MIT is going through changes right now in addition to the new phase of the CUP first-year experiment. Here are two that actually affect me.

Graduating Early

We are within throwing distance of Commencement 2019, in which most of the people who got here in September 2015 will be graduating. The occasion is scheduled for June 7, as it is traditional for MIT commencement to occur around the first week of June.

The ’18s graduated on June 8, the ’17s graduated on June 9, the ’16s graduated on June 3, the ’15s graduated on June 5, the ’14s graduated on June 6, and the ’13s graduated on June 7, and the ’12s graduated on June 8.

The late commencement date is pretty cool for a few reasons: IAP feels longer since we don’t have to register for spring semester until the first week of February, we get a 4-day weekend for Patriots’ Day, and all the other schools in the area Commence earlier so that your interaction with Harvard parents in public spaces is minimized.

However, graduating on June 8 means you have to move out of the dorm on June 9, and into… somewhere that lets you sign a lease starting in the middle of a month? Or maybe you live off campus, and the place you’re in wants you to pay a whole month’s rent when you only need it for another week. And maybe you were planning on doing an internship or starting a job immediately after graduating (such is society), but those are also the kinds of things that tend to kick off around the first of the month.

The howevers here (which all are more legitimate points than I don’t want to have to stand in line at Flour with Remington J. Halliburton V and Alexander Q. Raytheon III⁠01 These are jokes made in the spirit of playful rivalry! Please don't blacklist me Mr. Corporation! I need a job! ) have led to the generally favorable administrative decision⁠02 This feels like an oxymoron at this point to move commencement to the week of Memorial Day, which is the last Monday of May.

And so I will graduate with the other ’20s on May 29, the ’21s will graduate on May 28, the ’22s will graduate on May 27, the ’23s will graduate on June 2, the ’24s will graduate on May 31, and the ’25s will graduate on May 30.

My mom is already trying to buy plane tickets.

The Great Biology Merger

On Tuesday, I was a Course 7A. 7A is basically the same as Course 7, except you get to choose a CI-M that isn’t 7.18.

What is CI-M? What is 7.18?

Every Course⁠03 You call it <del>corn</del> major, we call it <del>maize</del> course at MIT requires the completion of two⁠04 You can take more than two if you want classes that are communication intensive,⁠05 Usually meaning that you write papers or do presentations and then have to meet with a communication instructor for feedback so you can improve on the next paper or presentation or CI-Ms. These are similar to CI-Hs, which are the two⁠06 Again, you can take more than two if you want communication intensive HASS⁠07 Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences classes that you are required to take. The difference is that most people⁠08 There are always plenty of people who do both of these freshman year, or on the other end of the spectrum, people who put off their last CI-H for freshman year because they want to take CI-Ms earlier take their CI-Hs freshman and sophomore years, and most people take their CI-Ms their junior and senior years when they actually have declared their majors and have taken classes to give them background knowledge to complete a CI-M. You have to finish at least one CI class per academic year.

7.18 is a behemoth 30- unit⁠09 At MIT, 1 unit=1 hour of in-class and out of class work per week CI-M in which you perform research and write what is essentially an undergrad thesis. This and the 18-unit 7.02 Intro to Experimentation and Communication in Biology were the required CI-Ms for course 7 until recently. In order to take 7.18, you must have taken 7.06 Cell Biology (which has 7.03 Genetics and 7.05 Biochemistry as prereqs, which have 7.01x Intro Biology and 5.12 Organic Chemistry I as prereqs, which has 5.11x/3.091 Intro Chemistry as a prereq) and also have completed a 12-unit UROP/non-credit equivalent in an MIT biology lab. The department does not set up UROPs for you, and they won’t pair you to a lab. Couple these demands requirements with a 30 hour per week (that’s 6 hours per school day) expected time commitment for a single class, and you’ve got a major that will scare away even the most curious biology hobbyist. Taking 7.18 requires a good deal of planning and class-passing⁠10 This is not to disparage the planners and class-passers; most course 7s I know of actually have cohesive projects that they have been working on for a long time and respect the 30 units of credit that they get for pursuing their passions that doesn’t come naturally to most people. For example, I am taking 7.06 this semester, so I would only be able to take 7.18 next semester when I am likely applying for grad school and should not be spending 6 hours (or more!) in lab working on a project that would have looked better on my grad school apps had I completed it earlier.

So I’m a 7A. My non-7.02 CI-M is 9.28 Current Topics in Developmental Neurobiology, a whole 21 units less than 7.18 would have been. All is well except now effective Fall 2019 I’ll just be a course 7. And I didn’t even have to fill out a major change form! All because…

• Courses 7 and 7A are being consolidated into just Course 7.
• 7.18 will no longer be offered.
• 7.02 is being replaced with the 6-unit 7.002 Fundamentals of Experimental Molecular Biology and the 12-unit 7.003 Molecular Biology Laboratory. 7.002 was first offered last semester as a sort of intro lab class that first years can take to gain the skills necessary to get a bio UROP without needing to have completed the standard course 7 prereqs.

I took 7.02, so I know just how much time that class took. I am happy that these changes have been made. It did, however, make things a little difficult for me last week when I was trying to get my double major⁠11 On my way! to a CMS major form signed. I already had to change the graduation date from 6/2020 to 5/2020. I took my form to the bio department to sign on Tuesday, then on Wednesday they emailed out about how everyone who is 7A will just be a 7 from now on, so when I got my form I had to cross out 7A in the primary major spot.

If you’re interested, you can find all the required classes for the bio major here (and if you click some of the stuff on the left you can find the requirements for other majors but why click on those when you can be a bio major). Here are the biology restricted electives of which you pick at least 3:

They’re all good options! Be a course 7!

I did some ~leadership~ in high school, as I’m sure many of you did. Maybe your experiences were similar to mine; probably a lot of them were, tbh, since I followed a very typical path. In middle school and freshman year, I joined some clubs, learned a lot, and had fun; sophomore and junior year, I stuck with the clubs I cared about the most and learned more about them and how they worked. Senior year, I was In Charge: the clubs took over my life, and I spent lots and lots of my time and energy planning events and teaching kiddos. By the end of senior year, I was super burned out and ready to move on, and although I still talk to the younger students I met through those clubs, I’m barely involved at all with their actual day-to-day workings.

Sound familiar? There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this path; through my extracurricular involvement in high school, I learned a lot, both about my clubs’ topics themselves (#Classics4lyfe) and about how to mentor younger people and run large groups. I had a ton of fun, met my girlfriend and some of my best friends, and was given an outlet for my energy and creativity that my classes didn’t always offer.

But at the same time, there were downsides. By the end of senior year, I was exhausted and desperately needed a break.⁠01 Which I didn't really get, because I worked a job all summer. Don't do this if you can avoid it, kids! Summer before freshman year = time to relax. Then, I moved to Boston, making me pretty unavailable to help the younger students who now run my clubs. I experienced this dynamic, too, when I was the younger student, and it was sometimes really difficult — for example, when my predecessor hadn’t left good enough records and I didn’t know how to do a traditional task, or when my predecessor was officially the one in charge for one more month, but in effect, they had already checked out.

In high school, I thought this was just the way things were. Life is hard; get used to it.

And then I came to MIT, and I realized that there was so much more to the world than I thought there was.⁠02 this is true with respect to many things. maybe i will make a post compiling them all some day

At MIT, or at least in the little corners of it I’ve seen, the leadership trajectory is nothing like this; it takes a shape I honestly never imaged in high school. At MIT, freshmen get to do things! Freshmen get to be the president of their a cappella group, or run an ESP program, or be in charge of running their dorm’s CPW events, or work with administrators to help review and update our housing policies… and these things are common, encouraged, and in some cases even tradition.

How do we make this work? What’s preventing all of us freshmen from biting off more than we can chew and drowning? Well, to be honest, it sometimes happens (it sometimes happens to everyone; that’s the MIT Experience TM), and I do think there are some positions that might really require a year’s worth of familiarity with the Institute. But the real secret here is: upperclassman and alumni involvement.

