In my last post (which was way too long ago ), but I guess I should update y’all on how my new schedule was going.

And the answer to the question is: Ok, I guess…

As a quick reminder my current schedule is:

• Real Analysis (18.100A)
• Physics II (8.02)
• Fundamentals of Programming (6.009)
• UROP

And it’s a struggle! Real analysis is still kicking my butt, but not nearly as bad as before. Physics is also kicking my butt :^) Programming is also kicking my butt :^)

In conclusion: my butt is being kicked.

But that’s ok! While this schedule is a struggle, it actually fits me fairly well. But why? Because I actually changed and improved myself!

Literally all I did was suck up my pride and start going to office hours/getting help :^) Isn’t that funny? Sometimes when you need help the best thing to do is ask for help! I never would have guessed. Even though, I still have a lot for work to do, asking for help has made me more productive and generally lifted my moods. 90% of my stress from earlier in the quarter (and last semester) were simply because I was too prideful to ask for help.

Oh yeah! I dropped 9.00. It was interesting, but I wasn’t in the mood to write an essay and catch up with my other classes.

Now, onto some spring break business. I did nothing almost all of spring break (except binge watch Black Mirror) and it waaaaaaaas glorious! Their is something very beautiful about nothing. I went back up to Maine and visited my old high school. It was incredibly interesting to see how much has changed since I left, and how much I’ve changed!

As for my UROP, my schedule is making it hard to get some hours in. But that’ll change soon!

And something is happening soon… but what???

https://giphy.com/gifs/IQ47VvDzlzx9S/links

Ah, I don’t remember :( but I do have a blog post I’ve been working on since like September (not continuously, I hope that’s obvious)

My fellow readers of the MIT Admissions blogs, a great tragedy has befallen us today. The favorite dining spot of hundreds of students on campus has been closed down. Yes, that’s right: the Subway in the Student Center is no more.

This past weekend, Subway closed abruptly due to issues between Subway’s parent company and the franchisee that ran this location. This happened with little warning and we are sorry that Subway is no longer an option for Lobdell Food Court customers.

Some of you might be wondering what all the fuss is about, but let me tell you: the Subway was, by far, the best eating place in the entire Stud – nay, perhaps the best on the entirety of the MIT campus. Indeed, what does the Stud have left to redeem it? The knockoff Indian restaurant? The sketchy Shinkansen? The tiny Dunks? Without a question, the only place the Stud has left to its name is the ever reliable Anna’s.

My relationship with the Stud Subway was rocky, but I could always rely on it to be there for me. After long hours of fencing practice, I would stumble out of the Z-Center with a growling stomach, and make a beeline to the gates of heaven – also known as the Stud Subway’s line. Sure, they were always out of the Italian herbs and cheese bread, and didn’t accept card half the time, but for a sweet bite of a spicy Italian sub, I would do anything – including trudging downstairs to withdraw cash from the ATM. A footlong sub could last me two meals, and I savored every delicious mouthful.

And now, in the blink of an eye, it has disappeared from my life. My grief is immeasurable; my tears have not stopped flowing. Good night, sweet Subway, and may angels sing thee to thy rest.

I texted my friend, “I feel like my frustration with 6.009 over the course of each week would make an amazing sinusoidal graph.” She said, “You should make that a blog post!” So here it is, a lil post about how crazy 6.009 makes me (and how I can’t stop thinking about it). Sorry it’s been so long since I last blogged⁠01 The flu isn't fun, kids :( — more content to come soon!!

As background, 6.009 is “Fundamentals of Programming,” the second⁠02 Why is it the second if the course name says fundamentals? Good question! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ class in the computer science department’s pure coding class sequence. I never took the first class in the sequence, 6.0001, because I did a bit of coding in middle school (before getting too busy in high school), so I took the Advanced Standing Exam instead. Because of that, this semester was the first time I’ve done serious coding in a good while.

At MIT, there’s often an attitude that because computer science is so popular and (typically) well-paid, people who choose to major in Course 6 are “selling out” or “only in it for the money.” This made a pretty big impression on me first semester, and I started to doubt my plan to major in 6. But now that I’m coding again, I remember how much I love it and I don’t feel like I’m making the wrong choice at all. (Side note: Although I’m not claiming every course 6 loves it as much I do, or that everyone should be a comp sci major, I have complicated feelings about how something that is usually excused as “just a joke” can actually influence people’s life choices and how they feel about their passions…)

ANyway, back to 6.009. I think what I love most about this class, on a lizardbrain level, is coding’s cycle of lots of small frustrations and rewards: overcoming many small challenges is less overwhelming than trying to overcome one very large one and makes me feel more like I’m making progress. Also, 6.009 in particular is really well-organized and has great office hours (i.e., they’re frequent and have a high number of competent teachers) which means that when I feel truly stuck, I can go get the little nudge I need to work things out myself. Knowing I have this fallback if I need it makes me feel secure enough to try for a little longer and fail on my own. Stretching my failing muscle and kicking learned helplessness‘ butt is something I really wanted to do at MIT, and this class has been right in my zone of proximal development for that. It’s so satisfying to feel like you’re actually getting somewhere in accomplishing your goals for yourself!

All of this sucks me in hard, and on the days I dedicate to the weekly lab, it tends to soak up all my spare brain space. (Do I feel like a huge nerd when I wake up in the morning and realize I’ve thought of a fix for a bug while I was asleep? Yes, and it delights me.) Then I finish the lab and begin to get really sad that I have no coding to do :( Witness this phenomenon, in rainbow glory, below:

It’s interesting that I’ve never been even remotely involved in anything political, and in all such situations would always be the outsider looking in. However, in late February a protest was held at the massive tent outside Kresge that was the venue of the College of Computing celebrations, a poster reading “Celebrating Complicity with a Billionaire and War Criminal,” appeared on the windows of my usual second-floor study spot at the Students’ Center, and my curiosity was piqued.

Late last semester, MIT announced the founding of the new Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, aimed at interweaving disciplines offered at the Institute with computing and artificial intelligence on a broader scale. In the college’s FAQ document, the Administration acknowledged that advances in computing and AI have power to alter societal ethics, and stated that the College of Computing would not only be concerned with advancing computing, but also with teaching and researching relevant computing ethics and policy.

However, students have raised concerns about the nature of MIT’s relationship with prominent personalities and foreign government authorities, and the effects that such public relations have on the ethics of the Institute. One rigorously publicized teach-in, ‘AI Can’t Fix This’, organized by MIT Students Against War Initiative, the Prison Education Initiative, Queer West, the MIT Prison Divestment Campaign, the Black Student Union, and Palestine @ MIT, was held to address the ethical implications of research done at MIT. 

The Tech has published numerous articles criticizing MIT’s ties to Saudi Arabia, demonstrated by MIT hosting a Saudi-US innovation forum and a widely-publicized handshake (with my oblivious dorm in the background). The innovation forum was held with all sorts of good intentions, to work together and find opportunities for both countries to benefit from the partnership. But soon after, a journalist was murdered and the administration came under sharp criticism for collaborating with a regime that allegedly targeted and murdered civilians, oppressed women and executed members of the LGBTQ community. In a charged letter to President Reif, graduate students in the Political Science department expressed their growing concerns about the message MIT sends by publicly courting government regimes that condone human rights violations.

President Rafael Reif shakes hands with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince

Intrigued, I reached out to a few students who are especially relentless in questioning some of the Institute’s decisions, to ask them:

1. Why we should all be invested in MIT’s ethics- sounds like an obvious question, but I think it’s important that we should be somewhat invested in the decisions that are made in our community that, in a way, reflect back on us and the values that we choose to uphold
2. The areas that they feel the Admin has not held up its ethical standards or has abandoned its moral duty
3. The steps that they would suggest for the Admin to revert the current situation or to avoid such situations in future.

This is what Nasir Almasri, a Political Science PhD student, had to say:

University funding (sources and investments): Quite simply, I think that the Institute needs to do a better job of being transparent and democratic in its decision-making. When large sums of money are donated or significant reorganization is taking place, the MIT community needs to be involved. In many cases, donors of large sums of money have significant visions for what their money is buying, even when they do not have any say in how it is used. This goes for Stephen Schwarzman, the Koch brothers, foreign donors, and anybody else. Schwarzman is the CEO of the Blackstone group, which is problematic to say the least. We need to at least have a more nuanced discussion about decisions as big as accepting $350 million and naming a new school.

 

The school’s massive endowment is a similar issue: it is unclear where the money goes and what it is invested in. There is no transparency. It is crucial that the school be clear of how the money is being used and the community ought to have some say in it.

 

College of Computing mission: Two issues to mention here. First, as the panel on AI covered, we need to be very clear about what the mission is here. MIT has a long history of supporting this US’ problematic imperial history, particularly by designing technology tailored to its needs. To accentuate this point, they invited problematic political figures like Henry Kissinger (whose destructive foreign policy was pointed out to the administration, including President Reif, who ignored our concerns and asked us to “look past” his history) as well as Ash Carter. The discussions about AI and its influence on our society needs to be centered as this college proceeds.

 

Second, and only somewhat related, the school lacks a coherent strategy to address issues related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This lack of coherence will certainly carry over into the creation of the College of Computing. Even though a new school provides a fantastic opportunity to rectify some of these issues and even be a model for other institutes and universities with regards to diversity, equity, and inclusion, we are not confident the school will be able to do so without a concrete strategy. To this end, some graduate students are organizing requests of the administration around DEI issues.

I also hit up Elena Sobrino, who is a graduate student in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS), and this is what she had to say:

The opening of the College of Computing promises to have significant impacts at MIT and beyond. This is why so many in the MIT community found it unacceptable to see figures like Henry Kissinger featured at the college’s opening celebration to speak as an authority on the future of computing, given his record of human rights violations. MIT’s growth should not be based on the expansion of technological systems that disproportionately oppress marginalized groups in society, such as the military and prisons. Hundreds of students, faculty, and staff gathered the week of the college’s opening for a teach-in and rally because we know MIT can do better.

At the “AI Can’t Fix This” teach-in, organized by students representing many different departments across campus, we put forward alternative possibilities. “AI Can’t Fix This” is a call to action. We are calling for more transparency around the funding of research at MIT—it is contradictory to pursue ethics initiatives around AI if we don’t also fully understand whether or not MIT profits from unethical funding sources. We also call upon MIT to commit to organizing the College of Computing to support interdisciplinary research. More than ever, we need to understand how science, technology, and society are connected.

Technology has the potential to contribute to great harm: climate change, mass incarceration, increasing economic inequality, increasing surveillance, and military interventions. MIT needs to invest in research and action that can take on these complex issues and contribute to a safer, healthier, more just world.

