There are some things that only make sense to you once you’re living it, that you can’t understand until they happen to you. And then there are some things that, even while they’re happening, you can’t begin to comprehend. One such event was my trip across the Niagara Falls border-crossing passenger bridge with all my possessions on a hand cart.
*cliche mid-00s kids’ tv show record scratch* OK, so you’re probably wondering how I got here…
Like most MIT students, at the start of every semester I make my trip from distant lands to Cambridge, via Boston Logan Airport. I hold great fondness in my heart for that
trip;02Lydia wrote about this once, and just rereading it now stirs my heart: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/getting-home-from-the-airport/
by the time I finished sophomore year, it had been made beautiful by familiarity. Tearing up a little as my parents dropped me off, napping the flight away, and the late-night suitcase-dragging walk through the airport, onto the MBTA silver line, to the red line, and all the way home…
Unfortunately, flying is not looking so hot right now. When I moved back to Cambridge this semester, my parents and I both agreed it would be better if I could avoid taking a plane. OK, so we’ll drive! Well, it’s not so easy, because nothing is easy these days.
Fact 1: my internship switched to being a Canadian internship when everything went remote, and as such I couldn’t leave Canada until it was over.
Fact 2: my parents would have to quarantine for 2 weeks if they left Canada to drive me to Boston.
Fact 3: the school semester started 1 week after my internship ended.
Conclusion: My parents could not enter the US with me.
Then I had a crazy idea. This was in late June, before any plans were made in earnest, and so it really was just a passing thought. One of my new housemates lives west of me, within the US; she was also hoping to drive to Boston instead of fly. “Hey Mom, wouldn’t it be so funny if I got Caragay to pick me up at the border and drive me to Boston?” “Haha, yeah, you could totally do that!”
Fast forward 6 weeks. Now it’s mid-August, and the situation is the same.
hey caragay what if you picked me up at the border
like at niagara falls
i could walk across the bridge
yo that would be fun!
And so a wild plan was set. I already knew that Niagara Falls has a pedestrian bridge that’s also a border crossing. Normally, it’s mostly used by tourists visiting the other country’s side of the falls; because of the pandemic, it was closed to everything except essential travel. (Which included “work or study”, and therefore, hopefully, me.) My parents could drive up to the Canadian side and park; only I would cross the border; and then my friend would pick me up on the other side.
Of course, I’m a worrier, and I got it from my parents. So we immediately started to overthink. What if they didn’t let me in at the border? How would I carry my suitcases all that way? What did the process even look like?
By the time September 4th, Judgment Day, rolled around, I had seen the seventeen-minute YouTube video my father made me watch of someone else crossing the same bridge; I had several types of coins in both currencies, in case the toll booth at the crossing rejected one for some reason; I had a folder with documents proving my citizenship, my enrolment at MIT, my
within-72-hours03As required by the Massachusetts Travel Order
negative COVID test, and my Boston apartment lease agreement; I had a hand cart we ordered from Home Depot to carry my suitcases. I was ready.
I was nervous as all hell.
That day, and the week of the Exodus in March, are the two most nervewracking moments of perhaps the last decade of my life. There were so many things that could go wrong, and I knew I could never even begin to plan for them all. So instead I stressed, all week, and all the day before, and all through our early-morning drive to Niagara Falls.
I’m no superstitious person, but I’ve always felt in life that if I can’t imagine something happening in the future — the fun trip that I got a stomachache right before, the boy I wished would like me back — maybe it’s not meant to be. I could NOT imagine this actually happening, and that only made it worse.
We did arrive, of course, as one tends to do when on a finite-length trip. We found (after much difficulty) the entrance to the pedestrian crossing. I hugged my parents, teared up, said goodbye. We took pictures. I paid my toll and started dragging my cart across the bridge.
And I still could NOT imagine it actually happening. Literally as I dragged the cart, felt and heard it bump along the concrete bridge, and saw the sun reflecting off the falls, I felt surreal and dissociated. Was I really bringing boxes full of stuff across Niagara Falls on foot to enter the US? Was I really moving to an apartment in Boston, to live fully independently with friends for the first time in my life, during a pandemic, during the first week of school? Surely it could not happen.
But it did. When I saw my friend, I screamed, and hugged someone who wasn’t related to me for the first time in five months.
I still can’t believe it’s happening, sometimes, now. When we returned to East Campus in a UHaul to pick up our furniture, when we sat together in our
finally-furnished living room04Those first few days when we owned literally no furniture were an interesting time...
for the first time, when I look around my
still-not-fully-furnished room,05don't ask me about IKEA delivery :(
when I pset right next to one of my housemates or we laugh over some dumb MIT in-joke together. I can’t believe I made this choice — but I know it was the right one. I have friends by my side who I can trust, in matters of health and safety, and of not letting dirty dishes pile up in the sink, and of psetting. We’re in this together, and although we’re not at MIT, we are a very small microcosm of everything that makes MIT so good. And we’re going to have an excellent semester.
Me standing in front of the bridge entrance with all my stuff. Photo by Mom <3
The bridge I was about to cross.
My dad snapped this pic of me from down on the ground.
One of my goals for my sophomore year was to do all the things I was afraid to do in my freshman year. One of the bigger things I wanted to do in my freshman year that I did not do was join clubs, specifically because a lot of the clubs required interviews. Being a wide-eyed frosh with low self-esteem and little to no experience in the content covered by the clubs I was interested in, I ultimately decided not to join any clubs that required an interview.
This year, I’ve changed that. I’ve been going to countless recruitment events and throwing my hat into a whole slew of different things, and I thought I’d document all my successes, failures, and experiences in between.
For starters, my past few couple weeks have been hectic, explaining the lack of blogs. Here’s what my past three weeks have looked like:
I’ll slowly break these things down week by week, explaining what everything is.
On August 31st, I had a call with Kellen about running the MITAdmissionsInstagram account. The ultimate goal was to create a space that showed MIT students doing non-academic things to show that MIT students, in fact, do have personalities outside of academics and studying. Just a week ago, I hosted a live where I played guitar and sang and answered a couple questions about MIT life. I really enjoy this Instagram because I think it’s really important to show all these different facets to an MIT student and that there is no “one” type of student here at MIT.
Sloan Business Club! I didn’t go to any recruitment events for SBC, although I probably should have, which is why I ended up getting resume rejected by them, teehee. Essentially, I wanted to join a business club because I wanted to find a way to explore my interest in business with a supportive undergraduate community, but I ended up being so hosed I didn’t go to any events.
MIT Admissions Panel
Week 1: panelist training
I also have the amazing opportunity to be a panelist for MIT Admissions! On Wednesdays and Saturdays, MIT hosts these Q&A panel sessions where prospective applicants can ask a panel of 4 current MIT students any questions about student life. I had to go to panelist training to learn the ins and outs and do’s and don’t’s of being a panelist.
Week 3: panel
I ended up hosting my first panel! I was with my friend, Aidan (who, if you recall, also wrote the Duolingo guest blog post), and it was really nice just talking about MIT and reminiscing on my experiences so far. I love, love, love talking about MIT (as is obvious from, well, this position) and it’s so exciting to know that some of the people I’m talking to in these panels right now could be inspired from just listening in and might even become future MIT students.
Associate Advisor
Week 1: registration
As an associate advisor, I work underneath an advisor, who is usually some faculty at MIT, and I provide undergraduate support and student perspective to first-year advisees. This year, I’m the associate advisor for three freshmen — Saketh, Brian, and Jacob. I was really nervous at first because they assigned me to three really big-brained freshmen that I have nothing in common with – super smart CS kids who are chess champions, IMO medalists, renowned athletes, and overall come from super strong STEM backgrounds. I was a little intimidated by them, but after getting to know them, I was incredibly humbled and excited to work with them.
Week 2: AA Drop In, AA: Meeting
I hosted an associate advisor drop in event with Shayna A. ’23 where we basically sat in a Zoom room for an hour and chatted while waiting for random frosh to stream in and ask questions about their schedule if they did. It was really nice catching up with Shayna about their classes and what was going on with them.
I also met with my advisor, Ken, and my three advisees on Saturday to check in with all of them and making sure they’re keeping their heads afloat at MIT. Thankfully, they are. I remember how hard it was to be a freshman, so I’m just grateful that they’re doing somewhat okay. We all have a messenger group chat together and they know they can message me whenever they’d like, so I’m glad to just have that established line of communication with them.
Student Council
Week 1: ua meeting, stuco
It’s really exciting to be 2023 VP! I ended up working with the Undergraduate Association (UA) on a project for
Q-week.01MIT undergrads who moved back on campus had to quarantine their first week back, hence the name 'Q-week'
We also ended up meeting as a class council to talk about projects we were working on, like the results of the MIT 2023 Talent Show:
This was honestly such a fun event and I loved every second of it. We also held a Logo Voting contest for the logo for the 2023s and talked about the 2023-2024 pen pal program that Anna and I planned! I honestly didn’t expect to like being on class council this much since it never really was my thing, but I really love the council so much and I wish we were in person so I could get to know them better.
Week 2: stuco: matching
Here, we gathered student council all together to do matching for the 2023-2024 pen pal program. We essentially sort through two 250-person lists and look at their preferences, interests, majors, dorms, etc. and try to match people based on this information. It’s super arduous and long, but hopefully very worth it when people receive their pen pals.
Week 3: stuco
We have weekly meetings, so we just met in again to touch base and check in with each other. I honestly love checking in with all of council and I think we all mesh really well together! :’)
CodeIt is a program for middle school girls and nonbinary students, where they learn basic programming concepts through Scratch labs and spend the rest of the program making their own final projects to present at the end.
I applied to be a CodeIt mentor this semester and I had an interview on August 31. It was a group interview with two other people, and it had three main parts: behavioral, situational, and technical.
The behavioral portion was pretty straightforward — questions like “Why CodeIt?” and asking about past mentorship experience. T
he situational part gave scenarios with students and asked how you’d react, such as a student who was disengaged often, or a student who cut off a lot of students when speaking. I was somewhat nervous during this part since I don’t really have that much experience with working with kids, but I know ultimately if you just treat them like any other human being and give them the respect they deserve, it usually works out in the end.
I was not expecting a technical portion to the interview and grew really nervous when I heard Rachel announce we’d be moving on to the technical part of the interview. We did two separate questions in pairs, where one applicant was a ‘driver’ and the other was the ‘writer.’ In other words, one person verbally explained what the code should do, and the other had to write down the code in pseudocode or a language of their preference. Then, for the next question, you would switch roles. Luckily, I was able to answer both q’s with ease (and I was SUPER duper proud of myself for this!!!) and the interview concluded from there.
I decided to try my hand and apply to MIT Consulting Group. This was kind of out of the ordinary for me and by far the one I was most nervous for. I went to the first event, Meet MCG, where I met a lot of different MCG members and got to know everyone. It was a really relaxed situation and I really enjoyed it a lot.
Week 2: Zoom Game Night, Case Workshop
I ended up making it to second round for MIT Consulting Group. In other words, I passed the resume review and was extended the opportunity to go to two exclusive events and have an MCG interview. The Zoom game night was really, really fun. We played Spyfall and it was overall a great time, even though I always get super nervous whenever I’m spy. I also tried my hand for the first time at a consulting case during the Case Workshop and I enjoyed it a lot more than I originally thought I would.
Week 3: MCG Interview
So I absolutely botched my MCG interview and got really nervous. There were three parts to this interview: a slide presentation, case, and behavioral. For slides, they send you a case beforehand and you have to make a slide about it. Then, they ask you follow up questions to that case and it runs just like the case workshop like the previous week, and then typical behavioral questions like “Why MCG?” and others. I ended up choking pretty hard on the case section and asked for a lot of help and got really flustered during certain math problems, so understandably, I got a nice rejection from MCG. C’est la vie. I was a little sad, since I guess I wanted to prove to myself in some way that I was…smart? Enough for MCG, but ultimately, I’m not too sad.
THINK is a section under MIT techx, a student organization that runs HackMIT, MakeMIT, xFair, ProjX, and THINK! THINK is a mentorship program for high school students, where MIT students provide guidance and advice surrounding their research projects. Having done some mentorship work in high school, I really thought pursuing this group was somewhat fitting. I also knew a couple people in it and I really liked them, so I decided to shoot my shot. The interview went pretty smoothly and it was really chilled and nice.
Week 3: THINK
I had my first THINK meeting! We introduced ourselves, got some logistics out of the way, and played Broken Picturephone. Then we spent like…1 hour after meeting just talking and catching up. It was so, so nice and I’m just happy I mesh well with the team.
Week 2: Intro to WBL + meet the team, upperclassmen career panel, resume and chill
This week was WBL’s recruitment week. I attended their Intro to WBL and upperclassmen panel and I honestly want to join WBL so, so badly. They seem like such a tight-knit and supportive group of women and it’s really important to have that kind of community in a space often dominated by men. I felt really comfortable and at ease in all of their events and met a lot of really cool people. I just have so much admiration for all of them, and that admiration skyrocketed when I listened to their individual experiences at the career panel. They have an education program for new members, where you learn the fundamentals of business, and I really want to join WBL to hopefully gain more insight on the field through this business lens.
Week 3: WBL Interview
My WBL interview went…okay? I have no real intuition or feeling on this and I haven’t gotten a response yet, so I guess only time will tell.
Global Research and Consulting Group (GRC)
Week 3: general body meeting
This is a new group on campus dedicated to consulting specifically for social impact. I don’t know much about the club since we haven’t met yet (i’m writing this the night of the 18th) but I’m really excited to learn more since it allows me to get some consulting experience in a really chilled and relaxed environment.
UROP/ELO Hunting
Ultimately, I’m searching for an additional UROP (research position) to throw under my belt since I want another source of income. MIT is offering ELO this year, Experiential Learning Opportunities, where we’re granted a guaranteed $1900 stipend for participating in any of these ELOs. So far I’ve applied to one UROP I really, really want, but have not gotten a reply for yet, and have gotten two other guaranteed positions. Hopefully, I’ll be able to choose. Still unsure.
conclusion
I’d like to put a little disclaimer here that this by no means is the ‘average’ amount of things that an MIT student does. In fact, I am doing more than the average and I am taking on a LOT of commitments just because I really wanted to dedicate myself more to my extracurriculars this year! It’s completely normal to do no ECs at MIT, or just one or two. I just thought I’d share since there’s a lot of clubs and orgs at MIT that deserve to be highlighted.
I spent this summer in a relatively “chill” state. My UROP that I did for the first half of the summer had only one real “deadline”, and that was towards the beginning of the project. I could work at my own speed and on my own hours, which was very useful when I was in Pacific Time and my PI was in Eastern Time. Studying for the GRE was also very self-paced; I could tell myself when was good to cram vocabulary cards and practice writing essays. My internship in the latter half of the summer also wasn’t exceptionally stressful; while of course there’s the pressure of doing things well to try to get a return offer, I could essentially focus on trying to do a single thing: the work that I was assigned.
Summers also nice because I get to do things that I wouldn’t have time for otherwise. I read books! Watched YouTube! Began
Avatar: The Last Airbender!13i’ve never finished a tv show in its entirety; i hope this will be the first. i am currently almost through season 2 with my gf and we are still trying to power through and finish it. pls no spoiler
Played too much SET!
But summer is over; It is fall, and I’ve started wearing jackets outside and the leaves will soon stop being green. And also there’s this thing called being an MIT student that takes up a little bit of my time.
There’s a time I can recall
Four years old and three feet tall
Trying to touch the stars and the cookie jar
And both were out of reach
This is a post about feeling hosed and wishing it would go away. The original draft of this post felt a bit too melodramatic, and that’s not what I want. I don’t feel completely overwhelmed. People always talk about drinking from the firehose at MIT, but I don’t feel like I’m drowning in it. I’m not in meltdown mode yet. I still feel “fine”.
Life outside of classes has been messy, but it’s getting better. Lots of my time has been spent assembling furniture and trying to put things into
square bins!14getting these boxes into this shelf was not easy. not because they didn’t fit, but because one of the sets of bins i ordered from amazon smelled absolutely terrible. some amazon reviews have described it as “sewage” and “vomit” and it was definitely as bad as the reviews make it out to be. only 2% of reviews were 1 star so i lost the rng on this one
My room is 95% set up (save for some wall decorations) and so I this area of life will hopefully much fewer hours going forward.
Besides that, there’s a laundry list of other things that are on my mind now. I’ve got extracurriculars to help out with by emceeing for fun events and running meetings. I have grad school apps that are being written much more slowly than I hoped they would be. There’s worrying about whether a singular cough is a dry throat or a certain virus. There’s trying to find time to blog, trying to find time to see friends, and so much more.
And there’s this little thing called classes, too. Classes that always take more time than you expect.
And later on in my high school
It seemed to me a little cruel
How the right words to say always seemed to stay
Just out of reach
reset day ( /rēˈset dā/), noun:
the day after all of your deadlines pass (often after a hell week) and you can relax, take a breather, and get ahead before the next busy part of life
(figurative) something that always remains just out of reach
My reset day was supposed to be last Friday; I had 2 psets due on Thursday and so was ready to take a breather and relax. But then my desk came in earlier than expected, and so I instead spent that day (and weekend) setting up the last of my furniture, my desktop computer, and generally cleaning out my room.
Then over the weekend, I had a club meeting for science bowl, needed to start a pset due thursday, and also set aside time to see my girlfriend for the first time since March. Jumping between all these different things, it’s hard to find time to reset.
As the week started, I realized my second
18.11215complex analysis
pset was much harder than I was expecting it to be, and I ended up spending much more time than I did on the first pset. This class has been giving me stress because I’ve had a hard time applying the formulas we learned in class to the “mini-quizzes” at the end of some lectures; Tuesday’s quiz I just could not get at all despite it being a very simple application of one of the literally two formulas we saw that day.
