anyway. We’ll be meeting during scheduled class hours on WebEx, discussing the weekly readings and maybe watching things together. Work will presumably be the same, since there are just three assignments throughout the semester.

4.507: Introduction to Building Information Modeling, now on WebEx

We spent almost the entire three hour time period trying to figure this one out last Thursday. I still don’t think we’ve quite figured it out, but hey, there’s still two weeks to go. It turns out that Architecture classes that have presentations, and require 3D printing and model making do not lend themselves exactly well to online. The professor made a comment about coming back and possibly finishing our 3D models at the end of the semester, and I can only commend him for being much more optimistic than I am. Eventually, we got the entire present class to go on WebEx, and then painstakingly each person attempted to share their screen to ensure we could attempt some kind of presentation in two weeks.

a WebEx exchange between my professor and three students, just "Can you read me?" and three "Yes"

 

We’ll see how that one goes.

My last class, 1.073: Intro to Environmental Data Analysis, wrapped up last week, so that’s luckily not on my plate anymore.


All in all, life isn’t the worst it’s ever been. At least, there’s a part of me that is still looking forward to things turning a corner for the better, and interested in the changes going forward. It’s hard to remain positive when I’m constantly overwhelmed by unfortunate news in the world, but I’m keeping my head up. Sometimes a meme or a news article will slip through my Twitter filter, and I’ll try to keep scrolling instead of letting myself spiral down a news hole. I’m sleeping better. I’m trying.

A Last Minute Rehearsal

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The past week has been total craziness. As previous blog posts covered, MIT, understandably, made all undergraduate students leave campus. As a result, all campus events, shows, concerts, etc. are no longer happening (at least not in their originally intended form), and the work that students had been putting in to plan, rehearse, or prepare for these activities very sadly could not come to full fruition. But as a last ditch attempt to make something positive out of this otherwise terrible situation, some student groups held small last minute open rehearsals or live-streams to display the work they had put in up to that point. We want to talk about one of these events that we were involved with and the experience of going to the final rehearsal in the last days of us being on campus, because it was actually a really beautiful and healing experience amidst the pain and chaos. 

This semester, we were going to be involved with the Latino Cultural Center’s production of In the Heights, a musical written by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Our friend Luisa, who was the director and leader behind this production, asked us if we could do the set design for this show at the beginning of the semester and our response was “OMG YES!” We looovve In the Heights so much – it’s such a beautiful show about a Hispanic/Latino(x) community in Washington Heights dealing with the effects of gentrification, loss of loved ones, financial struggles, and shows how they come together to overcome those hardships and, in the process, create their home. 

We were really excited to be a part of this production, originally scheduled for April 2nd and 3rd. We had only ever been in the audience of plays and musicals, and were looking forward to this opportunity in our last semester to be “behind the scenes.” The show was going to be in one of the biggest classrooms on campus, 26-100, and the set was going to be entirely on the chalkboards. We even created photoshop sketches already for how we envisioned it. 

Everyone involved in the production was just as, if not more, invested in making this show happen. So when the news hit that we all had to leave, one of the first things we thought about was this production, along with all other student events, that people were putting so much of their time and hearts into. It was really sad. 

But in the face of such bad news, students frantically tried to make the most of it. The directorial staff and cast held a small final rehearsal open to the people involved and close friends to celebrate their work (the few audience members sat far apart). It happened two nights before we left campus and it was BEAUTIFUL. They came together to run through all the numbers, and it became a night of improvisation, funny messups,  beautiful harmonies and voices, creative props, and utter joy. It was an incredible feet of collaboration between Luisa A. ’21 (Director), Diego B. ’20 (Vocal Director), Natasha S. ’20 (Co-Producer), Vanessa G. ’22 (Co-Producer), Kiyah W. ’21 (Stage Manager), Gabriella G. ’21 (choreographer), and Marty Marks (MIT Faculty in Music), and the amazing cast!

It was a true representation of the resilience and innovation of MIT students, and really reminded us how unique and amazing the people here are. 

Aside from being totally amazed by the incredibly talented cast who managed to do a great run-through under such circumstances, the content of the musical also really spoke to us in some unexpected ways. 

Breathe

Sigue andando el camino

Por toda su vida.

Respira.

Breathe.

Y si pierdes mis huellas

Que Dios te bendiga.

Respira.