After all these riveting takes, I sat back and thought of what MIT means, not only to me as a current student being shaped by the Institute’s ideals, but also to the rest of society that holds the Institute in such high esteem. MIT, and colleges in general, have time and again shown that education really can bridge divides and steer society into a more prosperous direction, and are seen by many as the remedy to so many of society’s pervasive plagues, such as war, poverty, and sickness. I especially resonate with an article published in The Tech that talked about the role that colleges played in encouraging the abolishment of apartheid in colonial South Africa. Given the stakes, surely MIT must not waver in its mission to make the world a better place, no matter the cost. Right isn’t only right ‘sometimes’ and wrong doesn’t become right ‘under some conditions.’ There is much to be said about the role of MIT in setting standards on what is acceptable and what is simply not, given the fact that it is one of the greatest science and engineering institutions worldwide. I’m glad that going forward, the Administration has dedicated a group to discuss the social implications and responsibilities of computing, and I hope that they continue to build the conversation around what defining and upholding a strong ethical fabric means for the Institute. Our ethics must stay impeccable now more than ever before- the world is watching.

I never thought I’d say this, but I’m kind of bored. A combination of not being an athlete + a lighter class schedule + spring break + being a senior = I just want to graduate already.

Let’s break that down and separate by terms, shall we?

1. I’m officially retired from the sport of basketball, as of late March. Our season ended in the first round of the NCAA DIII Tournament, which is pretty cool because it’s the second time ever that MIT has made it that far. Physically, retirement means my body is resting after ~18 years of bruised knees and twisted ankles and such. Logistically, ~15 hours of my week suddenly opened up. Emotionally, I miss it a lot.
   1. I came into this semester needing (2) HASS classes, (1) mechanical engineering class, and (1) thesis in order to graduate. And that’s exactly what I’m doing!

      17.447: Cybersecurity

      21W.755: Writing and Reading Short Stories

      2.002: Mechanics and Materials II

      6.UAR: Seminar in Undergraduate Research

      The sad part is, as much as I try to deny it, I think I’m low-key still busy. Next week I have two essays due, a short story to write, a pset, and a research poster to work on, and my thesis work is still chugging along in the background.

      Still, I’m looking at senior spring as the reward for having to live through senior fall. I already knew that with 2.009 (MechE capstone class, ~24 hours/week of sheer panic) I would have a healthy amount of work. However, something I did not factor in was the insane amount of stress and time that goes into The Job Hunt.

      ——————————–brief interlude for reflective purposes——————————-I did not anticipate how much time I would be spending on career activities last fall, which is something that upperclassmen should prepare for. Hours every week went into: preparing for career fairs, going to career fairs, searching for positions to apply to, actually applying to these positions (which can include writing cover letters, tracking down letters of reference, getting transcripts, completing coding challenges, and/or putting together a portfolio), setting up informational interviews, doing (hopefully many) rounds of actual interviews (which vary by location (Skype, in-person local, in-person far away, in-person fly-to-CA-on-short-notice), and type (chat over lunch, behavioral, technical-coding , technical-design-me-a-quick-robot-over-Skype-please)), and negotiating offers and deadlines.

      ^That paragraph was (intentionally?) confusing and overwhelming because I, too, was confused and overwhelmed. But I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have gone through all of that, for many reasons. First of all, as an MIT student I benefit from having the Institute on my resume, and I’ll never take that for granted. Also, through this experience I gained a lot of confidence from walking into so many rooms where I knew no one sitting at the table, and being incredibly nervous I was going to say something incredibly stupid, but still managing to get through the questions with varying degrees of success. I could tell that by the end of the Hunt I was much more comfortable talking about my experiences and coming up with passable solutions to difficult problems on the fly. It was cool to meet real-life engineers working on some awesome projects, and despite my initial nervousness, I actually found myself enjoying some of the technical interview questions.

      Anyway. Still glad it’s over.

      ———————————————-and we’re back!—————————————-

2. Spring break!!! Three of my friends/teammates and I drove to Nashville and back during the week off. We traversed 10 states, spending ~50 hours in a Kia Soul. Probably one of the highlights of my college experience. It was heartbreaking to come back to 40 degrees and rain.
3. A great part of being a senior is, well…being old, I guess? For example, 2.002 is the follow-up to 2.001, the class that inspired this post. I was more than a little apprehensive about taking this class, but it turns out something crazy has happened since sophomore fall- I’ve learned some stuff! I have a better grasp on stress and strain and all that, sure. But I’ve also learned about how I personally learn best, and how I study for tests the most effectively, and how to ask better questions. So it’s actually going pretty well, which is a pleasant surprise. Plus, I volunteered to be a lab assistant in 2.00b: Toy Design, which is a really fun “intro to MechE” class that’s basically like a smaller 2.009 where you design and build a new toy. It’s great going into lab every week to help freshman make something real for the first time.However, the flip side of being a senior is being absolutely and completely done with psets and tests and essays and all that. I have one foot still on campus and one on the West Coast, where I’ve starting looking for apartments and planning for the next step in my career. Theoretically, finish lines should be motivating, but as graduation gets closer, the opposite is happening. If senioritis has already punched me in the face in March, I can’t wait for May when there’s only a final exam standing between me and f r e e d o m. That’s going to be a full-on TKO.

So maybe “bored” was presumptuous. There’s still enough going on for the next couple months to keep the Class of 2019 occupied for a little longer. I personally have some bucket list items in Boston I want to check off before I peace out of here- a museum or two to visit, and I want to go to the beach at least once. I’ve been dabbling in guitar for a while, maybe it’s time to do some more of that. CPW is around the corner, which is essentially a tornado of excitement and free food, so that’ll be fun. For the first time in what feels like forever, the weather is tolerable. I got my sailing license when I was a freshman (it’s free! anyone can do it! you can do it!), so maybe I’ll start going back out on the river.  And ideally you’ll be seeing my face a lot more on the blogs. :)

on friday, loud, incessant bangs and whirrs of the never-ending projects just outside my window keep me awake as i attempt to make our 6.033 report seem comprehensible. i look outside and see the same view i’ve seen for two years: briggs field, flat and green and fine but boring. the sun is uncharacteristically bright.

missed readings and psets and reports and tests swirl in my head. they make me forget what’s outside of campus: it’s the mid-semester bubble rearing its ugly head.

i want to succumb into complacency but i have to finish these things swirling in my head so i sigh and sit down and maybe drink a calpico and finish them. i look outside and it’s dark.

i need a break. i want to leave.

on saturday, i pack enough clothes into the smallest suitcase i own, take the uber to boston logan, and join my friends. i take a plane far, far away, to a different country and a different continent and i forget everything about MIT for just one week and breathe a different kind of air. it’s almost magical.

on sunday night, i return to rainy boston, taking the silver line bus to south station, then taking the red line home. i eat gogo curry at h-mart and walk to next house, which looks so artificial and strange and different from the bustle of stephansplatz or the shops of amsterdam. but it’s fine: after two or so days, i’m used to it again, and the magic is over, and i snap out of my trance.

back to the grind, back to the bubble. but this time, it seems more bearable. things will be okay.

It’s CPW week!!!!!!!!! (What is CPW? It’s Campus Preview Weekend, or as I tell all my friends back home who don’t know MIT lingo, Admitted Students’ Weekend. Admitted high school seniors flood MIT for 3.14 days and all of campus puts on a bazillion fun events for them!) I wanted to write to all of you who will be coming to visit very soon. You might be super excited, or kind of nervous, or maybe you’ve already comMITted and so you’re honestly kinda meh. And that’s all okay! I definitely can’t hope to answer everyone’s questions and echo all of your feelings, but I’ll share what advice I have, and hopefully it can be useful to some of you. (If you want more good good CPW content, check out posts from previous years, like Yuliya’s, Selam’s,  Jack-William’s…)

For me personally, CPW was a way to decide where I wanted to go for undergrad. I hadn’t comMITted yet (and although I don’t know the stats, the people I met seemed pretty 50-50 with regards to if they had or not). CPW was the first admitted students’ weekend or day I had been to. I didn’t know what to expect at all — but wow, did it end up setting the bar high for every school I went to afterwards.

My parents didn’t come with me; they stuck me on a plane by myself. It wasn’t quite my first time flying alone, but it was my first time exploring a new city on my own (I’d always been picked up at the airport before). There are plenty of events for parents at CPW, and lots of them do come, but my parents and I agreed that I should experience the schools I was visiting alone, since that’s how I would be experiencing them for the next four years. (Also, they had jobs.)  ((If anyone else out there really likes Taylor Swift, it felt very “So here I am in my new apartment in a big city, they just dropped me off“))

I had no clue what I was getting into. For me, CPW was a revelation;⁠01 Complete tangent, but I will never be able to use this word again without thinking of the incredible song from the movie Boy Erased. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkbdUPKD8ek I came in stressed out to all hell about decisions and left with a certainty, even if I wasn’t fully ready to admit it, that MIT was the place for me. So many things helped me gain this knowledge — the campus, the events, the city — but most of all it was the people I met. They ranged across such a spectrum of passions and majors and hobbies, but they were all kind and interesting and so. freaking. nerdy. (and unashamed and exuberant and beautiful in their nerdiness!) in a way that made me want to stay here forever.

So, given all that, what advice do I have for you?

1. Don’t worry if your CPW doesn’t look exactly like someone else’s. Your parents came with you, or your younger siblings, or you’re all alone? You end up falling asleep at five am in a lounge somewhere far away from your host dorm room, or you go back to your room to get seven hours of sleep each night? (That was me, by the way. Take care of yourselves everyone!) You go to a new event every hour, or you go to a couple each day and then spend some time chilling with the new friends you’ve made? You want to hang out with as many groups as possible, or you’d rather have meet a few people and then take time to reflect on your experiences alone?

   All of these ways to “do” CPW (and the ∞ other ones I didn’t mention) are completely legit; don’t feel shamed for doing what you know is right for you. In particular, don’t feel pressured to go to tons of events or stay up really late if you don’t want to — CPW has a lot of stuff going on, but that’s so that everyone can go to things that are fun for them! (This sentence is also true about MIT in general, but CPW is definitely more overwhelming.) You don’t have to do every single thing, and in fact, if you did you would probably die.

