You might have read Kathleen’s earlier blog posts (one, two) about a little thing called dormspam-the-game, an MIT-wide competition with 452 different players across all of campus. This competition had various “game theory”-esque challenges run by anonymous gamemasters and $749 in prizes. If you’re still hungry for more details on this wacky game, never fear, for I was one of the gamemasters and have more content to share :D

For much of the summer, I worked with Whitney Z. ‘21 designing, iterating, and testing this project. The two of us wanted to share how the other side of these games worked: a “behind-the-scenes” tour of everything that it took to make these games come to life!

a history

WZ: Paolo was actually one of the first people I met at CPW. He struck me as somewhat charming, despite his obsession with the color orange,⁠01 whitney is actually obsessed with purple which puts us at very opposite ends of the same spectrum -p and certainly interesting. I’m sort of surprised I ever found him given the low number of course 14s. I gave him my number, but Paolo never texted me back. (I told him this story three years later— he didn’t believe me⁠02 i’m usually good at remembering random facts about people but i do not remember this meeting at all. cpw is such a blur -p and then found my number in his contacts. I’ve been converted to Messenger, so I guess he won in the end.) 

We took 2.00b together, then 14.30 and 14.05 our sophomore year. I’m 99% sure he didn’t realize I existed in 2.00b⁠03 wow i am being called out -p . We somehow re-bonded over psets sometime in either 14.30 or 14.05, and further in 14.19 our junior fall. 

There’s two amusing things about Paolo: he enjoys working on not-class things in class,⁠04 WOW i am being called out -p and he enjoys being cryptic about them. I stumbled upon Paolo running Next Forum Games, a precursor to dormspam-the-game, in 14.05. I promise this is all (mostly) relevant. 

PA: Outside of my room in Next House, I had a 2.5’ x 3.5’ whiteboard that served as a message board—something to share events that are happening and also a way to run fun polls with people in my wing, like “What do you miss most from high school?” or “Draw a snake that ate something.” At the start of my sophomore spring, I started running some games on my whiteboard—things like “Choose a number from 1-100, trying to guess 90% of the average” and “Choose the least chosen of A or B; but, I know you’ll choose A.” People could submit answers by dropping sticky notes into a small box outside of my room, and that was that.

I ran maybe 4 or so of these games and people seemed to like them; so over spring break, I started planning an even bigger version. And on April 1st (why did I decide that date), I sent the following message to my dorm’s email list. 

the snark starts early

People submitted their answers and seemed to enjoy; my dorm’s area director (someone whose full-time job is just to help residents) found me and said he liked it so much that he was willing to fund prizes for the rest of the games. I ended up running 5 more of these games, including “Hide and Seek” and “Guess the difference between your number and a randomly chosen partner’s number.” At some point this semester I told Whitney about these games after her many questions⁠05 I really had to pry for this information. Paolo enjoys keeping his many “skeekrets”, but I’m also a stubborn person. -w  about the weird spreadsheets I was looking at during 14.05. These games were fun to put on, but after the semester ended, all was done with Next Forum Games.

WZ: In May—a full year after the conclusion of Next Forum Games—I had been watching Money, a game show developed by Tom Scott. I was very excited and messaged our 14.19 group chat (named “snek econ kidz”) if anyone wanted to watch with me. 

PA: I hope you enjoy Whitney’s nickname in this chat. Brownie points to anyone who can guess what in the world it refers to. My nickname shall go unspoken.⁠06 I’ll give you an actual brownie if you’re capable of guessing what Paolo’s nickname is. No cheating, of course. -w But anyways, here’s what Whitney sent:

chat log 1/3

chat log 2/3

chat log 3/3

Previous Next

And after a while of bouncing ideas off of each other, we decided that we’d try and actually make this all happen.

To clarify, the name “dormspam-the-game” comes from the fact that we’d send out these games over dormspam, the informal name for the set of all dorms’ social lists. It’s the most-used way to reach all of campus to publicize events, clubs, fun polls, or start flame wars.

The start of these games happened very spontaneously. We didn’t have any well-defined goals going into it (which, honestly, is how lots of things in life happen); we just had an idea and ran with it. Our initial conversations involved sketching out different ideas that could make for entertaining and challenging games. We also just wanted to do something to bring a bit of joy and community to people’s inboxes, especially as we’ve all been relegated to the far corners of the earth⁠07 Topologists, please ignore that the Earth is a sphere (or at least approximately one). in corona-exodus. It’s really easy to just feel like every day is the same in quarantine, and this was one way to add some variety.

setting things up

We knew that we wanted to have prizes to give away to our participants. MIT students will do a lot for free money, like filling out many of the surveys that hit their inbox. There’s a few different funds at MIT that have money set aside just to help run cool events, including the Baker Foundation and the de Florez Fund for Humor. 

As part of the application process for funding, we wrote a proposal for how every dollar would be spent. This meant we needed to think ahead about how each of the games would work and how prizes would be divided. Unfortunately, the Baker Foundation application cycle had closed, but de Florez was still offering up to $749⁠08 Someone in the live Youtube chat asked if Paolo embezzled $1. He did not. We just really only had $399, rather than $400, for the final game. in funding and we applied for it. If you really want to examine the historical evidence, read our original proposal here. 

We were both immensely excited when we de Florez gave us money: 

literally big iff true

To make our whole charade appear just a bit more legitimate, we set up a website at dormspam-the-game.mit.edu. The Information Systems and Technology desk at MIT (more frequently called IS+T) supports a number of different ways to make websites; many students make their own personal websites using scripts.mit.edu. 

However, given our lack of website-making knowledge (neither of us are course 6, oof), we decided to use the Drupal Cloud website builder to help us out. Additionally, the Drupal Cloud website builder allowed for webforms that require MIT Certificates to access, making it easier to validate members of the MIT community when they played our games (and so random people on the internet couldn’t just win money). 

One of the first pages on our website, the FAQs page, helped us find our tone and style for being Gamemasters. At some point during website building, we also decided that we wanted to be ~mysterious, anonymous Gamemasters~ for the fun of it.

We then set up our first form game, “Game 0: Rate Paolo Out of 10,”⁠09 The correct answer to this game was 0. Answers were restricted to be between 1 and 10, so no one won. for our first playtesters: Emily C. ‘22, Dhruv R. ‘21, Faraz M. ’21, and Izzy B. ’21. It turns out that when there’s templates and many things already set up, even people who know nothing about websites can build working websites :D And so we moved on to the real thing.

game design

For dormspam-the-game, we ran 5 separate games. In this section, we want to just give you a sense of what each game was, some potential strategies to approach playing the game, and how we thought about the results. For each game, we’ve also linked the full game descriptions with the real results.

• Game 1: Hide and Seek. From a list of 20 places, choose one place to hide and one place to seek; your goal is to find the most people relative to how many people find you. Hide and seek isn’t usually thought of as a “game theory” game, exactly. But for a game structured like this, you have to try and predict exactly where people will choose to hide (places where people normally pass through? or never visit?) so that you can choose the best spot to seek, and vice versa for your choice in hiding. It’s the ultimate “reverse psychology” test—can you out-predict everyone else?
  To spice things up even more, we gave people a few “hints” to naturally draw their attention towards specific places on campus, such as “No one’s in Hayden because it’s under construction. On the other hand, everyone walks through Lobby 7 (or, at least did).”
  Because we deliberately brought attention to these places, it was natural that fewer people wanted to hide in them. However, some people chose to seek in these hinted places, indicating that they thought people would try to “hide in plain sight.” It didn’t work.
  Once we had a winner for Game 1, we decided to ask our winners of each game a few questions and post them to our winners page. We did not expect there to be such big beef over pineapple on pizza; shahul’s answers were a welcome, amusing surprise. 
• Game 2: Greed control. Choose 5 numbers from 1 to 50; If you choose k and that number was chosen n times, you receive k/n points. Go for as many points as you can. Those of you who frequent math forums might already be familiar with this game from AoPS; it’s basically a more involved version of that.
  In Nash equilibrium, each number is chosen with inverse proportion to its value; however, following this strategy yourself is unideal because people naturally aggregate towards certain values. In particular, we hypothesize that people shied away from “middling” values and “round” values because they feel less “random”. And this just makes them the better choices for your overall score.
  It was in this game that we got the idea to rebrand the in-game MIT as the Missouri Institute of Taxidermy.⁠10 As of the time of this writing, “Missouri Institute of Taxidermy” (with quotes) has 470 search results, including one of Kathleen’s blogs and the d-t-g website itself. Without quotes, you find a real Missouri Taxidermy Institute...
• Game 3: Division of Student Life.⁠11 Coming up with the name of this game might actually be the biggest lightbulb moment of my life. -w Divide 100 points between school, sleep, and social. We selected different metrics for each of 3 rounds, and aggregated them for the final score.
  This was our most complicated game yet—and probably a bad decision to have run without testing things first.⁠12 See the mistakes section below for what we mean. Lots of folks commented that they felt that this game was unfair, because in rounds 2 and 3, two players could submit identical answers but score differently, depending on who they were paired with. This brings up an interesting question of what exactly “fair” means. For example, tournament-style games work by pitting individual players or teams against each other.
  Of all five games, this game most directly forced players to think about tradeoffs and risk. Riskier players chose to place a large portion of their points in one or two categories, whereas more risk-averse players chose to more evenly spread their points across the board.
• Game 4: COVID-90: The Counting of Vacancies in Dormitories. Players guessed 90% of the average of all players’ guesses. More accurate was better.
  Given the complexities of Game 3, we elected to tone things down for Game 4, our easiest to understand game. We were surprised that one player guessed 4000 — since the maximum is 4000, 90% of the average is as most 3,600. The standard deviation of guesses was large, with many players guessing around 3000, and some guessing as little as 0.
  The pure strategy Nash equilibrium is for all players to guess 0. Intuitively, given what other players guess, each player guesses 90% of that; when all players think this way and continuously take 90% of some value, one reaches 0. Of course, to play in this manner, one has to assume that other players will also play using this strategy, which is clearly not true experimentally.
  Wikipedia says it best: “This game illustrates the difference between perfect rationality of an actor and the common knowledge of rationality of all players. Even perfectly rational players playing in such a game should not guess 0 unless they know that the other players are rational as well and that all players’ rationality is common knowledge. If a rational player reasonably believes that other players will not follow the [reasoning] described above, it would be rational for him/her to guess a number above 0.”
• Game 5: Institvte FUNdraising. Players invested coins they held into the FUNd, which multiplied and split investments amongst all players, regardless of their initial investment amount. Players also submitted a number of coins to punish the lowest quartile. More coins at the end was better.
  This game is a spinoff of a classic public goods game—more money in the pot is better for everyone, but everyone’s personal incentive is to be a free rider and not put in anything—bar the punishment, of course. At its core though, our implementation of the game boiled down to “guess the lowest quartile” and submit a value marginally above that. Of course, this is difficult and a poor guess could result in a steep loss, so many players elected to invest 0 and voted for the lowest punishment. Like Kathleen, we found surprising the submission that invested 0 but voted for a punishment of 300, as well as the submission that invested 1000 but voted for a punishment of only 50.
  If you liked this game, Wikipedia is informative about different variations of public goods games, and this paper is also a fun read.

For fun, a few games that didn’t make the cut:

• Guess Course 6: Guess the fraction of the players for this game that are course 6s. Every time someone submitted, their guess would be posted on a public list. Later guesses receive fewer points. With this game, we hoped to test how much people would trust crowdsourced information on the public list. Unfortunately, there was no good way to create this public list with DrupalCloud webforms.
• Guess when the next game is released: The next game will come out 10-15 days from now. Your score is how accurately you predict it. Like the above game, the longer you wait, the better you can guess; however, there’s also a chance that the game ends before you even can submit if you wait longer. In the end, we decided we wanted a regular release schedule and thought that this game would lean too strongly towards luck rather than wit.
• Paired Institvte FUNdraising: Before we came up with the Institvte FUNdraising in its final form, we toyed with an alternate version. Instead of entering an investment amount and a punishment amount, players would enter how much to invest, be paired with a random player, and then submit how much to punish that individual player. However, we ultimately decided that having a multi-week game wouldn’t work out very well. 

We had a few people ask where to find games like these and where to learn how to play games like these. To be quite honest, we have no clue. However, you might find something you enjoy in the following list. We don’t claim that this is exhaustive; feel free to add other things that you think would be cool down below :)

• TV Shows
  • Money
  • The Genius
  • Golden Balls
• Classes
  • 14.12 (Economic Applications of Game Theory)
  • 14.13 (Psychology and Economics)
  • 14.44 (Energy Economics)
  • 14.160 (Behavioral Economics)
  • 17.810/17.811 (Game Theory and Political Theory)
  • 11.011 (Art & Science of Negotiation)
• Books
  • Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
  • Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
• Basically any strategy board game

final game

The culmination of dormspam-the-game was a “final game,” where the 5 winners of each week’s contest could compete against each other for even greater prizes. We envisioned this as a 2 hour “game show” to entertain viewers. 

As we hoped to build a game show heavily inspired by Money, we also emailed Tom Scott, the creator of the show, who gave us permission and offered us some advice:

As you now know, we decided to take the luck instead of the advice to do something else.

Our initial show had 4 separate games—Negotiation (NG), Money Multiplier (MM), Public Goods (PG), and Endgame (EG)—with 3 rounds each. In each round, players could win both dollars (which they could just take home or transfer to other players) and stars (which players were told would be useful for EG, but couldn’t be transferred and had no inherent worth).  We revealed player earnings—with names attached—after each game.

The overall strategy for these games is quite interesting; a fully cooperative set of players could collectively take home all of the money in each game and split it evenly. While defecting from the group in each game could net you a bit more money in the moment, it also eroded trust and makes future games of trust much, much harder. A quick overview of each game and some strategies:

• NG: Players choose one of 5 cards, each with a specific reward. They receive what’s on that card if they’re the only one that chooses it. Some rewards had negative dollar amounts, while others had stars on them.
  A fully cooperative team would try to designate one person to choose each (positive) dollar amount, then transfer money so that it’d be split equally. However, the availability of stars complicates this strategy, since they can’t be transferred to other players, and no one has a sense of how much they’re worth.
• MM: Players choose an integer from 1 to 5. If they choose the lowest unique number they receive some base prize that is multiplied by their integer. For example, if the base prize was $5 and players chose 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, the person who chose 3 would receive $15. The person who wins the most money in this round gets a star.
  The optimal cooperative strategy is for exactly one person to choose 5, and everyone “doubles up” on lower numbers, so that the prize is multiplied by 5; then, the money can be split evenly between everyone. However, a defector could easily choose a number lower than 5; say that people chose (5, 4, 4, 3, 3); someone could (anonymously) choose 2 instead of 4, and walk away with $10 for themselves instead of only the $5 they’d get from collaborating with the whole group.
• PG: Players contribute money to a communal pot. The pot is multiplied by some multiplier (larger than one) and then shared evenly among everyone. The person who wins the most money in this game gets a star.
  Conceptually, this game is a lot like Game 5, Institvte FUNdraising. While it’s in everyone’s interest to contribute as much as possible, each person individually does best if they contribute nothing. This game, compared to all others, is highly reliant on individuals trusting each other. As the rounds in this game progress, the multiplier gets even higher, which only increases the incentive to defect.
• EG: One player, the endgame controller, creates a deal to split $150 among all 5 players. In the previous games, players could win money and stars. In Endgame, each star was one vote for selecting the endgame controller. If the deal doesn’t get approved after 3 rounds, then no one takes home any money. (Players didn’t know the structure of this round before starting it.)
  If players trusted each other in earlier rounds, they could do something fair; however, if there was no basis of trust, then there’s a chance that no one takes home anything in this round.

We knew we only had one shot at running this, so we ran three playtests with feedback sessions afterward to try and create a final game with the dynamics we wanted. Each of these playtests ended up differently, which helped us iterate and iterate again to make the final final game.

Playtest #1: We had an amusing 4 vs. 1 playtesting dynamic here, where four players chose to coordinate with each other against a single player that chose to deviate in the very first round. One of our players broke a few rules to help choose a specific endgame controller, who evenly divided $150 among all players in the cabal of 4. 

This playtest also had no centralized systems for sharing winnings with players; Paolo just PM’ed everybody after each round. This didn’t work out terribly well, and so we introduced “dashboards”⁠13 The backend of these dashboards is a lot of very messy Google Sheets work. Andrew K. ‘22, a later playtester, claimed that he could’ve coded up a webapp for all this in 45 minutes — but hey, what’s done is done, and now we’ve learned more than a lifetime’s worth of Google Sheets. for each player to keep track of their winnings in this game. Click here to see what these dashboards look like. 

At this point, we also did a slide revamping so that results would automatically update on the slides. This came along with slide-beautifying, and they look very pretty :) They also match the dashboard theme!

we definitely didn't use templates... but it's so pretty

pretty gradients with clip art!

slide of a round in progress from final game

our original theme was a bit less pretty

i am glad we did not use this theme

Previous Next

After Playtest #1, we tried to schedule the real game for the following weekend, but due to conflicts, ended up with a date 3 weeks later. In hindsight, this was very lucky for us in terms of producing a better game, as it gave us time to run two more playtests.

Playtest #2: This test started off seeming like it’d follow the same storyline as the first one. But, one of our playtesters convinced everyone that they weren’t playing against each other, but rather competing against us to try and win as much money. With that in mind, these people trusted each other completely and took home almost every single dollar⁠14 They actually took home more money than we had available because we forgot that the players didn’t necessarily have to obtain the negative values in Negotiation. This was rectified for the next test. that we had to give out in prizes. We maybe should have seen this coming—the one player who got screwed over in Playtest #1 later messaged Whitney that he only played as he did because he misunderstood the rules. 

We thought this wouldn’t make for good entertainment for our audience, and so we tried to incentivize distrust a bit more. Based on a suggestion from Jesse O. ’16, we made the revelation of winnings after each game anonymous so that people could bluff about how much money they had. We also reordered the games to PG, MM, NG, EG, as PG has the most opportunity to “fake out” the other players with respect to how much money you placed into the pot, and so could sow discord earlier.

Playtest #3: With all of that, we tried a third and final playtest one week before the final game actually happened. This playtest was by far the most chaotic of the three, with total earnings of $61 (which included no deal made in the Endgame). The game ran slightly over, so we decided to cut MM and EG each from three rounds to two.

We were a bit concerned about low earnings for the real deal, but thought that real money would pressure players into deciding a deal for Endgame, so that everyone would at least win $150. We also started designing live “Audience Contests” to help us engage with our audience, where they could make guesses about how the final game would go in real-time to win the money that the players didn’t earn. 

We are immensely grateful to all of our playtesters,⁠15 Many thanks to the SPAlumni Network -w Andrew K. ’22, Arushi O., Asia C. ’20, Clairey Y., Emily C. ‘22, Evan T. ‘19, Evangeline K., Haydn B., Henry K. ’17, Izzy B. ’21, Jesse, Kevin L. ’19, Nathaniel K. ’19, Sarah M., and Sarah P. ’20. We tried to avoid using current MIT undergraduates for playtesting, so that they could fully enjoy the live show. This turned out to be somewhat difficult, and a reminder of how MIT-based our friend groups had become. We had to dive very deep into family friends and people we knew from high school. 

So with all of that, we were ready for the real finale: the final game. The two of us were definitely anxious about how it’d go; despite all of the work we put into testing (probably 20 hours of work for us each), we really only had 3 data points we were using to build our final game—all 3 of which gave different results. We sent it out over dormspam (duh), did so many last-minute script changes and slide edits, and on Friday, August 21, the grand finale finally happened.

The final game ran about as well as we possibly could have asked for. There was a great balance between people trying to deceive each other and people trying to get everyone to collaborate; the 5 players took home $256.18 out of a possible $399 in winnings. There were a few hiccups (big and small) during the final game, but overall, we think it went spectacularly. We seriously think that watching this video replay is really entertaining, so if you’re in need of just under 2 hours of good fun content, click above. We gave live commentary about the final game as it went, so we’ll absolve ourselves of writing more about it here. Go watch!

fun tidbits about these games

Mistakes

These games did not run perfectly; nothing ever runs as planned, and there were many, many things that didn’t go as planned throughout these games. Some highlights of the mistakes that we made:

• Game 3: Our initial results were completely wrong; we used a different scoring system than we had said in the rules. We “fixed” it and they still were wrong, so we had to send out another correction; luckily for us, it didn’t change who the overall winner was.
• Game 4: We missed an error on our website that meant we didn’t actually record the usernames of people that played. This confused many people and we needed 100 people to resubmit their responses :(
• Game 5: We gave instructions in words about how we would calculate scores, but then added in a formula version of it to appease the math majors. The formula was wrong. We got corrected by (not) math majors.
• Final Game
  • Our forms for Negotiation didn’t have the correct numbers on them, requiring us to change the forms in the middle of the game.
  • Similarly, the forms for Endgame controller voting had names from our previous playtest. Oops.⁠16 at this point, someone in the Youtube chat asked if these were rigged. they were not, we pinky promise!
  • We had to calculate the winners of the Audience Contests live, and we goofed and read off the wrong names at first. Oops. That was definitely the most stressful part of all of this but we ended up getting them right after a few minutes of frantic spreadsheets.