Nina Rosario, a Stanford freshman comes home for the summer after just dropping out, as a result of having many side-jobs to pay tuition and consequently doing poorly in her classes and losing her scholarship. As a first-generation student, she is particularly upset because she was the first one “to make it out”, and put a lot of pressure on herself to succeed. She sings “Breathe” as a way to reflect on everything that happened that led her up to that point, and to remember to just breathe.

The context may be very different from our current situation, but the idea of remembering to breathe and to check in with yourself during times of panic feels very relevant right now. We should all remember to breathe (just six feet away from each other).

Blackout

We are powerless!

. . .

Look at the fireworks…

Abuela, are you alright?

Light up the night sky…

The stars are out tonight!

Look at the fireworks…

You’re not alone tonight

The whole city faces a major blackout, and chaos ensues. People have trouble finding their way home and small business owners worry that people will begin robbing them, so they set off fireworks to create beacons for people to follow to find their way home and to distract the robbers.  

MIT felt like it was hit with a similar “blackout.” The plug was pulled, everything suddenly ended, and chaos ensued. While the community of Washington Heights was literally powerless “electrically”, we, as an MIT community, felt powerless emotionally. But despite this, students lit their own fireworks and beacons to come together as a community one last time. Even in the darkness, we were able to find our way to a sense of home and family one last time, before saying goodbye to it. And in this time, where social distancing and isolation is imperative, we hope that we, as an MIT community, will continue to foster our sense of home (and hopefully share that with the newly admitted class) in creative digital ways. 

Paciencia y Fe 

I remember nights, anger in the streets, hunger at the windows

Women folding clothes, playing with my friends in the summer rain

Mama needs a job, Mama says we’re poor, one day you say, “Vamos a Nueva York”

And Nueva York was far, but Nueva York had work, and so we came

And now I’m wide awake

A million years too late

I talk to you, imagine what you’d do

Remembering what we went through

Nueva York! Ay Mama!

It wasn’t like today, you’d say,

“Paciencia y fe”

Abuela Claudia just won the lottery and reminisces about all her hard work and struggles in her life up to that point, and how through the hardest of times, one mantra kept giving her the strength to push forward. It was something her mother told her,  “Paciencia y fe” or patience and faith. 

Everyday this past week, every hour even,  felt so uncertain. We kept getting sent new information, new changes, new plans of action. It was very overwhelming. And these types of updates seemed to have become a new normal, because of the nature of this situation being an ever evolving one. And that’s really scary. Uncertainty is really scary. All we can do (aside from the recommended actions of self-quarantining/distancing/hand-washing), is to have “paciencia” for a new-new-normal of a calm post-pandemic world “y fe” that we will make it to that other side. 

So, remember to breathe during the stress, to look at the fireworks during the darkness, and to have paciencia y fe during the uncertainty. And if you want some new media to consume while you self-quarantine, we strongly recommend listening to In the Heights. Stay safe everyone! 

Surviving Self-Quarantine 101

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so…for the sake of social distancing, everyone’s trapped in their rooms. most public places are shut down, so there’s nowhere to go anyway….chances are that you’re bored out of your mind. you probably miss your friends a lot and are either binge-watching Netflix shows or sleeping for ungodly amounts of time just so you have to find fewer things to occupy yourself during the day.

tested positive for missing the homies

mood

for MIT students, this period of time is particularly tedious. we don’t have classes for the next week and a half, so we have a lot of time that we don’t know what to do with. in fact, in the past few days, we went from being students with insanely hard classes and 1000 extracurriculars to students who haven’t been this not busy since high school.

wild…

i can’t speak to how other MIT students are surviving this lull in academics, but i’ve developed a few coping mechanisms that have me straight vibin‘ through this self-quarantine. feel free to drop your own techniques in the comments :)

 

Reading

oh man, i love reading. i haven’t spoken about how much i love it on the blogs yet, but…guys. i used to be a semi-professional book blogger. i also had a bookstagram where i posted aesthetic and heavily-filtered pictures of my beautiful collection, and i read maybe five to six books a week.

things have changed SO much since then. at MIT, you don’t really get time to read unless you’re diligent and able to prioritize it over hanging out with your friends, which i am not. so, now that i’m in the midst of social distancing, i’ve been READING.

 

  • Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel — this dystopian novel is set in the aftermath of a strain of swine flu that wipes out the majority of civilization (ha ha…topical). it has wonderfully woven storylines that will keep you captivated. i read this in my sophomore year of high school but decided to pick it up again because of the current state of the world, and damn, does it hit hard. highly recommend.
  • Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — i don’t feel qualified to summarize this book given that i’m only fifty pages in, but wow, its prose is gorgeous. i don’t think i’ve enjoyed a book’s prose this much since reading The God of Small Things, which is also magnificent.