2. On the flip side, do make sure to go to at least some different places! Visit multiple dorms, don’t just stick around one; don’t just go to burger grilling events (although those are great), but also check out something academic, something from an extracurricular group, etc. There are literally hundreds of events; like I said, this doesn’t mean you have to go to hundreds, but make sure to explore at least a little! Go around campus itself, physically, and get a sense for how you like it. And, be honest with yourself. If you like one vibe you run into but not another, or if you’re generally not liking something, don’t feel the need to force yourself to enjoy it. CPW is a great time (as is the rest of undergrad) to learn more about yourself, and you’ll need to be able to ~listen to your heart~ to do that.
   Two things not to miss, imo:
   i) The academic fair, where you can see all the courses MIT has to offer and talk to professors who do everything. (I talked to: computer science, mechanical engineering, French, Latin, and literature professors. And there were so so many more!)
   ii) The activities fair, which is equally fantastic and overwhelming except that it’s full of upperclassmen and extracurricular organizations and clubs. These are great places to see, very concretely, the huge range of opportunities that are on offer here.
3. Talk to people! Talking to people is hella scary, tbh. I am still working, very much so, on the whole talk-to-people thing. Honestly, the best friends I made at CPW came up and talked to me, for which I am eternally grateful.  But still, the people are fundamentally what make every college its own unique place, and they will be what makes your experience a blessing and a curse (no offense, but sharing a kitchen with 40 other people, in my mind, can only be described as a curse. Even if you love those people to death and they make the rest of your day a blessing).
   Talk to your fellow prefrosh; talk to the professors you see at academic things; talk to upperclassmen, who are on the whole so ready to talk to you. We’re so excited to have you, and to tell you about this place we love! Don’t be afraid to ask honest, blunt questions (“what don’t you like about MIT?” “what’s the most underrated thing about MIT?”). This is the time for you to figure out if this environment and these people are right for you. (However, if you don’t find your bffs, that’s totally okay! Tons of people don’t immediately click with anyone at CPW, and that definitely does not mean you will be forever alone at MIT.)

I’m so excited for you all to experience the magic that I felt while at CPW. I don’t think that I will ever be able to forget it… seared in my mind is the stars and the lights in the night sky the moment I jumped the fence to Briggs Field, running from Simmons to MacGregor. My friends were holding my backpack for me and I felt so light and free, like I was moving so fast that I had shed all the constraints that bound me before. Like I could be anyone and the darkness would still hug me back.

Have the most wonderful of times*, kiddos, and I’ll see you soon <3

*and if you don’t have the most wonderful of times? That’s okay too. Go where you’re happy, because that’s really all that matters.

This past June, we wrote Axes of Confusion, a post about our struggle to decide whether to stay in our current major, 21E Humanities and Engineering which allows us to combine CMS with Course 6, or to switch into solely CMS.

One axis we were considering in this post was Time, specifically in terms of a course 6 class we ended up taking last semester, the infamously brutal 6.031 (Elements of Software Construction). This is what we wrote:

On average (based on end of semester surveys), students spend 10.1 hours/week on 6.009, while we spent on average 20. On average (based on end of semester surveys), students spend 20 hours on 031. So, doing the math, we’d most likely spend close to 40 hours on 031.

And spend close to 40 hours on 031 we did. This class CONSUMED our lives last semester. We anticipated this in the summer, and the angst associated with this anticipation (namely, “aaaaa-do-we-really-want-to-throw-away-one-of-our-precious-four-semesters-left-at-mit-to-this-damn-computer-science-class-when-we-feel-like-we’d-rather-be-doing-more-artsy-things”) was a big reason we wrote Axes of Confusion.

In the end, what let us decide to dedicate last semester to this class, was precisely not deciding. After mulling and mulling over the summer, we couldn’t decide between 21E and CMS, and ended up deciding to not decide. We didn’t want to make this decision rashly, so last semester we stuck with the path of least resistance — staying in our current major. This entailed taking 031.

Now that we are on the other end of this class, what can we say. Do we have regrets? What’s the status of our 21E vs. CMS struggle?

The short answers are no regrets and it’s (more-or-less) resolved! We are set on sticking with our current major 21E. This is because, this semester, we finally enjoy our schedules FULLY, even the course 6 class we are taking!

Before moving onto describing our classes, we want to underline that we feel like we still never had a *deciding* moment between 21E and CMS, even after finishing 031. We just made small steps based on what felt right in the moment, balancing requirements/pre-reqs, and our interests, and ended up here in this semester that we really enjoy. And now, since we finally enjoy the classes on this path, it just makes sense to continue along. Things seemed to just have worked themselves out.

Now, these are our schedules:

Both taking:

18.06 Linear Algebra

We both have to take this class because we need a REST (Restricted Elective in Science and Technology), and we specifically chose this class as opposed to other REST’s because of its applications in Computer Graphics and Image Processing. This class is probably the class we enjoy the least, out of the four, but something about doing math has always been oddly satisfying to us, especially when you finally Get It and Make Connections. Those moments make the class worth it.

6.815 Digital and Computational Photography

This was one of the two classes (the second is 6.837 Computer Graphics which we hope to take next semester) that we struggled through 6.00, 6.009, and 6.031 for. And was it worth it? Definitely! In this class, we get to learn how to code a variety of image manipulations from gaussian blurs to bilateral filters to 8-bit quantization to morphing! Almost every function we write in the class returns a visual output whether that be a photograph made to look like a paint-by-numbers painting or a sequence of images that transforms our professor into a werewolf (like what happens in the this Michael Jackson Music Video)! Coding is now fun!

Danny’s Classes:

CMS.S60 Drawing Comics and Sequential Art

You get to draw comics! This class just has three assignments – make a 4-5 page comic individually, make a 8-12 page comic in groups of 2-3, and make a 10-16 page comic individually. You get the theme here. And every week, our assigned readings include comics/graphic novels – definitely the most entertaining readings I’ve had from a class. So far my favorite one has been The Secret to Being a Great Artist. <–The author shares the first fifteen pages of the comic here, but sign up for their newsletter to get the full thing. I think it’s worth it for the read! Overall this class has been a blast and great way to force me to find time to make art!

CMS.611 Creating Video Games

I used to play video games in middle school, but kind of lost interest in them when I got to high school. So, I never really planned to take any of the many game related class offered through CMS. I was also a bit scared of these classes because I felt that I would feel like an outsider in the class since I just haven’t played video games in so long. But I think my mindset changed after participating in the Reality Virtually Hackathon at the Media Lab over IAP. It was my first experience in making interactive visual media as opposed to passive ones, like animations or paintings. I actually really enjoyed it, and decided that I really want to explore it more. And I am really glad I did! This is a pretty fast-paced entirely project based class, with a large focus on project management and teamwork. So far, I helped make a video game spinoff of Gess and a game where you play as a sea turtle trying to eat fish and avoid trash! Right now, we are in the beginning stages of our final project, which is to make an educational game for middle-high school students in Nepal. I’ve learned a lot in this class and have had a lot of fun in the process! Also fun fact: Nisha is also in this class and we are in the same group for this last project!

Allan’s Classes:

4.191 Independent Study in Maya Generative Tools

I really wanted to take a class this semester on scripting, modeling, and lighting in Maya. MIT doesn’t offer anything like this, and MassArt’s classes in Maya are more focused on animation. But about 3 week’s into the semester, a friend reminded me that Independent Studies exist, and I quickly figured out how they work, and registered! Independent Studies vary from department to department but for Course 4, all you need to do is find a supervisor for your study, and then fill out a simple form! Independent Studies allow you total freedom, guided by your supervisor, to learn and pursue what you want to! What my project is shaping into is a story of a child’s attic and imagination! I am lighting and modeling, manually and with python scripting, everything in my scene, and it is SO fun! Because I’m modeling from basic shapes like cones, cylinders, and cubes, it involves a lot of geometry, which was one of the math classes I found most fun in high school. It’s very math-nostalgic! I honestly wish I could dedicate more time to this class.

CMS.339 VR and Immersive Media Production

This class is both a theory and production class on VR! Every week we have incredible guest speakers, all of whom are pioneers in VR! Around week 4, we split up into teams to create our very own VR projects. My team is creating a VR experience/game to show the harms of Global Warming on coral reefs. My specific role involves modeling the coral in our experience, which I am also using Maya python scripting for! Essentially half my classes this semester are learning/making in Maya, and I am beyond pleased!  

We feel really happy in our major this semester. We’ve found balance in two levels that previous semesters didn’t strike: work/life balance and creative/technical balance. We’re busy, but not over-worked most weeks, and we’re thinking artistically, while making technically. Our first five semesters here were weighed much more heavily on work than on life and on the technical than on creative. And that’s why we were so confused this past summer. It took a long time to get here and it was far from easy, but we’re so happy we made it.

Distilling down all the stressful experiences, angst nuggets, and retrospective perspective, what we learned from this is to have the patience and self-confidence to see how your decisions — and “not-decisions” — unfold.

CPW 2019 is happening this week, starting on Thursday! There are hundreds of student-run events to welcome the class of 2023 and help them figure out if MIT is the right place for them. This amazing blog post by Yuliya K. ’18 has (almost) all the logistic info you need to have an excellent time!

The one thing her post is missing is a section called “how to get home when you forget to set an alarm and you have a morning train to catch” so I have put some instructions below.