When freshmen take on more leadership roles, older students don’t get as burned out; they stick around for mentorship, and to field a barrage of questions like “When was this due last year?”, “Should I mention X or just Y in my email?”, and “Do we always spend $1,000 on this?” MIT has a culture of alumni involvement, aka people not just blowing the popsicle stand after four years and then only interacting to donate money to the corporation, and I think that’s not necessarily present at all undergrad institutions. Plus, we have a robust grad school and we live in a big city; people often stick around for a few years after graduating, whether to get more education or simply because their job is here. Lots of those people just keep on showing up, supporting their old groups at events and pitching in when help is needed. So although freshmen may be in charge, in reality, our support system is much, much stronger than it was when I was In Charge (with capitals!) in high school.

I think that this is one facet, perhaps a less-often recognized one, of MIT’s unique mentality, which I have just now coined “sink or swim with support.” (And, like, I’m not claiming that it’s always like this — sometimes the support isn’t there, and that’s obviously Bad. What I’m describing is MIT at its best.) Here, you have room to try and fail: to tackle hard psets, to sign up for difficult classes, to try out roles for which you might have little experience. Many of us learn from this that our abilities are greater than we thought them to be, and succeed where we had worried we would fail. But if we do fail, there are office hours; there is a very late drop date; there are older students who can advise and teach you. And with this safety net, I personally, at least, feel more able to take a chance when I do not know if I will reach my goal — I’m able to stretch my failure muscles instead of only ever trying things I know I can do, and never finding out what else I might be capable of.

So, uh, catch me at my a cappella group’s concert on Friday?!?!? I will be the one holding the thirty-six servings of mac and cheese I just ordered on Amazon, handing out the skit scripts, humming my music so I don’t forget it, and trying not to lose my mind.

<3

Earlier today, we completed and released our decisions for transfer applicants who applied for entry during Fall 2019.

You may access your decision at apply.mitadmissions.org—the same site where you submitted your application. You will log in using the same email and password used to create your application account, and you can log in now to check your decision.

Our transfer admissions process was quite competitive: 607 students applied to transfer, and we have admitted 20. And as usual, we are very excited about the students we have admitted, and often chagrined about those we could not.

As a former transfer student myself (not to MIT), I know that this process can be a difficult experience. For those of you who were admitted: welcome to MIT. For those who weren’t: keep on trucking. I transferred, but if I hadn’t, things would have been fine. Whatever happens, I wish you the best of luck wherever you go, and whatever you do.

Centimeters to Inches

Peering out of the plane’s window,

a shy, tanned girl arrived

looking from left to right

trying to find something she’d recognize.

But the “hola”s from home, the kisses on the cheek,

they were all gone.

Replaced by grey handshakes and “how are you doing”s

lacking response.

The shy, tanned girl stepped down from the plane and learned how to laugh

Typing “h”s instead of “j”s so that they could finally understand. ¹

She spoke in centimeters but got used to the imperial inches

and screwed up a recipe or two…

How could she know what an ounce of milk was supposed to look?

But as days passed, the shy tanned girl learned

that measurements mean much more than that.

“The amount of space between two points” was not enough to describe

the excruciating pain that she felt in her heart.

Distance is much more than being far away,

It is to know how a welcome hug tastes,

Turning it into your favorite flavor

And doing the impossible to not forget.

Distance is learning not to say goodbye

Because it tastes so bitter and sad,

So instead you mutter a “see you later”,

Grab your bags and try not to look back.

Distance is to have your brain in one country

and leave your heart kilometers behind.

It is to acknowledge that you’ll be that friend that’s never there,

And that now you are the invisible daughter for your mom.

Distance is to gradually lose your accent,

And those words that you used to love.

Replacing them by “lol”s and “omg”s,

That’s what kids say nowadays, no?

Distance is the birthdays through Skype,

The long voice notes through WhatsApp,

The one million “I miss you” through texts,

And the longing for that eternal summer you left.

Distance is to learn how to live on your own,

To become stronger and independent.

It is to have some incredible days, and some really bad ones too, that’s also okay.

It is to feel completely lonely but to suddenly realize

That your people are still there, only a few texts apart.

Which means that you will never be alone,

Because sometimes the heart can travel where your voice can’t go.

Because distance separates bodies, it doesn’t separate hearts.

Because for a few weeks a year

the now-not-so-tanned girl will return,

And with tears in her eyes she’ll say:

I’m home.

MIT is a truly unique place where one meets people from different states as well as very different parts of the world. Despite there being a significant population of international students with whom one can relate to a certain extent, the bond will never be the same as one you would share with someone who was born and raised in your home country. Coming to MIT with your family and friends thousands of kilometers away is not at all easy. It forces one to mature very quickly and to accept the fact that every time you go back home things will be different.

I wrote this poem because, after not being able to go back to my country (Peru) for a year, I began feeling homesick once again. I want to let other international students know that they are not alone in this pain, and that I really admire each and every one of them because it is indeed really tough to suddenly wake up in a completely different culture and face the challenges that MIT gives you. So this is a piece of my heart that I’d like to share with my fellow international students. We can do this, guys!

Antonella Masini Ortiz is a sophomore majoring in Mechanical Engineering.

1. In Spanish the way that you type a laugh is “jajaja” instead of “hahaha”

I like to quantify. I like magnitudes and metrics. It’s incredibly easy to measure my life at MIT by courseload units, GPA, hours slept, money earned and spent (mostly spent). In fact, I often conflate progress with quantifiable successes—exam scores, for example. And sometimes this is fine, but in the last few months, I’ve been trying to step away from quantitative measures of growth.

I first realized my tendency to quantify at the end of last semester. One of my final assignments in a literature class was to write a letter reflecting on what we had learned, and I decided to be honest:

The reading journals were difficult for me because they were open-ended and I was used to formulaic writing within literature classes; sentences were patterned and it was my job to dissect those patterns for function. Similarly, this cover letter is difficult for me to write, because it is open-ended, and I usually am not expected to reflect upon what I have learned.

Parse a text for irony and allegory? Simple. Scrutinize a block of imagery for theme and characterization? No problem. Analyze my own educational progress in some non-rigorous manner? Um . . .

Don’t get me wrong. Quantifying can be useful. (How else would I keep track of how many times I’ve gotten Chipotle this semester? The answer, by the way, is 12.) But even at MIT, not everything can be measured.

When I signed with my literary agent in early September, she said, “I’d like to go out on submission this fall.” Essentially, I was supposed to finish revising my novel by October, so we could send my manuscript out to publishing houses. Keywords, supposed to, because it’s May now and I’m not yet done. In fact, within the last few weeks, I’ve realized that this isn’t the novel I want to put out into the wider world, and it was no longer something that spoke to me.

The last few days, I’ve been a little sad. I wrote tens of thousands of words, and yet have nothing to show for it. I wasted my entire sophomore year on a project that was never going to sit on bookshelves.

Except, as I realized, my sophomore year wasn’t a waste. Far from it.

There’s been quantifiable progress. Last semester, I got straight As for the first time, after a freshman year that can best be described as “oof.” I joined a couple of really awesome projects (one of which won $10,000 at the IDEAS challenge last Saturday!). I got to publish a short story collection—it’s still wild to me that there are people out there reading my words!!

But there’s been unquantifiable progress, too, which might be much more meaningful. I’ve only written one article for The Tech this year, but that doesn’t describe the many hours I spent in the office, bonding with the other wonderful staffers. My debate partner and I drove to Wesleyan University for a tournament, only to lose every single round (well, we won one by default, as the other team ditched); our win-loss ratio can’t measure the memories we forged on the trip.

Sophomore year as a bright conglomerate of friendships new and old: three a.m. conversations, impromptu 7/11 runs, acapella concerts and play readings and dance showcases, meme tags.