I spent almost all of Wednesday working on the 18.112 pset, and realized that I unintentionally skipped a club meeting for ESP. Too lost in the writing up my answers that I just forgot about the time. But I was close to being done, and Thursday would finally be the end of my stressful week. I’d get to relax for a little bit, I’d set aside some time to work on some grad school apps, I’d clean up the last parts of my room.
Thursday arrives. I submit my pset, and start watching the day’s lectures. And of course, I realize that I forgot to do a micro-quiz for
18.40416theory of computation
that was due earlier that day.
Missing the quiz honestly isn’t that important to my grade — less than 1%. But it’s only 3 weeks into the semester, and I’m already finding it easy to lose track of all of the things that I’m doing.
Thursday passes, and because of the missed quiz it doesn’t feel like a reset day; I catch up on lectures and find other small things on my to-do list that fell through the cracks. Now it’s Sunday, the weekend is over, and I don’t know when my next chance for a reset day will be anymore.
Well, I should not have thought it strange
That growing causes growing pains
‘Cause the more we learn the more we know
We don’t know anything
I’m not hosed beyond belief; I’m still finding time to do things like cook dinners, teach
fun topics to frosh,17all two letter scrabble words in five minutes and esp classes: real or fake
see friends, and more. But these don’t feel like “full breaks” to me — behind it all, I still have the stress of these different things that I’m up to.
I guess this is what we mean by the firehose at MIT; constantly jumping between a million different things because we want to do every single one of those things. I am living right now in pursuit of a reset day to take a breather, to catch my breath, but I haven’t gotten there yet. The search for a reset day feels like a cursed version of Parkinson’s law (work expands to fill the time allotted) where instead, whenever the reset day is about to come, there suddenly appears more work to fill it.
I keep telling myself that things will get better now that there are no more shelves to assemble and no more boxes to unpack; I hope that this will actually happen.
Another part of me wonders why exactly I’m feeling like this so early in the semester. Is it just the unpacking and apartmenting? Am I overextending and taking too many classes? Or am I in too many hard classes for one semester? Is it because I’m overcommitted with all of the other things in life? Did vegetating for six straight months make me forget how to be an MIT student?
I also keep feeling like I should already have this figured out; I’m a senior,
for crying out loud.18fun fact this phrase is a minced version of for christ’s sake and lacks inherent meaning
But for now, I’ll just get back to my readings and psets and application essays and hope I feel caught up eventually. Hope that I can finally reach the mythical reset day.
But still it seems a tragic fate
Living with this quiet ache
The constant strain for what remains
Just out of reach
A couple of weeks before the school year started, I spent countless hours perfecting my email’s filters, labels, and everything in between. I signed up for forwarding all my MIT emails to my Gmail, made
multiple inboxes06amazing feature, would recommend
in my Gmail account, and for the first time in quite a while I was so organized. It made me pretty proud of myself too, taking baby steps from my one-folder-for-all-my-classes routine and horrible inbox in high school.
Just for some context, this is what I mean by
horrible:07If you are curious of how this happened, don't ask. I'm still wondering too
In hindsight, when looking at those pre-semester preparations, I’m realizing I miscalculated. Because basically, it turns out no matter how many email filters you make, somehow, emails will flood in like a tsunami. It’s inevitable. Unfortunately, the naive prefrosh I was didn’t know this and mistook organization for safety from email blasts. I didn’t forecast the spontaneous school-wide email threads, underwear colors attached in emails, or a particular spammy thread.
When I last checked, I had received over 750 emails from Zoom University in a little under 3 weeks. Legend has it, when I blink, 2 more emails appear. So I was understandably pretty overwhelmed,
busy as a bee,08unfortunately bees are more productive than me during the day
and so was my inbox. I had long feared the tyranny of psets (problem sets), zoom fatigue, and a class known as 8.01 (Physics Mechanics). But emails being amongst the overwhelming aspects of my freshman fall was unexpected.
As a result, I did the only logical thing: make a visualization of a week of my emails:
When I was making this visualization, I was pretty surprised how many emails the club portion made up. I felt I was getting a lot of emails, but not this many by any means. It was interesting to see directly the amount of outreach that’s been done to MIT students generally and first-years like me.
Since starting this fall, it’s been an interesting yet exhausting process to learn about and join clubs, starting with Activities Midway (basically our club-fair). Our club fair went out with a bang, early on, unfortunately crashing after being inundated with prefrosh.
As an already indecisive person, as you will see in some future blogs, not being able to get a full feel of clubs has made it hard to discern what I want to join and commit myself to at the moment, especially while we are on
PNR.09Pass/No Record - Freshman Fall grading system
It’s nice to see all the clubs I want to join but harder to see what I can juggle at the moment. Though the past few days have helped me better see the point where I spontaneously combust.
Looking at the other categories, it was a diverse mix of canvas emails, canvas emails, and more canvas emails. Before MIT, I never used Canvas, and I’m not regretting it at all. The organization system of it gives me fear of missing an assignment and it sure loves to spam reminders for work I’m procrastinating on.
Sprinkled in were some emails from the UA, our student body organization, about applying for specific committees. There were also emails from the many fraternities and sororities (FSILGs) that I cannot remember the greek names of, along with emails from our SCUFFY dorms, an initiative by students to place 24s in virtual dorms and give us a sense of
community.10I'm in New House!
I’ve always associated frats and sororities with horror movies, so it’s nice to see them in a different, MUCH better way.
The emails I received came in the form of nice daily onslaughts, each one slowly throwing my inbox into more disorder. They were fairly consistent and distributed throughout the days, other than the sudden bursts from random threads and mailing lists. The only real exception to this was 2 Mondays ago, which was Labor Day.
Outside of the general scheme of categories, there were some emails that couldn’t fit in any broad sections. As a small disclaimer, most of these email threads and “events” are a bit dated now, showing their age from my chronic writing procrastination, but still hold up as some of the most notable email moments of the semester so far. So with no further ado, these were some of the most confusing, funny, or
I-didn’t need to-know-this moments.11anything is an adjective if you try
The Plont thread
On the evening of September 8th, a member of
Cursed MIT12a community that, well, fits the name very well with added wholesomeness. no further comment
known only as “Plont” sent a bunch of pictures of plants to the whole school. These plonts included the illustrious Dieffenbachia Camille, which is a name I might have just googled a few minutes ago. The plonts numbered at around a dozen and opening the email, I was at first puzzled.
Usually, I don’t like email threads and reply-all messages mainly because I beleaf they ping my notifications too much. But with this one, it turned out to be a good laugh after a long day. It was fun with the endless barrage of plant puns like these:
At some point, the plont email thread seemed to have met an untimely death. We had heard little news after it faded away on the 10th. However, on the 15th, the plont thread was resurrected with good news from Plont and his plants. We’ve been receiving updates since about Plont and the plonts’ health and many sent good wishes and “recover soon” messages when the chemistry GIR caused serious damage to them.
Bc-talk
So bc-talk wasn’t any one particular email or email thread, so it wasn’t unique to that week. I believe this experience overall was somewhat of a throwback to the start of September, but it may have been more recent, as time no longer exists in quarantine.
From what I understand, it’s the email list for people who live/lived in Burton Conner, another dorm at MIT. So basically any kind of promotion (clubs, academics, etc.) can be sent to it and all people on the associated dormspam mailing list. Unlike with most mailing lists, there is a catch in that you have to write a color at the end of your email.
So at first, I thought the colors at the end of the emails were just people’s favorite colors. I was kinda surprised by how many people liked black and grey, but seeing the variety of colors was just fun to see.
Colors like good ol’ “blue,” “martian red,” “polka-dotted,” and “none.”
I could have spent 4 years at MIT thinking like this, and been fairly happy. Over the week (9/7-9/11), I received about 54 emails that explicitly mentioned bc-talk, and saw such a wide variety of colors.
So remember when I talked about underwear colors?
It was an unfortunate surprise to learn I was paying close attention to underwear colors when I actually read my emails. Looking back, probably should have guessed this once I saw polka-dotted. There was no way polka-dotted was a color. But alas, not all good things can last forever.
Tetazoo Glounge
Opinions about “update: Tetazaoo Glounge” are mixed. There are those who hate it, and those who love it.
You can find me in the former. If I ever dropped out of MIT, it would not be because of any class or something like that. It would be from the endless pings of “update: Tetazoo Glounge”. The email thread welcomed us frosh to MIT with its usual 3 words and has not stopped since. My browser crashed when I opened this email thread before and I have not forgiven it since as well. My filters and labels, all rendered useless by this mysterious, EXTREMELY spammy email thread.
I have tried muting the email thread. Tried unsubscribing. Nothing has worked. Everywhere I go, I still see the words “update: Tetazoo Glounge.”
I’m still unsure what a Tetazoo Glounge even is. I’ve heard it’s a floor in East Campus, one of the dorms, but I don’t know why there is an update for it. Well hopefully, in the near future, I’ll be on campus to see what exactly needs to be updated for Tetazoo Glounge.
This is a long belated blog post; it’s been a busy summer. But I didn’t want to wait for the next cycle to begin before I told this collaborative tale from last April.
For me,
strenuous01But not injurious!
exercise isn’t just how I stay fit: it’s how I stay sane. I’ve found I need to continuously register the
connection between body and mind02Cartesian dualism is a pernicious myth.
to keep both in a good, healthy, well-functioning place. And I’ve found I benefit from a diverse range of exercises that all do different things. Yoga teaches me patience. Running teaches me persistence. Surfing teaches me when and how to take risks.
But the most important and fulfilling thing for me is powerlifting, which is just a fancy way of saying
lifting heavy things for its own sake.03Distinguished from bodybuilding, which prioritizes aesthetics.
I love lifting heavy things. I love having to set my body up precisely to execute a lift safely. I love being able to channel all of my aggression and anger out of my body and into the floor on which I’m standing. I love being able to make progress in a way that is measurable in a messy world that so often defies that anachronistic conceit. I love that, as Alyssa Keiko once wrote in an influential essay for the Toast, “it never gets easier, you just get stronger,” which idea Sabrina blogged about in the past too.
I’ve lifted 3-4 days a week almost every week for the past 6 years. Mostly at the Z on campus; sometimes, on the road
where I can find a gym.04I keep a stack of guest passes to the Stanford gym in my wallet, for whenever I'm in the Bay Area. No one tell Kiyoe.
In March, when everything shut down, I spent the first two weeks like everyone else, trying to orient myself to a new reality. I probably needed a break from lifting anyway. But then, the sad head voice started becoming unquiet, so I started strategizing.
I live in a second floor apartment in Central Square. It’s an old house with low ceilings and creaky floors, so it was immediately clear I couldn’t deadlift inside unless I wanted to end up in my landlady’s living room. However, there is a narrow, uneven, paved parking spot next to the building, and she was kind enough to offer me a few square feet for the interim.
At this point, I had a space, but no equipment: no platform, no rack, no bar, no plates. This was early April, and seemingly everyone in the country was trying to buy used gym equipment for their basements, while every manufacturer was shut down or out of stock. After a few days of Craigslist missed connections, I was eventually able to snag a generic big-box store barbell/plate package at a heinous markup from a thirtysomething ginger with a Ron Paul bumper sticker who asked if I could pay him in Bitcoin because he thought the banks were going to fail. Now I had the heavy things, but still needed sturdy ground on which to stand. I could, in principle, buy a rack, but the pandemic price-gouging was likely going to take one out of reach, and in any case that wouldn’t fix my foundation.
My grandfather was an engineer, my father was an engineer, both of my brothers were trained as engineers; I, by contrast, come to this project armed with only two critical theory degrees, a cordless drill, and ambition. I began by Googling homemade power racks and quickly discerned that they involved lots of triangles made by pressure-treated lumber. I didn’t have any CAD software or training, so I started by sketching out my plans, first on paper, then in Google Slides.
very professional
By this time, it was CPW, and we had a big Discord going with all the 2024s, and many upperclassmen, in it. In one of the off-topic chat channels, I mentioned my project and shared my slides. One bored, helpful adMIT named Wilson S. ’24 took pity upon me and decided to turn my sketch into actual accurate renderings.
oh
I was greatly touched by Wilson’s help, and told him how grateful I was. In response, he sent the following meme to like 2,000 people.
this is what i deserve
Armed with Wilson’s rendering, I rented a UHaul and drove to Home Depot, the same one from which Jamie C. ’19 and I (among others) had once bought the materials to build a cinder block oven for a disastrously large pie. I loaded up lots of lumber, decking screws, and pipe fittings, and drove them back home.
The next day, former blogger (and
Course 205MIT speak for Mechanical Engineering.
alumna) Selam G. ’18 walked over to help me build the platform (with masks, at a distance).
cue montage
builder buddies
the materials
Selam preparing to cut lumber to size on a table "borrowed" from the office that we usually use for committee
metal is the best music for drilling things
selam celebrating the base frame
the base frame with floor
scientifically level af
selam resting and admiring her work on the mostly-completely platform
now installing plate racks
because skulls make everything better
After a long day’s work, Selam went home, and the next day I went out and put the finishing touches on my big wooden son.
the final result
Since then, I’ve been back to my old habits, lifting 3-4 days a week. After a slow start from the time off I PR’d all my old lifts and learned some new ones. I like lifting outside. It presents new conveniences, given the fact that I just have to go downstairs, but also new challenges: the rain, the heat (and soon, the cold), birds and spiders and an inquisitive neighbor’s kid who likes to hang his head over the fence and ask me about dinosaurs between sets. The challenges keep me grounded too. If it’s raining, I can’t lift, and I have to be okay with that. I have to attend to the weather and the wind and the things outside of me that affect me, because these too are part of what affect me and are then incorporated into my through each workout.
Whenever I lift on this platform, it also makes me think about all the people who made it possible for me to do this. My landlady for giving me the space; the neighbors for tolerating the noise; Wilson for making my sketches into models; Selam for helping me put it all together. There’s something about the community collaboration that makes it more special, like what I imagine it must be like to have your friends organize a barn-raising to help you out in a time of need. I’m endlessly grateful to them for their kindness in helping me attain some modicum of stability and happiness in a difficult time.
When this all started, I remember doing the math on all the equipment I was buying and wondering if it would be worth it if/when the gyms reopened. I decided that, if I had to use the platform through, say, July, the three months would be worth it. Now it’s almost October, the Z is closed to non-campus staff through the rest of the year, and my new plans are sketching how I’m going to build a polycarbonate roof to keep the worst of the snow and ice off the platform. In a confusing, chaotic, unsteady world, I like having a rock-solid foundation on which to stand, and slowly, surely get stronger with the help of my friends.
in swim class, our instructor emphasizes the importance of relaxing.
“you’re in the water and your body tenses up. why? it’s because of the fear. it’s natural, it’s instinctive, it’s thinking that tensing up the muscles will help you float. but it doesn’t. you’ve got to let go of the fear.”
the first day of beginner swimming was last tuesday, and i viscerally remember shaking out of fear as i walked up to the doors leading to the pools. i remember milling around the locker room waiting for eleven o’clock to hit before stepping into the pool area and heading to the teaching pool. i remember cold shower water and cold air, and i remember shivering as i walked from the shower to the pool.
of all the classes i’ve taken so far, it is swim class that has made me feel the worse about underperforming. sure, half of the people in a class are below median, and i’ve been in that half several times now, and i’m lucky that i’ve never really felt that bad about it. but when there’s only six of us in the pool, and i can see how far others get when they push off and glide, or see how fast they can go from one end to the other when they sidestroke, it feels bad, in a felt sense.
i’ve been having more and more vivid dreams lately, often bordering on nightmares. i’d wake up and i’d feel tense, anxious, and i could hear, audibly, my heartbeat ringing in my ears. my psychiatrist says that it could be because i’m processing my trauma. or it could be because of the sertraline. or both, or neither, and the thing is that it’s impossible to tell, really.
i thought that the overarching theme of these dreams was escape: of running away from all that i had to do in the waking world, because i was overwhelmed, and because in my dreams, i could be wherever i want, with whomever i wanted. my psychiatrist thought that the overarching theme was loneliness, and said that maybe it’s because i felt that i’ve been left alone, out in the harsh world, to fend for myself.
a friend i talked to about my dreams thinks it’s neither, and that the theme is of having my trust being broken. that all of them had me placing my trust in someone, only to have it broken in some way. at first i said that this didn’t sound right, because i like to think of myself as a very trusting person. i like to think of myself as someone who has pretty high faith in people in general. but i could see his point, and it really was the case that most of my dreams had the same pattern.
for the past five nights i have constantly felt on the verge of crying. i’d be sitting in front of my computer, and it’d be ten or eleven in the evening, and it’d just come upon me, like hands pressing down on my forehead. my chest would feel half as light, and i’d feel the muscles around my eyes become tense.
it’d be pointed at a general frustration with my life. i’m doing too much homework and i’m not really enjoying my classes, or i’m struggling on a difficult problem set, or i’d feel randomly lonely, yet didn’t feel like talking to people. after all, i’m doing a lot of academic work right now, more than i’ve done before. or, you know, i’ve been seeing so many people through screens, and even the people i’ve seen in real life i couldn’t really get too close to. so it’s justified, right?
but the thing is, none of these reasons feel like the right one. it feels like something much, much older, like a profound emptiness, a hole torn into me years ago. one previously covered with tape, but which the wind blew open again.
after one of my nightmares last week, i remember waking up so tense that i call up some friends to see if anyone could talk, or even come over and give me a hug. but everyone was asleep, or busy. i felt awful. i felt my body become heavier and heavier. i feel the bed sag under my weight, and it bursts open, and i fall through the floor.
and then i wake up again. it was just a dream.