And so we weren’t the completely perfect gamemasters that we wanted to be, but honestly, we think we did pretty well for 2 MIT students putting this on in their spare time outside of work :)

Dolla dolla bills

One of the hallmarks of dormspam is that any email sent out to all of the dorm social lists needs:

1. To have the mailing lists bcc’ed
2. To have the text “bcc’ed to all droms” or some variant spelling of this phrase
3. To include the color of your underwear as “[color] for bc-talk”

The third one might stand out as a bit of a weird one; take a look at this post for some history and this one for some data. But regardless, we were indeed dormspamming, and we needed an underwear color. Now, many people who dormspam an event include some colors which are a bit “out there”, such as:

• Zoom blue
• AlexaFluor-647 red
• Coquelicot 
• None
• Road stripe yellow
• Synthetic ultramarine 
• Purell clear

It is (purell) clear some of these are less legitimate colors than others—many people simply choose to name a color that’s somewhat related to the event that they’re sending over dormspam. We had to sign off on our emails somehow, so naturally, we said dolla dolla bill green for bc-talk. 

However, we do not want you to think that we are like any of those plebians who lie about their underwear color for an amusing thing on the bottom of dormspam. No. Because Paolo, in fact, sent our dormspam while wearing dolla dolla bill green underwear. 

to my knowledge, i am the first person to post my own underwear on the blogs

The magic of QUERY

If you don’t know how to use the “QUERY” function, you need to learn it. It’s seriously so powerful. From an array, you can select specific columns, rows that match certain criteria, sort by specific columns, transpose your data, or even calculate averages or maxima for specific groups. Calculating our winners became as simple as a formula like 

=query(Import!R:AD,"select AD, R, AC, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB where R is not NULL order by AC desc")

which, in the realm of spreadsheet formulas, looks very, very pretty. 

Zoom streaming

It turns out that streaming a game on Zoom isn’t easy for a lot of reasons. Here’s some weird things that we did in order to make the stream actually work.

• To show a timer to the players, Paolo set a virtual background that was just a video with a 5 minute timer.
• All of the results that appear on the slides are linked to a “master dashboard” that Paolo had; updating them required you to press an “update content” button on that slide.
• This button didn’t appear when you shared the slides as fullscreen, so Whitney had to just show the slides as if she was editing them. But there’s a problem with this: players can see the slide previews and potentially get information they shouldn’t have. To solve this, we used jank Javascript code to hide the slide previews.
• Paolo tried to live-monitor chat as it happened to send links to the live Audience Contests and to explain games and strategies. This got harder as the stream went on and things got more chaotic.

the end

Neither of us expected that a lightbulb moment in May would carry us through 3 months of ideating, planning, testing, and, of course, gamemastering. It’s been a big rollercoaster of a ride, from joy to anticipation to “oh shit” (in both excitement and dread). 

We’ve loved every single comment we’ve received in the feels box. Whitney is happy that no one attempted to submit the Bee Movie script. Paolo would be happier if someone had tried.

For anyone that played, we hope that we’ve made you do a bit of a think, appreciate being at the Missouri Institute of Taxidermy (or that other MIT), and most importantly, brought about some light-spirited fun. The two of us had a lot of fun running dormspam-the-game this summer.

And with that, we take off our Gamemaster hats⁠17 If someone knows where to find a dolla dolla bill green hat, do let us know. for one last gamemaster goodbye. 

For most of my life before coming to MIT, I had been really into drawing all sorts of things.⁠02 there was a lot of… naruto though I had sketchbooks full of Digimon I’d made up when I was 8, and drawings along the margins of all of my notes. I learned how to use Photoshop and Paint.NET and GIMP and Paint Tool SAI beginning in elementary school, and for a long while I would draw things by hand on paper, scan them, and then painstakingly line them using a computer mouse so I could color them digitally.

In middle school, I’d saved up money from birthdays, holidays, and what allowance I got, so that I could buy myself a drawing tablet. After some careful research, I had gotten myself a Wacom Intuos tablet, which was a small black rectangle that I’d plug into my computer, and a wireless pen with six adjustable tips. There wasn’t a screen, so you’d have to watch your monitor as you made the strokes, which took some serious disconnecting from the mind-hand connection that I was used to.⁠03 as in, drawing a line produces a line at the tip of my pencil, and not a foot away and also vertically During this time, LED tablets were either extremely expensive or couldn’t support the necessary software, so most amateur artists (at least, the ones I’d followed on DeviantArt) had drawing tablets. But wow, did this tablet work a charm. The six tips were all textured differently to give you the sense of different materials—I most often used one that was hard and gritty and felt just like the tip of a pencil.

my first ever drawing using the tablet

I kept doing this throughout high school, when I’d post fanart and other original art on my Tumblr page. However, as is the story with most hobbies at MIT, the transition to college rigor made it hard to find time to draw, and the frequency of my art-making dropped to near-zero.⁠04 exceptions are: murals i painted in senior haus Plus, I didn’t bring my drawing tablet with me, and my drawing software⁠05 read: torrented drawing software was left behind on my parent’s home computer, effectively dashing my chances to continue on in my pursuit. I doodled in a sketchbook here and there, but it’s just not as fun once you get a taste of digital art, and you realize that there is a world in which you don’t have to worry about erasing the same spot a thousand times and ripping through the paper.

done in high school – i can’t actually color like this anymore

Well, what’s changed now? Why am I even writing this? Like hundreds of other MIT students, I received a free iPad and Apple Pencil in late August, as part of a new loaner program to help us with remote work in the age of COVID. Alex has also written about the glorious iPad and even did an unboxing video for the fancy Apple Pencil. I was pretty skeptical of the tablet life when it came to note-taking and doing work, but when MIT offered the option, I thought to myself: why not give it a shot? These are unprecedented times, after all.

The package arrived on August 27th, earlier than most of my peers, though I’m not really sure why. I was grateful for it, though, because I had a five day window where I had this new, fancy tech that was supposed to be for school, but I was also not yet in school. I spent a few hours just setting things up—downloading all the apps I’d need, installing certificates, synching my iCloud, logging into various websites so I wouldn’t have to later down the road, really just all the boring stuff that comes with getting something new.

I fiddled around with the pen, and found that I didn’t like the way there wasn’t enough friction in the pen-screen contact. The screen was too large for my hands, which was made worse by the clunky case we were also given, and I hated the feeling of holding it up like a giant phone. I’d made a mental list of all the things I didn’t like, convinced that my old pen-and-paper ways were far superior. But, still trying to get some use out of this thing which I’d decided I didn’t need⁠06 spoiler alert: i love it now, especially for taking notes I decided to download Procreate from the App Store.

What is Procreate, you may ask yourself? According to the internet, it’s a raster graphics editor (think Photoshop), though to anyone who is remotely interested in digital art, or even traditional art, it is a godsend. Now, I’m going to do my best to not sound like I’m being paid by the Procreate team for this, because I’m not, I’m just really excited about this app, okay? For starters, it only costs 9.99 on the App Store, with no advertisements, subscriptions, hidden or pay-locked elements. The whole app is yours after one payment.⁠07 compared to photoshop, which can range from 9.99 to 20.99 per MONTH, depending on your subscription type The main con is that it’s only available for the iPad,⁠08 there is an iphone version called procreate pocket, but it’s very limited compared to the original. also, drawing on a tiny phone is HARD but again, not a problem if you can get your hands on the loaner ones.

I’d first heard about this app through Twitter—I follow a lot of artists (a mix of professionals and hobbyists) who often would talk about their software or brushes they’d use and the like, and I saw the name Procreate get thrown around a lot. I never had an iPad until now, though. I started doodling casually the day I downloaded the app, trying to figure out how the software worked and different brushes. Everything felt simultaneously so familiar, yet so new. There was the pressure sensitivity, which was always buggy on my older tablet, but worked perfectly on the iPad. All the things I had forgotten about making art had started coming back to me as I tried virtually every brush available. My first piece was a very rusty rendition of two characters from a series I just finished reading, but it still felt so good to do it again.

testing out colors

I find myself filled with a newfound itch to draw again, like I’m 14 and can’t pay attention in geometry. I’m taking CMS.307: Critical Worldbuiling with Nisha, and for my latest story, I drew up a map of the location just so I could have it visually and reference it when I was writing. Whenever I finish a piece for this class, all I want to do is draw my characters or their worlds, just to look at this thing that feels so real and alive, in both words and pictures. It’s the thing I loved to do the most as a pre-teen with loads of free time: writing and then making fanart⁠09 although, i guess it's not fanart but rather just art of my own work like I’m part of a one-man fandom.

whoosh dramatics

At the risk of sounding like an absolute nerd, I’m also working on a partially-remote southern gothic tabletop RPG campaign with my roommate and some other friends, and I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to draw out all of our characters, and different things that have happened in our game so far. It’s set in a small fictional town in Louisiana,⁠10 definitely not inspired by the hit HBO series True Blood, which i binge watched last spring and is all being carefully planned by our great DM, my roommate Dominik M ’19, who’s name already has the initials required. So far, my character Clem has attempted (and failed) to steal a dead man’s cufflinks, and then completely botched a spell for summoning a ghost, but it’s all in good fun!

this is all done in procreate! no pencils or brushes necessary

Previous Next

It’s just so fun, drawing again with the world at my fingertips. I don’t need to buy inks or special pens or paints, because I can just change the brush type and make it look like whatever I want. It also helps that this has coincided with my recent fantasy-reading-spree, which fills my head with ideas and inspiration for things to draw.

a work in progress – clem (attempts) to summon a ghost

If it isn’t clear, I highly recommend this app if you like to draw, and have an iPad. I know I’m going to be really sad when I have to give mine back at the end of the year, but I’m still hoping my rekindled love for drawing continues in full force.

Right before school started, I sent out a survey to all the dorms asking what people’s favorite classes were. I received 130 responses listing 205 classes and why they loved that specific class. Here is a summary of those results and a full list of the classes submitted! All the graphs were made by Waly!⁠01 check out his last blog post on emails for more pretty graphs  

Top X Classes by Class Year

I forgot to add class year as an option on my form, and by the time I realized, 30 people had already filled out the form. So, this is based on around 100 responses. In addition, I tried to rank the top 5 classes but only 8 2020s responded to my survey and all with different classes. I couldn’t decide which five classes to keep, so I included all. For the rest, I included the class/classes with the highest frequency, and if the total was less than five, I listed the next most frequent class/classes.  Also, shoutout to the alumni who responded! 

2020

• 6.004: Computation Structures (1)
• 6.033: Computer Systems Engineering (1)
• 6.046: Design and Analysis of Algorithms (1)
• 6.832: Underactuated Robotics (1)
• 9.13: The Human Brain (1)
• 24.211: Theory of Knowledge (1)
• 21M.301: Fundamentals of Music (1)
• 21M.605: Voice and Speech for the Actor (1)

2021

• 6.115: Microcomputer Project Laboratory (2)
• 6.815: Digital and Computational Photography (2)
• 7.26: Molecular Basis of Infectious Disease  (2)
• 9.53: Emergent Computations Within Distributed Neural Circuits (2)
• 12.001: Introduction to Geology (2)
• 21L.590: The Spanish Incubator (2)

2022

• 11.011: The Art and Science of Negotiation (3)
• 6.002: Circuits and Electronics (2)
• 6.031: Elements of Software Construction (2)
• 6.046: Design and Analysis of Algorithms (2)
• 6.08: Introduction to EECS via Interconnected Embedded Systems (2)
• 6.UAT: Oral Communication (2)
• 8.033: Relativity (2)
• 2.00B: Toy Product Design  (2)
• 21W.762: Poetry Workshop (2)

2023

• 2.00B: Toy Product Design  (3)
• 3.091: Introduction to Solid State Chemistry (2)
• 5.12: Organic Chemistry I (2)
• 6.042: Mathematics for Computer Science  (2)
• 6.08: Introduction to EECS via Interconnected Embedded Systems (2)
• 18.01: Calculus (2)
• 18.03: Differential Equations (2)
• 21W.747: Rhetoric (2)

20xx

• 6.011: Signals, Systems and Inference (1)

2016

• 6.172: Performance Engineering of Software Systems (1)
• 12.400: Our Space Odyssey (1)
• 18.504: Seminar in Logic (1)
• 18.700: Linear Algebra (1)
• 18.701: Algebra I (1)

2013

• 8.012: Physics I (1)
• 16.07: Dynamics (1)
• 21L.434: Science Fiction and Fantasy (1)

Top HASS Classes

• 11.011: The Art and Science of Negotiation  (5)
• 21L.015: Children’s Literature (3)
• 21W.755: Writing and Reading Short Stories  (3)
• 21W.762: Poetry Workshop (3)
• 4.021: Design Studio: How to Design (2)
• 9.85: Infant and Early Childhood Cognition (2)
• 24.901: Language and Its Structure I: Phonology (2)
• 21A.157: The Meaning of Life (2)
• 21L.590: The Spanish Incubator (2)
• 21W.022: Writing and Experience: Reading and Writing Autobiography (2)
• 21W.747: Rhetoric (2)
• STS.050: The History of MIT (2)

Reasons Ranked

I went through the reasons people submitted and tried to label common reasons. Some are relatively straight forward such as good problem sets or great professors and staff. A lot of the reasons mentioned the content of the class in different ways, which I tried to capture by separating them into different categories though there is some overlap. Content: New Experience is the category I used for reasons that mentioned that the class was the first time someone learned something. Content: Applicable addresses reasons related to learning a new skill relevant to their intended career or major, was relevant to the real world, etc. I used Content: Insightful if the reason mentioned that the class changed their life or perspective, gave them a deeper understanding of something, etc. Reasons that mention the class as a good introduction class, the class gives students a lot of freedom, etc. A few people mentioned that they made connections in their major or interested community through their class. I labeled up to three categories per reason. 

At first, I was a little surprised that great teaching would outrank interesting or insightful content, but it made more sense the more I thought about it. An amazing teacher can present the most boring material as the most fascinating thing but interesting content can only carry a class for so long.       

1. Professor/Teaching/Teaching Staff (114)
2. Content: Interesting (83)
3. Content: Insightful (46)
4. Class Structure (44)
5. Content: Fun (33)
6. Content: New Experience (15)
7. Content: Applicable (14)
8. Discussions (9)
9. Problem-Sets (6)
10. Friends/People (5)

Lastly, here is a list of all classes and their reasons organized by course and ranked by the number of times mentioned, which is the number in parentheses. 

Table of Contents

Course 2: Mechanical Engineering

Course 3: Material Science and Engineering

Course 4: Architecture

Course 5: Chemistry

Course 6: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Course 7: Biology

Course 8: Physics

Course 9: Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Course 10: Chemical Engineering

Course 11: Urban Studies and Planning

Course 12: Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences

Course 14: Economics

Course 15: Management

Course 16: Aeronautics and Astronautics

Course 17: Political Science

Course 18: Mathematics

Course 20: Biological Engineering

Course 21A: Anthropology

Course 21G: Global Languages

Course 21H: History

Course 21L: Literature

Course 21M: Music and Theatre Arts

CMS: Comparative Media Studies

WGS: Women’s and Gender Studies

Course 22: Nuclear Science and Engineering

Course 24: Linguistics and Philosophy

CC: Concourse

EC: Edgerton Center

ES: Experimental Study Group

HST: Health Sciences and Technology

MAS: Media Arts and Sciences

STS: Science, Technology, and Society

SP: Special Programs

Course 2: Mechanical Engineering 

2.00B: Toy Product Design (6)

• Overall fantastic experience, even virtually. The teaching team is amazing, they put in so much effort, and it’s such a FUN class!
• Amazingly fun and hardly any hardcore maths or physics calculations. Lots of teamwork and designing. Also get to go on field trips and buy things for your projects using a budget. The class ends with a final playsentation something very unique to any other class you will take at MIT.
• so much fun. i felt like a little kid again. really great intro to the design process, and the course staff is so passionate about the class. 
• The staff really cared about us and all the effort they put into the class really made me feel valued and supported. After going online last semester they worked extremely hard for all of us to still benefit from a class that was not easy to transfer to remote learning. The passion for the subject that each instructor and TA had was contagious and made every part of the class a great experience. 
• First experience with product design and the different methods/ways to go about it along with how working together in groups (along with its frustrations) could come together to be really cool! 
• Amazing class! fantastic staff! mini 2.009! 

2.001: Mechanics & Materials I (1)

• I love Simona Engineering queen and the labs were pretty fun

2.009: Product Engineering Processes(1)

• 2.009 is just a really hype class but that is not why I love it. I love 2.009 because it has high stakes in ways other classes don’t. The pressure of the class feels more real because you know the entire school will be watching your product presentation rather than just your classmates. I think learning how to work under real pressure is beneficial and exciting. It’s also just a great way to learn how to work on a large team and leverage your teammate’s strengths. This was the class that reminded me why I wanted to be an engineer to begin with. 

2.00C: Design for Complex Environmental Issues: Building Solutions and Communicating Ideas (1)

• Real! World! Impact! 2.00C gave me opportunities I never would have dreamed of. Not only did I get hands-on experiences as a first year, I got to connect with real world clients (in my case, the mayor of Orocovis, Puerto Rico) to work on a project that would improve the quality of life in his community. This was one of the only classes where I felt like I was really connecting with the world outside of MIT, and where I could actually work on making a tangible difference.

2.013/4: Engineering Systems Design & Development(1)

• people don’t give the non 2.009 course 2 capstones enough credit. you actually do stuff in 2.013, have much more control over what your project turns out to be, and you are not subject to cutesy sound effects and confetti cannons. So big ++ all around.

Return to Table of Contents

Course 3: Material Science and Engineering

3.091: Introduction to Solid State Chemistry (2)

• a really fun spin on chemistry (I’m generally not a fan of chemistry), engaging and entertaining professor
• 3.091 helped me discover my interest in course 3! At the end of each class we would discuss how the concepts from that day were used in the real world and what jobs those could lead to. I always felt more rewarded by these classes because I knew exactly what impact my curriculum was having on the world – I knew why I was learning it. That really made me more excited to learn each day.

Return to Table of Contents

Course 4

4.021: Design Studio: How to Design (2)

• I was able to explore a new field that I hadn’t before and was able to work more with my hands.
• amazing professors and a great intro to course 4 as a department 

4.500: Design Computation: Art, Objects and Space (1)

• I looked forward to every lecture because I knew I would come away inspired. I felt like I genuinely learned useful skills in creative design from modeling, rendering and prototyping. All through the lens of furniture design! It was amazing to see our chair prototypes in 3d printed, laser cut and CNC cut forms. However, what really made the class stand out was our amazing teacher, Larry Sass! He created such a positive learning environment by prioritizing learning over grades. I am so thankful for that because it enabled me to focus on improving without the stress. Larry encouraged the class to be creative which really showed in my classmate’s unique designs. There were rough times during that semester, from my computer breaking down and my chair model experiencing issue after issue and Larry was just incredibly understanding and let me know that I was going to be OK. He’s a great guy and I’m glad I had the opportunity to be his student. Larry Sass was the first Black professor I’ve ever had. It was great to see someone who looked like me in his position.

Return to Table of Contents

Course 5

5.12: Organic Chemistry I (3)

• – the content was presented so things just made sense. after struggling through a semester of 5.112 and deciding that maybe I don’t like chem, 5.12 swooped in and hit me with that “conceptual understanding” and all of a sudden molecules were my friends and chem was fun again! 10/10 professors. they knew what they were talking about and everyone knew it. all explanations were crystal clear and it was so nice to learn from them! I especially liked this class because of how pleasantly surprised I was. I had heard the class would be horrible and had very very low expectations, but the combination of the content and teaching staff easily made it my favorite class of the semester!

• Really easy, fun PSETs
• This one might be a surprise; it definitely surprised me! I went into 5.12 thinking I would hate it and struggle through the content based on what I had heard from other classmates as well as the general stigma against organic chemistry.  However, I loved the different way of thinking that organic chemistry requires as you navigate molecular structures and mechanisms.  Professor Danheiser’s lectures were awesome, and his plethora of practice exams were even more awesome, so I felt well-prepared for exams.  I ended up liking the class so much I went on to take 5.13!    

5.13: Organic Chemistry II (1)

• A beautiful expansion on the concepts in 5.12, 5.13 explores why organic reactions happen the way they do. The integration of MO theory into the course makes it so much more interesting. Also, Laura Kiessling. That’s it. 

5.03: Principles of Inorganic Chemistry I (1)

• This class is wild. It’s really your first introduction to the beauty of transition metals. And the professors (Yogi and Dan!!!) are both amazing. Shoutout to An and Trevor for being the best TA’s. 

Return to Table of Contents

Course 6

6.08: Introduction to EECS via Interconnected Embedded Systems (7)

• My first ever experience with hardware. 
• I didn’t really have much computer science experience and I wasn’t really sure if it was for me, but taking 6.08 made me realize that 1) computer science could be fun and 2) I wasn’t as bad at it as I thought I was. The class was incredibly helpful with guidance and the office hours provided. All the LAs were so kind and really focused on making sure we understood concepts, alongside Joe Steinmeyer, the professor. It was just a really engaging and encouraging environment that helped me become more acquainted with computer science.
• Challenging but I learned a lot of cool things and the professor was super chill!
• engaging/funny professor, really fun class overall
• Building cool hands on projects – and Joe Steinmeyer!
• JOE STEINMEYER
• JOE

6.006: Introduction to Algorithms (4)

• I learned to think differently 
• Most incredible TAs ever!!!
• Though I found 6.006 difficult, I really think it changed the way I solve problems. It taught me how to break down problems into sub-problems, how to not only use but understand the tools I’m given to solve those sub-problems, and how to communicate my solutions effectively. Plus the teaching staff of Spring 2020 was phenomenal!
• They teach the concepts SO well my mind was blown at least once every class and ofc the TAs are all legends for carrying us through. bye jason ku </3

6.042: Mathematics for Computer Science (3)

• loved the mathematical zoo aspect
• It’s like math contests the class
• Everything’s like a fun logic puzzle, and Srini Devadas is an amazing teacher. 

