Best of the Blogs – MIT Admissions

My blogger bio over time

CJ Q. '23 — Fri, 26 May 2023 14:15:21 +0000

I’ve changed my bio, which you can view on my author page, once every few months since I started blogging. I thought I’d record how it’s changed for posterity, maybe before I change it one last time before I graduate.

September 2019

What does it take to get to know someone? I could tell you that I’m an international student from the Philippines, or that I live in East Campus. I could tell you that CJ is short for Carl Joshua, or that I have two first names, because a lot of Filipinos have two first names.

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. We could talk for hours about Homestuck and grilled tomatoes and calligraphy. I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite board games. We can play Splendor or Carcassonne, and if we get enough people we could play Modern Art. We could listen to music all afternoon, and I’ll tell you all about my favorite artists.

Or we could go on an adventure. There’s this nice spot in the MIT tunnels with beautiful murals that animate when you point a camera at it. We can take the T to Faneuil Hall, cram ourselves into the hallways, and buy lunch together. We could head downtown Boston and window shop at Newbury; we could go to Prudential and complain about how expensive everything is.

We could cross Harvard Bridge at two in the morning. We could stare at the river and the stars, and watch electric reds and blues painted on the Boston skyline. And sometimes it gets quiet enough that I forget about my body, and it feels like I’m hovering over the water. And maybe you’d feel the same way.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

January 2020

What does it take to get to know someone? I could tell you that I’m an international student from the Philippines, or that I live in East Campus. I could tell you that CJ is short for Carl Joshua, because I have two first names, because a lot of Filipinos have two first names.

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. We could talk for hours about Homestuck and grilled tomatoes and calligraphy. I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite board games. We can play Gizmos or Modern Art, and if we get enough people we could play Castlefall. We could listen to music all afternoon, and I’ll tell you all about my favorite artists.

Or we could go on an adventure. There’s this nice spot in the MIT tunnels with beautiful murals that animate when you point a camera at it. We can take the T to Malden Center, and buy lunch at this Chinese place I know. We could head downtown Boston and window shop at Newbury; we could go to Prudential and complain about how expensive everything is.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

March 2020

What does it take to get to know someone? I could tell you that I’m an international student from the Philippines, or that I live(d) in East Campus. I could tell you that CJ is short for Carl Joshua, because I have two first names, because a lot of Filipinos have two first names.

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. We could talk for hours about typography and grilled tomatoes and Esperanto. I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite board games. We can play Just One or Tractor, and if we get enough people we could play Castlefall. We could listen to music all afternoon, and I’ll tell you all about my favorite artists.

Or we could go on an adventure. It’s a sign of aging, I guess, but I now think that staying all day in the Floor Pi lounge is an adventure. We can take the T to Harvard, and buy lunch at this Japanese barbecue place I love. Or we could head downtown Boston and window shop at Newbury; we could go to Prudential and complain about how expensive everything is.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

August 2020

What does it take to get to know someone? I could tell you that I’m an international student from the Philippines, or that I live in East Campus. I could tell you that CJ is short for Carl Joshua, because I have two first names, because a lot of Filipinos have two first names.

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. We could talk for hours about vexillology and mac and cheese and Tetris. I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite board games. We can play Coup or Singaporean Bridge, and if we get enough people we could play Castlefall. We could listen to music all afternoon, and I’ll tell you all about my favorite artists.

Or we could go on an adventure. We could play Bomb Party or Drawphone or Skribbl. We could hop on a call and sing off-sync to background music. Or we could gather some friends, watch a movie, and we’ll laugh at each other’s reactions.

We can hop on a Zoom call until two in the morning. And we’ll talk about rivers, skyscrapers, and stars. And sometimes it gets quiet enough that I forget about the distance, and the screen, and it just feels like us, side-by-side, talking. And maybe you’d feel the same way.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

December 2020

What does it take to get to know someone? I could tell you that I’m an international student from the Philippines, or that I (used to) live in East Campus. I could tell you that CJ is short for Carl Joshua, because I have two first names, because a lot of Filipinos have two first names.