And I feel my past regrets
Slipping into present tense
So we stare at the wind
Cursing God through all our sin
This past semester, I haven’t been taking much care of myself. Lately, I’ve been feeling very unwhole. Stuck, almost. Every week seems to run the same, where my Friday through Sunday is filled with
009, 009, and more 009.016.009 is Fundamentals of Python. It's usually the second or third computer science class you take at MIT and it features weekly labs (they're basically psets, we just call them labs) that take the average individual about 10 hours to complete. If you are on the better end of the CS scale, it'll take you maybe 5-7. If you are on the worse end of the CS scale, then you'll be around 10-12 hours. I've been essentially trying to squeeze these entire ten hour labs into three days so I don't have to worry about them during the week.
Endless Python runs, the occasional five minute quick cry, frantic and frustrated key presses as I’m anxiously bent over my computer, staring at the screen and waiting for that green PASSED to show.
this is what i mean
Then my Mondays are spent relaxing a bit or catching up with 18.02. Mainly it’s just catching up with 18.02. This semester, I made the foolish mistake of taking two classes that occur at the same time, 8.021 and 18.02. I thought this would be okay because a) they’re both on P/NR for me and b) 18.02 is asynchronous, meaning I can watch lectures asynchronously and get all the content for the class. However, 18.02 hosts these helpful Q&A sessions at the time that class would normally occur (Tuesdays and Thursdays 1-2PM), when I am in 8.021 giving my full effort and brain power. Taking asynchronous classes also does a bit more damage than good because I also never…watch the lectures usually. By the time I finish all my work for my other classes, I’m usually too hosed to even bother watching lectures.
This is bad. This is very bad.
So essentially I’ve been doing somewhat okay in my three other classes (8.021, 21G.703, and 6.009…oh yes. I dropped two classes! Surprise!), but 18.02 has unfortunately been kind of left behind in my productivity study train. It’s been building and building and building and unfortunately I just haven’t had the time to dedicate to it. I often hop between classes to extracurriculars to just trying to find time to rest but really not…getting any.
This past month, I’ve also been hit with a slurry of health issues. I’ve been going in and out of MIT Medical for the past three weeks for a mix of private health issues, my ankle injury, and stress-induced eczema flare-ups.
When I was a kid, I had pretty severe eczema. My skin would dry up and get extremley red and I would scratch it to the point where my skin would become cracked, open and bloody. It was pretty mortifying as a kid, especially since my eczema made me feel very ugly and unlovable and I became very hyperconscious of my skin and my appearance as a result. For those of you who know me, you’ll know I have a somewhat vigorous skincare routine and I’m pretty adamant about moisturizing and lotion.
However, no amount of lotion can combat eczema when it’s caused by something that is constant and ongoing. One of my major causes of my eczema is stress. Generally just being stressed causes my scalp to flake, my face to break out, and, surprise surprise, my eczema to flare up! For the past two weeks, my eyes have been red and puffy and angry. I essentially looked like I had really poorly applied red eyeshadow on a large radius of my face and it was incredibly humiliating to have to Zoom into my classes like that.
This past weekend, when it kind of cleared up, I decided to take a day for myself and go out to Newbury. Funnily enough, I ran into Jeremy (the MIT AO!) there with his friend and we talked for a long time just about life, MIT, and existence in general. It was a very well needed break and I remember just being so awestruck by just being outside again. I remember walking down Newbury just the slightest bit teary-eyed because I was so amazed by how beautiful Boston was. I had nearly forgotten.
I had a good and wholesome day, getting breakfast at LA Burdicks before heading to walk around Newbury, running into Jeremy, and then going to Trident to work for the rest of the day.
And when I returned home, it felt like the end of a dream. Not quite like returning back to a cage, but more of just dropping back into reality. Back when I was on campus living at MIT, I would try to never study in Random. I found it was hard for me to study in the same areas that I slept and lived. I would try my best to leave and go to random cafes and to Stud5 (the fifth floor of our Student Center) to study. COVID took that away from me briefly, but going to Trident and sitting there for hours surrounded by the smell of sweet coffee and the quiet buzz of other college kids’ chatter reminded me of why I needed that environment in the first place.
The next day, I woke up and worked on 009. And more 009. And cried. And took a break to watch Howl’s Moving Castle in between bits of coding because I couldn’t stop crying. And more 009. And passed those test cases you saw up there, but that was at 2 in the morning (very early Monday morning) which meant I had spent the literal entire day coding. I felt defeated and exhausted and burned out.
The next morning, I didn’t wake up feeling any better. It just felt like any little movement, any small thing that could set me off, would set me off and I would just collapse back into crying. I knew this definitely was not normal so I became really wary of my mental state. It felt fragile and unstable, ready to just let go at any moment.
Then, later that night, I remember feeling the beginnings of a cold and my body erupted into itchiness all over, little rashes and patches of eczema encompassing my body. My arms, my legs, my eyes, my entire face even, my hands. And so I stared at the ceiling, red and itchy and gross and nauseous and with a raging migraine, and I just wanted to cry.
Which brings us here, to 5:27 on this fair Tuesday, where I am now sitting in a cafe in Back Bay and typing this very blogpost to talk about my mental health. In the time that has elapsed from my very bad Monday night to this current Tuesday evening, I have taken a lot of steps towards taking care of myself.
I woke up and went to MIT Medical for my orthopedic appointment. They gave me some good news and said my fracture had completely healed and if they hadn’t had any record of my fracture, they wouldn’t have even known I had had a fracture. Unfortunately, it still hurts a bit when pressure is placed on it, so I will have to wear the boot for the remaining two weeks, but at least I know I’m not broken anymore! Among all of these health issues and stressors and things, my 18.02 class scheduled an unmovable midterm during the same time and day as my Spanish oral assessment, which is…technically illegal (by MIT policy). When I tried explaining my conflict, 18.02 told me that ‘class conflicts’ were not a valid reason to miss a midterm. Thank you, 18.02. Very cool. Still kind of angry about this, especially amidst a pandemic, but what can ya do?
As I walked out of MIT Medical, I realized I still had my 18.02 midterm, which just made me want to crumple up and cry. I didn’t study for my 18.02 midterm because I was far too mentally drained from the hell that was 6.009 and far too physically drained from the angry red bumps that now covered my whole body. I then messaged in the Admissions Blogger slack if my stress-induced rashes/eczema was a valid enough reason to call S cubed, to which I received 4 very aggressive “YES”s. So when I got back to the apartment, I called S cubed, Student Support Services, and proceeded to go into their virtual office hours. I was then transferred over to the Dean on Call and I tried to explain my situation to him calmly, but ended up just breaking down in office hours. I hadn’t realized how tired I was or how close I was to crying, but merely just talking about my situation alone overwhelmed me.
He thankfully was able to get me an exception for my 18.02 midterm, moving it now to this Thursday, and after the call I went into my Spanish oral evaluation.
Afterwards, I went into my 8.021 lecture and learned about conductors. And then I played rhythm games on my MIT-issued iPad (thank you MIT). And then I headed out because I needed to get out again and feel that freedom and awe I felt when I walked down Newbury, which brings us here. To me sitting in Jaho in Back Bay surrounded by Northeastern students sipping their boba teas and iced coffees and working in Illustrator or catching a quick chat with a friend. And I feel somewhat at peace again.
This semester has taken much more from me than I originally anticipated. I felt myself giving and giving and giving, whether that was my time or my words or my emotions and feelings, and found very little time to regenerate all that was lost.
I am slowly working on trying to find that time again. I find it in little things, like playing Minecraft on the Nintendo Switch with my boyfriend, or playing guitar, or walking around Boston and breathing in air that doesn’t come out of my apartment’s AC units.
There are still lots of things I need to fix. I stopped working out briefly because of my ankle and I think that made things a lot worse. I’m going to start working out again, but keeping weight off of my ankle. This still upsets me a bit, since I really miss cardio, but my only option for cardio right now is swimming, and unfortunately there is no pool around me. I feel a bit heavier and more bloated and my body doesn’t look and feel right, but hopefully in these next two weeks my foot will heal alright and I’ll be able to work it all off.
(In fact, I just read Petey’s most recent post and I think it’s really incredible how much physical fitness, lifting, and working out is tied to my mental health. My mental health drop and all the Bad Things directly coincided with when I stopped working out. For the record, I stopped working out last Thursday because I knew my ankle appointment was coming up and I wanted to try and rest it up.)
I desperately would like my eczema to calm down, but hopefully with a couple days off and some relaxation, I’ll be able to get my skin back in check. My self esteem is…heavily tied to my skin (for better or for worse) so it’s definitely been really disheartening and ego-blowing to have my skin flare up like this.
I want this to be a good semester and so far it has the potential to be: I’m part of things I’m passionate about, I love all my TAs and my professors and my classes, I’m interested in what I’m learning. And I don’t really know where to go from here, or what the rest of the semester will look like, but I just hope it’s better. Or that I will get better and learn myself better and treat myself better, because that’s what I deserve.
happy wednesday. sending much love to you all in the middle of your week.
**mild/moderate Avatar: The Last Airbender spoilers, but also this show’s been around for like over a decade soooooooooo, y’know, there’s that**
In the TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender, Zuko, the show’s main villain for the first two seasons, falls very ill after freeing avatar Aang’s beloved sky bison, which he could have used as bait to capture Aang. Capturing the avatar is the only way that Zuko, who has been disgraced and banished from his family and his homeland, will be welcomed back as the prince of the Fire Nation. This has been his life’s goal on the order of years. The act of showing mercy to the avatar challenges the very core of Zuko’s identity, to the point that he becomes extremely physically ill. Once he successfully fights the illness, he emerges as almost a completely different person, working with his uncle to start a tea shop and build a simple, happy life in the Earth Kingdom.
The visual and narrative effect of Zuko fighting an infection is such a clever and beautiful way of showing the audience how painful it is to change on a deep, fundamental level. Just as the body fights infection, Zuko is engaged in a battle within where one part of himself –the compassionate and sensitive person he truly is– is finally confronting another –the angry, cruel person he’s been asked to be by his family and his nation, the parasite. While Zuko is sick, he switches which side of himself he identifies with to the authentic one, pushing the rage that once defined him into the passenger seat of his psyche. Of course, it isn’t this simple. As the series continues, Zuko periodically slips back into the person he once was as he’s faced with stressors and temptations, like being welcomed back into the royal family, but this is the turning point. His commitment to change starts here, and as time goes on, it becomes easier and easier for Zuko to listen to his heart instead of a lifetime of unhealthy conditioning.
I remember seeing this scene for the first time when I was much younger and not thinking much of it. But now, on the cusp of turning 20 and having rewatched it a few months ago, I find it’s not only a powerful piece of media, but an amazing tool in discussing the challenges of self-discovery and intentional change, those of which I’m currently facing in my own life.
I think that at some point, everyone is presented with a moment where they get to choose whether or not they’re going to be the person they are, or the person they were taught to be by their family, their friends, their communities and/or society at large. I ran into one of these opportunities a little while ago, and I decided that I was going to do something for myself that conflicted with everything I’d ever believed about me and my relation to the world: I asked for help. Ever since, the struggle to find myself –what I believe, what I value, who I am– has been the primary project of my existence. Kinda like Zuko, I’m “fighting an infection”, the person I once was and the person I want to be furiously struggling to overpower one another and leaving me –the physical thing that, y’know, blogs and does psets and responds to people’s texts– really fucking tired. Illness requires healing. Exertion requires rest. Change, the kind that obliterates your old identity so it can be rebuilt anew, requires time and privacy.
I wanted to publicize my taking a break from my responsibilities as a blogger vs. slipping silently into ~the void~ because I think it’s important to see the people you look up to engage in self-compassion. I know a lot of the people reading these blogs look to us bloggers for wisdom, and as someone who supposedly holds wisdom, I want you to know that stepping away from a good thing so you can take care of yourself is okay. Barely passing three classes in a major that fascinates you is okay. Quitting your high school robotics team and leaving behind all the little wires you like playing with is okay. Taking a break from a job you love is okay. It doesn’t matter if you have the flu, or you’re on a personal journey, or your situation requires a team of specialists and a seemingly unending series of grueling attempts to change the toxic beliefs that led you to toxic behaviors: It’s okay to take a step back –or really do just about anything– just because it’s important to you. I think this might be one of those fundamental truths about being human that I’m only just discovering.
I might hop back on the blogs time and again this semester to say something, but only if I feel inclined to. In the meantime, I’ll be eating some metaphorical soup and taking some metaphorical cold medicine. And maybe someday I’ll open a metaphorical tea shop, where we can all sit around a table, telling stories and reveling in just how full and beautiful a simple cup of jasmine can really be.
In August I celebrated my four year
workiversary05as the in-house designer on the communications team at MIT Admissions and Student Financial Services. Essentially, in the months when I’m not reading applications, sitting on the admissions committee, or
doing recruitment travel,06In a typical year, that is.
I am responsible for setting up our major publications to print (like the Affording Your MIT Education book for SFS, and the Application Guide, Best of the Blogs, and Make History poster for Admissions), designing the admitted student packages, and producing a slew of miscellaneous materials—everything from fact sheets, keynote presentations, business cards, advertisements, and even
laser-etched wooden challenge coins.07But I’ll save that story for another time...
A major part of being a designer of any kind is being comfortable with the fact that most things you make will never see the light of day. And this is something that I’m still getting used to, four years on the job.
For every publication I design that gets sent to press and mailed to thousands of prospective students, there are at least five other versions that got scrapped in discovery, rejected during final approval, or cancelled due to budget constraints. Often times, the only other set of eyes that see my projects are Kellen’s, because—back when we worked on campus—he sat at the desk behind me and could see what I was working on from my obnoxiously large monitor.
For the dual-purpose sake of nostalgia and decluttering my desktop, let’s take a quick retrospective at a few projects that
never were.08Although, if you think about it, this blog is a way to reincarnate them. Perhaps this was their fate all along?
2017
Campus Preview Weekend
In the fall of 2017, I introduced a new set of brand standards for Campus Preview Weekend, set to be unveiled in April 2018. The new brand was complete with a refreshed logo, new color palette, and a suite of merchandise, like water bottles, lanyards, and shirts. But, as every designer knows, it’s not a rebranding if you don’t mock it up on a tote bag. (!!!)
Unfortunately, our budget had other plans, so these were never produced. And as much as I love convincing the world I actually read my subscription to
The New Yorker,09Honestly? I’m a few months behind.
I still would have loved the opportunity to rep MIT at the grocery store with one of these bags.
This was meant to be given out to students at CPW check-in with a matching water bottle.
I also made a matching gift bags for parents. I think that year they just got a map, instead!
2018
Admissions web concepts
Some of you might remember that we redesigned the sites for Admissions and SFS a few years back. We did, in fact, hire a professional agency to take on this project—and I am very much not an employee at said professional web design agency. But did that stop me from designing web concepts of my own? Of course not. Like any good tragic hero, I was my own worst enemy on this one.
Here’s a look at the admissions homepage, featuring a scrolling carousel of recent blog posts.
A snapshot of a full blog post, featuring Shuli!
This is the landing page for the “apply” section, which offers a related blog of encouragement from The Twins.
It was a lot easier for me to focus on sharpening my UI and web design skills because I was working in familiar content territory (as opposed to designing a site for a fake company, hypothetical product, or an organization I’m less familiar with). As an added bonus, these web mockups offer a rare example of work I’ve made intentionally designed with color! (It shouldn’t take long to notice that my design preferences gravitate toward black, white, and grey—much like my wardrobe).
For all my type nerds out there, I paired Recoleta by Latinotype with Calibre by Klim Type Foundry. Even if it was a gratuitous exercise, I still like how these turned out, and I think they deserve some archival acknowledgement.
Class of 2023 tube concepts
Ever year I take the lead in designing the packages we send to admitted students. Colloquially they are known as “the tubes,” named after the silver packing tubes we use to ship them. Alongside their admit letter and some other important documents, we like to create a print or poster of some kind that unique to the admitted class—and it is usually centered around some kind of concept or theme.
Though we ended up going in a different direction, my earliest plans for the ’23 poster were based around optical illusions and tricks of the eye. I found a cool quote from Ada Lovelace, mathematician and early computer programmer, about imagination, and I set out to build the tube theme around imagination as a creative form of escape—an illusion of reality, of sorts
thanks to @haugentheodor for the mockup
After rendering all sorts of impossible triangles and illusions, I eventually led myself astray down a rabbit hole of isometric patterns. I don’t really remember what I was thinking here, but I do remember that these were exceptionally fun to make. Still, the isometric designs never coalesced into a solid concept, and ended up looking more like custom MIT 2023 gift wrap…
Red and white isometric pattern option
Black and white variation
In the end, I scrapped all of these ideas and started over completely.
2019
Class of 2024 stickers
In the wake of the global pandemic, in-person Campus Preview Weekend this past April was cancelled, a month-long virtual variation (CP✱) taking its place. With the move from in-person to online, I introduced a Limited Edition virtual CPW brand (which you can learn more about here!), which was an unexpected opportunity to create some new design work. Unfortunately, some projects I had planned pre-cancellation got lost in the virtual shuffle.
One of those projects that got left behind were holographic stickers I made for the Class of 2024 to give away at CPW. The stickers feature a minimalist flextangle graphic, referencing the custom 24-sided flextangle I designed for the Class of 2024 tubes.