6.046: Design and Analysis of Algorithms (3)

• Even though I feel that 6.046 could be better run/managed, I genuinely enjoyed the material I learned in this class. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I actually plan on taking 6.854 this coming semester (Lord, help me). It probably helped that I took this class on PE/NE last semester, but I felt that the algorithms I learned in that class were actually very interesting. I believe that 046 also helped me improve my problem solving skills, and the class gave me more confidence in my ability to create more interesting solutions to a variety of different algorithmic problems I may face. Also, I found the TA’s to be very helpful.
• I think it was the first time I combined all the stuff we learned in math with CS and everything just fit so well.
• So cool, and relatively well-taught. It really forced me to think hard and helped me prove to myself that I was learning and getting smarter at MIT!

6.UAT: Oral Communication (3)

• Technical skills are important, but equally important is the way you convey technical topics. I didn’t appreciate this fact nearly as much until I took this class.  There are so many things you have control over when you present, and thus the way you distill complex information to an audience is an art in itself. This class helped me see the beauty and practical importance in the art of technical communication. 
• became a much better presenter
• We’ve all given so many presentations in school, and mostly just read off of slides, have tons of bullet point text, and go through the motions.. I’d always look at people who were actually good at making engaging presentations, and think “Wow, they really are born with this gift”… but who knew that that skill is learnable?? 6.UAT really will make your presentation skills (your slides, your voice, your general confidence, your engaging-ness) 5000 times better

6.009: Fundamentals of Programming (2)

• I’m a nerd, and I love programming ^-^ This class has fun and interesting psets that allowed me to improve my programming skills. 
• The labs we did solved interesting problems

6.004: Computation Structures (2)

• It was cool to learn exactly how and why computers work.  I feel like I have a solid grasp on my field now that I’ve seen the most basic aspects of both software and hardware.  As a bonus, learning to use computer instructions helped me understand C/C++ in another class.  Things fell into place naturally.
• SO well taught, and it leads to a fascinating world of computer systems (operating systems, hardware systems, security systems – you name it!). Above all, it answered that question that I had always wondered but never asked out loud: how does a computer even work???

6.002: Circuits and Electronics (2)

• I loved the concepts in 8.02, and I loved seeing them applied to do useful things in 6.002.  The professors, Joel Voldman and Joe Steinmeyer, provide pre-written notes in lecture to make our lives easier and are really enthusiastic and approachable.  The labs tie-in the week’s lessons well, and you can see how each component plays a role in the larger system you build over the whole semester.  I left the class feeling competent and confident in my circuit skills.
• Joe Steinmeyer is an amazing professor and the labs were so fun!

6.011: Signals, Systems and Inference (2)

• Course staff is the most helpful I’ve ever had. They actually care about how you are best learning the material and how they are best teaching it. Not to mention, the content is very useful and broadly applicable. 
• It’s an amazing class taught by the people who pioneered signals and systems. Even though I’m not particularly focused on EE, this was the first class that I felt pushed me to enjoy the material simply because of how well it was taught.

6.031: Elements of Software Construction (2)

• It’s so useful and Goldman could literally make me excited about watching paint dry I love his enthusiasm so much <3 
• Built software with a functional end product without relying too much on staff-provided code

6.034: Artificial Intelligence (2)

• The class is pretty easy, but the concepts were also very interesting. Also, there were speakers that came in every week or so and talked with us about their research, and it helped me realize where and how AI is actually used in the real world. Also, even though I think ML is cool, it was nice to know that the realm of AI is much broader than just machine learning, and also includes concepts like knowledge representation, search methods, statistical inference, and other cool stuff. In short, I felt that this class was a nice introduction to the field of AI.
• This class changed my life! It gave me an incredible appreciation for intelligence, both machine and human. Through a vast variety of topics and lesson styles, I was able to learn not simply about AI, but also about AI in the industry and in research. I think 6.034 achieved the perfect balance of encouraging students with challenging problems while providing opportunities to grow soft skills. I loved the class because Dr. Winston effectively taught the intricacies of various topics in AI as well as how those topics connected to the larger world, industry, and other fields.

6.115: Microcomputer Project Laboratory (2)

• Very hands on, it was the reason I came to MIT in the first place.
• Building things from scratch is fun.

6.172: Performance Engineering of Software Systems (2)

• It’s an incredibly enriching experience, and it really opened my eyes to a lot of new material regularly. It’s certainly drinking out of a firehose, but it’s incredibly worthwhile (perhaps the firehose has some sweetener in it). And while most of the students in the class are over competitive to a fault, it’s also entirely possible to meet really clever people who are down to earth, and can provide a new mode of thinking.
• An incredibly rewarding, incredibly difficult course

6.815: Digital and Computational Photography (2)

• The material is really cool! You learn lots of awesome things about how cameras, the human visual system, and photoshop work. Plus, it’s a pset-only class, with lots of opportunities for extra credit. 
• The professor!! And because it’s basically How To Make Photoshop 101

6.301: Solid-State Circuits (1)

• It was really interesting conceptually, and Harry Lee taught it really well and was very engaging

6.170: Software Studio (1)

• The most useful class if you’re considering full-stack developer as a career. The professors are amazing, the lectures are all interesting (you’ll learn so many things related to UI design, and there’s not a lot of MIT class that teaches this), and the projects are also interesting. When I took it, my teammates in the final project groups are amazing and we still keep in touch > 1 year since I took the class!

6.033: Computer Systems Engineering (1)

• Explains how computers, the internet, and modern computer systems are designed

6.003: Signal Processing (1)

• Learning about the Fourier transform, and applying those concepts to music and images was really engaging.

6.832: Underactuated Robotics (1)

• Russ Tedrake is an incredible professor and delivers extremely engaging lectures. He has played a dominant role in the creation and advancement of the underactuated robotics research domain, and his passion and experience shows in every class. He truly cares that his students understand the material and adapts to their needs. 6.832 caters to several different courses (primarily 2, 16, 6) and cognizant of that, Professor Tedrake ensures that the lectures are very accessible and walks through the basics before adding layers of complexity. I had no experience in robotics or control theory prior to taking the class, but 6.832 helped me find a new interest that I hope to continue to explore! I felt especially fulfilled while working on the final project and realizing how much I had learned about the domain over the semester. It’s amazing how much you can care about and learn from a class with the support of a passionate, effective teaching staff. Major s/o to the TAs too for sharing Russ’s principles and enhancing our learning experience. 

6.857: Network and Computer Security (1)

• Cryptography taught by the R from RSA. Must I say more?

6.904: Ethics for Engineers (1)

• Rory is an amazing Professor, and we went through so many philosophy texts and case studies. It was the most interesting class at mit hands down 

6.809: Interactive Music Systems (1)

• Prof. Egozy is amazing and you get to create cool things like your own implementation of Guitar Hero!

6.884: Computational Sensorimotor Learning (1)

• The professor was great, I learned a ton about a field I’ve been interested in for a while (Reinforcement Learning), and the professor is also super open to just talking about ideas with students. The discussions were very interesting, and we were forced to read a ton of papers to get up to speed with the field. So I learned a ton, and got to interact with an awesome teaching staff. 

Return to Table of Contents

Course 7

7.26: Molecular Basis of Infectious Disease (2)

• Teachers are super passionate, a big focus on reading and understanding literature, super relevant! 
• It was so interesting! We learned about so many different aspects of infectious disease biology that were super cool– like how fungi propagate, or how different viruses store their genetic information. We also read a couple of papers a week, which I felt helped me a lot to get context for what we were learning in class, and get an intuition for reading and interpreting different kinds of experiments. The class did a good job with both in person (pre-COVID), and virtual styles. The exams were actually fun sometimes because they asked really interesting questions that we had to research to answer. 

7.012: Introductory Biology (1)

• Eric Lander, by far the most amazing professor I’ve had; he succeeded to make me love the subject even though I’m an electrical engineer. + I really enjoyed the stuff we learned and the exams and psets (disclaimer: most of what we learned was new to me)

7.03: Genetics (1)

• Super interesting content and very well taught

7.05: General Biochemistry (1)

• As a high school biology student, I fell into the common trap of memorizing reactions without fully grasping the “how” or “why.” How do the different domains of a protein kinase act to stabilize ATP and the substrate, resulting in a phosphorylated substrate? Why do we even need NADH and NAD+? Biochemistry teaches us to understand fundamental principles, with a focus on applying them to novel and challenging tasks with particular relevance to human physiology. Prof. Yaffe and Prof. Vander Heiden’s funny demonstrations (push-up contest?!) were a bonus!

7.06: Cell Biology (2)

• Cheeseman and Lamason care so much about delivering a well taught class! The topics I learned in this class have honestly been some of the most useful, the real basics of any biology or biochem research. They focus on techniques and examples. Plus Cheeseman brings a disco ball and does a dynamin dance. 
• The class I was looking forward to taking as a course 7, and it showed that cells are wonderful and mind blowing.

Return to Table of Contents

Course 8

8.033: Relativity (2)

• It’s a very well taught class, with a good balance between theory and physical relevance. Filled with lots of classic problems that are tractable but still applicable. Good for both 18 and 8 majors, though difficult.
• It completely changes how you think about EVERYTHING. Plus you learn how black holes work. :3

8.282: Introduction to Astronomy (2)

• It was amazing to learn about the universe in a fun and accessible way. I also took it with Prof. Frebel, who is awesome.
• Max Tegmark was amazing, and it’s such a good introduction to astronomy!

8.01: Physics I (1)

• A lot of my friends took this class with me and I enjoyed collaborating with them especially in my freshman fall when I was still adjusting to everything 

8.012: Physics I (1)

• Gyroscopes

8.04: Quantum Physics I (1)

• In all of the physics classes I’ve taken so far (which is only like 5, including both GIRs, but still), I felt that 8.04’s professors and staff cared the most about its students. Now, this isn’t to say that no one in 8.01 or 8.02 or any other physics class doesn’t have staff that want you to succeed, but I felt that 8.04 was the first physics class I’ve taken at MIT where I felt that the professors and TA’s all cared that I learned the material, which was rather comforting. Also in my “totally objective” opinion, quantum physics is an awesome subject to learn. 

8.20: Introduction to Special Relativity (1)

• 8.20 was a super fun and enjoyable introduction to special relativity.

Return to Table of Contents

Course 9

9.53: Emergent Computations Within Distributed Neural Circuits(3)

• 9.53 really gives you a fresh perspective on machine learning and frames the modern deep-learning craze among its historical predecessors. The material taught in this class is not often taught anywhere else, and it forces you to reconsider how you view modern ML. Plus, the instructors are really fun (AI winter is coming!)
• Small intimate class and very interesting material
• Robert Ajemian carries this class. I generally think that anything you learn in a class, you could just as easily find and learn about on your own, but this class introduced me to many ideas that I doubt I would have found on my own.

9.13: The Human Brain (2)

• You get to take class from the woman who discovered the fusiform face area (Nancy Kanwisher). Bonus: she’s not just an amazing research scientist, she’s also a very engaging lecturer. You’ll explore interesting questions about the mind and the brain in a way you never thought possible.
• Nancy Kanwisher is the neuroscience grandma you wish you had. She’s so passionate about cognition and research, and she makes the effort to try and get you excited about human cognition too. 

9.40: Introduction to Neural Computation (2)

• This class explored a variety of fascinating topics, ranging from using computation in neuroscience to applying phenomena in neuroscience to computer science. I enjoyed how it was broken into various segments, as I felt like the class had good breadth, and I got to learn about a lot of different options in neural computation. Dr. Fee was amazing too!
• Neural computation was my first exposure to the world that our fellow 6-9 majors call computational neuroscience. Most of my computer science experience had been developing Minecraft plugins and trying out machine learning techniques on datasets, but I had never before applied these skills to modeling neurons in the brain! The class also introduced concepts from electrical engineering, such as spectral analysis, to understand and predict output of our sensory systems. Overall, this class was a nice mix of application and theory centered around neuroscience.

9.85: Infant and Early Childhood Cognition (2)

• Laura Schulz is my queen. And you learn about babies!!
• It was really engaging! It’s a class where I felt I learned about the process of science and experimental design on a deeper level and the prof was super excited about teaching it which made it enjoyable. Also, babies are cute and kids are silly so it was fun to learn a lot about how they think and reason about the world. 

9.09: Cellular and Molecular Neurobiology (1)

• amazing content

9.19: Computational Psycholinguistics (1)

• Engaging lectures, interesting topics, helpful staff, very clean online transition.

9.46: Neuroscience of Morality (1)

• This is the best structured class I’ve ever taken. Every assignment contributes directly to your understanding of morality in the brain and experimental design. Rebecca’s excitement about the subject is infectious.

9.59: Laboratory in Psycholinguistics (1)

• For all the linguistics buffs out there, 9.59 is a hidden gem, as a class to follow 24.900. It sets up linguistics from an experimental perspective, and guides you towards conducting original research after just half a semester of learning about the current state of the field. 9.59 gives you just the right amount of confidence and support to do original work, and isn’t particularly intimidating or restrictive. This is one of those classes that is valuable because it teaches you a *mindset* that transcends the skills you learn, and it’s awesome for anyone interested in both course 9 and linguistics.

Return to Table of Contents

Course 10 

10.302: Transport Processes (1)

• The class unified so many different areas of what we aim to learn as chemical engineers, and the professors were amazing! 

Return to Table of Contents

Course 11

11.011: The Art and Science of Negotiation (5)

• Incredible class, hard work but totally worth it! Really teaches you how to navigate being a person in the world, and all of its lessons are immediately applicable to everyday life and personal development. Also, Bruno is amazing.
• It gave me more of the mindset that the world is very malleable and imperfect, and thus that there’s a ton of room for me to have an impact. Most of us have skills that allow us to take on a ton of technically challenging projects, but I think it’s also important to be gutsy enough to choose the right projects to work on. This class gives you a mindset that allows you to be gutsy enough to take on some of these impactful projects. It made me feel like the world runs on decisions created by a bunch of imperfect actors with many biases many times acting in their own interests. This not only made me realize that there’s a lot of room for improvement, but that you can make an argument for basically anything. So if there’s a reason for you not to do something, then there’s probably an equally valid reason for you to do that thing.
• professor individually gets to know students, learned many real-world negotiation skills I find myself using
• Bruno Verdini was an absolutely phenomenal instructor!! 11.011 helped me completely change the way I view negotiations, arguments, or any interaction between two parties.. Life isn’t zero sum; it’s always possible to create win-wins!
• Negotiation is a unique and introspective class that made me rethink how I interacted with those around me and improved my relationships!

11.005: Introduction to International Development (1)

• Great teacher, Ayan Meer, it forced me to read a lot of difficult books on topics that i was personally interested 

Return to Table of Contents

Course 12 

12.001: Introduction to Geology (2)

• 12.001 Is a great introduction to earth science! It covers a broad variety of topics and includes fun labs.  In non-pandemic years, there is also a camping trip!!
• The class was super engaging and we learned all about how earth processes work and different rocks are formed. We also went on a fieldtrip to Western Mass and got to see fossilized dinnosaur footprints! I learned so much and the class sparked my interest in geology.

12.000: Solving Complex Problems (1)

• As the Terrascope fall class, I got to know a lot of people I definitely would never have met otherwise! I also really enjoyed getting to do so much group work and having so much autonomy in the class, as the professors are mostly there to assist and guide, not to tell us what to do. Since the class is called Solving Complex Problems, it was interesting to see all the different facets of a problem (such as hurricane recovery and resilience) and just what makes it complex. We also experienced firsthand how it’s not really possible to address every facet of a problem throughout the class as we put together a proposal for a possible solution. The class definitely illuminated some of the many difficulties that administrations face as they try to solve different complex problems of their own.

12.007: Geobiology: History of Life on Earth (1)

• Geobiology introduced me to a new field and really interesting concepts, like deep time, microbial fossils, environmental microbiology, biogeochemistry, and past climate reconstruction from stable isotopes. Really great intro to how the Earth and life have evolved together, plus cool stuff about looking for life outside Earth and understanding climate change.

12.177: Astrobiology, Origins and Early Evolution of Life (1)

• It’s not offered this year, but I loved the class when I took it.  Being able to witness Astrobiology grow as a science firsthand is incredible, and the study of the early Earth and the origins of Life itself is absolutely fascinating to me.

12.400: Our Space Odyssey (1)

• Learned eye-opening things about space

12.409: Hands-On Astronomy: Observing Stars and Planets (1)

• This class didn’t even feel like a class –– 12.409, Observing Stars and Planets, is a perfect mix of learning what goes on behind the aesthetics and physics within astronomy! We also take a few trips to MIT’s very own Wallace Observatory to check out a darker sky with less light pollution.

12.A02: Exploring the Solar System (1)

• This was my freshman advising seminar and I loved it! You learn how to do amateur astronomy, and work your way up to using a 6-inch (iirc) telescope. You get to see incredible views of MIT and Cambridge (you observe on the roof of a building). Not only that, you get to see the night sky in a different way. Through the telescope, I saw the rings of Saturn, the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, a nebula, a double star system, an incredible full moon, and so much more, and I got pictures of all of them (not just phone pictures, actual camera photos). It was an amazing experience. I would highly recommend the class, even if you’ve never had a telescope and all you’ve ever done was look at the stars in awe (that was me).  There’s also a more involved version of the class offered in the spring, 12.409!

Return to Table of Contents

Course 14

14.13: Psychology and Economics (1)

• 14.13 is really fascinating. I’m generally interested in economics and psychology (if it’s backed up by some data), and 14.13 is a wonderful intersection of those two.

14.44: Energy Economics and Policy (1)

• It built on skills from prerequisites to allow us to better understand the complexities of the energy market and the role of policy in shaping consumption behaviors. The class was interesting, energetic, challenging and exciting to go to every day! I am I took this class!

Return to Table of Contents

Course 15

15.279: Management Communication for Undergraduates (1)

• Our professor and TA got to know us on a personal level and truly carried about the quality of the class. When things transferred to online, our professor constantly checked in with us to make the best transition to virtual learning, and even brought snacks our last class meeting. In addition, due to the small class size of fifteen and outgoing nature of many of my peers, the class became a tight knit group — to the extent that on our last day of class, we made and presented memes about our semester to each other! 

Return to Table of Contents

Course 16

16.07: Dynamics (1)

• Instructor, material, problems 

Return to Table of Contents

Course 17 

17.309: Science, Technology, and Public Policy (1)

• It’s cool to take some time to learn how all the technical stuff we do in other classes affects society

17.50: Introduction to Comparative Politics (1)

• Great professor and TA, and the small class vibes led to great discussions

Return to Table of Contents

Course 18

18.03: Differential Equations (3)

• Seymon Dyatlov is the best.
• Really interesting, fit together really nicely
• Semyon Dyatlov, the second most amazing professor I’ve had; I was thrilled to be in every lecture, he was hilarious, and his lectures were super engaging

18.600: Probability and Random Variables (3)

• Scott Sheffield is an amazing Professor. The class really made me think about the beauty behind probability.
• Sheffield’s story time (i.e. learning the fundamentals of probability but still applying them to interesting real-world situations)
• Scott Sheffield is a national treasure.

18.01: Calculus (2)

• Completely changed my understanding of calculus and helped me fall in love with math again. Also the professor is amazing and genuinely takes the time to get feedback and connect with students.
• Professor Larry Guth is amazing we love him

18.701: Algebra I (2)

• Best problem sets ever
• Two really fun classes to learn algebra. Took 18.700 first and then 18.701. Made me think about math in a different way. First “real” math class. 

18.100A: Real Analysis (1)

• I loved this class mainly because Prof. Rodriguez is funny and amazing and is VERY helpful in office hours!! (He is also teaching is fall 2020 :D) But aside from the professor, this class is very interesting for people who have not had any proof experience (like me), and it offers insight into how Calculus actually works (as compared to just remembering formula in most high-school-level mathematics!)

18.212: Algebraic Combinatorics (1)

• Crazy, interesting, and intriguing

18.404: Theory of Computation (2)

• Professor Sipser is one of the best lecturers at MIT! He does a great job of explaining the material in a simple, intuitive way, and he’s always open to questions. During the lectures, he checks up on us from time to time to make sure that we’re alive and understanding the concepts. Best of all, he has a great sense of humor. The class also covers really interesting topics, such as how to write a program that outputs itself, and how to show the equivalence of seemingly unrelated problems.
• Teacher and textbook (and problems) are all funny/awesome.

18.410: Design and Analysis of Algorithms (1)

• This class has such amazing cool content and it really showed how remarkable algorithms have become over the last few decades 

18.504: Seminar in Logic (1)

• Prof. Cohen is an amazing lecturer, and is incredibly passionate about the material. Logics are hard, and Prof. Cohen uses a variety of methods to try to make logics as approachable as possible. I really appreciate the work he puts in, and the amount of guidance he gives for our presentations.

18.700: Linear Algebra (1)

• Two really fun classes to learn algebra. Took 18.700 first and then 18.701. Made me think about math in a different way. First “real” math class. 

18.900: Geometry and Topology in the Plane (1)

• paul seidel, also it was the first class i took as a math major and it was really nice in forming connections

Return to Table of Contents

Course 20 

20.109: Laboratory Fundamentals in Biological Engineering (1)

• It taught me alot of lab skills and the content I learned from the class (new experiments, lab techniques, new current technology in the biotech field) I feel will be very useful in the future when choosing different career paths or job options. The instructors are super nice and helpful and they really care about you and your education. I love Ms. Becky!!