In the past eight months, I’ve learned how to manage my time better (thanks, iCalendar) and how to use a mop (apparently you’re supposed to wring it out first). I’ve become more compassionate, more introspective. I decided that it’s okay if my growth looks different than other people’s—it’s okay if I don’t snag a tech internship or take engineering classes or join lots of clubs, because I’d rather allocate my time in other places. It’s okay if I don’t sell a novel before I turn twenty-one; revising my last manuscript taught me so much about writing, even if it didn’t directly translate into publication. It’s okay if my growth can’t be measured along some numbered axis.

I still like to quantify, but I’m learning how to reflect upon life without metrics. So here’s to the unquantifiable: laughter, dreams, and the first sunshine in spring.

I rolled out of bed at 8:30am last Friday and raced to Pappalardo. 01 Pappalardo is a gigantic course 2 lab/workshop that fills the bottom of building 3. It's also where a lot of course 2s live when they take 2.009 in the fall. The persistent stings of the metal cuts and scratches littering my hands fueled my trek to campus. Today was the last chance I had to work on and impound my robot.

It didn’t work.

It could get a whole 7 points.

I don’t care.

Sure it was a bummer, but the fundamental problems with my robot, Flipstream, were too extensive to fix in time. It didn’t matter though.

2.007 was a trial by fire in the art of making. We were on our own, and had just a few months to throw together an FTC-sized robot. 02 16 in cube/12 lbs were our constraints. my robot was juuuust under 16 in long. I had one desire: to make something that looked cool enough so that I didn’t care about how it performed. And Flipstream, adorned with ~stylish~ foam-core “blinders”, haphazardly placed electronics, and drive belts galore all with a sleek, low-profile silhouette fit the bill. 03 Just mentioning that the pappalardo lab staff were supportive as heck.

I impounded my robot and left Pappalardo at about 3:45pm. Underneath my exhausted mess of a face, I was relieved and proud of what I’d spent hundreds of hours building and thinking about. Only then did I realize that the only thing I ate that day was a cup of vanilla greek yogurt.

Haha and you thought the day was over…

Three hours ahead of me lay the first-ever Next Sing 04 A hybrid acapella and instrumental singing group within Next House! Our main goal for the group was for it to be super chill and low commitment. concert. What started as essentially a shower thought by Cynthia L. ’20 ended up becoming an actual thing. Like, for lack of a better term,

W

T

F

In the beginning, I hardly realized what she roped me into being co-president for. I went to a sound check at 4:30ish for the song I actually led and put together, 05 If you're curious, the song was Cinderella Syndrome by YUC'e, an artist you should probably only know if you play rhythm games on a semi-regular basis. my head still a mess from robot.mp4, 06 I actually had to head to campus and back to finish and turn in my 2.007 notebook by '5:00'... I got back to Next around 5:45 and missed another sound check... oops and I saw lights set up, rows of soon-to-be-filled chairs, and a work in progress sound system… and then basically I thought “oh wait… this is actually happening.” I spent the 45 minutes I ended up having prior to the concert in my room both attempting to iron stuff on a chair, 07 This was not the first time I've done this, and it still was super frustrating. and attempting to rid myself of this nervous anticipation that filled my mind. 6:45 came around, and I raced down stairs where 5 billion things assaulted me all at once. I mean I came into this knowing that it was our first concert, but… it’d be hard to list all the concert-related things that were organized 15 minutes prior. 08 Like Cynthia's throat almost died right before the concert, and she was supposed to MC, so I had to emergency cover for that.

And yet… the concert started… and, guess what, once again, I didn’t care. I just wanted to have fun. Sure there were a number of issues (rip yellow mic… you let us all down at the worst time), but I didn’t let that bother me. I haven’t performed in front of a crowd in over a year, and I’ve never done a hybrid MC/Skit/singing thing like this ever, so I just let myself loose and had fun with it. 09 Nothing matches the experience of being heckled by a crowd you know well.

This semester, labs, projects, and extracurriculars supplanted the normal MIT drudgery of psets, 9am lectures, and constant midterms. I’ve made new friends, and I’m happy with these two big things I’ve made this semester. It’s been a huge mental struggle, but I feel like I’ve learned a lot about myself and the people around me. Nothing was perfect, nothing can ever be perfect, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t satisfied.

Now about that one final I have in a few weeks…

Avengers: Endgame opened the weekend before last, and with it, so did the new decoration of the MIT dome. Sometime late Saturday evening, or early Sunday morning (it’s always hard to tell with those who do their best work in the dark), hackers installed a Captain America shield on the roof of the Great Dome as an homage to the Marvel hero. Via the Globe: 

One of the jokesters — they cheekily call themselves “hackers” — reached by the Globe Sunday said dozens of people worked on the project for months, which they started planning about a year ago after learning a new Marvel movie was going to be released.

Chris Evans, who plays Cap in the MCU (and is from the Boston suburb of Sudbury), seemed to appreciate the gesture.

The Great Dome has long been a site of hacks, including tributes to Batman, LOTR, and R2D2. If you’re unfamiliar with the MIT tradition of hacks, you can read more about the history here, and read blog posts about hacks here.

Moments ago, at 6PM Eastern Time, we released, via email, our decisions for students who were on the wait list for the Class of 2023. If you did not receive this email, you should check your spam or other filters/folders now! 

We have been deliberating our decisions regarding the wait list for the last few days, since the May 1 deadline for admitted students to enroll at MIT. As such, we are approaching the last of the many decisions that are made while constructing a class: we decide whom we want to admit, then those people decide whether to accept our offer of admission, and then we decide whom, if anyone, we want to take off the wait list, and those people then decide whether or not to accept our belated (but enthusiastic!) offer. At long last, the deciding is almost done.

Every year, we plan to admit students from the wait list. How many we admit is a function of our yield rate, which is admissions industry term for the percentage of students who choose to accept our offer of admission. The wait list is used to manage the uncertainty of knowing how many students will accept the offer, and thus how many beds you have available in residence halls, for example.

This year, 78% of the students we admitted chose to enroll at MIT. This number is a record-high, and toward the upper bound of our projections; consequently, we have only been able to offer admission to 17 out of the 408 students on our wait list. At this point, our wait list is closed, and we will not be admitted any more first-year students to the Class of 2023.

A few years ago, in a post addressed to wait list students, Mikey wrote:

We have seen all the wonderful updates that many of you have submitted, and appreciate the time and effort you have put in to letting us know how much you love MIT. As someone who was wait listed at my first choice college in high school (but didn’t end up getting in), I’m actually glad that I ended up where I did (even though it wasn’t somewhere I really thought I wanted to go). Looking back now, it was a great fit for me and I had an amazing experience, even though I didn’t expect that going in.

I share his sentiments, and will add that I also was on a wait list, and remember what it was like to have that uncertainty pass well beyond the rest of my classmates. Unlike Mikey, I ended up getting in and enrolling at that school; ironically, I ended up not liking it once I actually went there, and transferred somewhere else entirely after my first year. I’m sharing this story with you to emphasize, as I’ve blogged before, that whatever happened with your wait list decision, and whatever decision you make about it, you will end up becoming yourself, and that whatever choice you make (or was made for you), chances are that five years later you will look back on this day and realize everything turned out okay. I also hope you remember that  success is not always a straight line, and that your path isn’t something MIT sets you on, it’s something you make yourself.