1. Screw up. I stayed up super late – like, 5AM late – talking to students on Saturday night of CPW. When I finally went to bed, I was exhausted. I fell into a deep sleep. (Even if my alarm had gone off, I’m not sure I would have responded to it.) I did set an alarm before going to bed. I even plugged my phone into its charger. My big mistake was not actually plugging the charger into the wall. So, my phone died and my alarm did not go off.
2. Regain consciousness. Dead phones can’t make noises. But a concerned person can. I woke up to someone – to this day I don’t remember who – pounding on the door of my host’s room. Waking up to a loud banging noise is a pretty good sign that you have screwed up. At first, my tired brain tried to ignore the noise and assumed it was just some crazy CPW event. When I finally did wake up, I leapt out of bed and answered the door.
3. Figure out the damage. On the other side of the door was a person with a clipboard. “Your friends called us and said you have a train to catch” they said. I asked the person what time it was (it was about 9AM) and if my friends were outside (they were not). I realized I still had a small chance of making my train, which was scheduled to leave at 9:30AM. My head was full of questions. Who was this person? Why did my friends call them? Why hadn’t I woken up to my alarm? I closed the door.
4. Panic! Panic! Panic! I located my phone and actually plugged my charger into the wall. Then I started running around the room, trying to pack up all my stuff. It was so hard to shove my sleeping bag into the little bag I had carried it in. Each precious second it took for me to punch it into place felt like several minutes.
5. Feel bad. Fun fact: I had been the travel coordinator for my friend group (Kathryn Z. ’22 and Emily H. ’22), so I had printed out all of our train tickets and told my friends not to worry about printing their own copies. My friends probably had PDF versions of their tickets on their phones, but I felt pretty bad for having told them not to worry about printing stuff since I might miss our train. Once my phone turned on, I saw dozens of missed messages and calls from my friends. Kathryn had taken the T to the train station and was waiting there. Emily was waiting for me at Kendall (a T station close to MIT). My guilt over the tickets worsened as I realized Emily could end up missing the train because of me!
6. Ask your host for help. My host saw me panicking and asked me what was going on. “It’s 9:10,” I said, “and I have to go to Kendall, meet my friend Emily, and then take the T to Back Bay to catch our 9:30 train!” My host looked uneasy. “The T might not be the best way to go.” she said. “It could run late. You should take an Uber.” I didn’t have Uber. She called one for me, telling it to go Kendall where my friend was waiting. I texted Emily to tell her an Uber would be arriving there and that I was on my way.
7. Ask your host for even more help. Prefrosh are supposed to go check out at the CPW desk in the Student Center before they leave. If I had gone to check out, I would have definitely missed my train. I explained this to my host, and she offered to go check out for me. <3
8. Get lost. I had an Uber to catch! I sprinted out of East Campus, arms full with  my suitcase, backpack, and sleeping bag. As I ran, I realized I had no idea where Kendall was. In my panic, I had forgotten to ask. I slowed to a walk and pulled out my phone. But it only had been charging for, what, like 10 minutes? As I opened my Google Maps app, my phone froze in the way it normally did just before it died. Before I could finish typing “Kendall” the screen went black. My dead phone had foiled me again!
9. Sit down in the middle of the road to figure things out. I stopped where I was, in the middle of Ames Street, and pulled out my laptop. I sat down, put it on my lap, opened it, typed in my password, and connected to the “MIT GUEST” wifi network. When maps.google.com finally loaded, I typed in “East Campus” and then “Kendall” and worked out where I needed to go. (I needed to keep running down Ames street and turn right).
10. Fail to know yet another critical detail. Just as I went to close my laptop, an iMessage from Emily popped into the corner of my screen. “What color is our Uber?” she asked. I realized I had no idea. I closed my laptop, shoved it back into my bag, and ran as hard as I could towards Kendall.
11. Run!!!!! Run! Left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg! As fast as possible! Sweating is a sign that you’re doing it right!
12. Allow a miracle to happen. As I turned onto Main Street towards Kendall, I saw Emily getting into an Uber. She had somehow found the right car. I got in, shut the door, and somehow made it to Back Bay in time for us to get on the train home.
13. Do not tell your parents how much you screwed up. I did not tell my parents about this when I finally got home. I wanted them to think I was “mature” and “not a total mess” so, ya know, it didn’t really come up when they asked how CPW went.

Have fun at CPW, y’all. Just not too much fun that you can’t get home! You’ll be trapped at the Institute before you know it. Go home while you can.

In 1981, Gerald Fink was a professor at Cornell and a member of a visiting committee at MIT. At the time, MIT faculty and administration were split over the idea of establishing an MIT-affiliated but independent research facility on campus that would be known as the Whitehead Institute. At the time, this was considered a “radical experiment” that faced much opposition. Fink remembers being a part of one meeting about Whitehead in which then-President of MIT Howard Johnson leaned over and quietly asked him if he thought Whitehead was a good idea. “Absolutely excellent, wonderful idea,” he whispered back. In 1982, Fink became a founding member of the Whitehead Institute.

I walked into 10-250 last Thursday not knowing what I was there for. There had been signs up all over campus for a week or two advertising a guest lecture entitled “What is a gene?”

I thought that was a stupid question, because I know what a gene is. It’s a piece of DNA that is transcribed into RNA that is translated into a protein. This must be a Hail Mary review for those seniors who are struggling with the concept in the 7.01x biology class that they need to pass in order to graduate. What could this guest lecture actually be about?

Brief sidebar here to mention that it is an incredibly nerdy thing to go to an optional lecture in my spare time for fun. I am a nerd. I don’t think I became a nerd UNTIL I came to MIT and was inundated with opportunities to hear from celebrities in science. Big names are drawn to our hallowed techy campus to speak to even the lowliest of undergrads. It happens so often that it doesn’t even feel like a big deal anymore, but I know this isn’t happening at every school.

I grabbed a program to read while waiting for the lecture to begin. That program informed me of the existence of the James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, which recognizes extraordinary accomplishments by full-time MIT faculty. It is awarded by other faculty members, which means the selection committee really knows what they’re doing. I then read the next panel, which was a mini-biography of Gerald Fink, the recipient of this year’s Killian Award and the person scheduled to teach us “What is a gene?” in a few minutes. I had never heard of Fink, so I skimmed through the bio until one part caught my eye:

I was frustrated because of the inability to engineer the DNA in yeast so that I could create yeast strains by design. Then, in 1977, my lab discovered yeast transformation.

Discovered yeast transformation? What?

Anyone who has been trained in basic molecular biology techniques knows about yeast transformation. It’s such common knowledge that I never thought to wonder about how it came to be, and yet it’s such a foundational technique in the field of genetics. This guy invented that? How come I’ve never heard of him?

The premise of his talk was that it is important to have an accurate definition of what a gene is because of our newfound reliance on computers to find them for us. Computers are simple; they can only find the genes in a string of nucleotides if we give them rules for how to find these genes. So far, the definition “a segment of three-base-pair triplets initiated by a start codon and terminated by a stop codon” has been sufficient for computers to find all the regions of DNA that code for proteins. But these protein-coding regions compose only 2 percent of the genome. What is the other 98 percent doing? Fink joked that we could have named this uncharacterized part of the genome “dark matter”, but since that name was already taken…

Sydney Brenner of C. elegans fame called this junk DNA, as opposed to garbage DNA, because garbage you throw out and junk you keep.

Recent studies have shown that this massive chunk of the genome, so-called “junk” DNA, has some bearing on gene expression that has yet to be fully characterized. There are junk DNA sequences that can jump around within the non-coding regions. If these jumping genes land close to a protein-coding sequence, they can affect the expression of that gene. In this case, no protein is ultimately produced from the junk gene, but an RNA is. This has shifted focus in the field onto whole RNA sequencing as a way of getting a fuller picture of gene expression in a cell. RAN RNAs, lincRNAs, microRNAs, and antisense RNAs, many of which have no start codons or classical open reading frames, were all previously invisible to the computer because of how we defined genes to the computer.

A further source of confusion lies in the mystery of DNA splicing. After DNA is transcribed into pre-RNA, non-coding sequences known as introns are spliced out, forming a more concise RNA. These introns are a huge source of discontinuity in scanning the genome for genes, as they interrupt coding sequences and are sometimes bigger that the protein-coding gene itself; nevertheless, it is not well-established what becomes of these introns after they are spliced out. Some of Fink’s latest research has found that introns in yeast have some functional ability to regulate yeast growth. After publishing this finding, Fink received an email from a biochemistry professor at UC Berkeley:

Just wild! Now I have to pay more attention to all that splicing crap!

Fink ultimately concluded that the definition of “gene” needs an update, but that the closest we can get to having an all-encompassing definition of the basic unit of heredity is the vague “a DNA sequence that is transcribed into an RNA molecule with a function.” How could a computer know if an RNA has a function? I guess that’s up to course 6-7 to figure out.

What is the takeaway from all of this? As a literature-brained person, I see a lot of analogy and allegory in this (We are the dark matter DNA, and the classical genes are the famous scientists; We are many and our sum is influential, but most people don’t know about Us because We haven’t made big discoveries yet), but analysis is boring sometimes, and the people want bullet points.

• Definition is a big and important part of science.
• The human genome is still a mysterious soup, even now that we know the order and identity of the base pairs in it.
• Computers are our friends, but we can’t expect them to do all of our work for us.
• Some people at MIT are fundamentally changing entire fields of science, and yet we all still get stuck behind the same groups of tourists in the Infinite. What a magical place.

This is a blog post for those of you who are struggling with the social implications of getting into colleges. It’s such good news, you should be elated — but it’s also complicated, and really difficult, when you get in but your friend doesn’t; or when you get in, but your arch-rival doesn’t, and then they start talking shit about you; or, especially, when the shit they talk about you is downright rude, racist, or sexist.

I haaaaaaated dealing with this stuff in high school, or rather, I wasn’t very good at dealing with it, and so my typical strategy was to pretend that nothing was happening. To be honest, sticking my head in the sand like an ostrich got me through senior year pretty well, although I was helped by the fact that I got to go home and rant to my parents every night. But I know that it isn’t that easy for everyone, and even for me, it still kinda sucked.

After each round of decisions came out, I hated hearing my name in the hallway, turning around, and seeing people quiet down instead of waving. Most people were just barely too polite to say anything directly to my face, so instead they hinted at me and, I’m guessing, waited until I was a few more meters away to say things outright. I was a girl; I wasn’t white or Asian (two labels which together described just over 99% of my school); I was an American citizen, uncommon at my Canadian high school. I didn’t know how to grapple with these facts, or with the heavy implications people seemed to give them whenever they came up in the context of college. (And senior year, we were always talking about college.)

When I compare notes with the people I know now, it seems like maybe I didn’t even have it that bad: I’ve heard from kids who got told outright that they didn’t deserve what they got, or that they stole another person’s spot. (Let me just say this right now: complete BS. MIT’s admissions dept. has full confidence in every kid they admitted to kick hella butt. And that goes for tons and tons of kids they didn’t admit, too.) I wanted to be able to give you all something to relate to, and maybe some helpful advice, no matter your experience and how different it was from mine. To that end, I did a lil email poll. Here are some (minorly condensed) comments from current and former MIT students, sharing their experiences and advice. (There were also a good few people who said “Lol no I didn’t have any problems”, so if that’s you, don’t feel alone either :P)

I got a low grade on an assignment in a science class and the teacher accused me of thinking I didn’t have to try anymore since I’d gotten into MIT. I did my best on it, I just did badly anyway.

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My classmates treated me like I was some sort of infallible genius, which was actually more stressful and embarrassing than flattering. They gave me a nickname combining my last name with “MIT”, which I grew to dislike. Overall it was just too much of a standard to live up to.

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I had a friend of my mother’s say (to her) that I only got in because I was a girl. My internal response to this was that my SAT score was good enough that I knew that was bullshit and I didn’t care what she thought. My mother thought she was jealous because her daughter was not as academically skilled.

I’d also been singled out for as long as I could remember because I was smart, oftentimes in a negative way, and even though MIT was my first choice as of my junior fall, I knew without a doubt that if I let slip to any classmates where I was applying, and then I didn’t get in, everyone would make fun of me and be nasty. Getting rejected/deferred from MIT would’ve broken my heart, and I didn’t want to make things worse by allowing myself to get dumped on by the jerks in my high school class. So whenever I was asked, I lied and said I didn’t know where I was applying yet.