20.129: Biological Circuit Engineering Laboratory (1)

• good staff

20.309: Instrumentation and Measurement for Biological Systems (1)

• This lab class is honestly top 2 course 20 classes and it’s not number 2. It is soo much fun, you get to build your own microscope and micro fluidic device then analyze biological specimens with it. It really encapsulates the spirit of what Bioengineering is. Also the instructors are all so nice, helpful, and amazing!

20.310: Molecular, Cellular, and Tissue Biomechanics (1)

• This class was really fun! It scaled from understanding bulk tissue to mechanics of DNA folding. It was the first class where I felt I really understood all the material, and it was cool to see how different models work and fit together to make an understanding. Also cool to see how little we know about brain damage.

20.320: Analysis of Biomolecular and Cellular Systems (1)

• As a course 20 it can feel like your skills don’t put you at an engineer level but 320 was the first time I felt my engineering and bio knowledge come together even if it was a struggle to figure out Matlab.

Course 21A

21A.157: The Meaning of Life (2)

• Meaningful, thought-provoking, fun, lovely people.
• Really brought the different perspectives together and created an awesome discussion experience to learn and understand more about the world in a context with what it means to be successful! 

Return to Table of Contents

Course 21G

21G.036: Advertising and Media: Comparative Perspectives (1)

• I needed to take a Chinese cultural class for MISTI China (I was supposed to go to China this summer with the CETI program). I chose this class because one of my friends was taking it and loved it. I joined in on the second lecture and found many reasons to stay. Our professor, Jing Wang, was extremely knowledgable of all the topics we discussed. The readings were so interesting that I did all of them without fail. I also loved the small setting of the class – we got to know each other pretty well. The class has a semester long group project which consists of identifying a brand category, a struggling brand in the category, and then designing a repositioning campaign for that brand. My group chose streetwear as our category and Michael Kors as a brand to reposition. We identified MK’s image and customer as its weak points. To combat this we decided to utilize the “drop model” (only release limited amounts of product) that makes streetwear so exclusive and desired. We also ended up designing our campaign around a collaboration between MK and a famous streetwear brand. Our project was so fun and interesting that our final paper was 30+ pages. Highly recommend this course for anyone interested in China and/or advertising! 

21G.049: French Photography (1)

• Cathy Clark is amazing and she makes the space so comfortable for discussion. She knows how to lead the class to ideas without ever planting ideas in our heads. Every comment is fully considered and respected. It is a very specific course name, but, more than any other course I’ve taken at MIT, it has made me a better person.

21G.221: Communicating in American Culture (ELS) (1)

• [Disclaimer: this class is just for international students] Lots of reflection of reflection on my culture and writing about what specific things make me who I am. I also got to learn about US history which I knew nothing about. 

21G.503: Japanese III (1)

• Get to form more advanced sentences in the language and communicate in Japanese about funny topics. The class is also quite chilled because homework is not intense. Japanese is just amazing.

21G.611: Russian I (Regular) (1)

• I took Russian I in IAP, and I really loved getting a chance to spend hours upon hours a day delving into the language.  The language itself is super interesting, and really fun, and both of the professors are incredibly kind and smart and amazing.  I initially was wary about taking such an intense class in IAP (given that it was 3 hours of in-class work plus homework a day), but it was 100% worth it.

21G.713: Spanish through Film: Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Spain (1)

• we watched a bunch of great movies and the discussions were always insightful

Return to Table of Contents

Course 21H

21H.161: The Modern Middle East (1)

• Pouya Alimagham was great at showing diverse perspectives, and it’s so important to know about the Middle East and American foreign policy.

21H.214: War and American Society (1)

• my first MIT history class and it really showed me how a curriculum works when every single reading actually has a purpose. really good balance of work for the class, as well as lecturing/discussions

21H.281: MIT and Slavery: Research (1)

• Best class ever! The first class I took where the instructor didn’t know the answers to the questions. You get to pick your own research area and dive into any topic related to MIT’s history. You also learn how to use archives as a resource. You get to help MIT come to terms with our own history.

Return to Table of Contents

Course 21L

21L.015: Children’s Literature (3)

• Wonderful professor! Marah Gubar is the absolutely sweetest and caring people ever! She’s passionate through and through about the subject’s day it makes you love the class all the more! Plus Children’s Literature has fascinating topics, even in childhood books like Harry Potter or The Hobbit.
• This class was an absolute treat!  We got to read The Little Prince, Moominpappa at Sea, and The Neverending Story as assignments, and got to write about the symbolism and meaning behind these works.  Additionally, as an aspiring illustrator, I absolutely loved analyzing our texts’ illustrations.
• Who doesn’t like re-reading their childhood classics AND getting CI-H credit for it?

21L.590: The Spanish Incubator (2)

• I got to go to spain, also the teacher was really nice 
• just a great time, Prof. Margery Resnick is wonderful

21L.006: American Literature (1)

• I enjoyed reading works by different American authors and understanding how the focus in their writing evolved over time (spanning even to the present day, like with contemporary authors like Tommy Orange). I grew to interpret writers’ messages–even from literature that I had read before–in completely different ways that I hadn’t considered before. Prof. Alexandre is amazing!

21L.007: World Literatures (1)

• the first time I took a “world” class that was actually about the world. also a really great balance of more “popular” books with some i never thought i would have liked. professor terrones did a really great job at facilitating discussions even when the class was quiet, and i honestly really enjoyed every single book we read.

21L.320: Big Books(1)

• The year I took it, we read Moby Dick as well as analyzing its depictions in its various film adaptations. I originally took this class since Moby Dick was always some book I felt like I should read, but before then I had never got around to it. Moreover, I think that this class was the perfect way to read it: over the first part of the class we read and discussed the rather hefty whaling book, both looking at the micro—how Melville uses language to make individual passages, and the book as a whole, so compelling to read—and the macro—larger themes of the book, and how Moby Dick occupies a strange liminal space between tragedy, comedy, and epic. In the second half of the class, we watched different adaptations of the book, including a musical version that was at the ART (shoutout to CAMIT for giving us tickets!) The second half was also fascinating,  watching and dissecting the different choices made by each filmmaker in adapting the same work into their distinct visions of what Moby Dick meant to them. I’d also just like to advocate for 21L classes in general, since MIT has a great literature program that I fear frequently gets overshadowed by technical classes, but I would *highly* encourage everyone to give it a try, if anything—maybe you’ll find you like it! (if you are thinking of taking one, I’d recommend going to the course catalog through lit.mit.edu, as frequently the descriptions there are more accurate than through the generic course catalog)

21L.434: Science Fiction and Fantasy (1)

• Kate Delaney

21L.460: Arthurian Literature (1)

• I had an amazing time in this class. Really old literature has always appealed to me, so this class was amazing. Also, getting to do whatever I wanted for the final project allowed me to be super creative in choosing what to do.

21L.591: Literary London (1)

• Living in London over IAP and being 110% immersed in the literature and locations with a relatively small class was one of the best experiences of my MIT career. Also, the professors are so dedicated to the class and material, and poured their heart and soul into teaching.

21L.706: Studies in Film (1)

• i literally never thought i would take a film class, but our visiting professor brought in these concepts into an advanced seminar super well. i actually felt like i learned the basics of film theory and he also allowed us to switch movie themes once the pandemic hit!

21L.707: Problems in Cultural Interpretation (1)

• As a foodie and women’s studies enthusiast, I had a wonderful time reading the only form of expression which some women had available to them and learning the deeper meaning of food in history. From colonial American traditions, to how food can initiate a conversation about race today and be political, I really enjoyed the discussions we had. It made me look at domesticity with more awe than before.

Return to Table of Contents

Course 21M

21M.030: Introduction to World Music (2)

• The class involved a lot of fun, immersive workshops for different instruments and genres like Senegalese drumming, gamelan, Irish dancing, and Carnatic music, and I learned so much from the class!
• World Music really opened my horizons! It encouraged me to speak to members of my family about our cultural roots and learn more about my heritage.

21M.301: Fundamentals of Music (1)

• Helped me understand the language behind music theory and gave me a basic framework to understand the types of sounds that I like!

21M.600: Introduction to Acting (1)

• It’s literally just recess but in college

21M.601: Drawing for Designers (1)

• Drawing is fun and a nice break from technicals also gives another perspective even to my major/20 

21M.604: Playwriting Fundamentals (1)

• Intro to Playwriting — I have never been super into creative writing, but I took this class completely on a whim. I wanted another HASS and it fit into my firehose. I was totally planning on dropping it, but I went to the first class, and I was sold. You learn about the different aspects of script writing, from plot (what motivates your characters?) to plasticity (how does the dialogue flow?). You write up short scenes based on different prompts, and present to your classmates, getting really useful, kind, constructive feedback. The environment is super friendly and supportive, the writing of fellow classmates never ceases to impress you, and the prof, Dr. Ken Urban, really helps you learn and grow as a writer. 843902/10 recommend :)

21M.605: Voice and Speech for the Actor (1)

• This class was like getting credit for therapy. If you take it with Keely Eastley, you’ll come out of this class more confident within your own voice and mind.

21M.706: Asian American Theater (1)

• The prof is AMAZING. She made the class a super welcoming and safe space where we could talk openly and dialogue and important issues. We took a trip to ny to experience the plays we talked about in person and tied the stories to our own lives. 

21M.733: Set Design (1)

• Get to do art, learned a lot about design and theatre

Return to Table of Contents

Course 21W

21W.755: Writing and Reading Short Stories (3)

• Micah. Nathan. 
• The professor, Micah Nathan, is one of the most down-to-Earth and compassionate teachers I’ve ever had. He goes to great lengths to help you write the stories that *you* want to, and he doesn’t muddle around in literary theory in an esoteric, self-aggrandized way — he discusses theory only when it is actually serving a purpose, and he does so in a concise way that, for me, completely annihilated the image of a high school literature teacher agonizing over the meaning of a red sweater.
• I wouldn’t recommend this class to everyone, but if you like writing or think you might like writing if you tried but never before had the impetus, I would recommend you take this with Micah Nathan. He has that rare ability to give constructive criticism while also inspiring you to write more. Pretty much all lecture time is spent workshopping stories.

21W.762: Poetry Workshop (3)

• The professor creates a really welcoming environment and it was very fun and therapeutic
• amazing flexibility in creative process
• This class actually managed to *improve* my mental health and stress levels. The prof, Ed, is absolutely lovely. It’s a very encouraging and positive experience for anybody who writes poetry, and having weekly writing assignments gave me the structure I needed to actually grow in a hobby where I’d felt stagnant for a long time.

21W.022: Writing and Experience: Reading and Writing Autobiography (2)

• get graded for writing about yourself :nice:
• I got a chance to express myself, improve my writing and the professor’s really nice. I like having a lot of freedom to really delve into whatever I wanted.

21W.747: Rhetoric  (2)

• Steven (professor) is very fun plus class content and work is fun.
• We get to make fun speeches about whatever we want

21W.744: The Art of Comic Book Writing (1)

• MARJORIE LIU IS AMAZING. COMICS ARE AMAZING. You get exposed to a TON of fun things to read in this class, but also intriguing concepts. How do you world-build? How do you start a story? How do you create impactful characters? And can you still write comics if you can’t draw?  I loved this class, and the things I learned in it have helped me become a better storyteller, both in the world of comics and out.

Return to Table of Contents

Comparative Media Studies 

CMS.301: Introduction to Game Design Methods (1)

• Last semester, when all my other classes felt empty and unfulfilling because of the COVID evacuation,  CMS.301 was the highlight of my day.  It was cool to learn how games work and what made them fun to play.  It was satisfying to make and test games and see that other people enjoy them.  Plus, you get an excellent excuse to play games with other people at random times of day.

CMS.701: Current Debates in Media (1)

• junot diaz yo

Return to Table of Contents

Women and Gender Studies

WGS.151: Gender, Medicine, and Public Health (1)

• Gender, Medicine, and Health — it’s really cool to think about public health as it relates to technology and biology and stigma and societal stereotypes/constructs

Return to Table of Contents

Course 22

22.01: Introduction to Modeling and Simulation (2)

• Super fascinating material and incredibly dynamic instruction!
• Really cool labs; seeing and hearing radiation, getting to build geiger counters, and we got to do power manipulations on the nuclear reactor on Albany St. 

Return to Table of Contents

Course 24 

24.901: Language and Its Structure I: Phonology (2)

• Kind professor, interesting topics, fun PSETs
• Figuring out the rules making sounds change is a super fun puzzle, and Professor Steriade is an amazing mentor too!

24.06: Bioethics (1)

• Bioethics introduced me to approaching challenges in medicine, policy, and scientific research through both philosophical and anthropological lenses. We often fail to incorporate ethical considerations in our work, whether it be using mouse models as a UROP student or formulating a plan to distribute scarce resources (like vaccines!) as a policymaker. Although class discussions never led to a clear-cut answer, they always left me with a newfound appreciation for the nuances and historical context tied to a particular issue.

24.118: Paradox and Infinity (1)

• It was a really good combination of just philosophy things and also a more technical side to philosophy! Also the professor for the class was absolutely phenomenal!!

24.211: Theory of Knowledge (1)

• This class makes you question everything, like how you know anything to be true, if it matters if it’s true, things of that nature. Highly recommend, it’ll make you think about the world differently. 

24.900: Introduction to Linguistics (1)

• amazing professor and TAs. a great chance to meet the multi-lingual community of MIT! In the lecture hall I’d say at least 20 different languages were represented, and during class, students would bring in examples from their native language. the final project involves speaking with someone about a language you’re unfamiliar with, so it’s a chance to meet new people, new languages, and new cultures

24.906: The Linguistic Study of Bilingualism (1)

• Really cool topics and Professor Flynn is a great teacher!

24.917: ConLangs: How to Construct a Language (1)

• Very fun and interesting was to introduce students to linguistics, and fun even if you aren’t planning to study linguistics. Instructor was very good

Return to Table of Contents

Concourse 

CC.512: Organic Chemistry I (2)

• Professor Taylor is amazingly good at explaining things and really broke down the chemistry. She was super patient with me and made herself more than available to go over concepts and answer any questions. After each exam, she would email us not only our score, but she would highlight our strengths and weaknesses so we could grow. I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but organic chemistry was the best class ever. The reactions were so beautiful and once you start to understand, everything builds on top of itself and it’s an awesome puzzle. Also, Prof. Taylor would connect the chemistry we were learning to different products and pharmaceuticals in real life. 
• Dr. Taylor is an *incredible* professor. Everyone loves to hate on orgo, but she makes the class content fascinating and accessible.

Return to Table of Contents

Edgerton Center

EC.S01: Special Subject at the Edgerton Center (1)

• It is a short IAP class that allowed to me learn to use machinery that I hadnt used before, I managed to create something I was proud of and learnt a lot of skills I can use in the future. Made me feel a lot more confident in my shop skills.

Return to Table of Contents

Experimental Study Group

ES.8012: Physics I (1)

• Learned that I love applying my knowledge to design and build things!

Return to Table of Contents

Health, Science, and Technology 

HST.434: Evolution of an Epidemic (Study Abroad) (1)

• Coolest class I have ever taken hands down. I’m super into biology, and learned about specific biology relating to HIV/AIDs and infectious disease, but also something that is truly lacking at MIT– ethics and humanities and the social determinants of health. We learned that science and technology isn’t enough– we need politics and public health, and trust, and a solid heap of good luck and intentions to make a dent in infectious disease. In retrospect, we learned those lessons in practice in South Africa, and those learnings apply to the current situation as well. We’re seeing the same patterns unfold. Learning about the entire context and history of a field was amazing and life changing, and in my opinion, should be required reading as part of grad school in every field, especially biology and medicine. 

Return to Table of Contents

Media Arts and Sciences

MAS.863: How to Make (Almost) Anything (1)

• I think I actually learned useful stuff in this class :p It’s also nice to bond with your classmates over how much of a shitshow the class can be. And! there’s a super-wide variety of backgrounds in terms of people who take the class, which helps make the class a lot more interesting.

Return to Table of Contents

Science, Technology, and Society

STS.050: The History of MIT (2)

• It was so fun! I learned lots of cool things about MIT and its history, and the assignments weren’t a chore. The professor is amazing too.
• You learn a lot about MIT’s history, some notable alumni, the campus(es), some cool quirky facts, and (before COVID) you took mini field trips that were really fun!

Return to Table of Contents

Special Programs

SP.360: Terrascope Radio (1)

• Terrascope Radio got me intensely interested in a form of communication I previously cared little about.  Bi-weekly listening sessions and mini-projects leading up to a final project in which we could create and broadcast our own radio piece about a complex challenge we had studied over the past semester was a journey in the art and technicalities of sound collection and editing, teamwork, and communication.

Return to Table of Contents

If I missed your favorite class(es) or if you want to say more about a class mentioned, share them in the comments!

In my freshman year of high school, my favorite teacher that year had a quote that sat right above his whiteboard, visible at every place in the classroom. It read “I am large. I contain multitudes.”

Every lesson would somehow tie back to this quote, as we learned more and more about humans and their time on this earth (it was AP Human Geography after all) and how things we considered to be brief or tiny, such as paragraphs in a textbook we’re all forced to read for class, were in fact monumentous and grand and large. All it took for us to understand that was a little more thought, a little more practice, and a little more understanding.

In that class, every time I looked up at that quote, I felt my chest puff out a bit more, felt myself straighten up a little taller, and, as my eyes glanced across each word, I felt a little bigger. Larger.

I didn’t quite realize that these laminated words atop a dirty whiteboard would stick with me as much as they did, but even now, I think back to it.

In the eighth grade, while we were all fracturing off to different high schools to pursue different journeys, our eighth grade teachers gifted each of us a custom version of Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go! Every page contained one of our names on it, saying we were all traveling off to different far away lands to do great things.

In the moment, I didn’t really think much of it. I really wasn’t dreaming of all the places I was going to go, I was more focused on the prospect of high school.

Throughout high school, I was deadset on finality and sureness. I hated spontaneity and the mere thought of breaking away from my set out plan and goals was ludicrous. As I tediously planned out my next four years of school and made a notes document of everything I wanted to accomplish in high school, I was determined to complete everything I set out to do.

In my freshman year, I dabbled around with major ideas. I knew I wanted it to be something in STEM, solely because I liked it well enough and I was decent at it. I entertained the idea of psychology, until my biology teacher scoffed and said that psychology was a fake science and didn’t deserve any respect. In my sophomore year, I took Biomedical Engineering and realized I liked making things and working in lab and I decided I’d be a BME major, and that was that. This was the same year I visited my friend Claire H. ’20 at MIT, fell in love with the school, and promptly decided to hate MIT for the rest of my high school career because I so desperately wanted to attend and the 6.7% acceptance rate was most definitely not my friend.

For the next two years, I continued to be a BME major and swore I would not apply to MIT because I wanted to ED Johns Hopkins’ BME program.

But in a very unlike-Cami fashion, I made the spontaneous decision to apply EA to MIT on a whim. Which brings us here. To now. Me, a computer science major at MIT.

I think a lot about 8th grade Cami, sitting in the auditorium with her book and not even being able to fathom the fact that 6 years later she’d be sat in a cafe in Boston, hunched over her laptop coding for her lab for her computer science class at MIT.

My life could’ve gone in many directions. Instead of being perched here in Massachusetts, I could be a BME major at Johns Hopkins, sat in the nook of some cafe in Baltimore. Or perhaps I could be in a fancy diner in the neighborhoods of LA, just a stone’s throw from USC. I think about these alternate realities often, wondering if I hadn’t gotten into MIT, if I would be in a similar position.

Because I wasn’t meant to be a computer science major, or at least I thought I wasn’t. Constructors didn’t make sense to me, variables were a jumbly mess, for loops and recursion made my head spin. I swore after APCSA I’d never touch it again, but for some reason, something about MIT made me want to pick it up again.

And as I code away, using recursion to build nth dimension Minesweeper for 6.009, I think not only about 8th grade Cami, but 9th grade Cami, too, who was only just beginning to comprehend her many dimensions and multitudes.

I often wonder what it would be like to meet my eighth grade or ninth grade self, eagerly showing them my cute planner decorated with MIT-themed stickers (I hated stickers as a kid) or my IDE and its cute color theme (I didn’t know what an IDE was until this past January). I like to think it would’ve inspired me to keep on chugging or would’ve made me less anxious and so determined to be right and sure all the time, since future me was so vastly different from what I had imagined. Rather than some BME major at Hopkins proudly donning the light blue as my feet pitter pattered against the brick walkways of Baltimore, I was a Cambridge body with an MIT lanyard that held the keys to my first ever apartment and an MIT-issued iPad that stored all my notes and scribbles for my difficult coding classes.

In reality, I think I’d probably break the laws of time travel and probably have something go horribly, horribly wrong if I ever did meet my past selves. Unfortunate.

So, I know, Cami, where are you going with this? Well, I’m proud of myself. Really, that’s all. I am so incredibly proud of how far I’ve gotten and all the places I’ve gone. I’m proud of how large I’ve become and the multitudes I’ve discovered. I’m proud of the Cami I have become. I look at where I was and where I am now and I’m so overwhelmed with how much I’ve progressed, how much I contained within me, and how much I have done.

“I am large. I contain multitudes.”

I would later learn that this quote was just the second half of an even more meaningful one: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” For me, at least, I see this as proof that humanity is inherently flawed, yet fixable. Unreliable, yes, but we still learn. We may have some idea of how some things work, but once we learn, we grow, and we contradict our previous self. This is a similar concept to a recent video from John Green, where he talks of a poem that opens with “Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are Twenty men crossing twenty bridges.”

For a while, I questioned why certain classes took longer for me to understand and comprehend than my peers. Why certain things about computer science excited others but did not excite me. Why I seemed to be struggling more at MIT than the peers who have traversed this same road.