On behalf of our entire staff, thank you for sharing your hopes, fears, and aspirations with us. We look forward to watching you achieve your dreams, whether from near or afar. Regardless what decision you received today, I hope you know that we believe in you, and wish you the best, wherever you path leads next.

ever take a class that inspires one of these lists?

things I could be doing instead of this class:

1. reading The New Yorker
2. talking about reading The New Yorker so everybody knows I’m an intellectual who reads The New Yorker.⁠01 I particularly like <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/26/the-right-way-to-remember-rachel-carson">this article about Rachel Carson.</a>
3. taking pictures of black holes
4. recreating the Monty Hall problem (anybody got two goats to spare?)
5. writing anime fanfiction⁠02 when I was twelve years old, I wrote a 60,000 word <i>Shugo Chara!</i> fanfic. in other words, I was incredibly unpopular in middle school.
6. memeing
7. my taxes

yeah so, this was me @ one of my classes this past semester. to make matters worse, this class was tedious and confusing, a deadly combination. in fact, I was so stressed about this class that I brought my problem sets to ring delivery.

with the other Tech staffers! not pictured: the two psets stashed in my purse :(

the next day, I dropped the class. I was pretty hesitant about doing so, since it was already mid-April and I’d sunk two-and-a-half months into this thing. all those four a.m. psets would be for naught . . . plus, I felt uncomfortable with the idea of only being in four classes, or forty-eight units, when most of my friends were in more.⁠03 I watched one of my friends fill out the form to drop a twelve-unit class. then he was all, <em>now I'm only in seventy-eight units</em>! and I was like, <em>how are you alive.</em>

but ultimately, I realized that this class wasn’t worth it. it wasn’t related to either of my majors⁠04 Comparative Media Studies and mathematics! and it wasn’t a graduation requirement and I wasn’t enjoying it at all. I wanted to devote more energy to the other classes I was in, I wanted to spend more time working on personal projects, I wanted to stay up late having fun with my friends instead of psetting for a subject I didn’t care about.

so I drop-kicked⁠05 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3C5L-EfR28">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3C5L-EfR28</a> the class and didn’t look back.

MIT has a super-late drop date; this semester, it was April 25th.⁠06 Baker House <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/2925301927695010/">dropped a piano off the roof</a> to celebrate! this is good if you are like me and have an unfortunate habit of saying yes to too many things, only to suffer later on.

I’m still learning how to manage my time, and how to select a courseload that will make me feel challenged, but not miserable. but for now, all I can say is:

yeet.

This semester has been weird for me. On one side I am for all intents and purposes I am a junior, a 2020. I will not be graduating until 2020, my degree will say 2020, and for the most parts my day to day classmates are 2020. On the other hand I am a senior. My oldest friends walked into MIT with me back in 2015, my brass rat says 2019, and despite not graduating this year I am still on the email list for the year I entered MIT with. So I am allowed to go to senior ball, senior week, and any other senior events that are planned for the class of 2019.

My main concerns currently revolve around doing my best for the last semester that will really matter before I apply to graduate school. I am taking five classes for the first time, I am spending a lot of my free time UROPing, and now I am pushing to do well on the four finals I will have next week. However, The last few months for a majority of my best friends has been something along the lines of applying or choosing a graduate school, med school, and occasionally law school, looking for places to live in their new found location after MIT, and doing a bunch of ‘lasts’ here at MIT (last DT dance show, last pset, last lecture, etc).

I can’t help but feel a bit displaced. I am happy to see my friends finally finishing up here and successfully making it through what is undoubtedly some of the hardest four years of their life, but at the same time…. I don’t want to say bye just yet. I have never regretted my decision to take a year off and study in China, but it slowly starting to hit me that this year is the ‘easy’ year as far as adjusting socially. For the most part the people that I grew through MIT with are still here, and are still very foundational to what makes MIT home to me, but these last few weeks I have had to come to terms that a lot of them are going on to bigger and better thing.

So when someone asks me “what year are you?” I often have a hard time answering. I am not graduating this year so the “congratulations you made it,” that often comes with me saying I am a senior often feels undeserved, but saying that I am a junior makes me feel almost as if I am losing a piece of who I am. I think I personally feel as if I am a 2019, but going through the whole “I took a year to study in China, but I studied Chinese, so it really didn’t contribute to me finishing my course 20 degree, so now I have a degree in Chinese, but I have to go for another year to finish my course 20 degree, so I am technically a 19 but kind of a 20…….” Seems like a lot whenever someone asks me what year I am, so more often than not I just say I am a junior to avoid any unnecessary confusion.

Now don’t get me wrong over this past year I have made amazing connection and friendships in the class of 2020 as well as 2021 and 2022 (….. <- these don’t seem like real years to me), but there is still something about looking back at my pictures from CPW and that many of those people are still a very integral part of my life. Seeing my friend’s tiny prefrosh little faces and then looking at them at senior ball grown and ready to take on the world really makes me appreciate just how far we have all come and how long we have been at the institute.

Before coming to MIT I moved every 2-3 years so knowing some of these people for 4 years makes them some of the ‘oldest’ friends I have, and they have become some of the few people I can look to and say ‘hey remember when that happened?’ But I am trying not be too sad in seeing them go, I mean look at my friends…. They have become amazing dancers, tattoo artists, writers, engineers, computer scientists, biologists, finance people… whatever that’s called, and just people in general, and I am thankful to have been a part of their life. I am making my own road through MIT and I am happy with how my life has gone but to any 2019 that is reading this, MIT isn’t going to be the same without you. I could not have asked for a better class of peers, friends, and family, I wish you all the very best in whatever avenue you have decided to go down!!!! MIT CLASS OF 2019 FROM NOW UNTIL FOREVER!!!!

Here are some glow up pictures of some 19s from prefrosh/frosh to senior year, see if you can make some connections:

Frosh/prefrosh

Sophmores

Welp… they are seniors…..

I spend several minutes in and around Building 68 elevators most days of the week. Often the elevators are where I find out about cool talks that are going to happen, see below.
 

Those posters are eye-catching, professional, and seem as if they were made by someone who isn’t the person giving the talk. Except, of course, for the many posters I see advertising upcoming thesis defenses. Those posters have a kind of soul to them—they radiate heavy grad student energy. I imagine hunched over adults sitting at a computer moving text boxes around and sending things to front, grumbling about having to make one of these posters in the first place and getting frustrated when they can’t find images with transparent backgrounds. Weirdly enough, however, I’ve noticed that graphic design is something that biologists are usually pretty good at. It might be all the figures and powerpoints you have to put together. Integrated passive design education.

Here is my definitive ranking of all of the thesis defense posters I’ve seen in Building 68 in the past two weeks, from least favorite to most favorite. Strap in!⁠01 I had a long back-and-forth conversation in my head about whether to censor the names on these posters. On one hand, a grad student's thesis is their baby. So much work gets put into these projects that it could be a bit alienating to separate their names from the years of work they put in. On the other hand, people on the internet can be mean. This is ultimately why I chose to black the names out. Additionally, even though I don't know any of the people behind these theses, I didn't want to make it seem like I was judging them personally by vaguely ranking them in terms of favorite-ness. I hope you understand, dear grad student (or freshly defended Doctor!) who may be reading this.

12. Synthetic Analog Feedback Control Circuits in Living Cells

Now this one was just a little bit plain for my tastes. It actually stood out from the others in its sheer simplicity. While I am tickled by the line breaks in the title,⁠02 It's almost like a course 6 snuck in as a bio grad student and was like <em>I want to study synthetic analog feedback circuits... in... umm... living cells!</em> the little circuit diagram doesn’t do much for me. It does have a little color going on, which makes it overall not too bad. 

11. The Assembly and Functions of microbial communities on complex substrates

Color! Good! Also good choice using a non-standard font. This one only ranks low on my list because of the murky figures at the top which remind me of 18.02⁠03 multi-variable calc for the non-MIT ppl out there for some reason and therefore trigger my fight or flight response. The bottom pictures are good for doing mini-Rorschach tests, especially the last one, which makes me think either “that figure/ground illusion where it’s a vase but also two faces looking at each other” or “Simpsons hair.”