We based their tube concept on the tesseract, and its ability to fold between worlds. The concept was framed as students were travel from wherever they call home to build their new home
at MIT,10We decided on this concept in the fall of 2019—not realizing just how difficult traveling between homes would soon become.
the tesseract was a symbol of that transition.
(While we’re on the subject, check out this tube unboxing video from blogger Mel N. ’24! She’s going to love that I’m including that video in this blog…)
video by Binh P. ’24 / gif made by me
With everything that came up with shifting to a virtual CPW, the stickers never got made. This was much to the disappointment of several the sticker-obsessed ’24s in Discord—who are properly aligned within MIT’s well-established laptop sticker culture. I don’t want to make any enemies out of the ’24s, so I’ll have to look into getting these printed and shipped to campus once we’re all back.
2020
For me, design is as much about letting go as it is about creating.
Much of this year so far has been about pivoting out of dead ends, and I am grateful to have developed some semblance of design resilience in the years prior that have made these circumstances slightly less immobilizing.
There are dozens of projects cursed to a lifetime of purgatory in my drafts—some of them even better than the versions that were completed!—but the reality of being a designer is accepting that rejections, criticisms, and alterations are a fundamental part of the craft. It’s not about being a Creative Genius whose work is taken at face value as a masterpiece. Embracing change in all of its forms is just as important as any design sensibility, artistic vision, or so-called creative genius.
Yes. A small part of me still feels disappointed after a project doesn’t end up making it. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in four years at MIT, it’s that the best way to ameliorate the frustration of dead-end designs is to keep designing.
I’m writing this sitting at my aunt’s kitchen table, at midnight, waiting for my next class, and then an info session, and my tutoring job after. From her balcony window, I can see the bright lights of the town’s shopping mall, the deserted town square with its Kremlin-shaped playground sets. I can imagine the outline of the forest I would see in the distance, in the morning. Except that I won’t see it in the morning light. Because I’ll be asleep. Because I’m living somewhere between Boston time and Moscow time, and as a result I go to bed at 4 am and wake up at noon. Except it’s not that simple. Some days, I wake up at 8 by some messed-up instinct, and then I jaunt around for the morning, and crash for a nap in the afternoon and feel sleepy for the rest of the evening. But I feel sleepy all day anyway. Every day. My sleep schedule needs help. So much help that my friend and I tried to build a sleep scheduling website for
HackMIT,01an annual hackathon, which happened last weekend
with little success and little
sleep,02ironic, I know
but lots of fun.
Allow me to explain from the beginning, though. I’m in a small town in Russia. Why I’m here is a complicated question, so I’ll start with the how.
On the morning of Saturday, September 12th, I attended a few Zoom sessions in the morning for
panhellenic recruitment,03spoiler alert: I joined a sorority! definitely a topic for a future post
then stressed about not being able to fit all the books I want to read into my suitcase, then put on my velvet tracksuit, and finally hopped on an Uber to the airport with my parents.
view from my gate at jfk… how i’d missed this
Now, you have to understand the importance of this moment. I’m obsessed with airports. I love them so, so much. Airports were an integral part of my childhood, and being in an airport never fails to invoke some sort of Feelings in some corner of my heart. There’s a sense of wonder to the idea of an airport. The interconnectedness of all things, and all places, and all peoples. Airports inhabit the space in between, the same way I myself exist in between (two cultures, two countries). And yet, standing in JFK airport in 2020, I felt something different. It was so empty: almost no people, no lines to be seen anywhere at all. And in that emptiness, I felt a distance where I would usually feel closeness. The pandemic has made everything so far away, and all of us so distant from each other. It hurt to see an airport like this, to hear its haunting quiet. And yet, being in JFK, like old times – it was mundane in the best way. I said goodbye to my parents. I went through security. I got a latte from Dunkin. I sat by the huge glass windows, and crammed my
18.0304differential equations
reading quiz that was due in the time I would be on the plane. But I also kept my mask on, and maintained a six-foot distance when possible, and sanitized my hands at every chance I could get, which is by this point mundane in an entirely different way.
I almost missed my transfer in London. I was originally very excited to see Heathrow airport, which I’d never been to. It’s huge. I had to take a connecting train to get from my plane to the main terminal hub, and then another to get from the hub to my connecting flight to Moscow. This is cool and all, but it takes time, and there are lines, and in the effort to maintain a modicum of social distancing, everything was so slow. I was also unprepared for the rigor of British airport security. It’s hard to describe, but the system they have organized at the checkpoint in Heathrow is somehow both more streamlined and at once slower than anything I’ve ever seen in an American airport. Between waiting in line, having my conveyor close because someone was holding it up, and getting my bag flagged for manual inspection [they didn’t end up finding anything], I spent well over an hour of my two-hour connection time just going through security. Thankfully, most of the passengers on my flight to Moscow were also transferring and having the same problems, so the flight was delayed and I was okay. Still, I’ll make sure to book at least four hours to transfer on my way back, for peace of mind. And I’m still upset that I didn’t get to fully enjoy being in a beautiful airport and seeing the sunrise through its windows.
the only pic I got from heathrow before i realized i needed to hustle to make my flight ://but look at that sunrise!!
My uncle met me at the airport in Moscow, and we drove out of the city, to the small town where my mom grew up, a few hours away from the capital. Russia doesn’t actually require a quarantine for travelers entering the country, as long as they test negative for COVID within three days of their arrival. I’ll admit that this makes me uneasy. The entire way in which Russia is handling the pandemic (by pretending that it’s over) makes me uneasy. Such are the times we live in. I of course got tested immediately (it came back negative), and I’ve been trying to avoid as much contact with others as possible in the two weeks since I’ve gotten here. Which brings me to my aunt’s apartment, where I’ve been living and studying and watching life go by outside the window.
driving through moscow!
That answers the question of how I’m in Russia. But… why? Why there, why now, why suffer the time difference and the twelve hours straight in a mask? The truth is, I’m not sure. Which isn’t so much to say that I don’t think I had a good reason to come as it is that I don’t know how to articulate that reason.
I could tell you that I was feeling very restless after months of quarantine and forced introspection, and I really wanted to move out, move away, go somewhere, do something. I could tell you that I wanted to live alone, but NYC is too expensive and I didn’t want to go to Cambridge and rub salt into the wound of college being online. Maybe I wanted to assert my burgeoning sense of adulthood at a time when college is just some more boxes on a screen and I’m asking myself, did I really even leave the mental space of high school? Maybe I needed a distraction, something to take over my life and my thoughts so that I wouldn’t focus on how much this semester isn’t what I imagined it would be. Maybe I wanted to take back a sense of control, to make the semester something good and memorable and special.
This is my plan: I’ve rented an apartment in St Petersburg. For all of October and most of November, I’ll be living there, alone, learning remotely on a weird schedule and walking around the city and taking it in and experiencing it. I’m in love with that city, but have never spent more than a week there at once. And I’ve always wanted to live in Russia for a significant period of time. After spending every vacation here as a child, I wonder how much of the warmth and feeling of home and familiarity came from these places themselves, and how much came from the time. I wonder also if I can ever shake the subtle feeling of foreignness – I know I pass, but do I belong here? Do I want to?
For my high school yearbook quote, I simply put the words “why not?” I’d like to think that that’s the mindset with which I approach life. Not all actions need a well thought out, calculated reason. Sometimes, the lack of significant counterarguments is reason enough in itself.
This is all to say, I wanted an adventure, an experience, something real amid the virtual-ness of it all. For now, I’ve gotten a messed-up sleep schedule, and lots of good food, and a decent dose of stress from falling behind in my classes. The adventure is coming, though. By the time you read this, I’ll be in Moscow, stopping over for a few days on my way to one of the most beautiful cities in the world.
Sixteen months ago, in April, I made a promise to myself: if you choose MIT, you get to take a gap year. You’ve been selling your soul to science for too long. I was walking along a riverbed and I was torn. I spent most of high school letting academics, particularly science, overwhelm me and eat up all my writing time. I didn’t want to go to MIT, because I thought that it would be more of the same; but I couldn’t not go, for it would teach me more science than I’d get anywhere else.
So I went and took that gap year, and it was pretty cool. I’ll blog about that, too, someday. I set out feeling that a year was not enough, but my mindset changed after months of milking goats and carefully calculating whether it was cheaper to buy groceries or just eat three-euro
pizza01Pizza, you idiot, you were in Naples. I was ready once again to learn — not only math and why the hell the Heisenberg uncertainty principle makes any sense, but also how ancient nations rise, and how to write a love interest that readers root for.
Specifically I wanted to take a writing class and a Greek history class. But at CPW, whenever I told anyone — even
HASS02HASS = Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences instructors — that I wanted to take two HASS classes, they laughed at me. So I knew that I would really have to fight with my advisor to get this to go through.
I was ready. This is what I’ve been trained to do. Every time I wanted to take a hard science class in high school, someone would sit me down and say things like “Amber, you do not know calculus. You should not take physics C.” And I would nod and say that I agreed, and then I would book another appointment with a different counselor, until someone put me in physics C. And then I tried to cancel out the d’s in dy/dx as one would do with fractions.
I crafted a very clever plan, sort of like the plan you make when you are eight. You say, “Mom, can I buy that entire cake and eat it?” Of course she will say no, but she will feel a little bad about saying no, so when you ask to get a cookie she is more likely to say yes.
My
math score03from the math diagnostic test which all freshmen take was good enough for MIT to grant me credit for AP Physics C, but simultaneously was not good enough for me to take 8.012, the advanced version of common core physics. My plan was to ask to take it anyway, since my advisor would definitely say no. I would argue a little, then give up and say, “Ok, but can I at least take this writing class?”
Except apparently my advisor is super chill, so he pretty much said “Cool, go ahead.”
He let me take the Greek and creative writing classes, too. Somehow I got in to both, even though they’re capped at 15
students04the number of times I have almost deleted this, or considered re-phrasing so that the world doesn’t know I am taking two HASSes, where anywhere else, taking hard chemistry and hard physics and Greek history and writing would be considered smart and not shameful -- don’t let it get to you, kid.
.
So envision yourself walking home, now, carrying the chocolate cake that you are miraculously allowed to eat. All of it. Tonight.
That’s roughly how I felt after the first physics lecture, and the second, and the third. I love physics, when the derivations are slow and detailed enough to follow. But these are not, or else I am out of practice. This class is hard.
my laptop looks like it’s floating, but really it’s sitting on top of a book
It kind of feels like a replay of Physics C my junior year, where I was not quite prepared, and the thrill of learning anyway made me feel alive. That class made me feel stupid and brilliant at various times (usually the former). It stressed the hell out of me. I remain convinced that that class got me in to
MIT05this is probably not true. Admissions looks at a lot of different factors. You don’t need to have done this to get in, and doing this won’t necessarily get you in. I did not have any STEM internships when I applied, so I feel that this class helped me.. So I wonder if, subconsciously, I put myself here again on purpose. My brain does not know that it is possible to learn without suffering.
Also, I am not used to being in an environment where the lowest level of a class will still challenge you and teach you. I know, logically, that MIT Physics is very different from an AP class in Arizona. But psychologically, I am scared of missing out.
I think that this is the case for many frosh, in many different colleges. It’s a sort of Pavlovian cycle: taking the harder route worked once, so I’ll do it again, and I am determined to make it
work06what do I even mean by work? My friend I could not tell you.. Then when I’m done, I’ll think it worked because of that class, when really I might have been fine either way. And do we keep on doing this, sacrificing more time and happiness in exchange for hard classes and good GPAs, so as to get internships, or get in to grad school? How much will you give to your job, and how much will you want to?
I wonder if I’ve failed myself, because I said that I would spend time on my writing and not waste it here. But maybe this, challenging myself to learn, is also part of who I am.
Maybe part of who I am — or who I try to be — is being where I am not wanted. They are giving two exams before
add date07the deadline for adding a class. If we wanted to switch in to 8.01, we'd have to add it to our schedule before this date., for the purpose of letting us “decide if this class is a good fit.” Hearing that, I thought, “You will not weed me out, sir.”
Maybe I’m having my last laugh, trying to be good at a difficult class, when I know I will not be academically remarkable in the thrall of MIT. Unlike some, I will not devote all my time to an impressive, demanding major. There are too many other things I care
about08I realize that this blog is just me wrestling with my ego.
.
Or maybe I just want to learn physics. I like to think that, anyway.
The authors of this textbook make sassy comments in the middle of dense paragraphs. I understand calculus now, which means I can see the patterns to equations that three years ago I was only copying down. My professor explained a bit of his research last week, regarding the strong force in eight different dimensions, and I wanted to understand more.
If we’re going back to you (or me) sitting at the kitchen table, with that chocolate cake, I’ll say it’s almost 10 pm. The night is young. I’ve eaten maybe half a piece. So far I think I like it.
Guys, in spite of everything that’s happened, I’m having a college experience and it’s absolutely wild.
Me and six other friends from my living community are living in near MIT in a place we’ve dubbed “soft house,” since, well, “soft” sounds like “soph.” IT’S SO GREAT.
Living with six of my closest friends is more fun than I could’ve imagined. We’re all equal amounts dedicated to working and having fun, so we grind out psets on weekends and then party after. It’s great to be surrounded by hardworking people because it motivates me to not laze around or procrastinate by watching Harry Potter for the nth time. On a normal day, there are at least four of us working in the kitchen at all times, with others joining now and then based on their schedules. It’s great since we can take meetings in our rooms and then hang out with everyone else whenever we want.
We also work out together!! One of the guys I’m living with is in ROTC and was assigned some kind of fitness training role, so he started leading workouts for us. The first night I tried, we did it outside at 11 pm, and it was actually incredible. I hadn’t worked out in more than a year, straight up, but now I’m a routine of doing it every night with the others. I love it!! Our large backyard area is really conducive to doing strenuous workouts at ungodly hours and I couldn’t be happier about it.
Occasionally, we do massive family dinners. I’m not usually part of communal cooking because I like having a bit more flexibility, but when we do make things in a big group, it’s wonderful. Last Friday night, we made dumplings while blasting Hamilton and it was honestly some of the most fun I’ve had in months. An amazing thing about this area is that it’s full of college students, which means that at least one person in our vicinity is blasting music on weekends and we don’t have to feel bad about doing the same.
outside workin vibes
Words can’t express how much I enjoy living in this house. Since I knew my dorm, Burton Conner, would be closed for renovations, I was planning on moving somewhere like this even before COVID hit. But considering everything that’s happened since March, now that this has been realized, it seems like a dream come true. I don’t have a single qualm about being here and I’m beginning to feel like moving back into my dorm when it opens up might be difficult to adjust to…I definitely miss living in a dorm since I was surrounded by so many people, but having space to myself is nice. REALLY nice.
One thing that’s interesting about living in a group like this is having to be organized about meeting everyone’s needs. Our meeting for the chore division established a regimen that mostly worked for a couple of weeks, but some people started taking on the burden of cleaning communal spaces more than others, so we had to sit down again and have a discussion. We also have to have semi-regular house meetings to talk about things like our stances on having people over, since some people are comfortable with it if the guests have been tested, while others are in favor of keeping contact just to people in the house. We’re getting better at working things out, though. Sometimes, when things are contentious, some of us pull up to house meetings with agendas, which is kind of hilarious to think about; you can really tell when people are exec members of various clubs.
Living in a house is entirely different from living in a dorm. For one, you’re in closer quarters, so you learn more about your roommates than you ever would if you were just sharing a suite. You also have to operate as a unit, so there’s a lot more centrality in decision making. It can be stifling at times, but I mostly enjoy it.
Being here is such a blessing. There’s always someone to go to Target with me, or to go work in the nearby park with me when the weather’s nice, or to drink/spill tea with me in quick breaks between classes. Last year, I had a much more diverse set of interactions with people, but given the circumstances, I’m having a great time spending the majority of my day with the same group of people. Sophomore year is HELLA rough and I don’t know how I’d survive it if I weren’t living here.
Recently, I’ve stopped listening to new music releases in favor of listening to old music for the sake of ~ nostalgia ~ and oh boy, these nostalgia trips have been hitting harder than expected.
I’ve had an incredible musical journey throughout my life and I thought I’d try and take you all through that with me.
For a brief overview into my different musical phases, I’ll try and put them into bullet points in the beginning of this post:
Birth to ??? 5th Grade?: Whatever’s on the radio/whatever my mom listened to/whatever my dad listened to. Commonly listened to includes:
country music, top50 songs from 2002s-2012
alt dad rock
Taylor Swift, a lot of Taylor Swift
Avril Lavigne
Justin Bieber
One Direction – my biggest regret in life is declining tickets to see them in concert because i was too afraid to be seen as one of ‘those’ girls when in reality who the fuck cares what music i like??
I also have a very strong memory of my first ever video I’ve ever watched on YouTube being the Club Penguin Stranded on Rockhopper Island series and as promo for the series, they made this fanmade MV for it which included Fall Out Boy’s Sugar We’re Going Down (this was around 2008). I would then go on to listen to and meet Fall Out Boy ~9 years later. For context, I was an avid Club Penguin player and I really enjoyed these, uh, little dramas that people would make on YouTube and there was something about Stranded on Rockhopper Island that really captured my attention as a naive 5 year old.
6th Grade to 8th Grade: Dubstep/EDM/Nightcore phase. This coincided with my growing Minecraft phase and a lot of the YouTubers would put a lot of ApproachingNirvana in their intros and outros. Simultaneously, I was slowly getting into the indie game/sandbox side of Twitch, where I watched a lot of older streamers (NorthernLion, McLaffyTaffy, CobaltStreak, Richard Hammer, etc.) and they would typically play their dad rock as well so I’d have some random songs occasionally thrown in there. Here are some memorable songs I listened to a lot during this phase:
Pika Girl – S3RL – Fun fact: I totally forgot this song existed until I heard it in Darwin’s, a Cambridge cafe, this past spring semester while I was psetting with Mariia. I literally had such an absolute rush listening to it again and I was shook to my core.