The reality of situation, though, is that the road is not at all the same. I have my own MIT, just as my peers have their MIT and those men have their own bridges. And as I journey through my own MIT, I’m constantly contradicting myself, growing larger and larger.

John Green ended his explanation by simply saying that the response to “What’s the bridge like?” is not “This bridge is terrifying,” but rather, “My bridge is terrifying, how ’bout yours?” and it really is reminiscent of something I was once told as a prefrosh at CPW by some upperclassmen at MIT.

Being nervous little prefrosh, we asked the wise upperclassman just exactly how difficult is MIT. He thought for a second, pausing, before giving his long response. I wish I could write it down verbatim, but I’ll just include the most important part: “MIT is an infinite ice cream shop, and everyone is going through their own special little flavor of hell. And the best part is, everyone knows that and gets that. So we help each other out.”

People always told me sophomore fall is the worst semester you’ll experience at MIT. This summer, a few of my upperclassmen friends warned me about not succumbing to stress as the semester gets progressively harder. They offered some anecdotes about their friends who were different people after sophomore year; more distant and withdrawn and on edge, more prone to anxiety, more jaded. I took these stories with a grain of salt since, well, I’d survived junior year of high school, hadn’t I? And it wasn’t even that bad!!

Oh man. Oh, man. Three mental breakdowns during office hours later, I’m starting to feel like I’m spiraling into anxiety about academics, and midterms haven’t even hit me yet…things are rough. I’m taking three technical classes and two HASS⁠01 aka non stem ones, so my workload isn’t as bad as it could be, but I’m struggling to stay afloat. My eczema is flaring up due to stress and my diet bounces between entire bags of Cheetos and giant vats of tofu soup because I have no time to cook more than once a week anymore. On weekdays, I’m working constantly. I wake up at 9 am and work until around 11 pm, and then I go to bed. It’s pretty consistent. On weekends, I either take a few hours to decompress and then start working, or I take m a n y hours to decompress and then feel guilty about it later. There’s no in-between.

The issue is that I haven’t yet found a rhythm that works for me in terms of finishing my assignments. My three technicals have psets/labs that are all due on Friday, while my Chinese class assigns homework every day. My CI-H has readings due twice a week and essays due twice a month, on average. I’ve managed to stay on top of my technicals by devoting as little effort as possible to my HASS classes, so when essays or unit tests arise, I’m screwed. I also haven’t yet figured out how to finish all my psets on time; my hardest class’s weekly lab takes me 10-15 hours to complete, which leaves me with little time to learn the material and finish the psets for my other two technicals. When I tried dedicating my time to finishing the lab before starting the psets for the other classes, I rushed learning all the material and was stressed about finishing the psets on Thursday night. But when I got them done early and then started working on my lab, I had to turn it in ten minutes before it was due. Like…where is the middle ground? How do I get everything done reasonably on time without sacrificing sleep/my mental health???

My roommates and I recently had a discussion about why sophomore fall is such a grind. We came to the conclusion that our class in particular is suffering because we’re tackling this difficult semester virtually, and we HAVE NOT HAD GRADES YET. We experienced our freshman fall on Pass/No Record, and then had a few weeks of normalcy in spring before being sent home and embracing PNR once more. Our motivation was at an all-time low in the past year because, uh, the pandemic, but also because we didn’t have…any tangible factors to motivate us. As a result, starting to take courses relevant to our major in a semester where we’re virtual is absolute torture.

On top of this, we have to juggle multiple platforms and means of learning (because MIT is NOT centralized in its teaching for each class). It’s frustrating—one of my math classes teaches course material via readings on MITx, and the other uses normal lectures on Canvas. I prefer the latter since it’s what I’m accustomed to, and I enjoy taking notes on lectures and being able to read through them later, but the readings are hellish. I’m never motivated to do them and feel like I have numerous holes in my understanding of the material.

So…yeah. Academics consumes my life and I am utterly unable to handle any stress beyond my classes. That’s why I was an absolute wreck when my personal life imploded a few weeks ago; that Thursday, a few upsetting things unfolded one after the other, and I lost all my motivation to work. I couldn’t help but wonder how I would’ve fared if the chaos had ensued on a Monday or Tuesday…

Yep. Things are difficult. I enjoy being busy, but I often entertain thoughts of putting my hardest class on P/NR and thus alleviating the majority of my anxieties each week. I won’t since I know I won’t learn nearly as much if I do, but damn, it’s tempting.

Freshmen…I know things are sucky for you right now, but embrace it. At the very least, you won’t have to experience your hardest semester in an environment like the one you’re currently in—you’ll (hopefully) have lots of friends to support you in person!

Hang in there, everybody…

This was originally going to be a post about how now that I’m in college I’m finally taking steps to beat procrastination and do things early and within a reasonable time frame. The plan was simple – I’d finish all my psets and work due on a given Friday, and then immediately start the work due the following week in the days that follow. However. In planning this, I failed to account for the fact that I am now in the most beautiful city in the world. I’m serious. It’s incredible. Look at this:

there are so many canals

and so many palaces

this archway leads to the palace square

beautiful streets everywhere

Isaac's cathedral at dusk

this sunset was incredible

a view of the Neva river. i died.

this is the winter palace at night

Previous Next

I got to St Petersburg a bit over a week ago, and holy shit, words cannot convey how happy and in awe I am. Logically, I’ve known that this city is gorgeous. I’ve been here before. None of the places I’ve walked so far are entirely new to me. And yet it’s a completely different feeling knowing that I’m actually living here, in the middle of it all, that I’m sleeping and cooking and stressing over psets while surrounded by all of this. One of the greatest joys, I think, is to have the mundane turn beautiful. So even on days when I’m stuck at home, going to office hours after office hours, I can look out my window and be reminded of the fact that, wow, I’m here.

my makeshift desk (there’s an actual desk, but the view is too good)

I constantly have the urge to go out, to walk around, to just sit and stare at a river somewhere or peoplewatch in a park. I want to get a coffee and read a book in front of the Winter Palace. I don’t really want to do my psets. And that’s okay, because I have a natural tendency to overwork myself and push myself to the limit, and is it really so bad to just slow down for a while, to focus more on taking in the world around me? I want to draw, maybe, to capture all this beauty. I want to write something, for myself, while staring out my window. I’ve already noticed a renewed interest in dressing nicely, in doing my makeup before I go out, all these things that used to bring me so much joy. I feel… alive, I think. In a semester when everything is virtual, I’m grateful to be able to access so much reality.

For two weeks in a row now, I’ve sat on a Zoom call at 7 pm (eastern, 2 am local!) with friends from my math class, trying to figure out the last bits of the pset due at 8. I might be better about it all next week, I might not, who knows. Sure, it’d be nice not to stress at the last minute, but it’s so nice to be able to walk around the city on those rare sunny days. I will have many more semesters to grind schoolwork, but the rest of them won’t take place here. I don’t have to do the most, yet. For now, I can be content with just doing enough. In that vein, there’s a lot more I could write, but the sun is out today, and I have four hours before sunset, and I can’t sit at home any longer.

I’m currently dealing with writer’s block, to be honest, and I’ve been blocked on finishing some post ideas for several weeks now. So instead, let me talk about some of the things I’ve been doing in the past month, and maybe this’ll inspire me to write more.

A new laptop. I got a new laptop! It’s a beautiful lightly-used ThinkPad T470 that I got off of eBay. I’ve been wanting to replace my laptop since at least the spring, which was when my old laptop, a ThinkPad E560, started becoming inadequate for my needs. And also when its spacebar and Enter key broke, so it became mostly unusable without an external keyboard.

I started hunting for a new laptop around the end of July, following the advice in the excellent Used ThinkPad Buyer’s Guide. The new laptop has a faster processor, which was the main thing I was looking for, but it also had four times the RAM, which is neat too. It’s also way lighter and feels nicer to carry around. And I got it for about the same price I got my old laptop. So that’s nice.

I also finally decided to switch to Linux. I used to avoid switching to Linux in fear for becoming a “tech person”, but to be honest, I’m too far gone in that direction to turn back. Of course, then I had to decide which Linux distribution to use; different distros could be as different as Windows and macOS! My friends pulled me in several different directions, with their reasoning being:

• Ubuntu, because “after all, you’re not a tech person, right?”
• Arch, because the AUR is apparently the best way to get packages.
• NixOS, because its declarative system configuration is “the correct way to do things”.

After long self-reflection, I picked Manjaro, a distro based on Arch. I wanted the glory of the AUR, but I’m not cool enough to use Arch, which is one of the big reasons I chose it. I then made the very important decision of what to name the computer.

This was a very difficult decision that took me thirty minutes in a Zoom call asking people for suggestions, because choosing computer names is important business. The shortlist included helium, ichigo, and flamingo. In the end, I named it rusty, after one of my favorite bands, Rusty Machines. I think that was a great decision and I’m very happy I named it that.

Now that I’m a month into using Manjaro after using Windows for pretty much my entire life, I like it. It was somewhat of a pain getting everything set up at first, since this is my first Linux system and I was learning a lot of things along the way. But I actually appreciate getting a deeper understanding of how the system works, and appreciate the freedom I have to customize pretty much everything.

Other new things. Although I do not often given in to the clutches of capitalism, I lowkey enjoy it when I do. I got a new pair of shoes, since my old shoes were tearing at the seams, and new bedsheets, because my old one had a huge hole beginning to form. I should probably get better at replacing broken things before they become very broken.

For swim class, I bought a very cheap pair of trunks. We were also given goggles, and swimming with goggles is such a different experience than swimming without them. I also got some new clothes, my favorite of which are these yellow shorts. I’m trying to get more into color blocking, and I like wearing silly bright colors.

Surprises in the mail. I get a bunch of things shipped to me that I don’t expect. They’re either surprise gifts, or things that I don’t remember ordering, which I guess are also surprise gifts but to myself. One of these things is a shark plushie, who is becoming good friends with Ice Bear. I got it as a gift from the lovely people in ESP, for co-directing Summer HSSP this year, which was themed around sharks. They don’t have a name yet, so if you have ideas you should comment them.

Another surprise I got in the mail was Book One of Saga, a comic book series. I started reading Saga around April, as I got the first 6 chapters as part of this Humble Bundle I purchased. True to its name, it’s an epic space fantasy, and despite appearances, it’s actually themed around parenting.

I was delighted to find out that MIT Libraries has Books 1 to 3, each Book being a compilation of 18 chapters. And I was further delighted to find out that they were delivering books to people staying on-campus! So I borrowed Book 1, totally forgot that I borrowed it, and then got it a few days later and was pleasantly surprised. That’s one of the nice things about being on-campus.

One of the things that amuses me about it is that one extraterrestrial race speaks Esperanto, a language I happen to speak. I didn’t know about this at all until I read it, so it was a neat surprise. It’s clunky at times, and it’s probably Google Translated, but it’s understandable. It’s so satisfying whenever there’s a series of panels in Esperanto and I just understand what they’re talking about without having to look it up. Is this what power feels like?

this is fair use right

There are lots of things I love about it: the diversity of its characters, the scale of the plot, the amazing art, the depth of the worldbuilding, its treatment of war. It’s an excellent series, easily in the top three comics I’ve ever read, and I strongly recommend it. (But do note that it gets pretty graphic at times.)

Classes. Miraculously, I am surviving in the swim class. I remember, back when I was in high school, reading A Hard MIT Class by Vincent A. ’17, and I felt this spiritual connection in absolutely hating swimming.

Now that I’m re-reading the post, I could’ve sworn I ghostwrote it. My instructor told us our goals were to learn swimming and to “socialize”, emphasized the importance of “rhythmic breathing” and gave me such glowing reassurances, all things Vincent writes about too. I also deeply relate to looking around and seeing everyone so stellar at swimming back and forth, when I couldn’t even swim halfway through the pool.

One of the classes I’m actually enjoying this semester is 24.902 Introduction to Syntax, taught by Pesetsky. He’s the same professor who taught 24.900 when I took it last semester, 24.900 being the intro linguistics class. For the first few weeks, he’d mention that class a lot: “Many of you might’ve seen this in 24.900,” or “For those of you who took 24.900 with me last spring,” and it’s amusing to count how many times he mentions it per class. I believe last Thursday was the first class when that count was 0.

Although the swim class is hard in the sense that I am making negative progress in learning how to swim, the hardest class I’m taking this semester has to be 6.854 Advanced Algorithms. 854 is a graduate-level class notorious for being difficult and time-consuming, and indeed, it’s by far the hardest class I’ve taken in my life.

On one hand, it’s sometimes frustrating to go over material again and again, and it’s frustrating to struggle for hours on a pset problem. But on the other hand, there are lots of things about the class I like. For example, the material is really interesting, and in lecture last Wednesday Karger offered some nice physical intuition for linear programming. And it’s really rewarding to get a problem after thinking about it for so long.

i saw this in the hallway today and it is relevant to linear programming so i am including it here

Karger is also a fountain of amusing quotes:

• “We’ll be working a lot with n-dimensional things, but unfortunately we do not have an n-dimensional blackboard.”
• “I put the dynamic optimality conjecture on the homework. Anyone who solves it gets an A.”
• “I heard some of you are watching my lectures at 1.5×, so I’m gonna save you the trouble by lecturing at 1.5×.”

History. I did a little digging in old course catalogs. I might end up doing a longer post about it later, but mostly I looked up how long some classes have been around. Karger has been teaching 6.854, for example, for at least twenty years, because the class appears in the 2000–01 course catalog with him listed as the professor:

I only realized how long ago this was when my adviser told me about how he took 6.854 under Karger when he was a grad student in MIT, which must have been ten years ago. Even longer ago, in the 1970–71 catalog, is 18.701, with Artin listed as the professor. That’s fifty years ago. It boggles my mind how I took 18.701 with Artin last fall and how he’s teaching 18.702 in the spring. I probably have professors who have professors who’ve been taught by Artin.

There’s lots more interesting things from the archives that I’ve discovered, but I guess I’ll save these for the post that I’m planning to write. Whenever I get around to writing it, of course, which at this rate will probably be two years from now.

Wearing an exoskeleton. I saved the coolest part for last. Today I got to wear an ankle exoskeleton, and I walked around in it for around an hour.

i look ridiculous but who cares

This was part of a study that Sarah G., a grad student in AeroAstro, is conducting. They attached some sensors to my shoes and chest, and asked me to move around, cross a balance beam, and walk and turn. First we did some measurements without the exoskeleton. Then I wore the fancy shoes and a backpack that had the battery, which Sarah then hooked up to the shoes. We did some more walking with the exoskeleton turned on, and turned off, and then we did some final measurements without the exoskeleton again.

It was really interesting walking around while the exoskeleton was powered. After a couple of normal steps, I felt it tighten and loosen around my toes, felt it pushing the area beneath my knees, and felt it supporting my ankles as I was moving. And it was neat hearing the quiet whirring sound and feeling my foot being raised and lowered kinda autonomously. It made me feel like an android while walking around, and it was pretty fun.

Sarah was pretty nice and wanted me to say that if you’re on campus you should sign up for their study, so I’m saying that now. The whole thing took a little less than two hours. I got paid $20 for it, but honestly, I would’ve done it for free.

It’s a reminder that even if everything’s online and no one’s around, I’m still studying in MIT. It reminded me of that sense of wonder I got when I first walked through the hallways of East Campus and stared at the murals and the doors and the lounges. People all around me are doing cool stuff, whether it’s working with exoskeletons or cooking food or giving flu shots, and that’s one of the reasons I fell in love with MIT in the first place.

(This is part 2 of my oh, the places you’ll go blogpost because they really were all written in one document but it didn’t make sense for them to be in the same post since they had different tones kind of so…here we are).

This past January, I learned how to code (again). On a whim, I decided to take 6.145 because I started to entertain the idea of being a computer science major again. Why? Well, I slightly blame the atmosphere of MIT — a good majority of my friends are CS majors and always seeing them beeping and booping away made me realize I should probably learn how to also beep boop. Regardless, I suffered through 6.145, with a lot of tears and a lot of late nights and a lot of meeting friends on Stud2 (the floor with the food court) to help fix my broken code.

In the spring, I learned what math was for computer scientists, as 6.042 brought me through graphs and pigeonhole principles. I secretly really loved 6.042, despite doing poorly in the class. It’s ironic, because I actually had a C in discrete math when I took it in high school and I absolutely hated it. Seems like we have a running trend here.

6.08 showed me that I could do this whole compsci thing, futzing around with circuits and wiring and making screens light up like magic. Then I started to realize that I really do, in fact, like this whole computer science thing, even if it makes me cry, and I started frantically applying to internships left and right, hoping to get something.

And by magic, and by sheer luck, I managed to nab an internship at Microsoft as a New Technologist, where my confidence in my abilities as a CS person skyrocketed. I was an active participant in team meetings and calls, I ideated and came up with my own vision for an app, I did practice technical interviews (though I didn’t get any of the questions right…), I networked and met countless software engineers and product managers who gave me insight on their life as a tech person. And I started thinking more and more that this was my place, this is a place I could see myself.

I try to be a proper computer science major.

And that brings us to the very recent past, where I decided to take 6.009, MIT’s Fundamentals of Programming class (a class that is notoriously very difficult but very rewarding). And I was applying to internships left and right, while balancing career fairs and practice interviews and LeetCode and HackerRank. My daily week essentially looked like grinding 009 for two or three days, then using my spare time to apply to internships, and then using that spare time to practice coding.

I did well at my past internship, so Microsoft allowed me to apply for their Explore program and immediately get sent to the final round, rather than having to pass the resume review, phone screening, and secondary interview stage. When I got this news, anxiety started to settle in. Heavily. I constantly question my abilities as a CS person. I don’t come up with the cleanest code sometimes, or it takes me a while to get things right. I don’t really understand concepts right away, and usually I have to have someone draw it in front of me in order for me to fully understand what they’re talking about. I don’t know what a stack is…or a heap…or any of those data structures, really. And honestly, I’m just trying my best.

Hesitantly, I asked my boyfriend (who has been coding for much, much, much longer than I have) to help me with my Microsoft interview. At first, I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. I didn’t want to build expectations. I’m scared of telling people when I get things or do things because I’m scared they’ll expect me to get it, and then I disappoint them when I don’t. This situation was even more stressful because I never ask my boyfriend for help when it comes to coding. This is one of my most toxic traits, I’d say, because I really hate embarrassing myself in front of him. I get scared when I’m wrong, especially when it comes to coding, and I hate looking stupid. There were times where he attempted to help me with my other 009 labs and I just burst into tears, crying because I just felt like a wreck and I felt incredibly stupid because he commented on a piece of my code that was messy or something else. And I would often times blame it on him, for his teaching style being too blunt or coarse (which it is), but I deserve to take some of that blame for being far too defensive.

For the next two weeks, I attempted to do HackerRank questions, opting to do easy ones since it was Explore after all and I was hoping they wouldn’t be too intense on me. Every so often, Raymond would check in on me, asking if I’ve practiced yet, or when the interview was.

I started to get little bunches in my stomach because every new day meant one day closer to this interview. While all of this was happening, Raymond was on his own internship search, too. And he was doing everything (at least to me) well. He didn’t even flinch when he had his second round technical, passing test cases and such with ease.

And I couldn’t help but start to think that maybe I’m not fit for this area, that maybe this is a realm I shouldn’t even be touching. For those of you who have read my previous blogs, you might recall me having extreme sickness and body rashes and in and out of MIT medical visits and so on. All of that was induced by the stress of this one interview. In fact, the week of the interview, I begged S Cubed to let me take a week off from school, mainly so I could focus on rebuilding my health again. (I am back to normal! Thankfully.)

I have my first ever technical interview.

Then, Tuesday came. I woke up, went to my favorite class of the semester (8.021…a physics class..y’all…A PHYSICS CLASS!!!), took some notes, and then waited. Agonizingly.

I set up my work area, adjusting the blinds so just enough sunlight would sheen on my face and make it look pretty and good, but not enough so that it would make it hard to code and see my screen. I put my hair in a Professional TM bun and slapped on a dress (that apparently made me look like a Star Wars character, according to Raymond) and proceeded to hype myself up in the mirror.

My stomach was quite literally jumping as soon as I entered the kick-off, a 30 minute call with the campus recruiters and other interviewees to describe the logistics of the day. Had we not been a pandemic, I would’ve been flown out to the Redmond Microsoft campus to interview and be accommodated nicely, but unfortunately, we are in a pandemic.

I would have two interviews this day, each about 45 minutes each, with fifteen minute breaks in between each interview. After my second interview concludes, I’m free to leave.

It seemed simple enough.

I anxiously gripped my Apple pencil in my hand and attempted to remember basic coding things, but instead of revision, I found myself writing positive messages and encouragement on my Notability document. Little things like “You will be okay. Stay calm. Breathe. You know what you are doing. You have prepared for this.” These mantras littered my paper, and they somehow made me feel a little better.

By the time 3:55 hit, I was already in the call’s waiting room. I figured it was best to show up five minutes early. At 4 o’clock, I was let into the call. I was told the interview would be a mix of behavioral, project based, and technical questions. We started off by introducing ourselves to each other. Then, he asked a lot about my previous internship at Microsoft. There, I talked excitedly about my projects. I was brutally honest, too, explaining how at first I wasn’t all too fond of the internship, but once I got to know my teammates and had better communication, I ended up really, really loving it. I found myself slowly getting more and more relaxed in my interview. I’ll admit that I think I do fairly decently in behavioral interviews. I like to think of myself as somewhat charismatic, albeit a little goofy and messy at times, but overall, I think I carry myself well. Regardless, I was really happy with how it was going so far.