10. Evolutionary Dynamics of the Human Gut Microbiome

9. Understanding Neurodegenerative Disease-Relevant Molecular Effects of Perturbagens Using a Multi-Omics Approach

I had this one closer to the bottom of the list before looking at it a second time and recognizing genius. Yes, it is a very average-looking poster. Yes, it contains the words “perturbagens” and “multi-omics,” and I did have to go look up what those meant. The coup de grâce, however, is the almost comically vague choice of clip-art at the bottom. Just look at it. Eppendorf. Assay plate with like 1000 wells. DNA. Graph. Nodes ‘n edges. This poster looks like something they would use in a movie scene where they’re in a really smart genius science lab, and the genius science person explains that they’re working on “understanding neurodegenerative disease-relevant molecular effects of perturbagens using a multi-omics approach” to the non-genius protagonist hero of the story, who responds with something like “could you repeat that in English please?” Beakers and flasks full of colorful liquids are bubbling and generating fog in the background as the science genius explains what they meant in three words. Eureka!

8. Enzyme Structure, Function, and Evolution in Flavonoid Biosynthesis

Oooo… flowers. Since I spend so much time doing experiments that involve animal cells, I forget that some people are plant folk. It’s refreshing. Tending to science crops. I didn’t notice the stick models in the flowers at first; it would be cool if those were bigger. Other than that, a pleasant poster. And they use the Oxford comma!⁠05 This is a thing that nerds who write are required to pretend to be excited about. Forgive me.

7. BMI1: a context-dependent tumor suppressor and barrier to dedifferentiation in lung adenocarcinoma

Insert Game of Thrones joke here. These dragons are giving me DeviantArt war flashbacks, but I long for colors. What do these dragons even represent? Why are they yin-yang? I want this image to be my new family crest.

6. Biosynthesis and medicinal chemistry of therapeutically promising plant natural products

This is one of the posters that was relatively eh but got pushed up to #6 because of the topic. Natural products supported by MIT research? Cool! Also, I’m wondering if that image is a stock photo or if this artsy af grad student waited for perfect natural lighting, arranged those flowers with care on the floor, and did one (1) art and craft molecule. Good for you.

5. Developing VHH-based tools to study Ebolavirus Infection

Hate to be predictable, but of course the poster with the llama gets to be in the top half. +1 for the Pac-Men in the lower right of the summoning circle.

4. The evolution and specialized metabolism of beetle bioluminescence

Now this is a poster with narrative. Confused Charles Darwin. Two kind, gentle bugs. A quote from Darwin saying that the bugs are simply too different to think that they got their shared light-up capabilities from a common ancestor who also glowed in the dark. A background that at first I thought was black but is actually a picture of some trees at dusk that gives me nostalgia for childhood because the lightning bugs⁠06 or you can call them fireflies if you're a terrible person would come out at dusk in the summertime.

3. Identification of genotype-specific dependencies in Keap1-mutant lung adenocarcinoma

Now this is a grad student who is familiar with Adobe Creative Suite. Look at that army mouse! The Nerf theme is well-executed, and I appreciate the details put into making it work (e.g. the swoosh in the Nerf logo was changed to a 2 to make it more clearly Nrf2). Also, go figure, the mouse that’s smoking a big cigar has lung cancer. Life imitates art, and this is art. Bronze medal.

2. Understanding the dynamics of fecal transplants and the immune system to improve health

This one was in the bottom half when I first configured my rankings, but it made it up here for similar reasons to why #9 wasn’t last. It’s got that weird, irony-adjacent feel to it that could only come from a poop scientist. The poop is also a lightning cloud, and somehow Poop, Blood, and and Cheese are the most important characters in this story. Silver medal.

1. Promoters of Metastasis to Different Organs

Dr. Seuss! So whimsical and yet so tragic. These  little colorful cells are about to make that big epithelial to mesenchymal transition and go find an exciting new place to attach, like Liver, Lungs, Brain, and Bone. It’s just so morbid to use children’s book imagery to frame metastasis. Like what’s more cute than stage IV cancer?  A brave editorial decision, and well-executed at that. Gold medal.

i really loved joon’s everyday post, so here is my own unnecessarily detailed day! watch as i stumble my way through like sixteen hours without ever leaving a ~0.04 km^2 area. dis boi long, so buckle up (and feel free to skim, if you’re into that).

Location: East Campus

6.02 am: i wake up abruptly from a dream in which i miss my flight home.⁠01 i'm leaving in eight days, next thursday, and damn am i ready to be home although i should be trying to get back to sleep, instead i start thinking about all the stuff i have to do to get ready to leave for the summer. as i do, tentative lines from a poem pop into my head. and a few more, and a few more.

6.05 am: i actually open my eyes⁠02 the morning light comes in bright blue around the edges of my windowshade, and my room is painted blue; i feel deliciously underwater. in order to write down the poem on the paper i keep by my bed. here it is, scanned, below. (please keep in mind: it wasn’t light enough to actually see the paper and i had just woken up. this is like a zeroth draft)

6.17 am – ??: i try and fail to go back to sleep.

?? – 9.24 am: i actually go back to sleep. my roommate’s alarm wakes me, but i was getting up in six minutes anyway.

9.24 – 9.35 am: i check my email and catch up on MITConfessions.

9.35 – 9.45 am: i reluctantly get out of bed, debate showering and decide to do it tonight, use the bathroom, and throw on some clothes.

9.45 – 9.57 am: i walk over to the kitchen⁠03 every floor in east campus has its own communal kitchen, fridges, stoves, and all and eat my traditional weekday breakfast of almond milk and applesauce.

Location: Building 26

9.57 am: i go to 6.009 recitation to get my checkoff.⁠04 lots of lab classes will have you work independently, then explain your work to a TA or LA (lab assistant) to receive full points. i am number 16 in the queue, but i quickly jump to the top; no clue who changed their minds. despite technical issue strugs, i get the checkoff! it’s my last one for this class (today is the last day that any assignments can be due, since classes end tomorrow).

10.15 – 10.58 am: normally there would be an actual recitation being held during this time, so now i don’t really know what to do with myself; i only woke up for 10 am because i was worried the checkoff queue would be long. i start writing this blog post and help out a friend, also at recitation, who hasn’t finished the lab yet.

Location: Stata Center

10.58 am – 12.25 pm: i walk over to my linguistics class, 24.9000. it’s our last meeting and i’m really sad — i’ve had so much fun in this class! today our topic is how languages change over time, and oh boy do i nerd out about etymology (which was one of my fave topics in high school).

12.25 pm: right next to my class is the stata cafe.⁠05 it's basically a miniature dining hall -- it has tons of food options and is usually packed during lunch, since the closest actual dining hall is fifteen minutes' walk away. i pick up my usual, their vegan⁠06 i'm not vegan, but i am lactose intolerant, and i swear to god EVERY other food they sell is covered in cheese indian food.

Location: Building 26

12.28 – 12.55 pm: my friend from linguistics has also picked up lunch at stata; we walk over to the Banana Lounge⁠07 this is new in the past couple years -- a student government committee, UA innovation, spearheaded a student lounge with places to work and sleep, and which is always in stock with bananas. there are honestly very few good study spaces on this side of campus, so it's always well-used. in 26 to eat.

12.57 – 1.56 pm: i’m back in 26-100, where my 6.009 recitation was, for 18.03 lecture. like linguistics, this is our last lecture, but i’m a little less sad about this: i love the content of this class, but i don’t always feel that it’s being well taught. towards the end of the semester i’ve started zoning out more than i should in lecture.