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That year, the only two people that got into MIT from my high school were me (a female human) and my best friend “A” (another female human). We had a close mutual friend “R” who did all the nerdy stuff with us (math team, science team, concert band geeking, etc.). A few days after regular admissions were announced, I looked over the shoulder of another mutual friend who was IM-ing “R” only to discover that he was trying to convince this friend that “A” and I only got into MIT because we were women. Needless to say, we aren’t friends with “R” anymore. What a shitty way for a friendship to fall apart.

If someone is giving you guff for making it into MIT but not being the next Nobel laureate. Tell them that it doesn’t matter what they think, admissions happened, and hopefully everyone’s happy after the fact; wherever they are going in life.

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Just ignore it, graduation isn’t that far away! But in reality, “Please stop, I’m the same person I have been up until this point” – reminding people that you’re the same person you were before very quickly after they make a comment of “look at miss/mr mit here”. Or just telling them “Please stop referring to the college I got into. It is none of your business.” And then sometimes they won’t stop, sometimes they will, but you have the moral highground now. I went back to my high-school post graduation to visit my FIRST robotics team and when someone mentioned during their meeting how I was visiting from MIT I got *applause*. AWKWARD AF. This will continue happening to you: “Oh look shiny MIT person”. It’s something I think you can only have two attitudes about: the get-used-to-it or shut-it-down-immediately-by-telling-people-to-stop. The second one works better as you get older because people are less shitty than highschoolers. It has also driven me to seek out people who *don’t* have this reaction, because usually they’re at least smart enough enough to not be impressed with the bare fact that you got into/went to MIT/other fancy school. Because smart people end up everywhere (and so do not so smart people *cough group project partners*)

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I was lucky to have a supportive group of friends where the sharpest of jokes was “MIT kid can’t use the copy machine” which was true and although embarrassed, I thought it was pretty funny. However, there were always some people who liked to talk down about me. After EA decisions, they would say things like MIT wasn’t as good as Caltech or Harvard and I was lame for getting into MIT (although you should have heard them brag about applying to MIT). And of course, the age old “‘she only got in because she’s a girl” or “Chinese”, disregarding all the work and effort that I put in to applying to college. I guess I always tried to not acknowledge those comments, but regardless of what I do, it always hurt a little bit. […] I also suffer from “caring too much”, so even if I could logically tell myself they were maybe just jealous, immature, or ignorant, I cared about how other people perceive me, even if they didn’t like me. […] I guess my take away from the hurtful things that happened to me when I got in EA was that asides from an amazing group of people I surrounded myself with […] accept the hurt that other people may bring down upon you. If a friend pushes you away permanently because of this, then they’re not truly a good friend. And if you have any more emotions to spare, be petty. Make it a positive thing that can disprove hurtful comments. Yeah, I might have gotten in because I’m a girl, but have you seen my awards in science fair or my robots I help build?

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I mostly received the “hispanic female card.” This was mostly from randos or acquaintances at school (small school), but someone who I considered a close friend pretty much said that my admission didn’t count because I did MITES ( a minority focused summer camp at MIT, with an admissions rate of about 2-4% at the time I went). I ended up not being friends with him for a variety of reasons, but cutting the toxic people out of my life helped a lot. I guess it helps that as a freshman in a school that draws students from all over the world, you won’t have trouble making new friends, so feel free to ditch the sore losers. Learning how to disengage from internalized racism has also helped my overall self worth and self esteem.

I hope that some of these stories and pieces of advice are relatable or helpful for you. There’s a lot of different ways to deal with issues like these, but I think one of the most important things is to remember that it will all fade away with time (as will we all, the void of death encroaches, etc. etc.)  Lastly, I want to link this incredible blog post on “the guilt of being admitted”: I think it’s exactly what I needed to hear at this time last year, and maybe it’s exactly what one of you will need too.

Stay kind, but remember that that includes being kind to yourselves, y’all. Take no shit and keep on kicking butt <3

A 21st birthday has significant significance in the U.S. because you can now drink that special fermented beverage that has basically been available to everyone in most other countries since they were a preteen. I’ve hit that milestone this semester and would like to share 21 thoughts I’ve acquired on the way to becoming a full-fledged adult (in no particular order).

1. Pick my battles. I was incredibly argumentative as a child, and I learned the hard way that proving you’re right rarely ever proves anything to the other person. If you must, only argue on matters that go against your core values. For example, picking a restaurant is probably not the hill you want to die on.
2. On a similar note, every word out of my mouth has the power to bring people up or tear them down. Make them count or don’t say them at all.
3. Impulse purchases = a bulging closet but no added happiness. Neither does scrolling on social media.
4. Keep the people that make me happy close. It’s also alright if they drift apart and the friendship lives on in your memories.
5. Walk around with a smile, and the world will smile back. And science says you’ll be happier too!
6. Not everything has to be profound or over-analyzed. Some things can just exist. Some choices can just happen. This includes blog posts, conversations, and whether or not to wash my hair at night (believe it or not, I’ve once thought through a pro/con list about this).
7. External validation does not and should not define my self worth. And yet, it still does. I’m working on this one.
8. I have really bad travel luck, and I need to plan for mishaps. In my time here, I’ve missed flights or had them cancelled, been ticketed by police on the metro in two foreign countries, had cash stolen from a tour bus, locked myself in a bus bathroom for 10 minutes…The list goes on. Solution: Arrive at least 30 extra minutes before you think you should, carry your valuables with you, and bring a phone to bathrooms for emergencies and flashlight needs.
9. Don’t wait for things to be taken away to be grateful for them.
10. Look up word pronunciations before I try to use them. @ you, macabre. (məˈkäb)
11. Reducing mental and physical clutter ensures I use my mental spoons for useful things.
12. Sometimes, I’m just not good at stuff and that’s alright. My inability to draw or do a pset doesn’t mean I suck at life. Rather, I have room to grow, and/or I bring something else to the table.
13. Listen first, talk second. With full attention and empathy.
14. When my mind is foggy, workout, write, or go to sleep. I wouldn’t drive with a fogged windshield, and by the same logic, I shouldn’t try to work in a fog.
15. I know how to say “May I pet your dog?” in 5 languages. There’s a joy in learning for the sake of learning. Or petting dogs.
16. Doing challenging things outside my comfort zone is the only way to grow. It’s also important to listen to that voice that says I need a break. Life is all about walking that balance beam.
17. Say yes because spontaneity breeds creativity and opportunities. The planner in me finds this one very hard. Once upon a time, I went to a hackathon in Russia and met one of my closest friends at MIT. She introduced me to her UROP, and the rest is history. Well hopefully, if we manage to get published.
18. Figuring out what makes me happy is a lifelong journey, and it might change. There’s a reason there are so many self-help books on it.
19. I’m definitely lactose-intolerant. Although not so much so that I can’t indulge in ice cream and cheese every once in awhile.
20. Anxiety and stress are different than motivation and drive. One incentivizes action to relieve the mind, the other inspires purposeful follow-through to nurture the mind.
21. Laugh hard and laugh often.

And there you have it. I don’t think I’ve necessarily mastered all of these things, but at the very least, they’re on my radar, and I’m making strides.

Spring is here, which means we are nearing the end of Kresge lawn torment season.

From August to March, the grass in front of Kresge is hit with an onslaught of violent offenses ranging from tents to snow, turning it to mud. Recovery begins in April, when it is no longer snowing, and the rain is sufficient to water new sod⁠01 I have all sorts of environmental beef with repeatedly killing grass and then replacing it with sod, but the bond between MIT and her tents is unbreakable. even with recurring episodes of tent.

This is a guide to re-sodding a Kresge of your very own.

Step 1: Get rid of all the grass, and apply an even layer of top soil. Mark the area with arbitrary white flags to indicate your surrender to the will of Sod.

April 3, 4:26 pm.

Step 2: Purchase expensive pallets of sod. Place the pallets on some of the major walkways through Kresge lawn to inconvenience passersby.

April 4, 9:10 am

Step 3: Begin to blanket the dirt in sod, but don’t sod the shadowy areas. It is not yet their time.

April 4, 5:56 pm

Step 4: Decrease the saturation of the sky over the lawn. The saturated blue sky puts a lot of pressure on the young sod to be vibrantly green. We want to encourage the sod to grow up in a non-competitive climate. This makes it weaker and easier to kill once it gets to be grass-killin’ szn again.

April 5, 1:51 pm

Step 5: Hire some actors to do sports on the grass. This will attract real students to enjoy the newly refurbished lawn.

April 11, 4:03 pm

And there you have it! Now you can grown your very own Kresge lawn.

You guessed it, I’m finally:

And because there are literally so many, so so so many blog posts that talk about the tradition of the MIT brass rat, the ring design and what happens at ring delivery, I’m going to skip past that. As surreal as it feels, I’ve finished half of my adventure here at MIT.  Looking back at it all now, a lot has happened in the past two years. I’ve been through a lot. Let go of a lot. Grown a lot. I like to think that I’ve collected some diamonds through my time here. So here’s to spoiling you with my riches:

The Ultrium

It’s 100% ok to not be 100% prepared. Wave goodbye to the days of spelling lists and map quizzes. Sometimes, the information is too much, the pset is too long, the textbook is too complicated. You really can’t know it all. And sometimes, knowing at least something is an accomplishment.

The Extreme Silver

Nothing beats a 11 pm food order. Seriously. Get that medium-sized banana pepper and pineapple pizza from Dominos. Or a small mango slush from Kung Fu Tea. Or a pineapple frozen yogurt with white chocolate chips on the top from Cafe 472.

The Brass

It’s ok to take breaks. No, I don’t mean put your work aside and stress about the things you have to do. I don’t mean watch an episode of Gilmore Girls  either. Don’t try to turn your mind off, but have it do something productive, but equally refreshing instead. Call up a family member or a friend. Go on a walk. Make yourself a smoothie.

The Prism

Explore the world around you often. Travel when you can. Take walks without your headphones on. Wake up to watch sunrises. Take naps in the grass. Go on spontaneous road trips. Stroll through city streets. Because nothing ever looks the same and every moment is its own.

The Stealth

Learn to spend time with yourself. Being alone and being lonely are two different things. It’s ok to spend all Saturday in your room away from other people. It’s ok to have a jam session all by yourself. It’s ok to get a table for one. Make time for self-care. It goes a long way.

The 14K Rose Gold

Dress up for exams. It does wonders to your self confidence.

The 18K White Gold

Take all the photos. Who cares if your dropbox is getting full? It’ll make you smile years from now.

It so happened that my younger sister got accepted into the Class of 2023 this year. She also happens to be quite a good writer, so we decided to do a dual blog post about our CPW experiences – hers as an excited prefrosh, and mine as a jaded East Campus CPW chair.