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. We could talk for hours about Celeste and logic puzzles and Clover’s BLTs. I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite board games. We can play NMBR 9 or Bomb Party, and if we get enough people we could play Sleepsort. We could listen to music all afternoon, and I’ll tell you all about my favorite artists.

Or we could go on an adventure. We could stream video games for hours on a voice call. We can take turns reading paragraphs from cheesy fanfiction. Or we could gather some friends, watch a movie, and we’ll laugh at each other’s reactions.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

February 2021

What does it take to get to know someone? I could tell you that I’m an international student from the Philippines, or that I live in East Campus. I could tell you that CJ is short for Carl Joshua, because I have two first names, because a lot of Filipinos have two first names.

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. We could talk for hours about Slay the Spire and semantics and Chipotle. I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite board games. We can play War Chest or Quoridor, and if you convince me maybe we can even play Hanabi, but only if you convince me. We could listen to music all afternoon, and I’ll tell you all about my favorite artists.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

June 2021

What does it take to get to know someone? I could tell you that I’m an international student from the Philippines, or that I live in Macgregor. (But I’d rather be in East Campus. Scratch that. I’d rather my room have a sink.)

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. We could talk for hours about Luck be a Landlord and formal verification and rice cookers. I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite board games. We can play The Shipwreck Arcana or Mascarade, and yes, that’s spelled Mascarade, with a C. We could listen to music all afternoon, and I’ll tell you all about my favorite artists.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

November 2021

What does it take to get to know someone? I could tell you that I’m an international student from the Philippines, or that I live in East Campus (for not much longer, it seems).

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. We could talk for hours about Monster Train and type theory and Domino’s. I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite board games. We can play Spirit Island or Lost Cities or Innovation. We could listen to music all afternoon, and I’ll tell you all about my favorite artists.

Or we could go on an adventure. We could take a walk along Downtown Crossing and get lost on the way back. We could grab some Nerf guns and have a shootout in some empty classrooms. Or we could wear silly hats and take pictures together.

We can sit in the couch in my room until two in the morning. And we’ll talk about jobs, and anxieties, and the future. And sometimes it gets quiet enough that I forget about all the decisions I have to make, and for a night, it’d feel like I can stay at MIT forever. And maybe you’d feel the same way.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

February 2022

What does it take to get to know someone? I could tell you that I’m an international student from the Philippines, or that I live in East Campus.

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. We could talk for hours about Stardew Valley and how email works and Clover. I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite board games. We can play Spirit Island or Go or Arboretum. We could listen to music all afternoon, and I’ll tell you all about my favorite artists.

Or we could go on an adventure. We could go to the Museum of Fine Arts and talk about all the artwork. We could go to a party and dance until two in the morning. Or we could go on a road trip, and I’ll try my best not to get motion sick.

We can sit in the lounge and watch a movie together. And we’ll talk about capitalism, and loneliness, and love. And sometimes it gets quiet enough that I forget about all the homework I have to do, and for a moment, it’d feel like I could live forever. And maybe you’d feel the same way.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

June 2022

What does it take to get to know someone? One of the first things people ask me is where I’m from. Is it the Philippines, where I grew up and spent my high school in? Is it East Campus, the dorm I’ve come to call my home? Is it Mountain View, the city I’m living in for the summer? At once, it’s all of these, and none of these.

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. We could talk for hours about Epic Battle Fantasy 5 and how Redux works and dumplings. I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite board games. We can play Castlefall or Beavers Against the Humanities or Aeon’s End. We could listen to music all afternoon, and I’ll tell you all about my favorite artists.

Or we could go on an adventure. We can ride the Caltrain for two hours and complain about public transportation in the Bay Area. We could spend all day in the Computer History Museum. Or I can give you a tour of the office I’m interning at, which, while mostly empty, has a lot of snacks.