1.57 – 2.54 pm: i have a UROP meeting at 3 in stata, so i don’t want to head all the way⁠08 when you spend all your time in one place, five hundred meters starts to seem a lot more like a trek home just yet. i go back to the banana lounge to update this post, read facebook, and contemplate whether i should study for my test tomorrow⁠09 my last one before finals! i'm so close to release asdjfsldf or take a nap. in fact, it turns out i’m too tired to have willpower, so instead i just hang around on the internet for twenty minutes, then do a few practice problems for my physics exam next week. shrug emoji

Location: Stata Center

2.58 – 3.15 pm: my UROP meeting is quite short! the grad student i work with and i mostly prep for the longer meeting we have tomorrow with our PI. this is good, because it’s freakin cold in there, for some reason. i head home to snuggle under some blankets until my next meeting (also for my UROP, also in Stata). on my way back, i spot some people selling tshirts that are a very pretty red and look soft! i am now the new owner of:

Location: East Campus

3.17 – 4.46 pm: even my room is cold :( but two blankets and a soft couch helps! i update this post and do a bunch more physics practice problems. notice that i have not yet studied for the test tomorrow? i am scared to. i tell myself that if i finish all my other work first, then i will be able to tackle it unfettered. thinking face…

Location: Stata Center

4.46 – 5.35 pm: back over to stata for another UROP meeting! (i take a different, more indoors route, because i am cold.) i tell my supervisor about how i have not been able to solve the problem i was given at all and the code base is not doing what i think it should be doing. my supervisor tells me that she also does not know how to solve this problem and thinks the code base, which i didn’t write, is just borked. i am extremely comforted (and wish i had spent a little less time near tears trying to fix this).

Location: East Campus

5.40 – 7.18 pm: and with that last meeting, i’m home for the day  everything gets a lot simpler now that i can work on my own schedule. on my way home, i stop to take a couple pretty photos! yay for spring :)

i plop down on my couch and finish off the physics problems⁠10 and surf the internet, and listen to music with my roommate... :D i am very happy, because this represents most of my studying for that exam and now i can put it behind me for a while.

7.18 – 8.05 pm: then i get hungry. i made rice pilaf yesterday and had leftovers, plus i froze a big batch of curry a while ago; i make liberal use of the microwave to “cook” a yummy dinner. it is The Dinner Hour, so the kitchen and lounge are full of people! we hang out. it is fun.

8.05 – 9.57 pm: i finally begin to study, somewhat frantically, for my test. it is Latin translation; I have 60 lines of poetry left, plus reviewing the other 200+ lines i’ve already done.

9.57 pm: i finish translating all 60 lines!!!! i feel glorious. especially since HouseComm⁠11 east campus has a biweekly house meeting, attended by the exec, representatives from each of the ten floors, and any other resident who wants to go. is at 10.

10.05 – 11 pm: the floor that is in charge of snacks brought oreos AND fresh fruit. i am delighted, thank you 41w!! we discuss changes to our rooming process and elect a new secretary.

11 – midnight: i intend to keep reviewing for my test, and i kinda do that, but also wordpress takes a long-ass time to upload images, so really i just finish off this post.
overall, this was not my most productive of days, but that’s OK, because i didn’t have too much to do! plus, by this point in the semester i’m pretty burned out, so i try not to judge myself too harshly.
today i walked a paltry 4,500 steps, but that’s also OK, because wednesday isn’t one of my workout days. (although there’s a gym in stata, so if it was, i wouldn’t even have to break out of my 0.04 km^2 box!)

midnight: bedtime at last! i need to wake up at 9.30 for a meeting, and it takes me like 20 minutes to get ready for bed, and like another 30 to fall asleep, and i need more than eight hours of sleep to feel rested (thanks body >.<) and so, about four hours earlier than everyone else i live with, i go to bed.

good night and sweet dreams, everybody <3

As my second semester at the Institute draws to a close, I’ve been reflecting on how I’ve spent my time outside of class. Of the various activities I have tried here at MIT, teaching has stood out because of how it has consistently inspired me and given me a sense of fulfillment.

Teaching is an exercise in both design and effective communication. I love solving the problems associated with creating a curriculum and breaking down complex concepts into clear explanations. I knew I enjoyed teaching before I came to MIT, but I had few opportunities to formally pursue it. This semester, I took advantage of three types of formal teaching opportunities. Each opportunity was different from the others in how many hours I spent teaching, the actual tasks I carried out, what I learned from doing it, and how I was compensated. I’ve put all the details below!

[1] CodeIt

[program description] MIT CodeIt is an outreach program which aims to introduce middle-school girls and nonbinary students to computer science using Scratch and Python programming. This is one of many outreach programs at MIT.⁠01 Some of MIT's other outreach programs include BoSTEM (a summer STEM program for underrepresented minorities), dynaMIT (a summer STEM program for low-income students), and Leadership Training Institute (a semester-long weekend program aiming to teach leadership to high schoolers). Like CodeIt, students who serve as mentors for these programs are volunteers and work directly with students.

[total time commitment] 40 hours (5 hours on Saturday, for 8 weeks)

[tasks] Scratch is a visual programming language (and it was actually developed here at the MIT Media Lab). Although many people wouldn’t call it a “real” programming language, Scratch was an invaluable stepping stone in my journey to pursuing computer science. I first learned to use Scratch in high school in order to compete in a Science Olympiad event called Game On. I quickly fell in love with it and used it to make a lot of silly games and procedurally generated animations. These experiences gave me a foundation on which I pursued more advanced coding. Throughout the semester, my goal was to help my students experience the same feelings of inspiration and confidence I felt through using Scratch, from which they could pursue bigger things. I helped my students work through several code labs and eventually develop their own final projects. I also guided them through fun engineering challenges we did during breaks. Watching my students grow into young computer scientists was absolutely amazing!

[what i learned] I’m getting (a little bit) old. There were many instances where I found myself unaware or less excited by the music, trends, and public figures that my students liked. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was occasionally out of the loop (there is a six year difference between my students and I, after all), but it was nevertheless a reminder that I’m a college student now. I also learned to adapt my teaching style rapidly to a lot of different types of students. Some students struggled more than others, and I had to learn how to keep them motivated without frustrating them but also without giving them the solution to their bugs.

[compensation] I enjoyed a free breakfast and lunch each Saturday. I also had the opportunity to tour Google’s Cambridge office with my students.

[2] Stretching, Anatomy, and Chill Vibes (Spark)

[program description] This one-hour class was taught as part of Spark, an annual weekend event organized by MIT’s Educational Studies Program (ESP) in which 7th and 8th graders come to MIT to take a variety of classes taught my MIT students and alumni. It is one of many programs organized by ESP.⁠02 In addition to Spark, ESP organizes programs such as Splash (a weekend event for high schoolers), HSSP (a semester-long set of weekend classes for middle and high school students), and Cascade (a five-weekend set of classes for high school students).

[total time commitment] 1 hour

[tasks] My co-teacher (Janice T. ’22) and I made a powerpoint on stretching and human anatomy. We also made a very chill Spotify playlist. With a background of lofi hip hop, Janice and I taught our students several different stretches and some of the human anatomy underlying the moves we were doing. In particular, we discussed spinal anatomy, different groups of core and leg muscles, and the concepts of ligaments and tendons. Our goal was to provide our students with a period of relaxation in their otherwise action-packed days. We asked them at the end to reflect on the feelings they experienced because of Spark.

[what i learned] It is harder than I thought to make middle-schoolers quiet down, especially when they’re naturally boisterous and excited to be away from their parents. Since our class was scheduled towards the end of the weekend, we had expected our students to be a bit tired. A few of them had loads of energy and would have had a better time running around outside than chilling on yoga mats indoors. Regardless, it was cool to review a lot of the anatomy I had previously learned in high school for Science Olympiad, and relate that knowledge to the stretches I do with my workouts.

[compensation] I got free lunch and a t-shirt! ^_^

[3] Lab Assistant

[program description] For many programming classes here at MIT, there are “Lab Assistants” (referred to as LAs) who assist students at office hours. I worked as an LA for two half-semester courses, 6.0001 (Introduction to Computer Science and Programming in Python​) and 6.0002 (Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science). At the start of freshman year, I took an Advanced Standing Exam to receive credit for 6.0001 and then actually took 6.0002 in the second half of my freshman fall semester. I loved the class, applied to be an LA for the next semester, and landed the job.