Carry On Wayward Son – Kansas – Surprisingly I did not find out about this through ..Supernatural? I think was the show it was used on. No, I also found out about this song through a Twitch steamer.
8th Grade to Sophomore Year: In the eighth grade, my mom introduced me to KROQ and soon afterwards Panic! at the Disco. This then started a three year Panic! at the Disco phase where I made an Instagram account for it (~7k followers, who the fuck why the fuck where the fuck?) and then moved to Tumblr afterwards for my bandom/patd account (I think I only hit about ~6k here? Maybe 7k can’t remember.) As expected, here’s the bands I listened to. A lot:
We have the emos and the very typical bandom beats
Panic! at the Disco – Best album is Vices and Virtues, don’t even argue with me on this, I’ll literally rip you to shreds with cold hard facts and logic. You all can argue about AFYCSO all you want but V&V was co-written by Pete Wentz and the lyricism and aesthetic of the entire album is such a godsend.
Fall Out Boy – My ex-best friend was really into Fall Out boy so she got me into it. It was kind of funny cause I liked Panic! and she liked Fall Out Boy and we formed 2/3 of this strange holy grail of 2016 bandom. Anyway, I’m a big fan of FOB and I got to meet them and they’re great.
My Chemical Romance – One of my strongest memories is listening to Helena on the way to school and thinking very angry thoughts. Who hurt me in eighth grade to need to listen to Three Cheers at 6am???
Halsey
Twenty One Pilots – Another strong memory: sophomore year finals season. Felt really defeated and wanted to cry. Listened to twenty one pilots on repeat the entire time I studied. My favorite album is self titled. I think there’s a lot of good 21p music out there.
Pierce the Veil – I have very strong memories of being left alone in the house and I decided to make use of my aloneness by putting Hell Above on full blast.
Sleeping with Sirens
PVRIS
All Time Low
Paramore
I have two stories I always tell people when I tell them how I figured out I was bisexual that are related to some of the artists listed above!
1) I realized I was bi when I was laying on the carpeted floor of my cousin Miguel’s bedroom that I got to occupy for the summer and I was listening to my iTunes playlist. I remember around this time TRXYE by Troye Sivan was somewhat recent and the first couple of singles for Badlands by Halsey came out. And I just remember listening to Halsey and really loving her voice so I looked up videos of her performing and I just sat there in awe because I couldn’t get over how beautiful she was. And how I was…attracted to her and in the most definite not straight way possible.
2) I was waiting in line for my very first concert ever: All Time Low performing a free concert at The Grove in LA. I had woken up at 4:30 am and lined up for this and I was around fifth in line. I remember this really pretty girl in front of me. She was a photographer and her hair was dyed and she had this really cute pixie cut and she was wearing Doc Martens and I just remember my breath was absolutely taken away. And so thank you All Time Low for giving me my first very Gay TM encounter.
Not only did I have this emo phase but also a…shit i don’t know what to even call this phase? Folk punk? I looked up the bands and that was what they categorized them as.
The Front Bottoms
Sorority Noise
The list is short but this is pretty significant. I think this is around the time I started getting really sad in high school and so this kind of makes sense. Listening to TFB was really helpful during this period of time, actually. Something about the music made me feel really seen. Some people may say it sounds really underproduced or the vocals are lacking, but I really enjoyed the rawness and the bluntness of the music. It didn’t feel underproduced or lacking at all; it just felt like the right amount of genuine.
But ohoho wait, did you think that was it? Foolish one, no, no. I went through yet ANOTHER music phase alongside this and this is Cami’s rap/hip hop phase:
Drake
J. Cole
Jhene Aiko
Big Sean
Miguel
Childish Gambino
Khalid
Rihanna
Frank Ocean
Kanye West
Fun fact: I only got into rap because the guy I had a crush on liked rap music. But then I ended up really enjoying it so after we broke up, I still listened. Another fun fact: his favorite artist was Big Sean and I then ended up really liking Big Sean. After we broke up, I ran a Big Sean fan account and Big Sean actually ended up following it and we DM’d a couple of times and he was really nice! (to clear it up: it was always comments on fanart and edits I would do, nothing personal!)
Did you think we were done? Not at all. Toward the beginning of my sophomore year, two very iconic albums were released in the same month in the same week. I remember this thoroughly. In my Tumblr sphere, people were both talking about how Justin Bieber’s Purpose and One Direction’s Made in the AM were both dropping. And I wanted to listen to both of them to see which one was better.
And that’s how I tricked myself into becoming a One Direction fan. I fell absolutely in love with this album and I wanted to know more. I made a One Direction in addition to my main Panic! at the Disco blog and ended up making a pretty notable presence in the One Direction Tumblr community (~2k followers) and I was absolutely in love. It wasn’t even on the same level as my love for Panic!, it was something way more. One Direction is still my favorite group to this day. I find this really ironic because I became a fan of One Direction after they announced their hiatus. So here are some bands/groups I delved into after beginning my One Direction phase:
One Direction (obviously?)
Little Mix
5 Seconds of Summer (Still love them to death. They have some of the best concerts in the world. So hype all the time.)
Eden
MAX
Insert all the boys’ solo careers here: Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, Harry Styles, Liam Payne, ZAYN
And now for some notable albums/songs that really carried me through this period / things that didn’t really fit:
Blurryface by Twenty One Pilots – I was here for this ENTIRE promo run and it was fucking insane. All the hints dropped, the fandom eagerly trying to decipher every code and tweet dropped, it was actually such a fun time to be a fan of 21p because they REALLY went in with marketing. I know all the lyrics to every song on this fucking album and I am not ashamed of that.
Soul Punk by Patrick Stump – On bandom Tumblr, it was a big meme to always say “soul punk deserved better” because it was a solo album released by lead singer of Fall Out Boy Patrick Stump that didn’t receive a lot of attention and I remember listening to it for the first time and being like “eh it’s okay” but then I returned to it maybe a year later and it is an absolute banger. Like banger full of bangers and listening to this album brings me back so fucking much.
Violent Things by The Brobecks – As I dove deeper into bandom Tumblr, I started doing more digging on the past of all the big bandom people, including Dallon Weekes (ex-bassist for Panic! at the Disco). This is his old band, prior to joining Panic! and of course prior to any IDKHOW work. I listened a lot to “Better Than Me” and “Love at First Sight.” In fact, “Love At First Sight” was one of the first songs I tried to teach myself on guitar after I got my very first guitar in the 8th grade. If you’ve watched me play guitar on MITAdmissions, this is that very same guitar.
Mediocre at Best by Sorority Noise – I just remember closing my eyes in PE class when we had nothing to do and putting in earbuds and putting this on full blast.
David Bowie – I listened to a lot of David Bowie after his death. I felt like I really was missing something because I had never listened to his music while he was alive, so I thought it was fitting that I paid my respects through listening.
City and Colour – My AP Human Geography teacher’s favorite singer is City and Colour. My APHUG teacher was my favorite teacher my freshman year, so I, of course, listened. This playlist sums up a lot of what I would listen to around this phase.
2014 Forest Hills Drive by J. Cole – I remember listening to this album for the first time and just being blown away by how every single song landed. I know J. Cole is pretty controversial right now, but I really, really love this album. It holds a lot of nostalgia for me and I still know a lot of the lyrics by heart.
Coffee by Miguel – This song was my alarm for school two years straight and I still feel a little bit of fear every time I hear those booming opening chords, but I really loved wildheart. It’s such a great album and Miguel is so, so underrated.
This list could go on and on. I really developed my music taste around this time and it’s when I finally started branching out and figuring out what I liked, but I’ll try and limit it to just that for now.
Junior Year to Senior Year: Surprise, surprise, I developed my music taste based on the guy I was dating. Yes, yes, shame me all you want. The guy I was dating at this time listened to a lot of Soundcloud rappers, so here are some artists I listened to a lot and some songs:
XXXTentacion
Trippie Redd
Ghostemane
Ski Mask
Smokepurpp
This is kind of where I started out. You can see a playlist I made based off of it here:
Once again, even though I did this for a boy, I ended up really liking the music and branching out and figuring out my own tastes…
88Rising – Joji, NIKI, Rich Brian. Everyone, really. I just loved seeing and supporting so many Asian artists and seeing myself up on stage. Representation is so important.
BROCKHAMPTON – This one…this one was a gamechanger. I found out about them when Saturation II had just dropped and I remember hearing “QUEER” for the first time while I was waiting for my food to arrive at some restaurant with my mom. And I was floored. I was FLOORED by the beat and the hype and the energy. Their songs just go so fucking hard and it always hyped me up in a way no other songs could.
Jaden Smith
Tyler, The Creator
Amine
And then this brings us to my unavoidable kpop/kr&b/krap phase.
And then a weird soft phase I had you can see in this playlist
Memorable albums/songs from this time:
Blonde by Frank Ocean – This album changed my life. I listened to it for junior year finals and I remember just staring up at the ceiling and hearing “Solo” come on and closing my eyes as I transported to another fucking world. High school was such a rough time for me and this album genuinely helped me get through so fucking much. I genuinely do not think I would be alive had it not been for this album.
Ctrl by SZA – This album was so empowering in ways I cannot even word. I would listen to this every morning on the way to school and it would really prepare me for the day, taking deep breaths to “Broken Clocks” right before I walked into APCSA as my first period. Brings back a lot of memories.
IGOR by Tyler, The Creator – Now this. This was the fucking album. This is the blueprint. This album is genuinely one of my favorite albums of all time. I listened to this a lot towards the end of my senior year and while I was vacationing in Barcelona/London as my graduation trip. This album just hits so hard and it is just so well produced and I am always in awe every time I listen to it.
Freshman year of college to Now: I don’t know. I think I listen to a mix of all of this, minus the EDM. I don’t really know what to say here, but I’ll add some of my favorite recent listens from this period:
Hot Pink by Doja Cat – I will NEVER. And I mean NEVER forgive COVID for taking away Doja Cat. For context, every year MIT throws SpringFest, where we get big artists to perform a concert for us. Last year was supposed to be Doja Cat, but COVID made it never happen. Doja Cat was honestly my favorite artist of 2019 and I love, love, LOVE this album. It makes me feel like I have ownership over my body and my sexuality and makes me feel like the bad bitch I deserve to be.
I don’t really know what to classify this as but here’s one of my favorite playlists as of now:
If anyone would like to classify whatever the fuck that is, be my guest.
Fine Line by Harry Styles – This album is a masterpiece. No song can give me butterflies like Sunflower does. This is such a lovely album and I can’t wait to hear it live one day.
As a treat, I’ll close off this album with every single concert I’ve ever been to:
concerts i’ve attended
07.29.15 – All Time Low @ The Grove 08.08.15 – Fall Out Boy @ Sleep Train Amphitheatre 01.19.16 – Panic! at the Disco @ The Tower Theatre 03.26.16 – Fall Out Boy @ Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre 04.03.16 – iHeartRadio Music Awards @ The Forum 05.14.16 – KIIS FM Wango Tango @ StubHub Center 06.11.16 – Capital Summertime Ball @ Wembley Stadium 06.23.16 – The Amazing Tour Is Not On Fire @ Dolby Theatre 07.24.16 – twenty one pilots @ Viejas Arena 08.03.16 – Panic! at the Disco @ Sleep Train Amphitheatre 09.07.16 – 5 Seconds of Summer @ The Forum 12.02.16 – Jingle Ball @ Staples Center 08.10.17 – Ed Sheeran @ Staples Center 09.19.17 – Niall Horan @ Hollywood Palladium 09.20.17 – Harry Styles @ Greek Theatre 09.23.17 – iHeart Radio Daytime Village @ Las Vegas Village
02.10.18 – 88Rising @ The Shrine Expo Hall 07.13.18 – Harry Styles @ The Forum 08.08.18 – Niall Horan @ Greek Theatre
:) Thank you for the walk down memory lane. Please leave music recs in the comments. Here’s my Spotify if you wanna follow and watch me go through more music crises.
Before we begin, a word of warning. This blog post is not representative of the schedule of a typical MIT student, nor should it be. It is, however, my current experience, which I guess is worth something. I’ll continue to remind you of this throughout the post, but I thought I’d be up-front about it as well. Without further ado, here is a recipe to make yourself extremely
hosed.01(adj.) bogged down in work. comes from the phrase <i><a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/getting-an-education-from-mit/">getting an education from MIT is like drinking from a firehose.</a></i>
ingredients
9 classes
4 activities
a handful of other small things
prep time: a couple of emails with your academic advisor
cook time: around four weeks
feeds: one person for one semester
directions
Step 1: Pour nine classes into online registration, making sure to keep an even mix between the courses you’re interested in and major requirements.
At MIT, a unit is supposed to be approximately equivalent to one hour of work per week; three units are equivalent to one traditional credit-hour at other semester system universities. Most classes are 12 units; some are 3, 6, 9, or, if you’re really unlucky, 15, 18, 21, or 24. If you’re taking at least 36 units, tuition is the same no matter what; in general, most students take around 48 units each semester, or 4 full classes.
I’m currently taking 9 classes, 7 of which are 12 units, for a total of 93 units.
This is bad. Any reasonable human being would tell you that this is bad. Heck, almost all MIT students would tell you this is bad. I will tell you that this is bad. I have never been known to make good decisions, though, so here we are.
Well, what are the classes? I’m interested in computer science, math, and writing, so I’ve chosen the following mixture of classes for this semester:
12 units of 6.006 (Introduction to Algorithms): This is a pretty standard
Course 602electrical engineering/computer science
class. I don’t have much to say about it—it’s definitely one of my harder classes, but so far has been mostly unexceptional. I have enjoyed being able to see the translation between an algorithm’s mathematical description and its actual Python implementation, and we just had our first quiz, which was quite challenging and took me the whole two hours we were given.
12 units of 6.009 (Fundamentals of Programming): Another standard Course 6 class! The labs in this class have been really fun, and I really enjoy just getting up on a Saturday morning and doing as much of the lab as I can in one sitting. Since I haven’t been in a coding class for a while, being able to write something and actually see its results has been really emotionally rewarding. One example of this is seam carving, which we did in lab 2. This is a method where you remove pixels from an image without disturbing the actual content, leading to much better resizing results:
the left image is the naïve resize; the right image is the one we implemented in class!
Lab 2 also involved a creative extension, for which I implemented seam insertion, allowing me to increase the size of the image. (This actually requires a
slightly different methodology,03to remove columns, you can remove the pixels with the least 'information' in it, but you can't just add those pixels multiple times or you'll blur the image. instead, you can to add a cost to traveling over the same pixels multiple times.
which was very cool!) Results:
left side is naïve algorithm; right side was generated by my code!
12 units of 18.03 (Differential Equations): This class is fine—I’m mostly taking it because it meets a lot of major requirements, but so far the content has also been pretty interesting. The format is a little strange—MITx videos which cover basically everything which occurs in lecture, small weekly quizzes—but the course staff have been really exceptional and I feel like the class itself is actually paced quite well. I didn’t know much of the content coming in, but the number of topics covered each week is relatively approachable, and hopefully I’ll retain that knowledge as the semester goes on.
12 units of 18.701 (Algebra I): The first thing I like about this class is the name. Algebra I sounds like a class you were supposed to take in high school, but, in fact, it is also an introduction to abstract algebra class at MIT! The second thing I like about this class is that it’s being taught by
Prof. Bjorn Poonen, who is best known for having a big mouth:04okay he is also a very good prof and important for many other reasons but this is one of my favorite memes This is by far the class I spend the most time on. The content is really quite hard for me, and we’re moving through it at a blistering pace, but at least part of me enjoys the challenge each week brings and the satisfaction of finally getting that ‘aha!’ moment when you’ve figured out how to solve a problem. (The other part of me is just along for the ride, I guess.) What makes it especially hard is that I haven’t really found a solid pset group for this class, but I’m still cruising along, and if push comes to shove I’ll probably
put it on P/NR05stands for pass/no record. traditionally, only freshmen get p/nr during their fall semester, but because of <i>extenuating circumstances</i> (read: the ongoing global pandemic) upperclassmen have the option of placing one class on p/nr
instead of dropping it.
12 units of 21G.704 (Spanish IV): I took Spanish for four years in high school because it was The Thing That Everyone Else Did and thought that I would never use it again. I felt kind of bad just leaving the language stagnant though (and a couple of my friends were also taking Spanish at that time), so I started at Spanish III last semester. So far this semester, we’ve watched some interesting movies and read some interesting short stories, and in general I’ve really enjoyed the feeling of being able to express myself and communicate with others in a different language, as well as some of the
more interesting grammatical aspects.06being able to speak Chinese and English and to think about these ideas in a comparative way is super interesting to me and if I had more time, which I clearly don't, I'd think about studying more linguistics, probably
I’m also hoping to do
MISTI07MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives; they run a lot of different programs from Global Teaching Labs where you get to teach in other countries to summer internships abroad
in the future when there are not global travel restrictions, so I’m also looking forwards to that somewhere out on the horizon.
12 units of 21W.757 (Fiction Workshop): I’m really enjoying this class so far since it’s providing me some structure and incentive to actually write fiction, and we’re also reading lots of short stories that are really good. Now that we’re getting into the thick of it, we’re reading four stories from our classmates each week, two per class session, and giving feedback while working on our own stories. This is exciting, especially since I don’t really have experience with writing in more formal environments like these, so I’m having a good time. This does remind me, however, that I should probably go work on my own short story.