The Build-Up [Ankita]

I committed to MIT a couple of weeks ago, so my main goal at CPW was to figure out housing. I thought it would be easy, but seeing the huge variety of events at each dorm was completely overwhelming, so I started creating my schedule pretty much the moment this year’s events leaked :’) Like a true #13, I spent hours creating and revising my schedule, and though I definitely didn’t need to invest so much time and energy in it, I don’t rEaLly regret it—it helped hype me up for everything to come.

Thanks to the phenomenon known as the Prefrosh Group Chat, I already had a group of friends to plan with. We were pretty meticulous with our scheduling (see: color-coded spreadsheets) and even had a group video call to figure out which events we all had in common (lol yeah we went OFF)Here’s a screenshot of my spreadsheet. I went to 18/33 of the events I put on my schedule so…not bad, I guess?

The Build-Up [Nisha]

I got elected as one of the three CPW Chairs of East Campus a while back (maybe in January, but I honestly couldn’t tell you the exact date because this year has been a blur). Our job is to basically coordinate all of the events that East Campus runs for the prefrosh, which probably sounds a lot easier than it is (and honestly, I thought it would be easier than it was). This involves bugging people to run events, buying them all the stuff they need to run the events, and making sure that things actually happen. Our spreadsheets were notably less exciting than Ankita’s, and most of them looked something like this.

In the week or so leading up to the actual event, we also had to go on a few shopping trips, including one to a sketchy warehouse where we picked up 65 cases of Yerba Mate (this is the second East Campus event they’ve sponsored!) and a Costco trip that maxed out a credit card limit.

THE YERB WAREHOUSE

Thursday [Ankita]

I arrived at CPW around 10:30 and attended orientation/put my luggage in Burton-Conner, the dorm at which I was staying for the weekend, before RUNNING to the Course 15 Luncheon. I then met up with some friends and briefly went to a couple more housing events as well as Where Will I Live?, the International Dinner at Number 6, and the Admitted Student Welcome. After, I walked around with my orientation group for a bit and then went to Baker Horizons (which was…interesting) and then Midnight Waffles at Maseeh.

Honestly, Day 1 was a bit underwhelming. It might’ve been because I allotted 45 minutes to an hour for certain events that I ended up not spending more than ten minutes at. Food events, quite reasonably, are generally more about socializing than the food itself (I admit to eating chocolate-dipped Oreos alone in a corner once) but it was hard to spend much time with as many people as I’d hoped when everyone is running off to different events.

Highlights:

• Face masks with the squad at 1 am in the Student Center
• International Dinner at Number 6 (great people and great food—I wish all the food events I attended were as fun as this)
• Frilled Cheese With F-Entry

Thursday [Nisha]

I woke up bright and early along with a fellow CPW chair to start up the grills. Thankfully, it was a beautiful morning that boded well for the rest of the CPW weather – there’s a longstanding joke that “the MIT weather machine is always broken for CPW”.

Why were we starting up the grills at 8 in the morning? East Campus has a tradition of grilling almost nonstop throughout the ~72 hours that CPW spans. If prefrosh walk by, we always want to have something to offer them – more specifically, a delicious Costco burger with all the condiments possible and melted cheese. The East Campus courtyard is a great place to come hang out and chill and have a burger, and we try to wake as many people up in the mornings so that the early rising prefrosh will always have somebody to hang out with at EC.

I spent the morning hanging around and making sure things were all set up to run smoothly. At some point, I realized that we had forgotten to buy cheese :P which prompted one of not two, but three Costco trips that we took over the span of 3 days.

Other than that, the day only had one major thing go wrong, and it was the strangely popular “set a cake on fire” event. Apparently to set a cake on fire, you need a LOT of vanilla extract, and the event runner had only requested a single bottle :P after running around distressed for a while (and setting some of the cakes on fire in the oven), we just hoped that a single bottle of extract would work and went for it anyways (it didn’t, but it was fine). Fun fact, though: vanilla extract is 70-proof???

All in all, though, the day went pretty well. I collapsed in bed at midnight (super early for me) completely exhausted and not ready to do it all again in the morning, but such is the life of a CPW chair.

Highlights:

• The “bee cupcakes” event was adorable and the cupcakes were delicious
• The sweet taste of a Costco veggie burger filling my mouth after so, so long
• Going to sleep

Friday [Ankita]

ankita w/ MIT mirchi

Friday was where things started to pick up. I had a Wholesome Breakfast of barbeque chips before going to BC Field Day and then Bolly and Boba with Mirchi, MIT’s amazing Bollywood fusion dance team.
After picking up some swag at the Academic Expo, I hung out in McCormick with some friends until Taste of Cambridge (long live Insomnia Cookies) and Charades Against Humanity in Burton-Conner, which was exactly what it sounds like and definitely one of my favorite events.

academic expo

My friend group hung out at Taste of New for a bit before migrating to S’mores at Maseeh. We didn’t really participate in the event—we just sat in a giant circle talking—but it was still one of my favorite experiences of CPW. Old Town Road played twice…bless

maseeh courtyard

I spent the rest of the night exploring campus, hanging out with friends, and getting food (shoutout to the Clover on Mass Ave for being open 24 hours a day)

Highlights:

• Charades Against Humanity
• Chilling at Maseeh
• Seeing Nisha in her Blogger shirt uwu

Friday [Nisha]

Another day of CPW, another alarm set at 7:45 am. I dragged myself out of bed to light the grills, but was met with a slightly concerning issue around 8:45 am: our 9 am event runner was nowhere to be seen, and prefrosh were already starting to gather in surprisingly large groups. It turns out that said event runner had stayed up till 5 am doing her taxes, and was rightfully too tired to run her event. What ended up happening was an impromptu display of East Campus spirit – when everything is on fire (figuratively, sometimes literally), everybody pitches in to help. We had the prefrosh help us make the batter for the promised crepes and pancakes, and also had them help us make the aforementioned breakfast foods in the kitchen. We somehow managed to meet the demands of the enormous group of prefrosh who had gathered for crepes and pancakes with batter (so much batter) to spare. Shoutout to that one frosh who was really good at making crepes.

We also had a brunch for parents and gave tours afterwards, and man, am I ever tired of giving tours. I must have given four or five parent tours during CPW, and this doesn’t include the tours I gave the prefrosh. Parent tours are a little hard because we have to censor ourselves to some extent, and the questions that they ask can sometimes be really obvious and frustrating. Like, yes, this dorm is co-ed, just like pretty much all the dorms at MIT??? :P

Other than that, I pretty much just ran around micromanaging the whole day. I managed to rack up around ~15000 steps just from being on my feet the whole day, which was impressive.

Highlights:

• Catching a flying wad of whipped cream in my mouth not once, but twice, to the applause of many impressed prefrosh (lol)
• Wearing my stupid blogger shirt with my face on it 
• Taking a quick trip with Jack Florey

Saturday [Ankita]

An hour of sleep later, I was speed walking to Anime Karaoke. It ended late, so I went directly to the Activities Midway, which was really fun and helpful; I spent the full two hours there visiting the booths and watching all the performances.

the taekwondo team at activities midway

Later, I went to the Mocha and Ridonk Workshop, which was absolutely amazing. I was super excited to check out the dance scene at MIT and the workshop confirmed that I have a lot to look forward to in fall!!

the CPW closing show

The sleep deprivation really kicked in after the Closing Show. I left Poker Night early to sleep but instead found myself slumped in a corner of C3 having a very healthy dinner of brownies and Oreos at Fondue Night (yikes). I felt gross and tired and decided to go to bed at 10:30, but after changing into pajamas and taking out my contacts, I checked my phone and saw that my friends were about to go party hopping…so I put my contacts back in, y e e t e d myself into my thigh high boots from hell and RAN to Maseeh to meet up with everyone.

Was it worth it? tbh, yes. After checking out the parties, we went to the lounge on Conner 5 and spent the next three-ish hours playing Sporcle and Contact. I passed out face down on a beanbag for an hour and then walked to the Harvard Bridge to see the sunrise…but rip, it was cloudy :( Still pretty, though!

cloudy sunrise over the charles

Highlights:

• All the dancing!
• Rope swinging to Electric Love by BØRNS in East Campus <3
• thicc squirrels

Saturday [Nisha]

By the third day in a row of waking up at the asscrack of dawn to light the grills, I was fairly sleep deprived, grumpy, and distressed at the fact that I hadn’t done any work in the last three days. Like, seriously. Zero work. I had even skipped mandatory classes :P

But thankfully, Saturday turned out to be a glorious day. It was the day of the East Campus signature event. This year, Admissions asked all the dorms to put on a “signature event” that best represented the culture and feel of each dorm, and we chose to throw an East Campus carnival, complete with a bounce house, a rope swing, spinning arts and juggling, and spray painting the yurt that several upperclassmen had been building since Thursday.

Since I hadn’t been in charge of the signature event, I took the day to chill out and ignore my responsibilities instead of running around panicking. I took the opportunity to pick up a spinning staff for the first time and play around with it for a few hours, and found that I really enjoyed it. I might continue on with it next year if I have the time.

Saturday was genuinely one of the best days that I’ve had in a very, very long time – it was great to see all of East Campus come out and ignore their psets and responsibilities to hang out in the courtyard together. It was a gorgeous day spent surrounded by friends, and it was wonderful.

Highlights: 

• The BOUNCE HOUSE
• The moment when you swing down for the first time on the rope swing
• The Japanese Student Union takoyaki event where I binged myself on Japanese snacks
• Getting a staff trick right

Summary i guess?? [Ankita]

CPW was a tumultuous, overwhelming, glorious, and honestly kinda surreal?? 3.14ish days. I ate sooo much unhealthy food (but walked >45 miles), met tons of wonderful and unique people, and definitely figured out which dorms are right for me ;)) I’m so grateful to all the upperclassmen (especially my lovely host) for offering such great advice and helping make my experience so amazing!!

If I were to do anything differently, I’d…

• embrace spontaneity. planning how long I’d spend at food events was a big ol’ waste of time
• HYDRATE.
• not wear uncomfortable shoes, obviously (pray for my feet)

…But that’s pretty much it!

Removing CPW 2019 from my Bookmarks Bar feels like the end of an era :( can’t wait to be in Nisha’s shoes in a couple

years!

notice the drastic increase @ CPW

Summary [Nisha]

Overall, I’d like to say my experience as a CPW Chair was positive – I liked the chance to be able to represent my community and do good things for it. Unfortunately, I guess I had been expecting it to be a rewarding experience, which it wasn’t really. But hearing the positive comments about East Campus from the parents and the students reminded me that somebody had to do my job, and I think I did a pretty good job of doing it. So all’s well that ends well, I suppose. I was glad when Sunday afternoon swung around and all the prefrosh were finally gone, and I could settle down for a nap and a session of binge watching Season 7 of Game of Thrones in preparation for the season premiere.