We can go to an overpriced coffee shop and buy pastries. And we’ll talk about housing prices, and adulting, and medication. And sometimes it gets quiet enough that I forget about how tired I’m feeling, and for a moment, it’d feel like I could live forever. And maybe you’d feel the same way.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

October 2022

What does it take to get to know someone? I could tell you my name (CJ), my year (’23), my course (18 and 6-3), my dorm (East Campus). I could give you a laundry list of fun facts. We can do all the icebreakers you want. Is that it?

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. We could talk for hours about Dicey Dungeons and meditation and monads. I’ll introduce you to some of my favorite board games. We can play Xoragrams or The Crew or Terraforming Mars. We could listen to music all afternoon, and I’ll tell you all about my favorite artists.

Or we could go on an adventure. We can go around Downtown Crossing and window shop at all the stores. We could spend all day in the Banana Lounge playing with all the art materials and eating bananas. Or I can give you a tour of the spiffy new admissions office, which has a lot of snacks.

We can go to a library and get one of the rooms. And we’ll talk, quietly, about grief, and big tech, and making friends. And sometimes it gets quiet enough that I forget about how tired I’m feeling, and for a moment, it’d feel like I could live forever. And maybe you’d feel the same way.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

February 2023

What does it take to get to know someone? Here, I’ll tell you something you want to know, and something I want you to know. You probably want to know my name, CJ, or my class year, ’23, or where I’m living, East Campus. Here’s something I want you to know: I’m graduating in a semester, and that thought terrifies me, because I don’t think I’m ready for the real world just yet.

You probably want to know about the things I like. We could talk for hours about Vampire Survivors and interactive fiction and compiler optimization. Or maybe you want to know what board games I like? I like Roll for the Galaxy and 7 Wonders and NMBR 9. Here’s something I want you to know: I have a particular taste in music, and I can tell you about all my favorite artists.

Maybe you want to see some places I like. We could go to the ESP office in the Student Center, or the SIPB office just upstairs. We could walk down Revere Beach, and I’ll complain about how I hate getting sand on my feet. Or we could go to 66-110, my favorite lecture hall on campus, even if I’ve never taken a class there.

Here’s something I want to do. We’ll go to a random lounge. And we’ll talk about AI, and anxiety, and faith. And sometimes it gets quiet enough that I forget about how tired I’m feeling, and for a moment, it’d feel like I could live forever. And maybe you’d feel the same way.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

May 2023

What does it take to get to know someone? A few words, a few sentences, a few pages, a whole book, more? From the fact you’re reading this, you already know a few things about me. My name is CJ, and I’m an MIT ’23. You can see my avatar, which is what I looked like, once. If you clicked Keep Reading to read the rest of this, you can see above that I’m in Courses 18 and 6-3, which are Mathematics and Computer Science. Is that it?

We could talk about the things I like, if that will help. My favorite video game genre is deckbuilding roguelike, like Backpack Hero, which I’ve been playing a lot of lately. More academic interests include model theory, dependent types, fan studies, and linguistic typology. I like Galaxy Trucker and Roll for the Galaxy, which, despite the similar names, are unrelated board games. I like pop music, for some definition of pop music.

Or we could go on an adventure. Many of my favorite places aren’t accessible right now because they’re in the Student Center: the ESP office, the SIPB office, La Verde’s. Lobdell and La Sala, W20-407. When East Campus will close for renovations later this summer, more of my favorite places will disappear: my old room, the TV Lounge, KL, my new room.

We can learn, experimentally, what exactly it takes to get to know someone. We can talk about institutional change and the meaning of distance. And maybe it’d get quiet enough that I forget about how tired I’m feeling, and for a moment, it’d feel like I could live forever. And maybe you’d feel the same way.

And then we could tell each other stories.

But until then, I hope you enjoy reading mine.

i don’t want to say goodbye

Audrey C. '24 — Wed, 24 May 2023 09:44:10 +0000

cw: death (after the horizontal line)

I remember the moment that the East Campus renovation announcement email hit our inboxes. I was a freshman. Covid pods⁠01 you got up to five other people who you could interact with normally; you had to remain socially distanced from everyone else were a thing. My podmates and I cried in each others’ arms, screamed profanities in the courtyard, maxed out the volume of the angstiest metal we could find, heartbroken at the thought of losing the very community we had just found.