12 units of 21W.765 (Interactive Narrative): This is a super interesting class and it’s being taught by my advisor, who is Very Cool. So far, we’ve talked about the concept of a narrative and the many ways a narrative can be varied, which has been interesting to think about as I’ve been reading and writing for 21W.757. We’ve also read some interesting and occasionally dubious interactive fiction/hypertext novels, which has been a good time. One of my favorites has been one from our first class, and we’re just now starting to get into some projects of our own. I’m particularly excited for what’s coming up soon, which is writing a fully fleshed out interactive narrative.
6 units of 21M.401 (Concert Choir): I joined Concert Choir last spring because I wanted to sing in a larger, more formal group, and because the repertoire was musicals! This was very exciting…and then it ended abruptly, and we spent the last half of the class in a lot of different lectures, which was cool, but, sadly, not actually singing. This semester, however, we’re learning Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in the hopes of singing it with the MIT Symphony Orchestra in the spring, and we’re doing very small chamber pieces (duets and trios). I’m learning Fauré’s “Maria, Mater gratiae” and “It Takes Two” from Into the Woods, which I’m very excited about.
3 units of CC.012 (Continuing Conversations): CC is one of the rarer department numbers (and it’s less obvious what it is from the class title, then, say, “Differential Equations”). CC stands for Concourse, which is a first-year learning community that focuses on
the humanities08the humanities? at my institute of technology? it's more likely than you think
and their intersection with the engineering focus of MIT. Concourse offers its own versions of the
GIRs09General Institute Requirements, which are classes everyone is required to take
as well as a smattering of other humanities classes, including CC.012, which is sort of like a Concourse book club, led by our director (a history prof) and my advisor from last year (a poli sci prof)! This semester, we’re reading Herodotus’ The History. This is cool because it is widely accepted as the first piece of historical writing in Western society, and also because Herodotus just includes a lot of interesting and fun anecdotes that we’re really enjoying.
Cool, we’re done with classes! Now, on to the next step.
Step 2: Add in the activities one at a time, making sure to mix well between each one.
think: As Cami has mentioned, MIT THINK is a committee of techX which runs a high school research mentorship program. I joined last year because the mission seemed really interesting and important to me: instead of judging completed research projects, we help provide funding and support for research proposals which we select
every year,10incidentally, this year's application opens in a few weeks!
with a special focus on providing resources to students who might not already have them. Usually, around this time of year, we’re just preparing for judging in a few months, but right now we’re working on virtualizing our program, which is taking a lot of thought, as always.
quizbowl: I actually had never done any
quizbowl11a small bit of context for those who want it: quizbowl is a team <strike>sport</strike> game where teams compete to answer academic questions of various forms
before coming to MIT; instead, the closest thing I had done was a very different and somewhat cursed South Dakotan variant called Knowledge Bowl. Despite not being very good, I’ve really enjoyed spending time with the people in quizbowl, and also occasionally knowing like, one thing, usually about musicals.
nREXtcomm: Most of the work on
nREXtcomm12next REX committee; we're responsible for welcoming first-years to dorms and, this year, maintaining our dorm's virtual support communities throughout the semester
is over, but we’re still managing a few small things, including twice-weekly office hours for the first-years assigned to Next. So far, it seems the subcommunities we’ve built are functioning well, so fingers crossed for the rest of the semester, I suppose.
asymptones: Asymptones is a low-time-commitment acapella group that performs fun and nerdy music! I’m a little behind on things here, but I’m trying to organize a small group cover of “history of the entire world, I guess” by Bill Wurtz which will be difficult but exciting, and our main project this semester is a cover of “Wait for It”, from Hamilton. A little smaller than our usual setlist, but this is to be expected.
We’ve gotten most of the ingredients out of the way now, but before we add our last ingredients, there’s one other thing we have to do.
Step 3: preheat the oven to 375° F.
Take a couple deep breaths and wait while the oven heats up. Look outside your window, and watch the Charles River flow past.
I had initially signed up for my course schedule ready to drop things at the first inconvenience. I made some plans at the beginning of the semester about the order I would drop my classes in, if things got hard. Within a week or two, I had promptly scrapped those plans and ended up with a tiered list of classes I was enjoying. I was still prepared to drop something, but thought I just needed a little more time to figure out what.
It’s now four weeks in, and I still don’t really have a clear sense of what I would drop first. That kind of terrifies me, but I guess I still have plenty of time to figure out, since MIT’s Drop Date is notoriously late; this year, it falls on November 18th, which is notably still a couple months out. Even if I have time, though, I also have to make sure that I don’t burn out and end up doing worse than I would have if I had dropped something earlier. It’s a careful balance, and I’m not sure I’ve found the right point.
Step 4: Add other small things to taste.
All of this is already overwhelming, but there are still a few small things that are missing. I’ve been trying to force myself to be a Real Human Person outside of all of this, and for me that’s meant setting aside time specifically to a) be social, b) go outside, and c) not be doing school work. These, I think, are hard for me in normal circumstances, but are probably more important and difficult now than they ever have been. A few key things that have kept me sane are:
Doing the NYT Crossword daily with friends over Discord.
Taking long walks on Sundays to the various parks around Boston.
Attending my afternoon classes outside on Killian Court, occasionally.
Calling my parents somewhat regularly.
All of these have provided me a brief reprieve from work when I’ve need it, and although sometimes I feel like I burn a little too much time on a crossword or a little too much time on a walk, I think there’s something valuable about this sort of unstructured activity that touches something different from the day-to-day of school and extracurriculars. It’s an easy thing to turn to when I’m feeling stressed.
Step 5: Pour mixture into pan and Bake until you are hosed.
You’ll be able to tell that you’re hosed when the work from two weeks starts to run together, and you move a todo list item from one day on your schedule to the next, and the next, and the next, until everything falls on the same day and you have to stay up later than you want or get up earlier in the morning or skip a class or two to have the time to be caught back up on everything.
For me, this hit me really hard this week—I played a quizbowl tournament last Saturday, and although I’d tried my best to push the work I was displacing earlier and not later, that effort was not entirely successful. It took me until Wednesday to be caught up to where I’d normally be on Monday, and now I’m trying to catch up on the work from Tuesday and Wednesday before all of my classes release new work on Friday.
It’s not horrible, but it’s also not great. I’m looking ahead, looking for a reset day where I’m caught up and can just sit on the side of the river and look out at the skyline and breathe. I’m coming to terms with the fact that that might not be for another two weeks, when we get a long weekend for Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In the meantime, the small things will keep me going, I suppose.
Step 6: Wait to see how the rest of the semester goes.
I’m honestly kind of surprised it’s taken me four weeks to become this hosed. It seems to be a good sign, although I’m not sure of what. Resilience or discipline, perhaps. I’m not really sure what the future will hold, either. I think that the only way to know is to wait and see, and to do one’s best on the journey to the next problem set, the next quiz, the next midterm. The only constant, I guess, is being hosed. As John Mulaney might say, if he were an MIT student, “I am hosed all the time. I am hosed now and I will be hosed later.”
We choose to be hosed for some reason, however irrational. Maybe it’s the love of learning, or maybe it’s some cruel way of trying to prove to ourselves that we can do something. Likely, it is some combination of both. One way or another, every MIT student ends up hosed at some point in their experience. This is just one recipe for getting there.
It’s weird how we do so much that we don’t stop and think about.
On Floor Pi, one of our traditions is this event called tea time. It’s a weekly-ish event, usually held around 10 PM, where we all come together in the TV Lounge, drink tea and eat snacks, and talk about stuff. Ostensibly, discussion is centered around a topic like “identity” or “community”, leading with a question like “what does it mean to be you?” or “what communities do you most value being a part of?” But often, discussion strays into video games, politics, or most recently, buses. (It sometimes strays into math, but we have a hard rule of “no math during tea time”.)
I’ve gone through the college application process, which meant shoring up all these details about myself, carving my identity into these palatable essays, splaying my life story to strangers in interviews, and thinking about abstract concepts like “fit” and “where I really want to go“.
In comparison, the internship application process demands less of you. Instead, you carve your identity into these “resumes”, you solve some programming problems on sheets of paper, and talk about your unwavering dedication to the company-of-the-week’s mission. I made my way through three interviews for this one company, once, last spring. It was the only company I applied to, and I got rejected. If a single rejection already made me sick of the process, how was I going to put up with several dozen more?
It tends to be the case that things are fine as long as I don’t start thinking about them too hard. As long as I distract myself by doing things, I won’t have to face the existential questions. Why bother doing tea time anyway? Why bother going through the application process anyway? Why do I even bother going to class?
When the real question, the one that I actually wanted the answer to, is “do I have enough energy to go to tea time today?”, or “do I have enough energy to work on my resume today?”, or “do I have enough energy to go to class today?” Recently, the answers to these questions have been no, no, no.
Two
Last year, I remember going to lots of infosessions from student organizations, all with the allure of free food. Looking back at my September 2019 schedule, I went to pretty much a different event every night: the music production club had boba, the Happy Club decorated cookies, then ESP had dinner, all in a single night. The next night there was an infosession for Splash, with Thai food, then Microsoft Azure did a talk with Chipotle. And then the next day, Sum of Differences had a picnic, HMMT had dinner, and some of the Filipinos in MIT went to Hei La Moon. And this was over the span of three days!
It goes without saying, I guess, that none of these happened this year. As much as I loved being on the receiving end of the endless stream of free food, and as disappointed as I was that we didn’t have that this year, I was plagued with the problem from the opposite side. How do these translate virtually? How do we do recruitment now? And I’ve had to deal with these questions in a litany of contexts: as a member of the Filipino Student Association, the Puzzle Club, ESP, Floor Pi, the Assassins’ Guild.
So yes, I’ve thought about recruitment. I’ve talked about recruitment lots and lots of times these past few weeks, and everyone else has been thinking about recruitment too, and somehow, we’ve all converged to similar answers. Now is the era of the “hangout”. The social Zoom call, movie nights, cooking together, and reimbursing people for buying their own food. Suddenly, everyone wants to play games together, whether it’s Skribblio or Quiplash or Among Us, all in the name of “socializing” and “building community”.
For hall rush, Floor Pi ran virtual tea time and game night. For the Puzzle Club, we all hopped on a Zoom call and did puzzles together. ESP moved its weekly meetings to Zoom, and we now intentionally put aside time to hang out after them, either talking about our weeks or playing games together. And sure, it was somewhat fun, but it all felt so hollow.
We could be doing the exact same thing, but doing it over a Zoom call changes things. It turns going to an infosession with friends and free food, to listening to someone read a slideshow in the background. It turns cramming ourselves in a room and doing puzzles, to staring at a spreadsheet talking to voices over the internet. It turned surprise birthday parties to silly virtual backgrounds and singing Happy Birthday out-of-sync.
But when the song ends and the celebrant says thanks, what do we do now?
Three
In the twentieth century, there were movements within Melanesian villages, with people building imitations of runways and airplanes, and doing dances or marches mimicking landing sequences. Doing these rituals would, supposedly, bring material goods, like how planes dropped supplies in the area during the war. Anthropologists at the time called them “cargo cults“. The phrase has evolved to be a metaphor for an irrational method to obtain some objective, making phrases like cargo cult science or cargo cult programming.
In a literal view, these ceremonies could just be viewed as a silly superstition. They’re actions that have all the appearances of cargo shipping, without the actual function. But the phrase itself is misleading, and I’d think that these rituals played a different role. I’m no anthropologist myself, so consider this speculation. But even if they didn’t bring them material goods, what if the rituals brought them a sense of social unity? Or what if “cargo” meant something beyond cash or supplies, and meant desire for independence, or salvation?
There are rituals like communion, worship, prayer. I’m not religious myself, but I wouldn’t dismiss the value it can bring to someone’s life. Even from a purely secular perspective, I know lots of people who’ve found some community in their religion. Convocation and graduation are definitely rituals. With a looser definition, parties, weddings, and funerals are rituals too.
Or even things like shaking hands, greeting someone with a hug, or singing Happy Birthday together. Maybe you’d consider these practices too mundane to be a ritual, but these aren’t things that are automatic. If I grew up in a different planet, hugging wouldn’t something I’d come up with as a way of greeting someone.
If you asked me why I shake hands, or hug people, or sing Happy Birthday, I’d say things like “it’s polite” or “this is how I’ve been doing things forever”. I don’t fully understand why, but I do these things anyway. Because even if their purpose isn’t fully transparent, I know that it’s satisfying to do it. Or more accurately, it’d feel awkward if I didn’t do it.
All this to say that ritual isn’t useless. It serves a purpose, even if that purpose is as simple as “it feels good to do it”. And that sometimes, things that seem meaningless on the surface play a deeper function. (Or, you know, something something structural functionalism.)
Four
And now I’m confused.
We’ve translated these social events into virtual ones, hoping that the same things will happen. We have all of the trappings of in-person events; we’re getting all the mechanics right. We’re pouring time into things that, supposedly, will make people feel closer to each other, or introduce people to each other, or reach out to people interested in certain things.
And yes, sometimes, it works! Sometimes it works. Sometimes I get good feelings when it’s two AM and we’re in a Discord voice chat talking about Geoguessr, or when it’s tea time and we’re talking about buses, or even just hanging out and doing homework over a video call. But what makes this different from the dozen game nights and hangouts I’ve been in, all of which feel like hollow attempts to bring back the days of free food and infosessions? More often than not, it all feels hollow.
But why? Why does it feel hollow? We’d be quick to blame the fact that we’re in a virtual environment, that maybe this medium is inherently unconducive for socializing. That maybe there’s just some fundamental spirit that’s only available in-person. That we’re hanging on to symbolic meanings, in the hope that maybe if we go to enough Zoom meetings we’ll feel part of a community.
Yet this explanation feels like it’s missing something. For one, what about the handful of events that do work? More importantly, isn’t this the same view that we get when we take a literal view of cargo cults and call them ineffective? The fact that things are happening online isn’t, shouldn’t be the real reason. It’s not getting to the heart of the matter to just blame it on Zoom and call it a day, and it doesn’t satisfy me to end there.
The thing about ritual is that, in some level, I need it in my life. I’m aching for the social rituals of greeting people with hugs and playing board games in the lounge and drinking tea together, that social distancing’s taken from me. I’m aching for waking up and dressing up and walking to class every day and listening to chalk-on-chalkboard, for reversing linked lists on a sheet of paper, and shaking hands with campus recruiters.
And when I say this, when I express this desire, I’m not just yearning for face-to-face conversation or free food. It’s a deeper craving, one that can’t be reduced to just “let’s do things in-person again!” I want regularity in my life, and to hell with however mundane it sounds.
Five
It’s weird how we do so much that we don’t stop and think about.
Through my first semester, I was pretty scrupulous about going to most of my lectures. I only ended up missing 6.036 lectures, but that’s because it was in the mornings and the videos and lecture notes were good anyway. For many of my classes, I don’t actually have to attend lectures live, because many of them were being recorded anyway. Yet I still felt this obligation to go, to uphold this thin illusion of consistency in my life. Yesterday, I did not have this energy, and for the first time this semester I skipped going to a lecture just because I didn’t feel like I could pay attention.
The other day I tried to work on my resume and could not find the motivation to. The next day, I tried to work on it again, but I still couldn’t find the motivation to. The next day, I decided that I didn’t really care, just put together whatever, and sent it through the application forms for an internship or two. I haven’t heard back, and I’m not sure if I want to. But I think I’ll still make an effort, I guess, to look for something that would interest me.
Last Tuesday, we had tea time. We hopped on a Zoom call and talked about home, and what factors make somewhere feel like home. Floor Pi is home, even if it is excavated of its people, and somehow, some part of me starts to enjoy East Campus stairwells and fire alarms in the middle of the night. Our discussion strayed into video games, and politics, and of course, buses. It was fun, but I soon got tired.
I’ve mentioned briefly on this blog before that I’m part of a cappella group, the Asymptones (tagline: “we sing fun and nerdy music!”). We had some really, really awesome repertoire planned for last spring, and it all got left behind when we moved out and stopped rehearsing together. We did record one song we already knew, but didn’t do much beyond that; it’s very difficult to learn new music over Zoom and there were a lot of other stressful things in everyone’s lives at the time, so all our rep was laid aside for months and months. Now it’s the fall, and we are trying to get back on our game, fulfill our club mandate, and have fun together again!
One of my friends is in the Shakespeare ensemble, and they too weren’t able to finish their (pretty much fully completed and ready D:) production of the Merry Wives of Windsor. She gave me the idea of writing a blog about what all the different performance groups on campus are doing this virtual semester. I loved that idea because I think one of the most underrated things about MIT is the huge variety of performing groups we have, and how big of a performing arts scene there is on campus. Other bloggers have writtenaboutthis before, but these are uNpReCeDeNtEd times and therefore our events must also be uNpReCeDeNtEd. So without further ado, here is just a sampling of the events happening this fall on campus!
(OK, I lied, here’s a small amount of ado: an important caveat is that, of course, I didn’t get to talk to every single performing group at MIT for this blog. There is undoubtedly much more happening than I can impart to you in one post. If you are a current MIT student reading this and are heartbroken that your group isn’t mentioned, email me :)
The Shakespeare Ensemble is putting on a virtual audio play of Macbeth! Their typical-semester plays involve, of course, tons of work on set design, props and costumes, lighting and blocking… But an audio play requires plenty of work of its own. They recruited a whole new team of students as their sound editors and are working hard to make sure all their actors have the equipment they need to record. Because the play will be pre-recorded, they can record in scenes as they go rather than doing it all at the end, which speeds up their production timeline. And that means they can move their release date to… Halloween Spooooooky. (Psst, current students: they’re still recruiting for production staff.)