He then asked me how long I’ve been coding for and if I’ve done this sort of thing before, and I said that I started learning this past January and this was my first technical interview. And then he offered something I did not expect: he said I could skip the technical question and opt for a design question instead. Here is when I started doing a lot of rapid fire thinking. For the past two weeks, I had been prepping for a coding question, but I didn’t quite know if I would be able to solve it. But design questions are pretty difficult as well and I didn’t really prepare for those.

So I responded, saying I’d be happy to do the technical since I wanted to get more experience and I’d try my best.

Question: Given a sentence (in the form of a string), return the words in this sentence in reverse order.

Luckily, I was able to complete the question, save for a few syntax errors and silly mess-ups.

I started off by talking about how every word in the sentence should be separated by the ‘ ‘ character. So, we’re able to parse out what is a word if we just slice the string every time we encounter a space. Then, we can add each word to a list, and then iterate over the list in reverse, returning each word.

I made sure to remember all of the technical interview tips my mentor had given me over the summer: talk often and explain everything, think of all the possible test cases and edge cases, ask clarifying questions and don’t dive into things right away.

I remember I stupidly asked “Did I do it correctly?” to which my interviewer chuckled and said “Yes, you did it great!”

(I would later find out that I did not do it super great. I realized I could’ve just done list comprehension for a one line solution. Oops. But who cares?)

We then spent the remaining time talking about life at Microsoft, his team, Microsoft work culture, and work from home amidst a pandemic.

I then had my fifteen minute break, to where I giddily exclaimed to my roommates that I did well in my first interview, grabbed some panic wheat thins, and then headed back in my room for my second interview.

My second interview was a little more intimidating than the first, since my interviewer wasn’t as open or as talkative as my previous one. He asked me a lot of interesting questions, mainly pulling them from my resume. He noted the fact that I was an avid media person and blogger (lol hello!) and then asked what in particular about computer science excited me.

I told him that I didn’t…well…really know where I wanted to go into computer science, but I really loved product design, app dev, and web dev. Embarrassingly, I admitted that I learned to code from Tumblr since I would edit my theme in HTML and add cute little colors or transition effects, to which he responded with a very humble “Oh gee thanks, I used to work for Tumblr so that makes me happy.” (This was a happy coincidence!) I then talked a lot more about the shortcomings I noticed in media and CS.

A lot of times, I think people forget to make technology accessible, whether it be not having accommodating color palettes for color blindness, or text to speech / alt text for readers, or just making confusing and difficult user interfaces so people can’t really understand your project. Sometimes computer scientists get a little too wrapped up in their world of coding and mumbo jumbo computer science jargon that they forget that regular normal people are supposed to know how to use things. And that’s why I wanted to go into CS. I wanted to be in CS to remind engineers of why we build the projects we build and how technology is useless if it is not accessible.

My interviewer was a pretty insightful guy, especially seeing as he worked on the UI and front-end part for his team, so it was really nice to hear about how he is currently trying to optimize run times and whatnot for his programs so it’s easier for people to use.

Then, we reached the coding bit.

Question: Given a string, return True if the parentheses in the string are properly open and closed. Return false if not.

‘(()’ –> False

‘()’ –> True

‘)))))’ –> False

The good news: I recognized the question. The bad news: I had seen a harder version of this question on LeetCode and I remember I failed / didn’t find the solution.

I struggled a bit in the beginning, stupidly telling my interviewer that I had attempted a similar question in the past, but didn’t know how to do it. Thankfully, he said that that was okay and he’d offer some hints if I got stuck. I babbled on for a couple of seconds, explaining my initial thoughts where I thought we should have some flag that was a boolean that was opened every time a parentheses was opened and closed whenever it was closed, before backtracking and explaining why my initial thoughts wouldn’t work (seems like a lot of flags to manage). He told me something that nudged me in the right direction, where he said the flag idea was along the right track, but I probably shouldn’t be tracking a boolean. I then realized I could instead keep a counter that adds one when a parentheses is opened (counter += 1) and subtracts one when a parentheses is closed (counter -= 1) and if the counter at the end is not equal to zero, then it hasn’t been properly closed.

He then said that my solution was correct (yay!) and then asked how I would refactor my code if I had all the different kinds of brackets I had to keep track of “({[” and what data structure I’d use. I didn’t get this bit right, seeing as I haven’t studied any data structures yet and didn’t really know what to do here, but he kindly explained to me that you’d use a stack here. We then spent the rest of the time talking about his time at Microsoft, as well as what I wrote about as a blogger!

Then it was done. The recruiters told me I should get a response within two weeks, so all I had left to do was wait.

Overall, I felt pretty good about my interviews. I was pleased with how I did and was really, really nervous to get the decisions.

two days later

Two days later, I get an email from a recruiter from Disney, who saw my resume and wanted to interview with me. I then also get an email from a recruiter at EA who also wants to interview with me because they saw my resume.

And then I refresh my email and I have an offer from Microsoft, telling me I’ve been accepted to Microsoft Explore.

And I burst into tears and I’m shaking and I text my mom and I tell my roommates and then I go on the bed and cry because I did it.

It’s difficult to put into words how strange my relationship is with computer science. There are moments where I love writing out the solutions and thinking of how to approach a problem and get childishly giddy when I figure it out. Then there are the moments where I’m staring at the ceiling and crying and banging my fists against the desk because my code won’t run or the runtime is far too long and I don’t know how to fix it and people try to explain it to me but I’m too stupid to understand. And then there are these kinds of moments, where after all of that, I still manage to pull through.

In this moment, I am overwhelmed and relieved and overcome with joy because to me, this is a sign that I am good enough. That my hard work has paid off and that with enough effort and time I can get these coveted positions. I’ve struggled a lot with computer science, especially because I’d convinced myself that I wasn’t as good as other people since I had started so late. I saw my peers and my friends ace coding assessments with ease, get big time SWE internships as freshmen, and clear classes like 009 and 006 without even blinking. But this day and this moment swept all of that aside and showed me that I was competent.

I know a lot of this is in my head. That I am not competing with anyone at all and that the performance of other people does not dictate my value or my worth, but regardless, this was a victory in my journey and I am proud of myself. Slowly, but surely, I’m gaining confidence in my abilities and I’m just so amazed to see my personal and technical growth throughout these past ten months.

I guess I wanted to write this blog because I wanted to say that it doesn’t really matter when you start or when you develop a passion for something, as long as you pursue it and work hard for it? Or something along the lines of that. I’m writing this also to mark the occasion, so I can look back on this blog as a senior at MIT and remember the time I had my first technical interview and have a recap of my CS journey so far.

I hope to do more blog posts on the cool classes I’m taking (since I mentioned them!!) but I really just wanted to share this important moment with you all :)

About a year ago, in the midst of job recruiting season, I wrote a post comparing applying to college to applying to jobs. It’s job recruiting season again, but this year, I escaped from the cycle by accepting a return offer.

Obviously, it’s nice to be on the other side of things, where you’re done with the process and don’t have to run the gauntlet of actually getting an internship or a job. But as somebody who is now removed from the process, I wanted to talk about how applying to jobs was literally the hardest experience of my MIT career, and how I dealt very poorly with the failures that I inevitably experienced during application season.

Unless you were the most OP high school senior alive, then you probably received rejection letters from some subset of the colleges that you applied to. The ‘perfect applicant’ doesn’t exist, and the college application process itself definitely isn’t perfect. You might have felt discouraged about some of those rejections, especially if they were from your dream school. That’s totally okay. In fact, the point of this post is mostly to advise you that learning how to deal with those feelings in a healthy way is an honest-to-god life skill.

Those of you who applied to MIT had to write an essay about how you dealt with a significant challenge for your application – or perhaps you’re in the middle of writing yours for this season of applications. I don’t know what you guys wrote about, but I wrote about something relatively trivial in the scope of things. I was really into competitive math in high school, and [competitive math lingo incoming] after two years of making the AIME, the AMC top 1%, or Math Prize for Girls in various combinations, I totally bombed the last AMC I ever took my junior year, and didn’t make any of the above. This was really hard for me to deal with because – as you’ll learn in this post – I deal with failure really poorly. Even though this is an objectively minor challenge to have to overcome, it was literally the worst thing that had ever happened to me at that point in my life because as an overachieving high school student, I didn’t really fail very hard at anything.

During the college app season, I did receive a few rejections that I was disappointed about. But I was lucky enough to get into my dream school⁠11 MIT, if that wasn't obvious , so I never really took any of those failures to heart, even though I was minorly salty about a few of them. Full disclosure: I got admitted into MIT and my safety school, and got rejected from Harvard, Stanford, and Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. And yes, none of these were really rejections to be salty about. It’s REALLY HARD to get into all of those schools.

Flash forward to actually being an MIT student. As I’ve mentioned in many, many blog posts, I am a solidly average, if not below average, MIT student. This is a fact that I still struggle with, even though I know that deep down, being an MIT student at all is something that I should be proud of. But watching people complain about their ‘trash’ GPAs of 4.5/5.0 and above, and watching my friends get straight As for multiple semesters in a row, has sort of worn down on my self esteem over the years. But this is something that I’ve more or less learned to deal with due to being exposed to it for over three years now. Coming into my own at MIT has helped me deal with this particular drain on my self esteem.

So what is this post about, you might be wondering? Well, let me tell you what has hit my self esteem harder than it’s been hit in my literal entire life: JOBS.

Everybody knows that job recruiting season is, in a word, awful. Getting a job is sort of like a 12 unit class all by itself, and it’s really stressful, as I talked about in my previous jobs post.

I was really lucky⁠12 like, REALLY lucky - I was applying to MISTI Japan pretty seriously and just sort of shot an application at PlayStation for the heck of it; also, my interview was on 6.004 material, and I happened to be in the Intro to Caches lecture ON THE DAY of my interview when they asked about caches to get into the only company I applied to seriously in sophomore year, and I had a job offer in hand by mid-November. I didn’t really struggle with the jobs process at all as a sophomore, and didn’t really experience the Course 6 gauntlet in its true form.

I mentioned in my jobs post last year that I was really stressed about not having a job yet, because it was December and most of the big Course 6 companies were wrapping up with their recruiting. This meant that a lot of juniors – my peers at the time – already had jobs, and were already starting to talk about getting housing for the summer and what they were excited about. This was the first time I sort of felt the (partly self imagined) peer pressure of not having a job. I had been safe from it sophomore year, but junior year, I put a lot of stress on myself for not having a job offer in hand.

Let’s pause for a second to unpack that.

• It’s definitely not true that every junior at MIT was employed for the summer except for me, but a lot of the juniors I hang out with on a regular basis were already employed by November and December. This still doesn’t mean that I should have been constantly comparing myself to them. This is not a healthy mindset.
• The companies I really wanted to work for were *not* big tech companies and therefore had slightly later recruiting timelines than Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and the like. So it was definitely illogical for me to be feeling stressed in December at all.

I always thought that I wasn’t very susceptible to peer pressure, but I definitely learned otherwise. And the worst part is that nobody was pressuring me to get a job – I have an amazing UROP that I could have worked on⁠13 and did work on it unpaid regardless, despite having an internship, because I'm addicted to my UROP over the summer. But I was literally just conjuring up all of this stress because deep inside, I had this notion that being employable was what made MIT students special compared to everybody else. Everybody always says that having MIT on your resume opens up so many doors, and makes getting a job easier. I staked my entire self esteem on the idea of getting a job because I thought, illogically and irrationally, that getting employed was what me a worthy MIT student. I literally only wanted to get a job to be able to say that I got a job.

Here are some ways in which this toxic mindset tangibly affected my life:

• Undervaluing the UROP experience. I think that this is something a lot of MIT students do, and I am clearly no exception. I think we have a toxic mindset that UROPing over the summer is *inferior* to getting a job in some way. This probably stems from the fact that getting a UROP is technically less competitive than getting a job. Does this actually matter? No, not in the slightest. Being able to UROP at MIT over the summer is a privilege that I think we as MIT students don’t think about enough. And to personally attack myself, thinking that getting a job over the summer made me better than if I UROPed over the summer is stupid. Although I genuinely wanted to spend a summer in a city that wasn’t Cambridge because I did UROP here over my freshman summer,⁠14 and had a great time, by the way and also wished to make more money than a UROP offers,⁠15 it pays minimum wage, and once you subtract housing from the picture, you do almost break even... telling myself that UROPing over the summer wasn’t enough was really dumb.
• Not being able to go on LinkedIn for literal months. Does this sound dumb? That’s because it is! I was so caught up in my own negative feelings about not having a job that I literally wasn’t able to go on LinkedIn for months because it would just make me feel inferior. If you’re thinking: “There’s a lot to unpack there”, then you’re totally right. My self esteem is pretty bad and I need to work on it.
• Getting really sad when my friends talked about job offers. Even though I should have been really happy for my friends and all the amazing offers they received for the summer, deep down, it made me feel really shitty. Yes, this is toxic. And yes, I did unintentionally make at least one person feel bad for talking about their summer offer around me because I would clearly get really sad when they did. And YES, this is terrible and toxic. Don’t be like me.
• Crying for like, actual days. Last IAP, there were three companies left that I was interviewing for. When I got rejected from the first two, I probably spent actually 10 hours in total just crying about those rejections.  I skipped classes, obligations, and activities just because I was that upset. This was bad for a multitude of reasons, the most important one being that this is not a healthy way to deal with failure.

None of these were healthy ways to deal with failure. I acknowledge this and encourage everybody reading this to really take that to heart. These were not healthy ways to deal with failure. And to be honest, I don’t think I ever really learned healthy ways to deal with failure earlier on in my life because as I mentioned before, none of my shortcomings were ever very significant. And in the scope of things, getting rejected from jobs isn’t very significant either.

Ever since actually getting a job and having my depression towards the whole process subside, I’ve been thinking about healthy ways I could approach my failures. Then I saw this post on LinkedIn, and both the description of the post and the actual implementation of the idea were really good.

This is absolutely the mindset I should have taken towards all of my rejections. I learned a lot from those rejections – and I know people say that a lot, but I actually did. I’ve learned that coding interviews are just about as much practice and exposure as they are about actually knowing the concepts, and the reason I was so bad at them was because I missed an entire year of practice during sophomore year. I didn’t have the experience of applying and interviewing and getting rejected from jobs during sophomore year because I got into the first job I applied to. And I missed out on all of that practice. But after my experience with job recruiting junior year, I know exactly how to prepare and interview for jobs in the future. And sure, I’ll probably still get rejected from a bunch of places, but it’s the practice I gained from interviewing that really counts. Learning how to interview, practicing coding questions, working on your soft skills, and writing cover letters are all skills that I gained from the many companies that I applied to that rejected me anyways.

To all the MIT students going through the job hunt right now: good luck, and remember that getting a job isn’t the end-all-be-all of the MIT experience. You’ve learned a ton just by being a student here, and have probably grown immensely as a person and as a member of whatever field you’re pursuing. Getting a job takes practice and some amount of luck because no system is actually meritocratic. You’ll learn just as much from your applications as you will from your rejections.

To all the high school seniors reading this: if you’re like 99% of the population, you’ll probably get some college rejections in the next few months. If you feel sad about it, try to think about what you gained from just the process of applying to those places. Did you write some bomb essays that helped you learn a lot about yourself? Did you particularly enjoy your interview? Did you enjoy touring said college? All of those are things that you could have gained from the experience of applying at all.

So, finally: here’s my rejection resume from last year. I got rejected from every single one of these companies, but I learned a lot from just applying to them.

Quick applied and never heard back:

• Lyft
• Pinterest
• Twitter
• The Climate Corporation

Actually applied and never heard back:

• Bridgewater⁠16 This one was kind of strange because they contacted me for a coffee chat and told me to apply but then never got back to me after I applied, lol. It's probably because my GPA was too low :P
• Spotify
• Apple
• Duolingo

Rejected after coding challenge:

• Roblox SWE and PM
• Flatiron Health

Rejected before final round: 

• Microsoft PM⁠17 I actually got a final round interview for Microsoft, but they never flew me out...
• Facebook
• AT&T

Rejected after final round: 

• Niantic
• Lark Health
• Google APM⁠18 I was shocked to have gotten an onsite for this program at all tbh, it's super competitive and I literally didn't know anything
• Google SWE⁠19 Google typically has two software screens, neither of which are very difficult, but I totally bombed the first one and did great on the second one, which meant I got a third chance to redeem myself. I failed it though lol

Personally, I have always found it ironic how universities tout their student: faculty ratio. For freshmen and prospective students, how significant is this number? Does a ratio of 5:1 mean a lot when you can have a freshman lecture size of 400?

One of the quintessential features of American college is the big, spacious rooms where lectures take place. When I imagined college in high school, I imagined being in one of these huge halls, taking a class surrounded by countless other students. Similar to the lecture videos one would see on MIT OCW⁠01 MIT Open CourseWare, basically freshman fall but free or youtube.

I liked this thought, but at the same time, a future in these big lecture halls felt odd and foreign.⁠02 not a coronavirus premonition I swear Was it an experience I could be fine with? Of course. I would probably need some time to get accustomed to a new atmosphere, but over time, I would find my niche. Yet I had lingering worries of how it would be like being in such a large atmosphere. Worries about how these classes could wind up feeling highly impersonal.

Now, what is even more ironic is probably the fact that I came from a pretty large high school. We had several thousand people in our school, which is probably larger than some small towns. I presume one could say that even though our high school was large, our classes were not, with around 30 in a set class. Nothing like the size of lecture halls, but those classes of roughly 30 were sometimes intimidating as well. Not in the number of people. But because of how I continuously am an absolute expert at clowning myself in large groups. Basically, I start the year planning to participate, but those plans go haywire very quickly. 

I have always loved my STEM classes,⁠03 with few exceptions :o but often find it difficult to ask questions or participate in a larger setting. Kinda a long-running anxiety snowball of second-guessing my answers. In most humanities classes, on topics that deal with analysis, interpretation, or arguments, the line between right or wrong answers is more blurred, so it felt more natural to participate in a discussion for me. But for STEM classes, there are often very right and very wrong answers, so I usually find myself too slow to answer or blatantly wrong. It took a while, but I’ve found a greater sense of solace and peace of mind in being able to ask questions in smaller groups. In high school, I utilized this as much as I could, and it was greatly beneficial to me for the most part.

So during the summer before MIT, one of the things that took my interest was ESG, one of the small freshman learning communities. There are multiple that freshmen can apply/lottery into, such as Terrascope (a more environment/sustainability-directed one), Concourse (humanities-STEM mixture), and Tutmonda (a brand-new language-centered one). If you have read my introduction, you probably know how this story ends. Tl;dr, I’m in ESG, because for once, just once, I actually won a raffle. And considering that stroke of luck, I probably am gonna get struck by lightning soon.

But if we backtrack to last July-ish, I was just thinking about applying to learning communities and freshman advising seminars.⁠04 advising classes in many topics like knot theory, politics in covid, and more (freshman only btw) I thought of applying mainly to Terrascope and ESG for learning communities, though the decision between the two was difficult. I liked the sustainability aspect of Terrascope along with the 12-unit class all Terrascopers take in the fall. But at the same time, I felt that ESG would make for a less road bumpy start to freshman fall. My thought process was that MIT was gonna hit me hard anyway, so I might as well try to have a floatie to lessen the impact.

Before starting the school year, many thoughts flooded my mind. I knew for certain that I would be taking my math and physics GIRs in ESG, but for Chemistry, it was a much harder process. ESG has a chemistry GIR class, but course 3 (Material Science) offered a solid-state chemistry class that I felt would be more applicable to me. Especially since I’m flopping like a fish regarding what I’m majoring in at the moment.⁠05 Courses 1-24

Fast-forwarding back to now,⁠06 Sorry this turned into a bad time lapse story :) it’s been about a month of taking classes both inside and outside of ESG. Regarding my ESG classes, I’ve grown to really enjoy the structure of the small environment. Many of the key aspects playing in my decision over what learning communities to apply to have been particularly important to this virtual semester.

Now, this isn’t to say that smaller classes make topics easier. For reference, this is live, unedited footage of how my two brain cells in 8.01⁠07 Physics Mechanics, also featuring me struggling with communications are doing:

So yes, I did get hit hard by MIT. Full throttle.

8.01 has been hard, not harder than I expected it to be, because I expected it to be hard to start with. It’s been a struggle but at the same time an enjoyable one. There have been certain days that I’ve felt very confused and disheartened. But through that, there’s been so much support from my professors and throughout the wider ESG community. Just a whole, wholesome community that is there without even asking.

Between general classes, office hours, and more simple daily interactions, everyone is just so helpful and friendly. I don’t like hyperboles, but it’s everything I could have wanted in classes. So even when class is hard, I feel like pressing “play again” rather than “quit.”

There is a completely different dynamic than my larger high school classes and even a more drastic difference when compared to my much larger Chemistry class. With only about 6-10 people in my 2 ESG classes, I feel far better about clowning myself with bad questions or very wrong answers.⁠08 big emphasis on very I can ask the questions that I wouldn’t have asked in a larger room. When I go to office hours, I’m able to ask for help or clarifications easily and feel fulfilled being there. In a nutshell, learning feels really accessible. It’s a similar feel to any time I was in small groups in high school, in a good sense.

When I look at physics compared to chemistry, which is a mainstream class, there is a stark difference between my ESG and general experience. I would say both are rather difficult, as we can clearly see here, featuring bad lag:⁠09 Shout to my friends for helping make these live-action vids!

But in Chemistry, there isn’t the same feeling of support due to it being a much larger class, which is compounded by our virtual environment. To some extent, my slight worries about a large lecture hall were realized, and I find myself being more lost and isolated in that class than my others, including my CI-H⁠10 Intro to Media Studies! (which has around 25 people).