To finish off this post, here’s a great picture of Simmons that Ankita took. And, soon to be officially true…welcome, class of 2023!

Welcome to MIT, class of ’23!

the fall 2019 catalog was released recently, perhaps yesterday, and already i’ve seen my friends planning out their fall semesters on firehose for lack of better things to do. michael from 2E is part of the dev team at sipb that’s working on the new-and-hopefully-improved-but-probably-not-yet courseroad 2.0, successor to blogger danny b.d. ’15’s courseroad which has many blog posts about it. (use our website’s search tool! it’s not too bad.) courseroad 2.0 was also released recently, and although it’s in a bit of a rough shape from personally wrangling with it for a little while, it’ll probably be a better version than the original in the near future.

i know for sure that i’ll be using some of these sites in the next couple days to plan out schedules when i have the time:

student.mit.edu/catalog/index.cgi

this is the holy grail. heading 2 tier, no question. personally, i think this website is beautiful. there really is something nostalgic about those HTML4-era-looking icons and the verdana font. this website is the bible of all the classes offered at MIT in the fall. personally, i’ve got the URL memorized. it provides all relevant information about a class and nothing more or less. it is the epitome of what online university class catalogs should be. on the other hand, catalog.mit.edu/subjects/ is absolutely inferior, and is harder to read for lack of icons, and boasts disgustingly modern aesthetics. it also doesn’t include info on actual class schedules, so in short is only pretty to look at and honestly doesn’t even deserve the heading 4 on wordpress.

courseroad.mit.edu/old/

sorry michael, but for now i’m going to go ahead and say this one’s better for now. there’s just a couple things that make it confusing to use at the moment to say it’s better than original courseroad. also, the original courseroad also has a beautiful, nostalgic layout and color scheme to it that courseroad 2 homogenifies.

courseroad.mit.edu

i was originally going to bump it down to a heading 4, but i think it’ll just keep getting better so i’m going to say it deserves the heading 3. i also talked to michael himself for five minutes and was able to learn a lot of non-obvious but necessary/cool features. for example, to change the class year, you click on the year for any semester in your road and a popup appears, where you can tell it your class year. i was initially confused using the app because the default is freshman year, and i thought it was a bug that the road went until 2024. also, you can click and drag classes in right from the requirement list on the left, which is nice and something the original didn’t have.

tldr: good to great features, UI/UX is a little questionable right now, and also bootstrap is not nostalgic to look at.

firehose.guide

now i feel bad for all the recent mit grads that just missed firehose when it was released, because this is a really good tool and the one i primarily use. it’s an indispensable way to quickly see how your schedules will actually turn out on paper so you can debate with yourself for a bit longer whether or not you should not pre-reg that class you really want to take but it’s got a mandatory section at 9am and you’re really not about that.

heading 2 tier for sure.

three bonus things:

1. i dyed my hair! it’s light pink. i like it a lot.
2. i did not succeed in the housing lottery to move back to east campus, so i’m staying at next house next year. this is sad, and maybe i deserve it, but i’m also happy that i’m fine with it since i like 2E.
3. watch letterkenny, it’s a good show.

my alarm goes off at 8am, and i turn it off in probably enough seconds to annoy caleb⁠01 my roommate as i go back to sleep without even thinking. eventually, though, it’s 9:30 and i should really get up, so i climb⁠02 in room 251, we all have Next House Approved^TM lofts down my bed, throw on the clothes i wore last night to see endgame⁠03 i won't give any spoilers. it's both happy and sad, and it was definitely really good but not amazing. , pack my laptop, and head out of next house in light rain.⁠04 i was fortunate to acquire both a waterproof jacket and a waterproof backpack this year, so rain is something i no longer dread

i’m definitely going to be a little late to class⁠05 i have been trying my hardest to never come late to class again in order to not disappoint aikawa-sensei. the story goes like: i'd been late to class a couple times, and one day we were writing practice sentences using the grammar we had just learned. i decided to link my sentences into a story about how i was late to class and it's bad. well, aikawa-sensei was going around and reading people's sentences, and she read mine, smiled, then looked at me with a serious face and said simply, 「本当だよ。」 i swear, that simple sentence hits harder than a pound of brick. don't ever discipline your kids with force, just convey disappointment like aikawa-sensei can. at this rate⁠06 i left next house at 9:50, it takes about 15 minutes to get to building 14, class starts at 10:05, plus there's a vocab quiz. , but i might as well try to get there sooner than later. cory⁠07 my roommate hasn’t even passed me yet, so i’m a little worried for him, but he should be fine. i get to class fine, at exactly 10:05, saying a hurried nod and 「 おはようございます⁠08 it's polite to say good morning. 」 before taking a seat for Japanese 6. cory gets here fine, but kevin⁠09 kevin is a frosh in 2E - my hall - and is a precious boy. in fact, my hall is quite weeb and a significant number of people have taken at least one japanese class at MIT. and also there are like, four freshmen in japanese 6 right now, which is, well, huh. is nowhere to be seen.

we learned about vending machines in japan, and that they rank second in number of installed vending machines in the world.⁠10 behind the US, though the textbook is dated they serve both cold and hot drinks, they talk in 関西弁⁠11 the most popular dialect of japanese besides the tokyo dialect , they make ramen, they sell tickets for ramen, they use Machine Learning to recognize your face and recommend drinks. it’s fascinatingly terrifying.⁠12 i think back to the reddit post i read last night that quipped that 'tokyo was the future that the 90's promised me.'

i’ve been inconsistent with going to 6.857⁠13 cryptography, security recitations but i decide that today was a good day, so i head on over to the green building and head up three flights of stairs to the next floor.⁠14 the story goes like this: I.M. Pei sought to create the tallest building in cambridge. at the time, there was a height code that stated that buildings could be no taller than 18 stories. I.M. Pei had the galaxy brain idea to simply build the Green Building on 'stilts' so that the first story was the equivalent of three stories high, thus creating a 20-story 18-story building. there’s nobody in the seats of 54-100⁠15 a lecture hall today, but the TAs are there.

“Is there recitation today?” i ask.

“Nope, instead of recitation we’re holding a sort-of office hours if you have any questions or need any help on the final project.”

cool, nice. i say thanks and walk out. then pause, and walk back in.

“Do… you know what the grade cutoffs are looking like?”

“I… don’t know, to be honest.”

“So… let’s say you did average on the quiz, and you’re doing pretty alright for the psets. Where would I be?”

“Well… I’d say you’d be in the A/B range. It would depend on your final project.”

cool, nice. i say thanks and walk out.

it’s 11:30 am and i’ve decided to stop at lobby 7 to open up my laptop for a bit. i see a tour group forming and hear a familiar voice. one of my friends is the tour group leader.⁠16 though now i haven't got the time, freshman year summer was when i gave a lot of campus tours. the format's also changed due to new campus additions everywhere and i couldn't even sub for someone now i smile and realize that probably nobody sitting in this institutized⁠17 the café in lobby 7 used to be peets coffee, and they had the mocha javiva, which is an iced blended coffee and mocha drink that in my opinion was to die for. but now it's been replaced with bosworth's café and the iced blended drink is no more. well, dunkin is the way to go now i guess. café are actual MIT students, and that they’re all holding MIT walking tour flyers and taking pictures. there is someone to my right on a close-to-back-cover page of genki 1,⁠18 genki 1 is the textbook used by japanese 1 and 2. japanese 1 covers the first six chapters of genki 1 and japanese 2 covers the last six chapters. japanese 1 is offered in the fall and IAP, japanese 2 is offered in the spring. though, so i know they’re the same as me.

i realize that i need to read several things before 2pm today, first and foremost being another design project⁠19 the final group project where we're trying to design a system that is better than the current 6.033 grading and submission system, which is honestly pretty all over the place and could use some work, though it's not as bad as you would think team’s preliminary report⁠20 the first 'milestone' assignment for the design project for the peer review.⁠21 one of the many things we have to do because this class is a CI-M, i.e. tons of writing

i decide to do the reading in building 12.⁠22 mit.nano before i begin, shardul⁠23 a lovely frosh from toons walks up to me and holds my hand.

“there are no places to sit,” shardul said.

“yeah.”

“i dislike this.”

“yeah.”

“i am going to go somewhere else now.”

“go do that.”

we stare into each other’s eyes for maybe five seconds, then shardul nods and smiles and walks away. 24 i love shardul.

i head to 6.033 in building 66. peer review was fine, i said maybe like three or four sentences for the entire actual thing, there were lots of people in the discussion group so it wasn’t like i was pressured to say anything.⁠25 nisha probably said the most out of anyone. and just like that, my day’s over. what happens next is up to me.

i browse reddit⁠26 unfortunately the main source of procrastination, though i don't regret it for a second and find out that they teased a new league of legends champion, and her name is yuumi and she’s a cute adorable cat. i immediately send joanna⁠27 my so a link and send messages along the lines of “SHE HAS AN ABILITY CALLED ZOOMIES” and “she also has a voice line that goes something like ‘shields, heals, cuddles!’ and i really vibe with that.”

it’s 3pm. i decide to take the walk back home to next house, seeing as i’m kind of tired and feel like taking a nap. it’s still raining lightly, but less so than before. there’s a taco truck parked outside of kresge that i couldn’t buy from even if i wanted.⁠28 unforunately, my bank account is all zeroes. in fact, one could say that this very blog post is partially motivated by my desire to not subsist on dining food on a daily basis.

kale’s watching something on his laptop. i’m going to take my clothes out of the dryer from yesterday and take a nap.

i end up staying in next house for the rest of the day. the rain started to get worse and by 8pm, lightning crackles in the sky. i put my laundry on the rug under my bed and contemplate folding it but decide⁠29 like a degenerate to not fold it and leave that for tomorrow.

tonight we watch letterkenny with the boys and play 1000 blank white cards⁠30 our hall liked to play mao on a near-constant basis once upon a time. this game was a good alternative. for the first time. it’s a good example of a next-house-y friday night.⁠31 along with all the other things that weekend nights at MIT usually imply

before i know it, it’s 2am and my head kind of hurts so i climb into bed and within ten seconds, i’m out like a log.

A couple days ago in the blogger slack, Petey sent a screenshot of a prospective 2023’s message expressing hesitation about choosing MIT.

I think a lot of ppl are concerned about choosing MIT due to it being more ‘technical’ than other schools, especially those less certain about what they want to do.