The Musical Theater Guild is doing a virtual play of The Theory of Relativity, a musical about the lives of a bunch college-aged kids. It’s a song cycle that mostly has solos and duets, rather than the large-ensemble musicals they often perform, so that they’ll be able to record video as well as audio. Their timeline is offset from the Ensemble’s, so they just finished recruiting directorial staff and are starting auditions now. The Ensemble ran their auditions over Zoom and found that it was actually very successful; it was less intimidating for auditioners and easier to connect. MTG is doing theirs asynchronously by asking auditioners to submit videos of themselves.
Lots of different a cappella groups — including the Asymptones, the Muses, and Syncopasian — are recording some of their repertoire into individual videos, which will be available on YouTube (and probably pubbed on every social media platform you know of). Usually, the end of the semester is packed full with one group after another putting on concerts showcasing all the songs they’ve learned in the past few months. This semester, my guess is that performances will be more evenly distributed as groups finish recording and editing each song.
Some groups are also holding workshops on different parts of a cappella, like percussion & beatboxing, arranging music, and soloing, that are open both to their members and to MIT students in general!
Next Sing, MIT’s newest a cappella group, was created to be a more open, inclusive, and low-commitment a cappella group. They typically perform a wide range of songs, and although they have do auditions, they believe that anyone can learn to sing and perform. This semester, they’re using an “open cover” system: anyone who’s interested can lead a cover of a song or audition to be part of one. Each cover lead will work to organize rehearsal and filming for their covers, and then the executive will mix them together to be released.
TheChorallaries are also recording videos, but they’ll be releasing them all at the same time at the end of the semester, as a mini-concert! They’re also running a separate recording project, open to all undergrads, to make something Big. Details to come :000
The Ballroom Dance Team usually goes to (and kicks butt at) in-person competitions all over New England. They’re taking this semester as a time to step back from competing and focus on learning and connecting as a group. That means social events, virtual solo dance practices, and classes open to everyone at MIT! They have weekend yoga, morning workouts, and beginner dance classes!!
One of the common threads that each group mentioned to me was their desire to keep their members connected, and to bring new members (particularly new freshmen) into the fold. Everyone is planning movie nights, workshops, office hours, and all kinds of social events for their group and for the greater MIT community.
I also noticed that a lot of groups were finding what silver lining they could in this very dark cloud, and using the changes we’ve been forced into to reflect on what positive changes they could make to their organization at the same time. The Ballroom Dance Team is focusing on bringing their community closer together. The Shakespeare Ensemble, spurred on by the protests and murders of black people this summer, are working on inclusivity in both their cast and their productions. Syncopasian is collaborating with other groups on campus, like the Asian Dance Team, for the videos they plan to put out. None of these are happening specifically because we’re virtual, but without the upheaval we experienced, they would not have come to pass.
I’ve felt tired a lot recently, and alternately apathetic and sad about the semester and the weeks to come. But talking to these groups got me excited again, like how so many days on campus used to feel. I want to see Synco’s collab with ADT! and listen to Macbeth on Halloween! and see the Chorallaries’ big secret project! It warms my heart to think of all the art being created right now, across so many miles and screens, and imagine the joy it will bring to its creators and its audience (that’s me! and you!). If this is the sort of thing that warms your heart too, then here — take it with you, like a hot mug of tea, to hold as the weather gets cold. <3
So one day I up and took a gap year. I may have mentioned this. Every now and then, I’d stare out the window — of my car, of a plane, of a smelly bus in Spain — with music blasting in my ears, and do that thing where you think of yourself in a movie. Or, y’know, a blog.
I know a lot of students are gapping this year, and others are considering taking spring semester off if the current situation doesn’t change. Maybe this will give you some ideas.
This blog I’m going to talk about what I did, the fun and stupid anecdotes of road tripping up the west coast, working on a farm/retreat in Santa Cruz, and backpacking around Europe. Part two will describe the mechanics of how I got those gigs, how to use
HelpX02like WWOOF but dodgier and cheaper
and find cheap plane tickets and the ways I tried to not get
murdered.03these were inexhaustive and I still totally could have been, honestly. But I’m lucky.
I’m no expert, but maybe you’ll learn from my mistakes.
Now take that 35-lb backpack and let’s get going!
June 2019
The Tucson sun is sweltering, and the rubber of your shoes will soften on the asphalt if you stand around. You’re three hours past a breakup, pacing in the parking lot of one of the endless plazas that make up the gridwork of Tucson. There’s a Target with an “Apply now!” sign, and the wage is above Arizona’s minimum.
July 2019.
Working at Target! Suffice to say it wasn’t glamorous. They scheduled new hires for 6am – 2pm shifts, and one day a jar of alfredo sauce cracked on the assembly line and dripped on everything below it. My jeans from that day still smell like sauce.
I earned enough money to travel, though.
September 2019.
Road trip, day one.
I drive an orange 2005 Nissan Murano, which is to say a short, squat minivan with a rounded hood. Its secret: if you fold the backseats down, there’s a perfectly flat surface from the hatchback to the front seat, just long enough for someone of my stature (footnote: read: short) to lie down.
I’d watched a number of
#vanlife04pretty much what it sounds like: living in a van, which is gutted and re-modeled on the inside to look like a chic tiny home. For further reading: Stephi Lee on youtube.
videos, and I wanted to be out of Tucson but didn’t want to pay for airbnb rooms. I had an internship ahead of me, so I wanted some time where I wasn’t tied down in one place.
So I packed some plastic crates with clothes and food and running clothes, and also twenty-some books, most of which I still have not
finished.05Two -- <em>Mists of Avalon</em> by Marion Zimmer Bradley and <em>The Three Musketeers</em> by Alexandre Dumas -- are on my bookshelf in Cambridge, daring me to take them home again unread.
And went off.
The first night, in Flagstaff, I remember sitting petrified inside my car in a Walmart parking lot. I’d gone running on a hiking trail and found a gym that let me shower. I’d heard a crow call in person for the first time. I’d had a salad and canned beans and several handfuls of nuts, and it had all been wonderful, I was finally free. But I was terrified.
I wound up driving around a quiet neighborhood, taking random twists and turns to make sure no headlights were following me. Nowhere seemed “good,” but finally I decided that one cul-de-sac was no riskier than the others, so I parked, killed the lights, and crawled into the back. I kept pepper spray in the door shelf, my keys in my hand. The stars out the windshield looked beautiful.
A typical day of this: I’d wake up in the back of my car, after several rounds of alarms. Drive to a park, set up my cookstove, and stretch on the grass while my water boiled. I’d make oatmeal with peanut butter and cranberries, and wolf it down and clean everything from a gallon jug I filled up at gas stations.
From there, the goal was always coffee shop (write), run, drive, but getting two of these done was a victory, three a cause for celebration. So on a day with no driving, I’d look up a coffee shop and head there to write.
After some hours — sometimes two and sometimes six — I’d walk back to my car, my head spinning with characters, magic rules, and all the plot threads I had yet to weave together.
Then, if I had time, I’d run. Then I’d look up ‘gym’ and drive from one to another, looking for free trials and showers. This usually took an hour. After that I’d head to some parking lot, where I would cook dinner on the curbside, drag it into my car and lock the doors. I’d read a bit.
Then I would drive to a gas station to brush my teeth, and drive somewhere else to sleep.
Parts of this were really great. I remember driving down highways lined with trees or rolling prairie, singing Killers songs off-key when my data cut out. When I came to somewhere new, I’d look up a cafe and park far from it, so that I could walk and see the town. Every place I stopped, I’d spend a day or two, and by the time I left I could feel the map of the place taking shape in my mind.
I was obsessed with being cheap, cooking dry rice and couscous with my limited supply of water, and I was always somewhat hungry. I brushed my teeth in gas stations, and every time I went running meant an hour-long search for free showers. I wound up running five-to-seven miles every time because of this, and skipping days in between, instead of the 5k-per-day routine I’d stagnated in for years.
I’d been alone before, but never for long. I had told myself (and my family and friends, many times) that if school didn’t eat 60 hours from my week, I would write so fucking much, run far and read fat books and do the things I wanted.
To some extent, I did.
I was disappointed in myself at the time, because I hadn’t realized how much effort living in a car required. Vanlife isn’t glamorous unless you spend thousands of dollars, as much or more than the day-to-day cost of living in a house. Every simple thing takes a lot of time.
But the scenes were beautiful. I am from the desert and I fucking love trees.
I met a man in Paonia, this tiny Colorado town, who told me about his chocolate company and Buddhist practices, and gave me some of the best chocolate I’ve ever tasted.
I was on a mountain in western Colorado (I’d tried using paper maps instead of Google, and drove 100 miles in the wrong direction) and followed a sign that said “B——— Ranch,” which led me to a homestead where there were twenty-odd men in decommissioned army fatigues, whose job was to herd and shoot cattle. The ancient owner hospitably gave me coffee, asked what race I was, and showed me a skinned bull hanging by its feet in the garage.
I ran my first half-marathon, alone, on a 20-mile loop trail on a mountain in Oregon. I miscalculated slightly how fast I could hike, and dusk was setting in by the time I made it back. My legs were exhausted.
I lived on the shitty stale coffee you only find in gas stations and waiting
rooms,06and, apparently, ranching-hunting homesteads
and I always drank it black.
I wrote a lot. Something like 60,000 words. I was working on an epic fantasy book I’d been planning and dreaming about for a long time. I’d started it in January and hadn’t gotten far. This trip, the plot came together, advancing in leaps and bounds past what I’d planned. The words I wrote on the road would be the best ones of the book.
Tucson, AZ → Flagstaff, AZ → Navajo Nation → Four Corners (in the Navajo Nation) → Cortez, CO → Paonia, CO → Grand Junction, CO → Salt Lake City, UT → Idaho → Portland, OR → Mt Shasta City, CA → Santa Cruz, CA
October 2019.
Wow, holy shit, that was long. Felt like forever to me, too, even thought it was only twenty-some days.
Ok so after that road trip I came to this cool internship on a writing retreat in Santa Cruz.
The place looked like an Airbnb, the kind that goes for hundreds of dollars per night. Writers came for weeklong stays, and my job was to take care of the place and the garden, milk the goats, and do random crafts to keep up the charm: make goat cheese and whey lemonade, goat’s milk soap, and goat’s milk lotion, little pretty things I never used to let myself have time for. It was very much
cottagecore,07if I understand what this means correctly
very not real farm life. I really liked the goats.
I lived in a barn from Home Depot. As a kid I had always wanted to do that.
I met a lot of people here: a TV writer who dominated every dinner conversation with stories about famous people he’d run into; a former kickboxer who made mushroom tea and ran rewilding retreats as her day job; a young
MG08middle grade
author who was intelligent and nice, but never did the
dishes;09for context, everyone was supposed to help clean up after dinner
this writer couple, she published but not famous, he working on a debut, who were every inch what I want to be.
After eating less-than-wholesome — I think the worst was these disgusting soggy noodles that I made by getting boiling water from Starbucks and just putting the noodles in the cup while I drove, and then I didn’t have tomato sauce so I used
Tapatio10hot sauce, which is not in grocery stores in the east apparently??
instead — food on the road, the lifestyle at this place was strange to me. We ate three-course dinners every night; the writers took turns cooking. Everything was tranquil and sophisticated. In the day, everyone was writing, and it was so quiet you could hear the floorboards creak.
I loved the goats. There was a white one, Buttercup, and her daughter, Henrietta. Goats are kind of like dogs, it seems, except that they have vertical Satanic pupils, and very long ears. Henrietta was a few months old, excited and new to the world, and she would always nibble my
clothes.11and when I wore shorts, my legs.
The owner of the place, a political writer, would look at my work for one hour each week. I actually learned more about editing in those hours than I had while editing an entire novel my junior year. He taught me to cut all the unnecessary words — murder your darlings. It’s still a struggle for me, but a worthy one.
You could go down to the beach and watch the California surfers. I went with a girl from Germany who worked there too. One time we got asked out by a guy with a Bible quote tattooed on his chest, something like Christ is you’re savior.
We declined.
January 2020.
EUROPE TIME EUROPE TIME
Story’s almost done, y’all. You’re watching the months go by and you know what’s coming.
To preface this, let’s establish that I do love fantasy books, and forgive me but the fantasy I started on was pseudo-European, full of castles and forests and cobblestones. My family travelled when I was young, but only to see other family members, so I’d never been outside North America. I wanted to go and see these places that had roots of something ancient, feel the wonder that soaks the pages of books I read years ago.
I found a $146 plane ticket from
LAX12the Los Angeles airport, a hellish 8-hour bus ride from Tucson.
to Madrid, Spain, which I’d bought months in advance. I booked a hostel for
9 euros13something like $12, which I calculated in my head right now because I never did accurate conversions on this gap year, so why start now?
per night.
I put some clothes, running shoes, and eight books in a backpack, plus my Chromebook and sixteen pairs of earrings, then said goodbye to my family (I’d come home for New Year’s) and left.
And went on a big big plane, and across the sea.
That first night was scary, because I’d messed up the time zones and had to book an extra night, and the only bed left was in a 12-bed mixed-gender room, which meant it was full of men, who came and went all hours of the night, and there was a couple who might or might not have been having sex on the bunk beside me.
I fell asleep at three, and the next day I walked groggily to an art museum which happened to be near my hostel. It was called El Prado, which I thought I had heard of, maybe.
Turns out El Prado has all the cool artwork!!! Lowkey on par with the Uffizi. I was just walking along, la-de-da, lookit that naked woman some crusty Renaissance dude painted and — hey is that Albrecht Durer’s Adam and Eve? (It was). There were a dozen prototypes of Venus of Urbino, lounging naked women that Titian would draw staring at the audience and thus shock the monks and nobles of his day. I walked around with wide staring eyes. These artists lived in Europe! Their stuff is actually here! There’s a Ruben and a Goya and a Velázquez and
motherfuckre14the sophisticated European way to say it, as in 'theatre.'
—
I saw every single art piece in that entire museum. My favorite, and also inarguably the best, was Hieronymous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which is this proto-Renaissance
triptych15three panel painting, usually used as an altarpiece, although this one *wasn’t*
of people engaged in all sorts of debaucherous sin, and then suffering in Hell and being eaten by giant birds.
Garden of Earthly Delights in all its majesty
debaucherous sin
Garden of Earthly Delights close-up
Durer's Adam and Eve
Venus of Urbino; the fact that she is looking at the viewer was seen as scandalous
After Madrid, I went to work on a farm in the south of Spain. It was owned by this old gnarled Dutchman who read my star signs and did not cut the tails off his sheep. (Did you know that all sheep naturally have long tails?
Not goats16most goats do have horns. BUT NOT BUTTERCUP AND HENRIETTA, theirs were cut off as babies.
, though). My plan was to volunteer and live there for a month, but there was no electricity or hot water, so I left a week later.
I read Citizen of the Galaxy by Heinlein in a guest house that the owner had built himself, shivering under dusty blankets because I could not keep my fire burning.
Sadly, I never got a picture of the sheep
Citizen of the Galaxy -- not this page, but somewhere in there is a reference to a character who went to MIT!
Next I went to Grenada, and stayed there for two weeks. It was really great. Food is cheap, and there was a cafe where I could get a cafe con leche (read: cappuccino, in the little cup) for 1.90 euros and write for several hours.
I wrote a story about a shepherd whose goat went missing, and a witch hunter who promised to find evil in her village and thus get the goat back. I finished it at night, in two different cafes, writing in a frenzy before closing time. The words just poured out, as they rarely do, in those moments when you are not in a restaurant where the owner wants you to buy an actual meal, not even in Grenada, but on some moor a million miles away, where a witch hunter rallies a mob into murder.
Anyway, then I went to Naples. It was full of narrow streets and fast fashion, women with red lipstick and leather jackets who rode motorcycles. There was pizza for 4 euros, and I mean the entire pizza here, wood-fired and better than anything in America. One day I was walking home, and I passed a policeman standing outside his car, in the middle of traffic, holding a machine gun.
In Italy, it seemed to me, men flirt with you as a matter of course, even if you’re just ordering coffee. Even if you’re running, sweaty and red in the face, wearing mismatched, baggy clothes and looking halfway dead.
I really liked it here.
After that was Florence. The hostel manager, a tall, soft-spoken man who was usually smiling, and yet seemed somehow sad, cooked dinner for his guests every night. I had only three days there, but I crammed in so much
art.17I also spent a solid day scrambling to get money transferred from my savings account to checking, because my checking was at flat zero and I owed the smiling landlord money and when you overdraw from savings six times, apparently, you cannot draw from it again that month, and there was an eight-hour time difference between Florence and Tucson so calling my bank was very hard.
The art. The perfect marble gods: powerful Athena, and young, drunken Dionysus, so familiar with the satyrs. To keep things short I’ll say that I love Cellini’s Perseus, holding Medusa’s head high, which I did not know I liked until I saw it. I love Giambologna’s Jason of the Argonauts. At his feet sits a conquered dragon that looks like a dog.
Cellini's Perseus, close-up
Jason of the Argonauts
Dog dragon
Bernini's bust of Constanza, his lover
Dionysus and satyr (kneeling)
Dionysus (right) with a satyr
Dionysus (left) and a different satyr
Sometimes I was lonely. You meet a lot of people, travelling: students in hostels, old people. The connections are fleeting, usually shallow. Travelling seems interesting, but travellers themselves — I guess that after the fourth or fifth conversation, the next attractive grungy person’s litany of places that they’ve been is no longer intriguing.
A woman with a Cockney accent told me that her husband was sick and she hoped that he died, though, that was wild. And a Scotsman and an Italian lady in my hostel started a love affair even though neither of them spoke the other’s language.