Everything isn’t rosy in my 2 small classes of course. It most likely wouldn’t be a perfect experience for everyone. Even for me, there are days when I want to just turn off my camera and nod off thanks to Zoom Fatigue/Overload/I’m tired of it, but I really can’t because there are about 6 other people in the room. It would be pretty damn obvious. There is a pretty clear plus side of this since it forces me to stay accountable with classes, and I have little self-control to do so otherwise. And I personally enjoy the fact we have lectures 4-5 times a week. It doesn’t feel too rushed, so I can grasp material decently well.

When I was applying for ESG, MIT had not formally announced freshman wouldn’t be on campus yet, and my lingering hope was fading, but still there. So consequently, this wasn’t something I factored into my choice of learning communities or freshman advising seminars. I had no clue Zoom would be the quintessential lecture hall for this year, where I’d be partaking in class surrounded by my classmates, except on my screen. But seeing the student-faculty ratio I always found ironic become a reality, I couldn’t have been happier with my choice to rank it.

My entire professional life has revolved around education and college admissions.  Even though I have observed many changes, including the transition from an entirely paper-based process (featuring typed or hand-written applications) to a largely digital one (with applications and supporting documents completed and/or transmitted online) to recent COVID-necessitated innovations like the now ubiquitous interactive virtual information sessions, I remain most interested in facilitating the reflection and investigation undertaken by prospective students that ultimately leads to a college choice.

In my work with prospective college students, (as an admission officer and/or college counselor) I have always tried to provide the type of counsel that I would have most appreciated when I was attempting to navigate this journey long ago, even though things were far simpler then.

With application portals open, and deadlines fast approaching, I am reminded of the bulk of conversations that I have had about essays, right around this time, for each of the last several years while I was away from MIT.

Conversation #1

Student: What did you think of my essay?

Me:  What’s the takeaway?

Student: What?

Me: What was I supposed to learn about you as a result of reading your essay?

Student:  I’m not sure.

Me: You need to start over.

Student: What?

Me: With anything that you write, you should know what you are attempting to communicate.  First, figure out what you want to say, and then figure out how to say it.

Conversation #2 (assuming there is an answer to my first question)

Me: Does the takeaway address the most important (or at least a sufficiently important) thing that the reader/admission officer needs to know in order to determine if you are a good fit for the community?

Student: I don’t know.  How am I supposed to know what is most important?

Me:  You decide what is important and what you would like for a reader to know.

Student: Oh.

Me: So, is the takeaway the most important thing they should know about you?

Student: No.

Me: What is the most important thing?

Student: I don’t know.

Me:  Once you decide on the most important thing, you’ll know what to write about, but at this point you probably need to start over.

Conversation #3

Me: What does your essay say about you as a person or community member?

Student: What?

Me: Have you provided any insight that is personal?  Keep in mind that your application and recommendations already contain a lot of information about what you have done.  Your essay is really an opportunity to focus on who you are and the ways in which you are likely to interact with other members of your campus community, like classmates, roommates, and teammates.

Did their essays generally turn out better?  I don’t know, but I hope so.  Now, I am not advocating overthinking the essay, but I certainly encourage taking a thoughtful and intentional approach.  In my mind, there is a difference between trying to give the admissions committee what you think they want and being conscious of what you are saying.  Since there is no magic formula that will unlock the secret to getting admitted to the college of your choice, taking my advice may not necessarily help you to get into your dream school.   It may, however, go a long way toward helping you get into the right school.

here’s the thing: most of my MIT friends are currently in the Cambridge area. however, even if there wasn’t a pandemic, I wouldn’t be able to meet up with all of them since I’m hosed all the time. given current circumstances, I’ve had to pick and choose who to spend my [rare] free time with, and it’s been…exhausting, in a sense; I miss being able to bump into friends in the halls, at Stud, or as I’m hurrying down Dorm Row to class. I went to campus recently to get a flu shot⁠18 all students were required to by MIT and felt so…distant? maybe it was because I saw so few students, or because I’ve been away from campus for longer than I was actually there (rip), but I felt like a stranger. the MIT people I see feel like the only evidence that I actually had a freshman year, that I actually formed connections that I’m putting in effort to build during this socially distant year. so, damn, I want to be better about that.

I saw people from a few different groups in the past month, but is it enough? should I be trying harder, given that the majority of my friends are in town, or less hard, since even the most socially distant encounters make me feel like I’m endangering my housemates?? man, I don’t know what the healthy balance is.

my process for meeting up with friends is ensuring that the friend/someone in their group has been tested recently, letting my house know and making sure they’re okay with it, and seeing the friend outside with masks. that seems…fine, and people in my house test negative regularly, but I still feel weird about it since I’m the only one in my group who meets up with other friends often.

in September, I met up with:

• several bloggers in a park super near my house!! it was so nice to see everyone :’)
• members of the Sloan Business Club in the Boston Commons
• a junior friend in a park near his place
• some Mocha Moves members to choreograph a piece for our virtual set
• a sophomore in Harvard Square (we got bagels at Black Sheep Bagel Cafe and oh baby they were GODLY)
• another sophomore SBC friend I’ve been hanging out with all summer; her roommate is at risk for COVID and they’re safe about their interactions, so I hung out inside their apartment

I’m also in a pod with three juniors and another sophomore,⁠19 my ex dorm roommate and we’ve been pretty good about keeping everyone informed about who we’re seeing/when we’re getting tested.

when I think about last year, I feel like I’m missing out on a host of interactions that I could obtain if I tried a little harder. the number of “so when are we meeting up?” texts I’ve ignored is stressing me out; there are so many people I want to keep in touch with, and I know I can see them safely, but I’m so BUSY ugh

it’s frustrating that I feel guilty about not seeing people, but even more guilty when I do!! I’m being so deprived of a college experience that I want to at least maintain my friendships, but damn.

@people in the Cambridge/Boston area, how many people are you seeing? where is the healthy medium??? lmk

There’s a large park system in Boston called the The Emerald Necklace which stretches seven miles from the Boston Common all the way down to Franklin Park Zoo. Before this semester, I’d only been to the Public Garden and the Boston Common, which are two adjacent parks right in the middle of downtown Boston. I knew that this semester would be particularly tough though, and that I would struggle to get myself out of my room if I didn’t have a concrete plan to do so. With that in mind, I set a goal to explore the whole park system, preferably before the weather got too cold.

The Emerald Necklace Conservancy provides an intricately detailed map with a total of 46 points of interest⁠01 these also have associated numbers, which are used throughout this post scattered across seven park areas. As someone with completionist tendencies, I decided that I would try and visit all of them across different weekends—and, since walking outdoors is a comparatively safe activity, I recruited a few friends for each trip. I also ended up getting a ton of photos, many of which I’ve included⁠02 including photos of each of the 46 points of interest throughout this post.

Part 1: September 13th—Back Bay Fens, #25-32

I started part one of the journey with the naïve assumption that I would be able to knock out this adventure in just three trips, the first of which would be the trek from Next House all the way out to the Boston Common. With such a plan in mind, I met Shuli outside Next early in the morning. We headed out towards the junction of Riverway and the Back Bay Fens, near the Fenway T⁠03 T stands for MBTA, which is the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, which runs Boston's public transportation station.

This part of the journey took quite some time. It turns out that the Fenway T station is actually over a mile from Next, so it took us a good half-hour or so to even get to the park.

crossing a road...

and we're in!

look at this smol river

Previous Next

Eventually, we crossed the road at a somewhat confusing intersection and found ourselves in the Back Bay Fens, which run along the Muddy River.⁠04 the Muddy River, in my opinion, is a creek at best, but to each their own We walked along the outside sidewalk, between the road and the river, and headed south towards our first point of interest.

#25: athletic facilities/the Joseph Lee Playground area

#26: James P. Kelleher rose garden

inside the rose garden!

#27: war memorials

#28: Japanese bell

Previous Next

The first item the map had marked was the athletic facilities in the area, which we did not find particularly interesting. However, the second item was a rose garden! We spent a good amount of time inside the garden, wandering around, looking at the flowers, and occasionally laughing at some of the names.⁠05 it turns out that rose variants are named in a manner similar to Kentucky Derby horse names, that is to say, completely randomly. There were also some war memorials in the area (although they were a little out of our way), as well as a Japanese temple bell “found on a scrap heap in Yokosuka…in 1945.”

crossing to the other side of the muddy

#29: Shattuck Emerald Necklace visitor center (ft. Shuli)

#30: a plot in the Fenway Victory Garden

all this green inside the city!

#31: Boylston Bridge

and thus ends our journey with the Muddy River

Previous Next

We crossed over to the other side of the Muddy to swing by the (closed) Emerald Necklace Visitor Center, where we found a very nice printed copy of the map with all the points of interest. The road then swung back up to the Fenway Victory Garden, where Shuli and I contemplated whether or not we could get a plot for the bloggers. Further along the path, we came to the end of the Back Bay Fens and the Muddy River.

#32: Leif Eriksson statue

the start of the commonwealth avenue mall

Previous Next

On the other side of a gnarly intersection with the Massachusetts Turnpike,⁠06 also known as I-90, which also runs through South Dakota! we found ourselves at the last item of the day, a Leif Eriksson statue. At this point, instead of continuing on to the Common, we headed back to MIT over the Harvard Bridge, ending our journey for that day.

September 27th: Commonwealth Avenue Mall, Public Garden, Boston Common, #33-46

I did the next leg of the journey with Selena L., a ’24 living in Cambridge (who is also Mel’s roommate!). Having done this journey many times, this trip was fairly straightforward; we met at the Harvard Bridge sometime in the morning, and headed across to the Commonwealth Avenue Mall.

#33: Boston Women’s Memorial

#34: Samuel Eliot Morison statue

#35: William Lloyd Garrison statue

#36: Alexander Hamilton statue

Previous Next

Commonwealth Avenue Mall was pretty unremarkable; it’s just a thin strip of greenspace they’ve parked between the two sides of Commonwealth Avenue. I didn’t know much about Lucy Stone⁠07 who is in the Women's Memorial, along with Phyllis Wheatley and Abigail Adams and Samuel Eliot Morison, so I searched them up—the former was a prominent abolitionist and suffragist and the first Massachusetts woman to get a college degree and the latter was a prominent historian. 08 I would be remiss if I did not at least mention the musical <em>Hamilton</em> with the statue, so here's an annotation, I guess

#38: George Washington statue

#37: 9/11 memorial

#39: swan boats (if they were not gone)

mmmmmm pond

#40: Make Way for Ducklings sculpture (my favorite!)

Previous Next

Commonwealth Avenue took us up to the Public Garden. It took us a little bit of effort to find the 9/11 Memorial; it’s tucked back behind some bushes on the side of the park, creating a sort of solemn, distanced effect. The famous swan boats were not there, unfortunately, but our last stop, Make Way for Ducklings, was quite popular with children,⁠09 including me, a child at heart meaning it took a while for me to get a good photo that did not have a kid’s face in it.

#41: Central Burying Ground

a particularly audacious squirrel

#42: Soldiers and Sailors Civil War Monument

#43: Frog Pond

#46: Boston Common Visitors' Center

#45: Brewer Fountain

#44: Shaw Memorial (temporarily absent)

Previous Next

Having hit all the points in the Public Garden, we crossed over to the Boston Common, the terminus of the Emerald Necklace and our last park for the day. Of note was a brave squirrel, which scurried up the fence of the Central Burying Grounds towards Selena, and the numerous items on the list that were abnormal: the drained Frog Pond and Brewer Fountain, the absent Shaw 54th Memorial.

the Massachusetts State House

I really like the way Boston streets look

look at these quaint houses

Previous Next

Having finished all the items at this end of the map, we headed back up to Cambridge via some side streets and eventually the Longfellow Bridge.

October 4th: Riverway, #17-24

I did this leg of the journey with two of my podmates, Oris S. ’23 and Kylee C. ’23. Since I was feeling kind of hosed, my initial plan was to cut our journey off at Leverett Pond. We took the same path down to Fenway T station as Shuli and I had taken the first time, but instead of heading into the Fens, we headed the opposite direction, into Riverway.

this turkey was way too comfortable with us

the start of riverway!

crossing to the other side

#23: Chapel Street Bridge Area

#24: Round House Shelter

can you believe this is *in* boston?

look at the ambience!

Previous Next

Riverway was quite pretty, a strip of park next to a river sandwiched between a road on the left and the Green Line on the right. Occasionally, a Green Line train would pass by and we would watch it go past. The map also included some interesting tidbits about the Chapel Street Bridge, which “separated walkers above from the bridle path below.”

crossing over to our next park

entering Olmsted Park!

#20: Allerton Overlook, and #21: Leverett Pond (I swear it's in this photo)

#19: Daisy Field

#18: Wildflower Meadow

please excuse my shadow

Previous Next

We marched on to our intended destination of Leverett Pond, which is in Olmsted Park. When we arrived, however, we found that a good portion of the pond was fenced off, which was kind of disappointing. Since Kylee and Oris were still up for more walking, we headed over to the next few points of interest, with Ward’s Pond as our tentative destination.

the Paul Pender Rotary! (4.3 stars on Google Maps)

#17: Ward's Pond

we made it to Jamaica Pond!

Oris did get five at some point, but I don't have a photo

a beautiful place to work

oh to be ducks in a lake in Boston

Previous Next

We were briefly sidetracked by the Paul Pender Rotary,⁠10 apparently <a href="https://patch.com/massachusetts/brookline/rotary-named-in-honor-of-paul-pender-a-brookline-champion">named after World Middleweight Boxing Champion and Brookline firefighter, Paul Pender</a> before arriving at Ward’s Pond. Unfortunately for us, there were also no good places to work at Ward’s Pond, which meant that we had to soldier on to Jamaica Pond, where we spent an hour and a half doing work on the shore,⁠11 nothing like reading Herodotus in the sun basking in the sun and the fall colors. We took an Uber back to Next House after our worksession.

October 11th: Franklin Park, Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Pond, #1-16

I ended up leaving the first sixteen items (including, notably, some of the items at Jamaica Pond) for my last trip. This, in retrospect, was not the best decision, because it left over ten miles of park left for the last leg of the journey. Fortunately, however, the weekend of the 11th was a long weekend, meaning I could afford to sacrifice a day to the cause. Even better, I was able to convince Shuli to go on this journey with me.

it was so weird to be on the T again

#8: Ellicott Arch

#8: The 99 Steps

more steps

still at the very start of our Franklin Park journey

#7: The Wilderness

more wilderness

Previous Next

We met early Sunday morning on the T⁠12 note: safety during a pandemic is relative. because we did this at off-peak hours and <a href="https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/09/how-safe-public-transportation">MIT Medical guidance suggests travel is comparatively safe to other activities</a> as long as you follow all relevant guidelines, we decided this was okay. at Kendall/MIT and headed down to Forest Hills, all the way at the very end of the Orange Line. Upon arriving at Forest Hills, we headed down towards Franklin Park, where we entered The Wilderness,⁠13 not the Civil War battle a small area with many meandering trails.

#6: Schoolmaster Hill (named for Ralph Waldo Emerson!)

view from Schoolmaster Hill

#1: White Stadium

#2: Overlook Shelter Ruins

#3: The Playstead

Previous Next

Not wanting to delay for too long in the Wilderness, we headed to Schoolmaster Hill, a picnic area which was our first stopping point. I brought out my snacks⁠14 a bag of mini m&m's, a carton of grapes, and four clementines and we took a brief break, before heading back onto the trail. It took us a little bit of effort to find the Overlook Shelter Ruins (because they really are ruins), but we eventually succeeded.

#4: Franklin Park Zoo (we did not go in)

this should suffice for this item

#5: William J. Devine golf course (originally a sheep meadow!)

also this is apparently the second oldest public golf course in the US

#9: Scarboro Pond and Hill

the moon is in a few pixels of this image

Previous Next

The next leg of the trip had much more distributed points of interest, including the Franklin Park Zoo, which we decided not to actually visit, the golf course, which we mostly walked through, and the Scarboro Pond, which we agreed was a good pond. This was the last point of interest in the first area of the trip—although at this point we were already two hours into our journey.

entering the Arboretum!

look at this tree!

#11: Explorers Garden

this is a fujiyama rhododendron. you can tell it's a fujiyama rhododendron by the way that it is (also the plaque)

look at those leaves

heading up to peters hill

Previous Next

We took a brief water break halfway between Franklin Park and the Arboretum. Our progress in the Arboretum was much slower than our progress through Franklin Park, because a) we were more tired; b) the area is more hilly; and, c) we spent a lot of time looking at trees. The Explorers Garden, in particular, was quite cool, because it had a lot of plants from Asia, as well as a species of tree that is extinct in the wild.

but first, lunch!

#10: Peters Hill

Shuli and I had to briefly remind ourselves not to eat them

heading towards the vine garden

#12: Larz Anderson Bonsai Collection (thwarted once more)

what if I...took a picture...of the bonsai collection...over the fence...haha...jk...unless?

#13: Hunnewell Building

Previous Next

We headed up Peters Hill in the Arboretum, the highest point in the Emerald Necklace. Right before we reached the peak, however, we found a very good bench, which we used to eat lunch.⁠15 more accurately, shuli ate a packed lunch and I ate snacks We then reached the summit, gazed out for a little bit, and then headed back towards the exit to the Arboretum, through an accidentally roundabout path. In particular, we were looking for a bonsai garden, which we eventually found out was closed.⁠16 :( A little disappointed, we headed out of the Arboretum and up towards our final park.

#14: Jamaica Pond Boathouse/Bandstand (in the distance)

#15: Parkman Memorial (also from a distance)

full disclosure, we did not do this stacking

#16: Pinebank Promontory

the foundations of an old mansion here

Previous Next

The last park of the day was Jamaica Pond.⁠17 pt. 2: electric boogaloo Two of the three points of interest were a little out of the way, and at this point we were doing our best to minimize additional walking, so I got pictures from afar. The very last item on the list was Pinebank Promontory, which apparently used to be the location of a mansion that was owned by the city and demolished in 2007.  We sat on the bench there for a while—although we were done with the Emerald Necklace itself, we were still about a mile away from the T station.

We walked down to Stony Brook T station on the Orange Line, and changed back onto the Red Line at Downtown Crossing. I got off the train at Kendall/MIT, waved goodbye to Shuli, and then walked back to Next House. The trip had taken eight hours and around 32,000 steps, but I had finished the last leg of the Emerald Necklace.

While I’m working on a longer post, I wanted to write a quick post and share some of the old bookmarks I was digging through today. It’s a window into the kinds of things I was interested in three to five years ago, so read into it as you will.

Hopefully you’ll find something interesting to look at. I tried to pick things that are all relatively short. Let me know if you found something interesting.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.

I don’t know which is stranger: the way mathematicians often embrace ideas that at first glance (and later glances!) seem nonsensical, or the way mathematicians often hold obvious truths at arm’s length, scrutinizing them with a skeptical eye and asking “How do we really know it’s true?”

I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled “Danger: Do Not Push”. The big red button marked “Do Not Push” will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not clearly be labelled as such.

Second, this is a two-player game. However… the second player won’t be playing with you. They’ll be in your mind as you play.

Programming languages personified. An amusing comic comparing programming languages.

Four days after I returned to my home in New Hampshire after the Great Campus Exodus in March, I decided to pick up running again. I decided that I would absolutely lose my mind staying inside all the time, and that I needed some form of exercise that wasn’t just long walks with my parents, the only form of exercise that really occurs at my home.

I ran cross country from something like 2nd-6th grade, so this was not my first rodeo with running. I was slightly above average at it and generally enjoyed it because most of my friends were in it as well. One of my most vivid memories from childhood is nearing the finish line of the end of season race and just seeing piles of puke spotted everywhere. Mood.

After 7th grade, I totally abandoned physical pursuits and stopped running. I think I maybe had a brief stint with it in the summer before? 9th grade because I very distinctly running up the road near my house to the tune of the first Attack on Titan theme, which is still on my running/athletic hype playlists because it is a BANGER. Other than that, though, I did not do a single sport until college, where I started fencing in freshman year.

I’ve tried to pick up running a couple of times in college, most notably when I lived in LA last summer. But the LA air literally dried out my lungs and not a singular one of the runs I did there were enjoyable. In retrospect, this might just have been because I didn’t know how to pace myself properly.

I’m not sure if I thought my quarantine running stint would stick, but as it turns out, I really had nothing else to occupy my time with. My first run, however, was literally AWFUL. I distinctly remember the burning feeling in my lungs and the nasty taste of overexertion, which tastes like blood.

i ran the first mile REALLY FAST and then just died

Nevertheless, I persevered, and five days after my first run, I managed to squeeze out my first 5K since childhood, probably.

a moderate glow up

I ran for the next week or so and then stopped because it was allergy season in New England. I maybe ran about two times in the next three weeks and thought I would just lose all my gains. Then, on a particularly nice day after not running for a while, I shocked myself by running my first 10K ever.

an ABRUPT glow up

Feeling extremely on top of the world, I ran FOUR more 10Ks in the next week, two of which ended up being 8 and 9 mile runs.

At some point in this interval, I realized that if I could run 9 miles, then I could probably run an entire half marathon. So I waited for the right day, and in the middle of a snowstorm in early May, went for it.

And although I was really proud that I had done it, it REALLY knocked the wind out of me. I remember stumbling inside after finishing, not being able to eat my dinner, and then passing out for like four hours from sheer exhaustion. I had run a half marathon out of sheer force of will, not because my body was trained or prepared to do it. I aspired to be the sort of person who could just get up and run obscene distances before breakfast, and I wasn’t quite there yet.