We were in this boat as prefrosh, and then in our freshman and sophomore year, we hopped into the “did we come to the right school?” boat.

We don’t want to treat this blog as a way to directly advise you. We don’t want to say something like: if you feel X, then you will regret coming to MIT, or if you feel Y, you will definitely love being at MIT. So, instead we will talk about our journey. We hope that this will help somehow, if you are still thinking about what to do on May 1st.

Let’s start with high school. For us, MIT was our dream school. We obsessively read the blogs and didn’t give another school a chance… that is, until… we got deferred.

Suddenly, we were faced with the reality that we most likely wouldn’t be able to come to MIT. We had to seriously consider other schools, and for the first time in high school, we did.

When we were fixated on MIT, we did not question that we would major in a STEM field, because STEM is what consumed most of our classes and time and activities in high school. But in those three months between deferral and acceptance, we found ourselves checking to make sure all the other schools we were applying to either had animation classes or art departments or both. When forced to look at other options — schools that weren’t as uniquely technical as MIT — it became evident to us that art was something important to us, and maybe something we’d even want to major in.

Fast forward to getting accepted to MIT. We were beyond shocked and ecstatic. We Felt All The Feelings.

But unlike if we had gotten accepted in December, getting accepted in March left us not automatically comMITed. We now had hesitations, because we weren’t sure if MIT would be able to support our artistic interests as much as other schools might be able to.

At CPW, we scoured Activities Midway for art-related clubs, and we went to the CMS and Course 4 booths at the Academic Expo. We still felt some things were missing, like traditional art and animation classes, but we found out MIT allows cross-registration at MassArt. This, plus all the amazing people we met at CPW, convinced us to comMIT.

Despite CPW’s reassurance, we did still feel that ‘did we come to the right school?’ feeling in our freshman and sophomore year. Freshman year was consumed by technical GIRs, which vastly did not interest us. And in Sophomore year, our favorite classes we’re the ones that we took at MassArt each semester. This, in summary, made us a) feel confused about what we should be majoring in and b) made us feel that we made the wrong decision coming to MIT.

But, describing this side of the coin paints an incomplete picture. At the same time that our freshman and sophomore MIT classes made us feel like we messed up when choosing a college, our freshman and sophomore extracurriculars convinced us we didn’t.  

From Borderline to Art Club to FAP to Art Scholars to the SAA, we completely immersed ourselves in the Arts at MIT! These activities shaped our first two years at MIT more than any classes could’ve. The people we met through these communities, who felt similarly in this regard to us, and the projects we worked on made us so happy to be at MIT.

Now, where are we? As juniors, we feel like we finally found our footing, in terms of confidence in our major, choice of MIT, and enjoyment of our classes and activities! And even though it took 5 semesters to get here, we don’t regret it. 

This is our journey. We’ve had lows, questioning why we’re spending so much time on such technical and difficult psets that mean so little to us, highs, feeling so satisfied in our classes and extracurriculars, and in betweens, feeling content but not ecstatic about our experiences here.

We still waver sometimes, and have minor doubts about our college/major decisions, like when, over winter break and spring break, we do personal art for the first time in months of not. But the feeling is much more mellow now than it was in our first half of MIT.

It’s not perfect, nothing is; and it’s not like in our first half of MIT, we subscribed solely to the ‘hate’ variety of IHTFP, and now we subscribe solely to the ‘paradise’ variety, even if this blog may have made it seem so.

Much like an unexpected rainbow after the rain, the ‘paradise’ variety revealed itself, but you still see the wet pavement underneath. And likewise, when the rainbow isn’t visible, you know that eventually, one day, it will be.

To set the mood: Feeling Blue

“When I’m in New York I listen to Palestinian hip hop, but when I’m in Palestine, I listen to the blues.”
— Nida Sinnokrot, Palestine Blues

Spring break, I embarked on a site visit to a small village next to Ramallah, Palestine, with my HASS class, 4.314 Common Ground: Art, Science & Agriculture, offered under the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT).

I signed up for this class out of the blue, not really knowing what I was getting myself into. The syllabus sounded interesting, and I wanted to do something totally out of the ordinary, something beyond the confines of computer science or even STEM.

The course description read:

The history of art is also a history of agriculture, marking humanity’s complex relationship with the land…In this era of impending climate catastrophe, it is essential to seek diverse knowledges and build new narratives around humanity’s relationship to the environment.

and suggested that we’d:

examine historic typologies of Palestinian architectural and agrarian technologies, bringing them into conversation with contemporary technoscientific and artistic discourses … and travel to Palestine over spring break to study Sakiya’s physical site and work with the local community to build prototypes of their projects.

After the first class, I was sold. I even passed up an offer to skate in a charity show the weekend we’d depart for Palestine. But this was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I took a leap of faith and was ready to be out of my depth. I was also looking into ways I could intersect my technical background with an entirely different domain.

I mean…what better time to try than senior spring?

We spent the first day exploring the Old City of Jerusalem and some of its holy sites. I was amazed with the hustle and bustle and the flow of people, conversation, and goods to and from shops and storefronts and in between narrow and winding footpaths and alleyways and streetcorners.

After enjoying a refreshing family-style breakfast consisting of generous portions of various varieties of fresh humus, spreads, vegetables, and breads, we did some shopping, picked up some local pastries and fruits, and headed to the Rockefeller Museum, exploring a rich collection of local archaeological artifacts dating back to some of the world’s oldest civilizations.

We then crossed some checkpoints and arrived at the base of Sakiya, the top accessed only by foot (or donkey). After a short but challenging hike up to the top of the main hill, we were rewarded by the most stunning sunset, the perfect culmination of a long day’s worth of travels and sightseeing.

It was absolutely breathtaking, a sunset I’ll never forget. I’m still in awe.

The next morning, we explored historic dry-stone walls and mintars (dry-stone homes) that weave in and out of the landscape, and began our week-long inquiry into the local flora and fauna of the landscape as well. With the help of an agroecological professor, we engaged in a survey of the local wild relatives—including the ancestors of modern wheat and legumes, and even snacked on wild asparagus, almonds, mustard grass, and other tasty delights—and discussed the ecological impact of modern-day agricultural practices and technology in the region.

Before we arrived, my group prototyped a rocket stove to be developed and tested on site as part of our midterm project. We tested a scaled down version out of clay on campus, but one afternoon, we decided to test one on site out of the same stones used for the dry-stone walls.

Bridging their separate domain expertise into the intersection of art, science, and agriculture, my classmates worked on their own projects on site: soil chromatography, seed bombs, ceramics, glass-blowing, 3D imaging, and more.

The last few years, I’ve pursued human-computer interaction through various UROPs, classes, and projects. Since taking this course, however, I’ve surprised myself in starting to break away from human-centered exceptionalism and explore the implications of putting human-centric mental models at the forefront without a second thought on their impact on ecological sustainability.

Often, classes and even projects seem too theoretical and impractical beyond the confines of the classroom or academia, but this class has completely transformed the way I think and approach problem-solving. The literature we’ve read and discussed in class has enabled me to rationalize much more critically and intentionally about the things I build and my relationship with the land we live on, the technology we use, and the systems, infrastructure, and power dynamics that govern our communities—more so than any class I’ve taken, ever.

In fact, the most interesting classes I’ve taken have been my HASS classes, whether it’s in history, political science, theater arts, or languages. Each semester, it’s nice to take a step back from the psets and exams, explore a different domain, take on different modes of inquiry, make connections, explore parallels and alternate perspectives, and use all that to better inform how I approach my work within Course 6. This class, not only brought me to the other side of the globe, but has opened up an entirely new domain of inquiry that I’ll continue to debate and explore far beyond the confines of this course.

For my final project, however, although I intended not to work on anything digital or technical, I ended up focusing on a project that involves sensors and microcontrollers. You can never escape those hardy Arduinos! One afternoon, I quickly prototyped a mini weather station to collect temperature, humidity, and magnetic field data in a portable unit, and went around the hillside to capture data in dry-stone walls all around the site. I’m now using what I learned on site to design the next iteration of my project back here on campus.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I loved how fresh and wholesome the foods we ate were. A local family cooked many of our midday meals and suppers with ingredients sourced locally, many even coming from Sakiya’s land too. Freshly baked pitas, rich humus, goat cheese, and labneh (thick yogurt), smooth olive oil and za’atar (dried thyme), refreshing tomatoes and cucumbers and citrus—I can still taste and smell it all.

We also tried stretchy ice cream, the predecessor to the ice cream we know and eat today. This was by far my favorite delicacy. The texture is so unique and fun and delicious, even in its plain form. Our professor suggested we all try the “taste of childhood,” a colorful combination of various fruity flavors popular amongst the younger crowd. Another favorite of mine is kanafeh, a hot desert made from sweetened cheese and other toppings.

On a morning off, we got a chance to explore Ramallah, Palestine’s largest city, and its shops and street-side vendors. Even in the morning, the whole city was bustling with people and energy. Another afternoon, we got a private tour of the Palestinian Museum and a sneak preview of its newest exhibition, Intimate Terrains: Representations of a Disappearing Landscape, quite pertinent to the themes that we’ve been discussing in class. Each piece was centered around one of the four themes: erasure, loss, fragmentation, and resistance, and how these themes can apply to any part of the world. Our professor even has a piece in the exhibition that we got to check out.

I spent most of the week off the grid. I cherished being temporarily outside the campus bubble, on a completely different continent, mostly disconnected from news, social media, and the drudgery of responding to emails, putting all my work for my other classes on pause. This was spring break after all.

Our days started fairly early and ended pretty late. But my goal for this trip was to soak everything in, the environment, people, and stories, apply what we’ve learned in class earlier in the semester in a true Mens et Manus fashion, find inspiration for my final project, my life, my career, and appreciate each and every moment we had here.

I spent many hours hiking, climbing rocks, exploring the hillside terrain and ecology, taking pictures, playing with Tutti the dog and Shareefa the donkey (my two new habibi‘s!), and sitting and staring out into the mountains, reflecting and internalizing my experiences here.

There is something just so beautiful about this place, Sakiya, so raw, pure and authentic. Maybe it’s because the landscape feels oddly familiar. It reminds me much of where I grew up in the Bay Area and the unique Mediterranean climate it offers.

Here, I was content and relaxed.

Near the end of the week, we spent an evening at a home of a local artist and, for hours and hours, were captivated by all these absolutely incredibly powerful and moving stories of strength, resilience, and beauty of the land and people through a showcase of a wide variety of Palestinian art pieces.

As I look back and reminisce about each moment of the trip, beyond the stunning sunsets and landscape, I will forever cherish how warm and welcoming everyone was to each of us throughout our trip. It has hard to say goodbye. This is a week I will never forget.

شكراً