 

Dancing

members of the MIT dance community really came together to support each other through quarantine!! it’s wonderful. some famous choreographers have started holding online workshops and training sessions, so my friends and i participate in them and post videos of ourselves dancing in a FaceBook group we made. someone also organized freestyle training, in which we’re given a prompt each day to freestyle to. i’m so excited about these opportunities to grow as a dancer even though i’m stuck in my room all day. the dance community is so, so uplifting, and i couldn’t be more grateful to be a part of it.

here are some free live dance classes, for those who are interested!

 

Learning New Things

hey, i have time to learn new things now! that’s crazy. Nisha, who happens to be very good at guitar, showed me some tutorials that i’ve been using. i learned Take Me To Church by Hozier the other day and found it suuuper satisfying.

i would also recommend learning a new language during this period. i, uh, would be doing this if the Chinese class i’m in this semester weren’t so intensive. Duolingo, Coursera, and edX are always there for you, though!

i know so many people who have complained about having no time to learn something because they’re so consumed by what being an MIT student entails. well, here’s your chance!

 

Good Ol’ Internet (With Friends)

 

Watching TV Shows/Movies

  • Discord has a screen sharing service called Trast. it’s great for watching TV shows with your friends remotely since it has a non-janky chat box (looking at you, Zoom…)
    • please, god, do not Zoom call to start a movie at the same time like one of my friend groups did yesterday…there are better options, i promise
  • Netflix also has the Netflix Party Chrome extension! go crazy.

Games [for those who probably don’t identify as real gamers lol]

  • Stardew Valley!
  • Town of Salem
  • Skribbl.io or one of its many other variants
  • Quiplash!
  • Catan
  • Spyfall?

i’ve joined 12 Discord servers since leaving MIT…we out here thriving

 

Self-Care

disclaimer: i need to do this myself

this time is rough for everyone, right? why not pop on a few face masks, or start a new workout routine, or organize all your belongings if they’re messy and have been bugging you for months? the possibilities are endless. start bullet journaling and practicing mindfulness! everything is stressful and isolation makes it worse, so try to implement things in your lifestyle that will benefit your physical and mental health.

scrolling through your timeline for six hours straight and taking four-hour depression naps is NOT self-care, y’all.

 

 

how are you surviving quarantine? let me know :)

stay safe, everyone!

A special announcement about SAT Subject Tests

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MIT has made the decision to no longer consider the SAT Subject Tests as part of the admissions process. You can read about our revised testing requirements here.

I’m happy to announce our decision to discontinue the use of subject tests starting with the 2020-21 admissions cycle for first-year and transfer admissions (for students entering MIT in 2021 and beyond). We made this decision after considerable study, in consultation with our faculty policy committee. We believe this decision will improve access for students applying to MIT.

Below are answers to some questions you may have about our change.


Will you still require the SAT or the ACT?

We will continue to require the SAT or the ACT, because our research has shown these tests, in combination with a student’s high school grades and coursework, are predictive of success in our challenging curriculum. While we know these tests are not perfect, they do provide an informative and consistent measure of a student’s academic potential in a world where high school experiences vary so widely, and they allow us to admit students from across the country — and the globe — who we are confident will thrive and succeed at MIT.

 

I took the subject tests. Can I submit my scores for your consideration?

No: in fairness to all applicants, we won’t consider them for anyone. We think it would be unfair to consider scores only from those who have scored well and therefore choose to send them to us. They are neither recommended nor optional; they are simply not a part of our process anymore.

 

How does this apply to international students?

International students will not have to take SAT subject tests, but we will require all students to take either the SAT or ACT. In addition, for non-native English speakers, we strongly recommend taking the TOEFL if you have been using English for less than 5 years or do not speak English at home or in school, so that we may consider that alongside the SAT or the ACT.


We hope that this change will allow students to focus more on the things that matter to them while still preserving our ability to evaluate the academic preparedness of every applicant through other means.

And last, but certainly not least: I know we are making this announcement during the COVID-19 pandemic. We had already been planning to make this change, and decided to announce as soon as possible in part because we wanted to make sure no one was spending more time or energy studying for tests they wouldn’t have to take for us, especially during a public health emergency. As we’ve written elsewhere, your focus right now should be on your health, and the health of your community, and not worrying about college applications. Your health and happiness is in our hearts; stay safe, and talk more soon.

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