Renovations actually got pushed back a year, letting me enjoy two and a half years at East Campus. Never before have I experienced such intense feelings of belonging and joy, tidbits of which I’ve documented on the blogs. Living at East Campus has taught me how to stand up for myself, hold others accountable, and take responsibility when I mess up. I’ve found a community to lean on for support and made my shoulder available for others to cry on. My friends have pulled me into adventures that would make for great stories in front of a fireplace fifty years down the line. As have many, I’ve adopted the mantra of “I’ll just make [insert yet another jank DIY thing] myself” when said thing does not currently exist in my possession.

Two Fridays ago, I threw most of my belongings in too many cardboard boxes. The dust on my walls and shelves traced out the silhouettes of what used to live on them, like ghosts. The circular base of a cat butt figurine. Rectangles of pictures from freshman year. I hate packing. It’s so physically tiring, but I also hate the way it shoves into my face, “you’ll never live here again.”

I anti-hazed⁠02 tEp is a co-ed fraternity that is very against hazing new ~~pledges~~ peldges (aka new members), so much so that peldges are entitled to politely anti-haze current members into doing tasks of their wishing. also i guess i'm a frat boi now :O Isabella ’24 into helping me carrying my boxes down two flights of stairs from Tetazoo and up five flights of stairs at tEp, where I’ll be living this summer and next year. I’m grateful that tEp, another tightknit and creative community, decided to take me in. I’m excited for what’s in store for me there. But I don’t want to say goodbye to East Campus.

I bumped into some of my graduating friends as I ran around campus taking care of moving out related errands. I wish I could sit down and have a real conversation, but a badly lit selfie and a quick hug would have to do. One day we’ll meet up again in whichever city we happen to be in at the same time and complain about shitty coworkers or the economy or whatever. But it stings not knowing when “one day” will be. I don’t want to say goodbye, unwilling to let go of the certainty that comes with “today.”

I spent all of Monday night finishing up two final projects. Notifications from both classes’ group chats went off the entire night, a periodic reminder that my time at East Campus was ticking to an end, that I’m stuck in my room shorting microcontrollers instead of late night baking in the chaotic Tetazoo kitchen for the last time.

I was dreading Tuesday night, where I’d have to fall asleep to an empty room with bare walls. So I didn’t, instead stumbling around hall in a sleepless stupor. At 6am Wednesday morning, I took one last glance at the East Campus that I knew and loved and left for the airport.

Four flights and three layovers later, I arrived in China. This trip was a “now or never” deal: my parents had wanted to make this trip after my high school graduation to visit extended family, but pandemic restrictions made getting a visa impossible until now. With rising political tensions between China and the US and Taiwan, who knows for how long borders will remain open. This was reason I left MIT so early, before I could properly say goodbye to the people and places I cared about.

This trip has been full of hellos. I’ve met so many first/second/third cousins and great aunts and uncles for the first time in recallable memory. It’s an unfamiliar but exhilarating feeling, experiencing what like it’s like to have a large extended family in the same area. Squeezing twenty people around the same table in a restaurant. Listening to relatives drunkenly recall stories from childhood. Walking two blocks to one relative’s place, and another two blocks to a different relative’s place.

But I keep thinking about this trip as one for saying goodbye. The last time I visited China prior to this time was ten years ago, with one of my most vivid memories being my maternal great grandparents waving goodbye from their apartment’s window. I remember thinking that this can’t be our last goodbye, but in a few days we’ll be setting up their shared gravestone. A lot has happened during the pandemic and me going off to college that my parents has shielded from me: I didn’t know that my maternal great grandma had passed until I asked my mom how she was doing multiple months later. I didn’t know until now that my paternal grandma’s health has declined so much from when I’ve last seen her.

“Talk to your grandma as much as you can while you’re here, okay?” I can read between lines to understand what my mom is actually trying to tell me.