At some point very early in the pandemic, when I was first getting into running, Petey had mentioned that he does the New Hampshire Half Marathon every year, and I had (ambitiously) expressed interest in participating.

And thus, Petey and I decided to Suffer unnecessarily together and just run the half marathon ourselves. Despite doing relatively little running for the entirety of my summer in Seattle,⁠01 it was too hot, but I did give it my best effort I got my inspiration back and started training again.

notice i restarted on the exact date that i messaged petey, lol

This carried into September, where I did my best to adopt Petey’s training routine.

It turned out that this worked quite well for me as well, although I definitely slacked at running during the week. By the end of the training regime, I was running 4 miles at the beginning of the week, 6 miles in the middle, and 13-x miles every weekend, where x is how many weeks I had left until the half marathon.

I started to realize that I was getting better as a runner somewhere around 9 miles, where I just chugged the run out painlessly – and could still walk the next day. After my reasonably effortless 12 mile run, it dawned upon me that after training consistently for 6 weeks, I had actually improved visibly. I could see it in my heart rate at various parts of the run, in my pace, and how I felt during and afterwards.

This is what I’ve really come to enjoy about running. At school, it sometimes felt that no matter how much effort I put into something, I was just doomed to not understand it. I’m sure I’ve improved at a lot of things since coming to college, but it’s honestly hard to see that progress sometimes, as I mentioned in a previous post. Tangible process is what keeps me motivated at this point in my life, which is why I’m going into industry at the next juncture rather than grad school.

And thanks to all of the tangible progress I’ve made over the past few months: this past Saturday, I got to thoroughly enjoy running what would have been the NH half marathon in a normal year, but was still the best run I’ve ever had, with some of the best scenery New England has to offer.

broke all my records and finished with about a ~8:59 pace!

i am a self professed wolf girl and i found this pillow in the dollar store that petey and i hit before starting the run

socially distanced pre-run picture

Running is not everybody’s sport, but I am glad that I have made it mine. At least until I can start fencing again, this will certainly be tiding me over and making me feel like I can actually do things that I set my mind to.

If you’ve read any of my other posts, you probably know how much I care about my dorm and floor communities. I’ve talked about my experiences on the Burton Conner Transition Team, which is responsible for helping students transition in and out of the dorm and navigating student concern during the renewal process. Being a member of this team was formative in establishing my interest in preserving student culture across MIT, starting with my own dorm.

As you might have heard, in the renewal, Burton Conner is seeing a few changes that have implications for its ability to preserve its communities. For one, our murals are being painted over, and we’re seeing some fluctuations in bed count. Burton 1 is potentially having an Associate Head of House apartment installed somewhere on their floor, which is annoying because it hinders college students from, uh, being college students. There’s quite a bit of concern that this apartment would prevent the floor from existing in the capacity it’s used to, so people would end up moving away to frats or sororities, where they would have the ability to ~vibe~ freely. Also, my floor, Burton 3rd,⁠01 burton 3rd bombers, for future reference isn’t being allowed to install our iconic orange and black tiles on the floor outside the elevator landing, which is pretty frustrating.

In such circumstances, where people are separated due to a global pandemic, our dorm is being renovated for two years, and we might not be able to exist in the way we want to once we move back in, the question of what community preservation will look like has been raised and discussed quite a bit. It was first posed to me on a call with someone on Transition Team, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

What does it mean for a community to be preserved? Ignoring the resoundingly obvious answer of “that depends,” this is an interesting question to consider.

Is it the visual identity—our logo, various insignia, murals, or any sort of branding that signifies the community to others? Is it traditions—miscellaneous small and large scale events that have been maintained for decades? Is it simply values—thoughts and ideas that people in the community resonate with and adhere to?

And in this set of options, when a community has to be split up or no longer has access to its space, what should be adapted, and what should remain?

Well, it’s complicated. Communities emphasize things like visual identity, traditions, and values differently; some don’t have a logo but feel bound together by their name, some have traditions that come and go but are united in their values, and so on. I know that in my community, we have a STRONG visual identity, a huge emphasis on traditions, and many shared values. However, we used to be white, overly fratty, and male, and now we’re…very much not that; we have people from so many different backgrounds with unique identities, and we feel a kinship with the alumni we meet from decades ago even though we wouldn’t necessarily vibe with the floor culture at the time. Cultures aren’t static since people come and go and model the community to be more like what they want it to be.

The community’s physical space also plays a role in how culture is shaped. My dorm has suites, so suite culture is prevalent throughout the dorm’s communities; on many floors, there’ll be a main suite⁠02 the 23 for conner side, i believe, and the 41 for the burton side? that serves as a social hub for the floor. Since suites are separated off from the hallway, it’s easy to hang out with certain groups of people but also to hang out in the hallway and interact with people passing by. Suite culture is a significant contributor to how social BC is, in my opinion. Other dorms, like East Campus, are corridor-based, so they have varying levels of hallway and room culture. On some floors, everyone will hang out in the hallways when they want to socialize, and on others, people socialize mainly in certain rooms. These are two completely different vibes that tend to say a lot about the floor.

In dorms like New House and MacGregor, the Cook-For-Yourself aspect shapes a few cultures around cooking. It’s wonderful when these community members are all on campus, but when they’re scattered across the country due to quarantine, it’s hard to feel connected due to communal cooking anymore. It’s challenging for one to preserve communities like this in extended periods of time where we don’t have access to campus.

But what’s a community or culture without the people? Branding is important, but you don’t need to wear a shirt emblazoned with a community’s logo to be a part of it. I could meet someone wearing a Bomber shirt ten years in the future who I don’t vibe with at all, and it would be sad but indicative of the fact that there’s a lot more than insignia in binding people together. Traditions are wonderful, but a lot of them were created just a few years ago and aren’t as ingrained as you might think. On my floor, we champion most traditions as being held for “33rd years and counting,” but really, some of them started in 2016? 2017? (Many)⁠03 prioritizing is hard. my floor has thrown a party for over 50 years and that's important to us and our culture, so putting traditions on a scale of 'what is important and what is not' in the context of the renovation is annoying and difficult to navigate traditions are mutable just as values are. Also, in the case of my community and many other communities I’m familiar with at MIT, a lot of traditions are utilized as means of strengthening relationships with new members/people in the community you don’t know well. In quarantine, my floor has held virtual versions of multiple of our annual events that are fundamentally different since they’re not in person but are mainly a means of engaging our freshmen.

So, at the end of the day, traditions aren’t super important and branding isn’t essential to our identity. We’re all in different places and time zones, but we stay connected, and that’s what’s critical to maintaining our bond as a community. That doesn’t mean it’s not frustrating when we aren’t allowed to tile our floors or paint our walls, though.

As for what should be adapted and what should remain, things that are important and symbolic to an existing culture should be given to, but not impressed upon its successors. New generations should inherit what they want to keep, and current ones shouldn’t get hung up on the things that must be preserved. I spoke to an alum who I really, really respect about this topic, and they mentioned the importance of agency in choosing what you want to pass on and in deciding what you want to keep. This cycle of inheritance is important to many, if not most dorm communities at MIT.

Another aspect of community is being able to inherit a support network. Upperclassmen are essential in guiding new members of a community, which is why it’s so important to my class that we move back to Burton Conner when it reopens. Alumni are important as well; just as Bomber alumni have helped me out multiple times in the past, I know I’d do the same for any future Bomber. I feel a strong communal duty towards ensuring that current and future generations of the floor are able to thrive.

When I asked my community’s floor chairs about what it means to preserve our culture, they told me that it boils down to having a structure through which forming friendship and community is prioritized. I wholeheartedly agree; friendship and community are the cornerstones of our culture, regardless of how much our values have shifted throughout the decades. In addition, giving new members an identity to claim, but also the agency to grow and make the culture what they want is so, so important. Many student cultures today are so different from what they were even five or ten years ago, but they still can connect across generations through a shared identity.

I’m writing today to remind our applicants that we do not give any kind of preferential “bump” to students who apply to MIT during Early Action. This is a longstanding policy. There is no reason to rush your application to us by November 1st, especially if you are still dealing with delays and disruptions from the ongoing pandemic. 

In the last few weeks we have received a number of questions from prospective students who had originally intended to apply to MIT during Early Action but have been unable to take tests,⁠01 As a reminder, we are </span><a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-suspending-our-sat-act-requirement-for-the-2020-2021-application-cycle/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">suspending our typical SAT/ACT requirement</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for this year, due to the pandemic. receive grades, obtain letters of recommendation, or otherwise develop their application as fully as they would like. Maybe they are still awaiting their first grades since last February, or a recommendation letter from a favorite teacher who has been Zooming from home while taking care of two kids and an aging parent and hasn’t been able to get it done yet. Judging by our inbox, these delays have been the source of considerable anxiety for applicants who want to put their proverbial best foot forward in our application process, and believe that, as is true at some schools (but not us!), applying early helps. 

As Stu wrote earlier this summer, we are committed to evaluating students fairly and holistically, whatever their conditions and contingencies, regardless of when they apply. However, it is perhaps especially true this year that everyone — applicants, teachers, parents, and others —  could use a bit more time to get everything together for their college applications. So you should feel comfortable, even encouraged, to wait for Regular Action if you would benefit from the additional time (or for any other reason). We use the same processes and standards of review during both cycles. So, again,⁠02 I realize this is like the third time I have stated this in this short blog post, but there is a lot going on in the world, it is a confusing time, and I want to make sure it is </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">perfectly</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> clear. you will not be penalized or disadvantaged in any way by applying during Regular (nor, as follows, will you be advantaged by applying to us Early).

Meanwhile, here at the office,⁠03 By which I mean "wherever we each happen to be Zooming from at any given moment." we are all getting ready to read your applications. We’re swapping tips for ring lights and headsets and wifi extenders and everything else needed to work remotely and collaboratively to evaluate all your applications with our normal process, if not quite our normal conditions. In other words, we’re making the best of a challenging situation, just like you are. So hang in there, and we look forward to reading your applications when they are ready. 

Here is a duck being petted until it falls asleep because I find it soothing and I hope you do too.

I wake up at 9 AM, and it’s the first time in a while that I’ve been awake this early. Of the four people I’m sharing a room with, I’m the first one to wake up. I curse the morning air for being too cold to go back to sleep, and after checking my phone for five minutes, I get out of bed and put on pants. The smell of scrambled eggs brings me downstairs to the kitchen. Ben is cooking breakfast.

“Good morning, CJ.”

“I don’t even know why I’m awake this early. My earliest class today is 2:30 PM.”

“Yeah, I know. You told me that last time.”

He grabs a plate and starts stacking the eggs on it. I grab a plate, serve myself some eggs, and sit down on the dining table. I check my email, and then Messenger, then Discord, then Twitter, and when I run out of things to check, I start eating.

“I just had a dream. I was walking down the hallway on Floor Pi, and all the doors to the rooms were open, and the light was streaming in from the rooms. And there was no one else on the floor, but I’d hear the voices of Theo, and Jacky, and Carina, and all the other people who lived on Floor Pi. And I don’t remember what happened next, but there was this bit where I went into my old room and found it completely empty.”

“Huh. Maybe you just miss East Campus?”

“Maybe? But it’s not as if East Campus is the same this fall anyway. I think only two people came back to Floor Pi. I think I’m happier living here, even if it’s the middle of nowhere.”

“I’m happy living with you here too, CJ.”

After washing my plate and placing it in the drying rack, I head back upstairs and grab my laptop before heading to the living room. Kate’s there too, writing something on a notebook, and she greets me good morning too. I work on a problem set for the next hour and a half, before I head to the kitchen and cook lunch.

The whole house comes over for lunch. There are twelve of us in all, and we’ve been living here since the fall began. Half of us are from MIT, and we’re all sophomores. The other half is from pretty much everywhere, which I guess happens when people keep pulling in friends they want to live with. I’ve known Ben for three years now, but I didn’t know anyone else who wasn’t from MIT before coming here. I grab a bowl of rice and adobo, head to the living room, and continue working on my problem set while eating lunch. It’s not the best lunch, but it’s what works.

Then I go to class, which amounts to sitting in the living room with my headphones on while on a Zoom call. It’s an hour and a half of linguistics, and then it’s 4 PM, and I’m bored. I put my laptop down and start going around the house, looking for people to bother. I spot Noah in the basement.

“What are you working on?”

“Oh. 404 pset.”

“Oh, yeah. I was just working on that. I guess it’s nice living with other people taking the same classes. I can’t imagine how this semester would look like if I was living alone in MIT again.”

We talk for a while about how we ended up living in the middle of rural Pennsylvania, and then we talk for a while about problem 6 on the 18.404 Theory of Computation problem set. Then I head back to the living room to grab my laptop before going upstairs to take a nap.

When I wake up, it’s 7:45 PM, and I head downstairs to eat dinner that’s already getting cold. I had an ESP meeting 8 PM, so I eat quickly, before realizing that I forgot my laptop upstairs, so I head back up and join the meeting from the bedroom. After the meeting, Ben pokes me and asks if I’m free to play some Among Us, and we play for a few hours downstairs, and then I went to sleep.

I wake up at 9 AM, and it’s the first time in a while that I’ve been awake this early. I’d fallen asleep on the couch, and someone placed a blanket over me. Which isn’t too bad, as someone ends up sleeping on the couch every night anyway, given that there are seven of us crammed in this apartment that’s supposed to be for, what, five people? Four people?

I roll around and try to fall asleep again, and I do, for thirty minutes or so, before I wake up and feel worse. I check my phone for a few minutes before I head to the kitchen to drink some water and take my meds. I reheat some leftover pasta from last night and check my email, scroll through my Twitter feed, whatever.

No one else is up until half past ten, and Sam is the first to wake up. I greet them good morning as they lurch to the dining table.

“You know, Sam, I dreamed about Floor Pi last night.”

“Really? What was it about?”

“I was walking down the hallway, and all the doors were open. There was no one else on the floor but I heard people’s voices, you know, like there were people playing Tichu in the TVL, or people room-crashing H306. And then I just found myself in my room and it was completely empty.”

“Huh.”

After pouring themselves some soymilk, Sam grabs their laptop and starts working on the kitchen table, next to me. I get my laptop and do the same, and started working on my 18.404 pset. We don’t talk for a while until it’s noon, and I get some more leftover pasta from the fridge and reheat it. Sam looks up from their screen.

“You really like pasta, don’t you?”

“You know, that’s exactly what my Sam simulator said you’d ask.”

They laugh. “Oh no. You might replace me with a simulation then.”

“I’d rather not. I like talking to the real you, rather than this version in my head, or like, rather than through a screen or something.”

By the time I finish eating lunch everyone’s awake. Scattered through the living room are people on their laptops, all working on one thing or another. I’m the only sophomore in this house. There’s two cruft: one who graduated two years ago, and one who just graduated. Then there’s two seniors and two juniors, one of which is taking a gap year. We all know each other from Floor Pi or Epsilon Theta, an independent living group that happens to be interested in a lot of the same things people on Floor Pi are interested in. They kinda took me in back in March, and I’ve stayed here since.

After my 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM class, which was 24.902 Introduction to Syntax, I decided to take a walk. House rules were pretty strict about meeting up with people outside a certain group, but walking to parks, getting groceries and the like, are all fine. I put on some pants, grab my mask and my phone. I sent a message to our Discord asking if anyone wanted to walk with me, and after getting no response, I head out alone.

I walk past the T station on Central Square and down Prospect Street, making my way to Sennott Park. It’s a fifteen minute walk, which is a nice opportunity to think about some of the problems on my 18.404 pset. Compared to a few weeks ago, there are more businesses open now, and more people walking around.

I sit down on one of the benches in the corner of the park, and just watch for a while. People are sitting on the grass and talking to their friends, and people are taking their dogs on walks, and every once in a while a runner would pass by the park. My mind wanders, thinking about my 18.404 pset, thinking about how Cambridge feels so foreign to me even if I’ve lived here for the past year or so, thinking about what it’d be like if I stayed on-campus or went back to the Philippines or went with another group of friends.

The sun starts to set at around 6, which was when I decided to walk back. It was my turn to cook dinner, and then I had a meeting at 8, and then I was going to call some friends on the Floor Pi Discord.

I wake up at 9 AM after a two-hour long nap. My sleep schedule these days has kinda naturally adjusted to being biphasic, so I’m asleep for some time early morning and then I’m asleep for some time through the afternoon. It’s probably not the healthiest thing to do, but it’s not as if I have a lot of options when I’m living halfway across the world.

I make some oatmeal in my room before hopping on a call on the Floor Pi Discord. We play Among Us for two hours or so. The lag wasn’t too bad, since it was just a voice call, but I did break up three or four times in the middle. One time, this actually worked out to my advantage—I was the impostor, and my Discord connection silently dropped out for a few seconds during the meeting, so no one thought to question me about where I was.

Eventually, enough people leave that we decided to stop playing. Joseph shares his screen, showing us the Geoguessr game he was playing, and we watch him play Country Streak for a while. We look at road signs and architecture and emails and URLs. We get this country that, for a while, Joseph thinks is South Africa, before following it up with the complaint that South Africa, Eswatini, and Lesotho all look so similar.

As the morning progresses and midnight passes on the East Coast, more and more people drop out of the call. Eventually it’s just me and Reagan, Floor Pi alum, who’s now working in the Bay Area. He shares the dream he had the previous night, in which he’s in a summer camp after ninth grade and he meets this girl he begins to like. I share a dream I had that morning, in which I was walking down Floor Pi and no one was around.

The conversation subsides and we put on some music through a Discord bot. I eat a banana while doing some logic puzzles. At around 2 PM, Reagan says he was going to try sleeping earlier that night, so he logs off. I decide to go to sleep too.

I wake up at 8 PM. I didn’t have any classes until 2:30 AM, and wouldn’t really have anyone to talk until midnight.

That night, I wondered what it’d be like if I didn’t decide to go back to the Philippines back in March, if I decided to stay on-campus. Would I have really felt better then, if I was going to be pretty much alone either way? At least there, I wouldn’t have to nightshift or deal with bad internet. Or you know, what if I decided to just take another gap year here, work on some projects, maybe try to pick up a job? I didn’t know. I don’t know. I don’t even know what I want to do next spring. I don’t even know if I’d come back on campus if MIT offered us to.

I stare at my 18.404 pset.

It’s going to be a long night.

I wake up at 9 AM, and it’s the first time in a while that I’ve been awake this early. Unsurprisingly, it looked like Justin was already awake, while Nathan was still asleep, and would probably stay asleep until noon. I roll around bed trying to fall asleep again.

The next time I wake up, it’s half past eleven. I head downstairs and see Justin just finish cooking lunch. I grab a plate and eat while I browse my inbox, and scroll through Facebook, and Twitter, and Discord. Everyone else joins for lunch. Well, everyone except Nathan, who’s still asleep.

I’m living with five other sophomores in this house in rural New Hampshire. We moved here around the time fall began; in fact, Eric and I moved from campus to here together.

The four of us at the table talk about getting our flu shots done at the CVS nearby, since it’s a state-mandated requirement for MIT students to get flu shots. After lunch, I toss my stuff in the dishwasher, which was apparently broken until Justin fixed it the other day? I’m still not sure what happened there.

Then I work on a pset. Then I go to class. Then I work on a pset again. Then I eat dinner. Then I go to an ESP meeting. Then I head down to the basement. Then I’m on a call on the Floor Pi Discord. There’s me, there’s Reagan, an alum working in the Bay Area, and there’s Vincent, a senior who’s living on Floor Pi this semester. Reagan’s streaming himself doing logic puzzles. Meanwhile, I ask Vincent about how he’s been doing.

“So how’s life on-campus, Vincent? Did the food get better since I left?”

“Well, there’s chicken half the time.”

“Oh. And I know how much you hate chicken.”

We talk about what it’s like having to live on-campus, having to get tested twice a week, and all the new rules they have. We talk about Floor Pi and what it’s like now that the only two returning residents were him and another senior.

We talk about the things we miss. We talk about having conversations in the hallway, blocking people from passing through. We talk about board games in the TV Lounge and crashing each other’s rooms to work on puzzles. We talk about tea time, and fruit bowl, and the frosh, and the future of Floor Pi. We talk about where everyone else is now.

At the end, he says he misses me. I tell him that I miss him too. But I also tell him that it was the right decision for me to leave on-campus housing.

Then Colin joins the call, and I ask if people want to play Tichu. The four of us play games for hours. By the time we finish, it’s 1 AM, and Vincent had to go because he had a meeting early tomorrow morning.

I close my laptop and head upstairs. I see Nathan, sitting on his bed, scrolling through his phone, getting ready to go to sleep.

I say, “Wow. You’re going to sleep early.”

And he says, “Wow.”

I reach out my arms, and he gives me a hug.

Would I have gotten these hugs, if I was living somewhere else?

The art of being hosed isn’t hard to master;
the tasks (you hope) will teach you something new.
To be busy, then, is hardly a disaster.

Waste hours for fun, while still knowing that after,
one still has just as many things to-do.
The art of being hosed isn’t hard to master.

31 days of being carried through the crossword by my friends

I’m hosed this week. But looking at my last, or
next-to-last weeks, I was quite hosed too.
I was busy, sure, but it wasn’t a disaster.

Practice working harder, working faster:
psets, labs, and readings each week new.
The art of being hosed isn’t hard to master.

every piece of red text is something I am doing later than I want to be; more on the method to the madness, later, probably

I’m falling behind in this fall semester,
and running hard to try and get back to
less busy, but it’s hardly a disaster.

—And in the end if times are hard, I’ll pass, purge
classes but I shan’t have lied. It’s true
the art of being hosed’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

the fog, I think, captures my mood right now

the original poem can be found here: https://poets.org/poem/one-art.