[total time commitment] 120 hours (10 hours a week, for 12 weeks)

[tasks] I served as a resource for students during office hours. Students could come in to ask about lecture concepts and get help debugging their code. I also helped grade students by giving “check-offs” in which I’d ask students conceptual and coding questions relevant to a given week’s problem set.

[what i learned] I gained a much deeper understanding of all the concepts I had learned in 6.0002; when I needed to explain a concept to my students, I had to truly understand it beyond the level needed to just complete the problem sets. I also became much, much faster at debugging. I could spot syntax errors quickly and became more effective in my approach to checking for possible sources of bugs. This benefitted me in a class I was taking (6.009, Fundamentals of Programming) which I hope to LA in the future.

[compensation] I was paid the standard rate for a Lab Assistant in Course 6, which is $17.00 per hour.

All in all, after spending the majority of my nights and weekends teaching, I’m able to say that it has been one of my favorite experiences here. I didn’t expect teaching to be such a popular activity in college, but every semester hundreds of students take advantage of teaching opportunities here to make an impact on their peers and the Boston community. I hope to continue teaching in events like Spark, mentoring through outreach programs, and working roles like LA/TA in courses I enjoy.

It’s finals week. However, there’s a lot going on besides final exams. This blog will be updated over the course of the week the things that are going on! Not everything is all that interesting (in fact, most of it is boring) but it is an accurate representation of my life at the end of the semester.

[Sunday 5/19]

• The morning/early afternoon were very rainy, so I stayed inside. Then sun came out so my friend Gabi N. ’22 and I took a study break and went for a walk!

• A few dorms (especially the cook-for-yourself ones) purchase their residents breakfast and dinner during Finals Week. So instead of doing my usual Sunday-night-meal-prep, I had some Popeyes chicken and biscuits. It was good.
• I realized I have a lot of groceries to finish before Saturday (the day I move out of MacGregor). At this point, that includes some eggs, yogurt, apples, frozen edamame, and frozen dumplings.
• I finished grading some problem sets for 6.0002 (Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science), a class for which I am a Lab Assistant⁠01 For more information on this, see the third section of this post: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/teaching-at-mit/ .

[Monday 5/20]

• Started this blog post!
• I ate lunch at Chipotle in Kendall Square with my friend Moctar F. ’22. It was the first time I has been to this particular Chipotle – I normally get meals from on-campus options, my own food, or cafes on Mass Ave.
• I finalized my summer storage plans. I got a storage locker just outside Cambridge that I’m sharing with a friend. Protip: storage facilities in Boston/Cambridge get lots of business over the summer (this area is saturated with college students) so you should start your search for storage space as soon as you know you’ll need it! The main things I’m going to need to store are my whiteboard, desk chair, winter clothes, and a piano keyboard⁠02 I got this for free at a party one time. As someone who has played piano for many years, it was a super nice addition to my suite lounge. A lot of my friends also had a good time learning or practicing on it. .

On Monday night, instead of studying for finals, I went to church.

The First Parish in Cambridge hosted a Q&A book-signing with cult star and cultural icon John Waters. I love his movies and what he’s done for Weird Culture, so of course I had to go.

He was full of great one-liners and aphorisms, but one that stuck out to me was this, paraphrased:

Baltimore is better than ever. You should all move there. It’s great that you don’t have to move to New York or LA to be a star anymore. You can stay in your home town and make it big. And it looks like people understand that now: my audience in Des Moines looks the same as my audience in Paris.

As this is a college admissions blog, I’m gonna extend this a bit to rant about this pervasive idea that you have to go to an Ivy or a Stanford or an MIT in order to become something. In this day and age, this is far from the truth. You can go to a state school and thrive! You can go to a community college and thrive! A lot of people just don’t go to college at all and yet they thrive! Barriers are breaking down, and suddenly you can find every kind of people in every kind of place. This whole college admissions game is so contrived. Each year it just gets more stressful and selective for the poor kids who go through these cycles. Don’t get me wrong; I am glad that I go to MIT. There are so many resources here that I would have to fight for if I had gone to school back home. I’ve learned so much about the world here. Nevertheless, I cringe a little when a nerdy movie character is introduced as having gone to MIT. These top universities have become punchlines that obscure the unhealthy obsession we have with them. These aren’t radical new opinions; I’m just trying to plant a little seed of doubt in the minds of kids reading this who want to go to Harvard just because it’s the most prestigious school in the world. Harvard is a meme. Harvard is camp.

Back to the actual topic of this post: I met John Waters! He said that I was the youngest person there, but I assured him that I am just 21 years old with a baby face and short legs, and there was likely a younger, older-looking person there. At least I hope so. I don’t like being called an old soul. Here’s a series of photos in which I explain that:

I’ve never been to a book signing before, but imagine my surprise when he signed my book. 10/10 experience; would do again. John Waters is a pleasant guy.

to set the mood: episodes – mishegas

here are some photos I took on a warm sunny day

warm sunny days were rare this semester

rainy, cold days made it more bearable to hole up in the library or in lab

when it was sunny I got really excited to go outside and soak in some much-needed vitamin d

just one more exam to go :)

I have seen much in these past weeks. Here is a small selection:

The weather on campus turned beauuuutiful this week (just in time for finals and my leaving…) and I haven’t been able to resist snapping some lovely springy pictures.

This was drawn on one of the public use blackboards in Stata! (If you haven’t seen it, more background on the dome decoration is here.) It must have taken a lot of work and it really warmed my heart at a time when I was quite nervous about my next final. :)

On Monday night, I met my friend Avery ’22 downtown. We read at a bookstore, got vegan thai food and bubble tea, and had a delightful wander around the city. We got back to MIT just as the sun was setting. As we walked onto Main Campus I said, gosh, I sure wish all these buildings weren’t in the way because I bet the sky is beautiful… and thus began an adventure to find the highest spot on campus which was both unlocked and many-windowed. I won’t reveal the location (because I’m planning to start working there all the time, just for the view!) but here’s the best pic I got. Feel free to try to make your guesses.

On Wednesday, I finished my last final at 3.30 pm. From 3.30 to 12.30 am, I packed boxes: many, many boxes. I’m moving to a different room next year, which means literally everything I own needed to be packed; thankfully, East Campus lets us store things in the basement free of charge, so I didn’t have to pay storage costs. Still, damn, it was hard. I’ve never moved before and now I understand why it is said to be so horrible. I walked 19,000 steps in the process of trying to pack all my stuff (including an 11.30 trip to Verde’s for more packing tape) and was absolutely fricking exhausted by the time I took this photo. But all eight of my boxes are safely stowed on the basement shelves, and I am hoping desperately that none of them will explode over the next 2.5 months (in particular, the top leftmost one… but let’s not talk about that).

(By the way, let me take this brief moment to advertise vacuum-sealed bags: you see those boxes? They’re 18 x 18 x 16 inches. In one box, in a vacuum-sealed bag, I fit: two pillows + their pillowcases, my duvet and a duvet cover, two sets of sheets, four blankets, a bathrobe, two towels, two thick hoodies, and miscellaneous washcloths. This was the highlight of my horrible night and made me extremely excited, so I now have a compulsion to proselytize.)

Yesterday morning, I flew home! (This very short sentences elides my early wakeup, getting three suitcases down the stairs, the super-cute baby in the bag check line in front of me, and all the things I realized I forgot back at EC… but that’s fine.) Here is the obligatory fancy high-up photo :D

And here is the photo you have all been waiting for, although perhaps you did not know it! Someone very special was waiting for me at home, and we had an enthusiastic reunion, then soaked up some rays together.