A wave of guilt washed over me for having complained earlier about missing end of the year celebratory events, forgoing a Spinning Arts retreat, and OX’ing a class to go to China. I know that I can be upset about multiple sucky things at once, even if they are of different magnitudes of sucky, but guilt colors a lot of my relationship with my grandparents.

My paternal grandparents lived with my parents and me in the US until my sophomore year of high school. I could go on and on about how they did so much for me growing up. But frankly I was an awful, unappreciative granddaughter, and there’s so much I have to say about this that will stay in my private notes.

These past few days, I’ve been trying to talk my grandparents about anything, holding onto the time I have left with them like water in my hands. I’ve babbled about Spinning Arts, a tailless cat I met in Wales, how I injection molded the 2.008⁠03 Design & Manufacturing II yo-yos that I had brought over. Even though my explanation of injection molding was littered with a lot of “um I don’t know how to say this in Chinese,” somehow it was easier to say than “wo ai ni” — “I love you.” Chinese families seldomly say “wo ai ni” out of the Confucian belief that actions speak louder than words, and the few times I’ve been told “wo ai ni” growing up felt like flimsy ribbons dressing up awkward apologies.

But I’d much rather say “wo ai ni” a hundred times over than my last “zai jian” — “goodbye.” Zai jian translates directly to “see you again,” which feels cruel to say if I can’t guarantee for it to be true.

smoke and spice

Kanokwan T. '25 — Tue, 09 May 2023 21:06:40 +0000

… and everything nice!

My favorite dish in the whole wide world is called pakaprow.⁠04 spelling variations include Pad Gaprao, Pad Kra Pao, Pad Kraprow, etc. I love it so much that it’s been my Instagram username for the past 2 years. For the entirety of my freshman year, it was literally the only dish I cooked. I made it 7 times, which comes out to around once a month. In times when things were tough, I often turned to pakaprow. To me, it brings a sense of comfort like no other. It’s neat having things in life that you can always count on to brighten your day.

So, what is this dish? Pakaprow is a spicy Thai basil meat stir fry. The sensation of cooking it is always such a riot. Spicy smoke fills the room and the cook always ends up coughing and crying, unless they’re well-acquainted with the difficulties of this dish. It’s almost like an ayahuasca ceremony,⁠05 plant-based psychedelic ritual (FYI: I have never done one and have only heard of them) at least from the experiences of others that I’ve read up on: one relinquishes control, fights to stay afoot, and feels an exhilaration of energy. It’s tough, but I like a challenge.

a snippet of when I had it in Thailand, where my family is from

It holds sentimental value because it’s the only dish that every adult in my immediate family has cooked for me. My mother’s version leaned sweet and had perfect texture; my father’s was a funny amalgamation of flavors; my uncle’s was, by far, the spiciest; and my aunt’s version best highlighted Thai basil. Everyone had their own take and I enjoyed all of them.

I love my Thai culture and how it has spread around the world through cuisine.⁠06 the gastrodiplomacy of Thailand is quite fascinating! here is a great article, if you wanted to learn more Although, back at my middle school lunch table, I remember being confronted with “lunchbox moments,”⁠07 defined as an "instance of extreme embarrassment caused by the introduction of an unfamiliar ethnic food in the presence of peers unfamiliar with said food." more nuanced take here. which feels like such a cliche as a first-generation Asian-American student of immigrants, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Prompted by the intense smell of the dish, a few people would turn their heads and scoot further away, unwilling to try to understand a dish of something new. Eventually, I started bringing lunches of less piquant smells. I felt a tad dejected, like I was the odd one out at the lunch table. Like, I understand that people like some foods and don’t like other foods, but the immediate and curt responses struck me.

This glum experience made me all the more surprised to see people in college so excited to try my Thai cooking, let alone enjoy it. It was refreshing. Perhaps there’s something about being somewhere new and starting fresh that enables people to be more open-minded. I don’t know, really. But, at the very least, what I do know is that I, along with the people around me, loved sharing this dish together for the past 2 years.