Then I went to Venice, on my birthday, which happened to fall on Carnivale. Venice is lovely; the crowds were immense. The lines were too long to get to the Carnivale show — think ornate
masks18the Mardi Gras kind
, trapeze shows over the water, a veritable sea of tourists — but I made a morning-after display of kids in flamingo outfits rowing little gondolas.
I walked around a lot, imagining this city on the water in days when doctors wore crow masks, the beaks stuffed with flowers, because they thought that bad smells spread disease — which when you think about it isn’t too far wrong. The Carnivale, my tour guide said, was born when medieval Venetians wanted to party it up without having their identities known. For my birthday I bought myself spaghetti con nero di seppia, ‘nero’ meaning ‘ink’ and ‘seppia’ meaning ‘squid’. The noodles are black. 10/10.
After that, I worked for three weeks on a farm in the outskirts of Venice, or rather, the suburbs on the mainland. Walk off the farm and everything looked pretty normal. Squint, and you could forget you were in Italy.
It was relaxing there. They were a vegetarian farm, with twenty horses and many chickens which they did not kill. The farmhouse was filled with books on history, art and philosophy, and at least five copies of Machiavelli’s The Prince — all in Italian. It was owned by an older couple who spoke mostly Italian, and run in part by a young teacher and a lawyer-turned-farmer, who were having a secret affair (though I think the owners knew). I helped the ex-lawyer clean vegetables — read: cut off the rotten parts — and helped the wife cook the most glorious meals. I temporarily went vegetarian.
Then — end of February — Coronavirus hit Venice. I was some ten miles away, an hour by bus.
I took a bus to Rome, where I would stay for a few days, and then on to London, where a writing internship was waiting. Surely Corona wouldn’t follow me.
In Rome, there is a running path along the Tiber river that stretches for miles. I ran another half-marathon, and ate an average of 1.5 gelatos per day. I went to the Vatican on Sunday, not thinking because I am a chaotic Jew, and the Pope was giving a sermon. I didn’t understand a word except for “Dios” and “Diablo,” but I saw him from the window.
Then I went inside the Vatican, which was a very bad idea — where else are there more tourists, coming from all over the world? My thinking was different then. I justified it by saying, when will I next be in Rome?
Anyway Raphael’s frescoes are lovely. The Sistine Chapel smelled like sickness, which was probably just my imagination. The Vatican church was ornate, gold everywhere, and there was a statue of Saint George with another dragon that looked like a dog. And marble reliefs of naked angels. If you took a shot for every bared breast you saw in the Vatican, you’d leave stumbling.
When I wore a mask in the airport between Rome and London, everyone looked at me as if I were sick.
Mid-March
London!
Everything sounds like it’s from
Harry Potter19disclaimer: JK Rowling I don't love, this series I do. Most classics, I think, must leave their authors behind.
: station names, street names, accents and words. Everyone spoke English, which I did not miss, but it meant my brain could think less hard. I accidentally got in a long conversation with a missionary Christian lady, and in a rage went to a science museum, where I was aggressively interested in exhibits on evolution.
After that was a slew of museums: I went to the natural history museum and uncovered years’ worth of memories of my mom reading my little sister dinosaur books. There was a museum with lots of clocks and old steam engines, the mechanisms of which I did not understand. There was one museum with a vast room of Victorian science — the complicated devices, tray on tray of things like mummy fingers and dried moss, believed to have medicinal properties. There was magic in people’s vision of the world, then, but it was beginning to be categorized, the first step toward its extinction.
I’d been leaving my books in hostels one by one, and even though a Dutch girl gave me Stiefvater’s Call Down the Hawk back in Grenada, I was nearly out of books. I went to a Waterstones and bought I think five more. My favorites would be Lud-in-the-Mist, a pre-Tolkein fantasy by Hope Mirlees, and Wolf Road, a thriller by Beth Lewis.
I went to Paddington Station to meet Deb, the owner of a writing retreat in Sheepwash, Devonshire where I would be interning. We took the train, then a bus, and got a lift from a friend of hers to finally reach Sheepwash, a town with four streets — East Street, South Street, West Street, and North Street — and maybe one hundred houses. Devonshire is lush, wet and green, rolling hills broken up by hedgerows and little copses of trees. This retreat was full of charming clutter, women’s fiction, a vast collection of English teacups, and there was always cake in the fridge.
I helped run a tea shop, where the guests were lovely and, in their own words, quintessentially English. I took care of the dog, an old chocolate lab who did not look like a dragon. I was working on a different book then, about witches, and I got some chapters done, long hours by the window. I read Lud-in-the-Mist. I called my friend in Tucson, who had just been barred from her university campus due to Coronavirus.
I had been there about a week before the first outbreak in London. My parents called me to come home.
I was in the middle of nowhere, I protested. I would be seeing no one except the dog and the owner. I still had to go to France. I didn’t know when I would have the money to get to Europe again.
I texted my friend frantically for two days straight. My mom kept sending headlines of Italy running out of ventilators. My dad texted ominously, “anyone could die. And you would be. Gone.”
I didn’t want to go.
But I started packing — I couldn’t afford to be hospitalized here — and the next day, the owner decided to shutter the writing retreat, take her dog and shelter in place with family.
She drove us to London, switching from news to podcasts and back again. The schools were closing. Would there be a travel ban?
She dropped me off at the airport. It was one of the smaller ones, I don’t remember which. My terminal was empty, and my plane, which hopped to Ireland, was nearly so.
I had a twelve-hour layover before my flight to Baltimore, and ten hours after that before I would be in Tucson. America. It seemed impossible that such a place existed.
My painfully heavy backpack, crammed tight with new books, was checked, so I had only a cheap London hoodie and Oliver Twist with me. I walked outside. You didn’t have to go through security to enter the airport from this exit, it seemed. I could walk to a bar, but I didn’t feel like drinking. I walked along the grass, once again in a country I’d never been to before.
It’s for the best, I told myself. It’s been so hard to focus on writing, you know. My backpack hurt my shoulders after ten minutes of walking. I’d been living on pizza and espresso and this one weird brand of yogurt, and every variety of European dessert. My body was exhausted. Maybe, I feared, I wanted to go home all along.
I knew that was a lie. Going home felt like a breakup, that moment when you’re saying, “Yes, I’m fine. In fact I’m better off.”
The night air was crisp and very cold, as I knew it would not be in Tucson. I could walk anywhere from here. Nobody knew me.
I looked up at the starry sky, wondering if the constellations looked different on this side of the world, and promised that I would be back.
I’ve sort of been implying this on the blogs for awhile now, but I’ve been having a crisis over whether to go to grad school or not.
And as the school year has progressed, I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that I am very tired. And I don’t think that I’m ready to go quite yet.
This semester, I have been feeling what I can only describe as an overwhelming amount of exhaustion. I am doing much less than I ever have in a semester – there are no sports, activities, or social activities to really keep me busy. I’m taking less classes. And yet, I feel like my brain is floating in sludge, and that every amount of work I do actually get done takes me a million times longer.
I think that this is partially a symptom of the #pandemiclifestyle, partially because it’s my last semester and I only need to take four classes to graduate, but primarily because I am really tired of school.
I feel like when people at MIT say this, they don’t really mean it. They complain about hating school and hating MIT, but still go on to do an MEng, or do a multi-year grad program.
But I actually mean it, and I think it stems from something that I’ve always felt that I lack in comparison to other MIT students: I just don’t enjoy academic learning as much as my peers.
Don’t get me wrong, I love learning new things. But I’ve never been the type of person to, say, read a textbook, or enjoy lectures. I’ve never even really engaged the notion of doing those things for fun on my own time. I’ve always felt like I’m inferior because of that, even though it just means that I learn differently from other people. But at school, when those are really the only types of learning that students are offered, it can get tiring to constantly shove new information into your brain using these mediums that are not conducive to your own learning.
The way that I learn best is by actually doing things. And yes, of course, there are project classes, and I made a point of taking as many of those as possible last year. But the thing about project classes is that in an environment where you’re supposed to be learning, quantifying what you’ve learned from project classes can be difficult. Sure, you learned enough to create a cool final project, but it’s hard to actually describe what you learned sometimes. And that can be sad, and a little disheartening, when it happens at school, a place where you’re supposed to be stuffing new information into your brain constantly.
I found at my internship this summer that I preferred the way that learning works in the real world. I struggled and flailed and had no idea what I was doing for most of it, but towards the end, I started to figure out how to start that build process, how to go through the logs and fish out errors, and how to deduce how to fix my code from the error message. And since I had to work on my project every day, the progress was slow but constantly visible. And that was very motivating for me personally – granted, it was because my mentor and manager chose a very fitting project for me to work on, but it worked. I learned a lot and gained a lot of confidence in myself. And it’s sad, but that’s something that I’ve never really felt at MIT.
Well, what about grad school? I wouldn’t have to take that many classes, and would get to work on lots of cool projects related to my interests. This was my primary reason for wanting to apply to grad school: I love my research, and really believe that it has a positive impact on the world. But, do I love it enough to sacrifice a healthy work-life balance and a relatively stress free lifestyle? That’s a hard question, and I think that right now, I would answer no.
I’m so tired. I need energy, and maybe being given a few years to let my brain decompress from constantly being pressure cooked for all of my academic life would help me regain it. To be frank, when I think about grad school – and I know I would work 80 hours a week and not have a single ounce of work-life balance, because that’s just the kind of person I am – it doesn’t reenergize me. It makes me feel tired and sad that I would have to give up work-life balance to pursue the fields that I’m really passionate in.
But, I have a lurking feeling that I’ll get bored of the working life someday too. Someday, I’ll crave the challenge of casting my brain out to research areas that are yet unexplored. I’ll miss writing papers, and I’ll miss building ridiculous projects for research purposes. And maybe, by that time in my life, I’ll be older and know how to assert my boundaries – I’ll say no to working more than 40 hours a week, and maintain the sort of schedule I would have gotten used to. I’ll be starting grad school less burned out and less jaded from 3.5 years of getting my ass handed to me academically in undergrad. Maybe that’ll happen one day.
Or maybe it won’t. Maybe, I’ll have buffed my research portfolio enough by the end of this year to get a research job in industry, which is increasingly sounding more and more ideal to me. By the end of this year, if
all goes well01and even if everything fails, I'll still be on 1.5 conference papers and 2 journal articles...pretty good
, I could be on as many as 3.5 published conference papers and 2 published journal articles. I’ve been told that that’s pretty good.
We’ll see. I do want to do the things I love in life, but not at the cost of actually enjoying my life. This is commonly referred to as selling out, my greatest fear. But right now, to be honest, I don’t care. I just want to wake up every day and have my most stressful issue be trying to solve whatever I’m working on at my job, not the crushing pressure of having to finish a million projects for a million different research initiatives to publish a million different papers. Even if I love every single one of those projects, that doesn’t make the pressure any less crushing. Call it self-care.
Twitch offered me a job on Thursday, and I think I’m gonna take it.
At the beginning of September, I moved into a new house! It’s 10 minutes away from MIT by foot and dope as hell. There’s an upstairs and downstairs with two sets of fridges, washing machines—sans
WashLava,04the laundry app we used in dorms
the bane of my existence—and living spaces. It’s pretty litty.
My group started moving in on September 1st, which is the day classes started. Yeah, it was pretty unideal. We had some people come in the day after, so we rented a UHaul for the 3rd and spent the majority of the day lugging all our boxes from the storage locker we’d used to hold things from our previous apartment. It was a long, tedious process that I wasn’t a part of since I had class from 10 am to 4 pm.
Since everyone in the house has classes and work, it took a few days to get the essential furniture set up. Boxes were so strewn across the common areas that we could barely move…
behold,,
Thankfully, on Friday night, a few days after we’d moved in, some of us had a cleaning-up party. Picture four college students blasting 100 gecs and Cardi B while deep-cleaning an entire house and moving furniture up and down flights of stairs at 1 AM.
pristine kitchen, post-cleaning
It took us a good while to get our common spaces more together, though. The living room was in disarray for two weeks, but we decided to move its furniture around once we realized that having a movie night was not possible with just a single wooden chair in front of the TV…It looks pretty good now, though, and we’ve had dozens of movie nights since. We do still need another couch, however. I guess we’ll get it whenever one of us feels un-hosed enough to take the initiative and hop on Craigslist to look for one.
As for my own room, I have a single now! Inspired by my housemates’ rooms, I decided to put some effort into decorating my room, aka I went full college girl and ordered a tapestry and fairy lights.
So…my room went from this…
featuring a sideways couch
To this!
Featuring: album covers, some nostalgic pictures from my freshman year (like my dance team and living community), and a gorgeous ukiyo-e style tapestry that I adore.
I was so distracted with my classes that it took me almost a month to get my hands on a desk; thanks to my initial order being canceled, shipping took WEEKS. I managed to keep up with my classes despite working on my bed all day, which is quite an incredible feat for me. Having a desk is a game-changer, though—there’s so much space to put things!!!
The joy of having a single is unprecedented. I can plaster pictures all over the walls, get a freaking body pillow if I so desire, start a growing collection of Digimon plushies at the foot of my bed, and cultivate a ~vibe~ that’s uniquely my own. It’s great!
The rest of the house is steadily accumulating more furniture and decor, so I’m excited to see what it’ll look like in a few weeks. We’re going to be here for 11 more months, so…there’s a lot of potential for it.
I’m really happy about my living space right now, and I feel like all my needs are accommodated. Setting up the house took ages since we’re all tired and hosed, but things are looking pretty great! I miss living in a dorm, but having a place like this is IT, y’all.
Back in July, when the Institvte first accidentally leaked their plans for the fall, most people reading the FAQ immediately scrolled to big-ticket items like “who gets to live on-campus next year?”,”how much will tuition be?”, and “will we get grades in the fall?”. Many of us had spent months pondering and debating every possible answer to these questions, based on nuggets gleaned from meetings with MIT administrators, the UA’s Instagram posts, and whisper networks. We were thrilled to finally have some real information. However, some intrepid students, rather than skipping to the good stuff, painstakingly close-read the entire document, and found a few unexpected tidbits:
my podmate Aidan turned 22 this week and we had our grad ra get him a cake from costco instead. you know, like normal people
one question remains: what will they do with the 6000 ipads once the loan expires and everyone has to give them back to mit?
Yes, you read that correctly: MIT announced that students in the dorms would be able to bake birthday cakes in a simple 3-step process involving two safety trainings, a registration system, and a kitchen deep-clean by the janitorial staff. Also, they announced intentions to ship a cellular-enabled iPad and Apple Pencil to every undergrad and every grad TA who wanted one.
Many students were baffled by the generosity of the iPad plan01especially given the lack of generosity of some other parts of the plan, like financial aid
and also confused about how it would work logistically. Memes ensued.
i don’t know who made this, but thank you, and thank you to my friend Eren for sharing it with me
I actually already had an iPad, so I was excited for my friends, but didn’t think I would personally get one. Then, I learned that “cellular-enabled” meant unlimited data and 50 GB/month without any throttling. My parents’ wifi generally goes out for a few minutes at least once a day, so I was intrigued by the data plan, to say the least. Soon, I learned that the MIT iPads were basically the newest, most expensive models, and at least 3x the cost of my still-pretty-good iPad. Also, I’m not one to turn down free stuff.
So, it was a no-brainer — I signed up for an iPad. I decided to transfer my data from my personal iPad to the MIT iPad, and then factory reset and lend my personal iPad to my mom for the school year while I used the nicer MIT-provided iPad. Every day in August, I checked my parents’ front porch for a package from IS&T. No dice.
Still iPad-less, I flew back to Boston and moved into Simmons. I was disappointed that my plan to lend my mom my iPad hadn’t worked, but I vowed to make the most of the experience; I decided to kickstart my career as an influencer by making unboxing videos for the iPad and the Apple Pencil. There were just two problems: I did not yet have anything to unbox, and I have never seen an unboxing video and thus had no idea how to make one.
Finally, I got the
second-most-exciting email of the entire fall semester:02more to come on the first-most-exciting email of the fall semester. watch this space.
tech yeah *sunglasses emoji*
Now, I had something to unbox, and I wouldn’t let my lack of experience stop me from vlogging the experience.
This is the part of the post where I would embed the iPad unboxing video. There was just one problem: I doxxed myself so thoroughly and completely in the video, displaying my full name and address in almost every frame, that I can never post it publicly on the Internet. Due to my lack of unboxing-video know-how, I didn’t have the foresight to remove the address labels beforehand, and once the iPad was out of the box, so to speak, I couldn’t turn back the clock and film the video over again.
However, the story wasn’t over. I received the Apple Pencil a few days later, and I was able to film myself unboxing it. It was quarantine week, so I had to hold my phone in one hand and open the box with the other. I still doxxed myself a little bit, but I was able to edit out that part of the video,
replacing it with a picture of Sunspot, one of my family’s cats.03I honestly think this is more enjoyable than watching my disembodied hand flailing around anyway
So, if you’ve ever wanted to watch an unboxing-video-turned-accidental-ASMR filmed and edited by someone who has never seen an unboxing video, and who was filming and opening the box at the same time, you’re in luck. Enjoy.
This is by far the class I spend the most time on. The content is really quite hard for me, and we’re moving through it at a blistering pace, but at least part of me enjoys the challenge each week brings and the satisfaction of finally getting that ‘aha!’ moment when you’ve figured out how to solve a problem. (The other part of me is just along for the ride, I guess.) What makes it especially hard is that I haven’t really found a solid pset group for this class, but I’m still cruising along, and if push comes to shove I’ll probably
Halloween