I am extremely happy to be home for the summer. ^-^

dedicated to 18.600, a.k.a. Probability and Random Variables, which I took this past semester.

special thanks to:

Brice H. ‘19, for your endless patience and generosity,

& Ivy L. ‘20, who said, I feel like poetry that tries to incorporate math always comes off as cringe.

almost a year ago (wow how has it been that long), i made an extensive, fangirly post about how much i love spotify and its playlist making features.  i am happy to report that spotify has only continued to satisfy me since then, and i have created many new playlists and have even discovered new music tracking software to complement my spotify experience.

in the spirit of last year’s post, i’ll start this one off with a list of all the playlists i’ve added to my collection this year:

• loading docks – i consider this my galaxy brain playlist. it contains all the songs that have listened to and i like, but i’m not sure as to which of my carefully curated playlists i should add them to yet. most of it is trash indie that i’m not sure how to classify, but it’s a pretty mixed bag of songs overall
• music from my friends!! – i emailed out to my social list and asked friends to add songs to this playlist. feel free to add some yourselves if you feel so inclined
• old timey jams – Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis, and the like
• She Wants Revenge 2018 setlist – i came upon a recommendation to a She Wants Revenge song on some random forum on the internet last year, and i’ve loved them ever since. in october, they came to boston on tour, and i attended their concert. i only ever attend concerts if i really like the band, so this was something special for me, and i made their setlist into a playlist so i could remember it
• “愛してる”の響きだけで – the title is a lyric from a japanese song. the playlist consists of songs that remind me of my SO :)
• slow dance – slow, cute songs that i can whip out if a slow dancing mood ever strikes me. (fun fact, La Festin from the Ratatouille soundtrack is on here)
• musicals – i made this on a long train ride in europe over spring break, inspired by the Sound of Music tour that i had taken in salzburg. it has every musical song that i’ve ever enjoyed

similar to last year, i also made a playlist called “MIT sophomore year”. the reasons why are best stated by earnest 2k18 nisha in last year’s post:

All the songs on it have some specific significance to people I met, adventures I went on, and feelings I felt in first semester. I made the playlist without really thinking through the significance of the songs; I just knew that they were significant to my freshman year in some way. So for this post, I wrote down all the songs and why they mean something to me. It was a very pleasant jog down memory lane and I hope to keep making a playlist for every year that I’m at MIT.

thanks, me from the past! now without further ado, here are the songs that made it onto this year’s list:

• Banana Pancakes by Jack Johnson  – i associate this song with all my friends returning from various corners of the globe the week before sophomore fall started, and i remember how happy i was that we were all back together at MIT again.
• We Ran out of CD Space by Psychostick – this song is my first memory of most of the freshmen on my hall; we took some of them to get Green Building hot chocolate the weekend after they had moved onto our hall, and after a conversation that i can’t recall, one of them played this dumb song and we laughed about it for a long time
• Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (to Love and to be Loved) by Bright Eyes – my friend really likes this song and plays it a lot (enough that his neighbor can recognize it in the first few bars of the song), and i decided to learn the lyrics and chords so i could play it on guitar and sing with him
• Nowadays by Valleyheart, Alright, Spaceboy by Bat House, and Hurry, Hurry by Air Traffic Controller – these are the three bands that played at the 2018 East Campus FredFest, an open air concert that we organize every fall. i remember so little of first semester because it was literally awful, but this concert was a great time. i particularly remember Hurry, Hurry by Air Traffic Controller because all the spectators got up and danced and cheered along to it and it was really fun and freeing. i even bought an overpriced Air Traffic Controller shirt after the concert because they were so good
• Tear You Apart by She Wants Revenge – this was the last song on the She Wants Revenge setlist, and i absolutely lost my mind when they started playing it cause it’s a great song. it is on this playlist to commemorate that concert
• Crush by Cigarettes After Sex – [reasoning redacted]
• Smereka by Mad Heads XL – this is a weird song. one of my friends on fencing introduced it to me as “this weird ukranian ska song by my uncle’s band”. it’s actually a bop even though i have no idea what the words mean, and i listened to it on the way to fencing practice every day to make myself walk faster
• Los Ageless by St. Vincent – i had a phase fall semester where i listened to this song literally non-stop. i couldn’t tell you when this phase began or when it ended, but i can tell you that i do remember listening to this a lot while sitting in 6.004 office hours struggling
• Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber – this song has made my list two years in a row, but for a slightly different reason this time around. i actually soloed this song in my a cappella group’s fall concert, fulfilling a very longtime dream of mine :)
• When We’re High by LP – this wasn’t really a phase that i went through, but a lot of my friends went through a LP phase and i unwittingly got roped in. she’s dope though
• Tokyo – Vampires and Wolves by The Wombats – i recall really jamming to this song on repeat for the entirety of IAP. i’m not sure why, it’s basically just another trash indie song on my playlist. maybe because it talks about tokyo. that might be it.
• La Vie En Rose by Daniela Andrade – i learned this song for my SO as a valentine’s day present :,)
• Do-Re-Mi by Julie Andrews – two of my best friends and i went to austria and germany for spring break, and of course we had to stop in salzburg for the sound of music tour. it was truly something to turn around a bend on the curvy mountain road and have the alps in all their glory come fully into view with julie andrews singing the sound of music in the background. really something.
• Main Theme of Final Fantasy VII by Nobuo Uematsu – obviously this song has to be on my playlist again because final fantasy 7 will never not be my metaphysical rock. i also went to the final fantasy: distant worlds tour when it came to boston in april, making up for six years of regretting not going to distant worlds when it was in boston in my freshman year of high school. i cried five separate times during the concert, bought a really expensive t-shirt to commemorate it, and went home so happy that my SO said that i was “glowing”.
• Lifetime Piling Up by Talking Heads – my SO and i went through a phase where we both played this song on repeat for a week or so during CPW. CPW was also possibly the most stressful weekend of my life, and this song really bops so it made me feel better
• Jenny of Oldstones by Florence + The Machine – this song is a shoutout to the release (and falling apart) of game of thrones season 8. i’ve read/watched game of thrones for about 6 years now and the tv show coming to an end seems like a media consumption milestone. i also had so much hope for the show when this song came out and was so disappointed when it all came crashing down
• Furr by Blitzen Trapper – this is probably my current favorite song (short term favorite; my long term favorite is still, and always will be, Why by Ayaka). there’s something really wistful about it; the way i interpret it is that it’s about growing up and settling down but still missing the wild times you had when you were younger. weirdly, one of my other favorite songs has the exact same theme (Fluorescent Adolescent by the Arctic Monkeys). but this song gets extra points for being about wolves and i am a self-professed wolf girl (like a horse girl but for wolves :P)
• Hold Me In Your Heart from Kinky Boots – some friends and i took another friend to Kinky Boots for her birthday, and i wasn’t really expecting much because i had never listened to the soundtrack before, but i was blown away. this is the particular song that made me tear up.
• Panic by The Smiths – i pulled two all-nighters in a row to write my final paper for petey’s class, and i did most of my writing to this song after mentioning the Black Mirror episode “Hang the DJ” in the paper (it’s the song that title is taken from, if that wasn’t obvious). i really enjoyed writing that paper (it wound up being 20-something pages long and way over petey’s word limit) and it convinced me that i should write a thesis for my CMS major. stay tuned, folks.

i also mentioned this dubious website as a method of music tracking software last year. at petey’s recommendation, i have since moved onto last.fm, which a. tracks my music with way more accuracy than aforementioned dubious website, and b. has lots of nice stats and graphs that please my little data grubbing heart. 

the songs i listened to the most for the last month

the albums i listened to the most the last month

the artists i listened to the most for the last month

1. i listened to more artists than 91% of last.fm users, 2. i listened to more albums than 91% of other last.fm users, 3. i listened to more tracks than 82% of other last.fm users

graphs of genres of music i’ve listened to for the past few weeks, and when i listened to it

1. i listened to 31% more artists than i did last week and was on the 83rd percentile for new artists listened to, 2. i listened to 46% more new albums than i did last week and was on the 32nd percentile for new albums listened to, 3. i listened to 53% more new tracks than i did last week and was on the the 33rd percentile for new tracks listened to

hope you enjoyed all those pretty graphs. but wait, there’s more! follow me on last.fm,  and check out my top 100 songs from last year’s spotify wrapped :)