During every season of MIT life, different situations have prompted me to learn how to make this dish in incrementally more-difficult styles, all of which I had never attempted before…

1. sharing with my floormates (Beast)

As the months went by during freshman year, I started sharing the dish with people on Beast.⁠08 a floor at my dorm East Campus I had never made it communally before, only for my personal meal prep. I didn’t even have to announce that I was making the dish: the aroma permeated the walls. People flocked into the kitchen and would shyly ask if they could have a little bit, to which I would enthusiastically respond “absolutely!” I remember a small group of people eagerly asked me to teach them how to make it. As I did, they jotted down notes and prodded with questions, like they were doing a study of this dish. It warmed my heart to see people not only enjoy the dish, but also learn how to make it themselves.

2. meal-prepping for ~42 people in my living group (pika)

The summer after freshman year, I lived at pika: an MIT independent living group where we cooked and cleaned together. One day, I was the lead cook and decided to make pakaprow for the MANY people that ate our daily dinners. Not only had I never made it for nearly that many people before, but I had never had to accommodate for so many different food preferences: gluten-free, vegetarian, non-spicy, dairy-free, and all that jazz. It was a little scary, but I think that made it all the more exciting.

3. serving it for a spice competition (CPW event)

from the East Campus CPW schedule

This sophomore year, I was roped into making the dish for a Campus Preview Weekend⁠09 a weekend where admitted students visit MIT to experience a ton of fun events and, in that process, see all that we have to offer event: Super Spicy Food, where challengers came in to take on our spice challenge. I’ve never included more peppers than I did in this dish: 40! Yes, forty. A floormate and I collectively served three dishes, in order of ascending difficulty: (1) turkey-parmesan sandwiches smeared with Habanero jam, (2) Texan dry-rubbed baked ribs, and, of course, (3) pakaprow. We laid each dish out on the table, exclusively queued up Red Hot Chili Peppers⁠10 a rock band songs, and let the feast begin.

It was funny watching the time lag of spice hit people. They would insist that they were fine, but, after a few moments, would be downing massive amounts of water (which I absolutely do NOT recommend because capsaicin, the chemical that triggers the spice sensation, is oil-based and would only be moved around in your mouth to trigger even more pain receptors), ice (which somewhat helps because it numbs your tongue, but will ultimately result in the same fate as drinking water), and milk (which is very good because it actually breaks the bonds between capsaicin and taste buds). My personal favorite remedy is to slowly chew on carbs, typically rice (because it absorbs the capsaicin).

nom nom nom (front view)

nom nom nom (bird eye's view)

before chopping

after chopping

imminent pan frying

The Recipe

I’ve hyped up this dish enough already that I might as well share my recipe. Apologies for the lack of measurements: it’s very vibes-based (I used to be annoyed at my mom doing this, but look at me now ). This version certainly isn’t the only way to make it, but, at the very least, how I do it.

Grind up Thai chili peppers and garlic cloves in a mortar and pestle.
1. Alternatively, putting the chilis through a food processor or finely chopping could work work, but it’ll be a bit different. The manually mashing of the pestle causes the breakdown of the ingredients’ cell walls and that, in turn, releases the spice and tang of the respective ingredients.
Fry that mixture in oil.
1. This step is basically just creating fresh chili oil.
Mash in the protein.
1. Once the garlic turns golden, put your protein in the pan. Then, with a wooden spatula, mash the protein such that it starts to break apart into little pieces (roughly 1 cm cubes). Keep mashing until the protein is all broken up.
2. The staple protein is ground pork, but you can substitute any protein here. Chicken breast, diced tofu, seitan, whatever suits your fancy.
Pour in each of these sauces.
1. You don’t have to have these exact brands; these are just the ones my family uses.
  1. Squid fish sauce
  2. Kwong Hung Seng thin soy sauce
  3. Maekrua oyster sauce
  4. Golden Mountain seasoning sauce
Toss in Thai basil leaves.
1. Mix up the dish for 1 more minute then turn off the heat.

Voila! Serve with Jasmine rice and a sunny side egg for full authenticity. I like to tack on a bitter melon soup as well. Sometimes, I make an ~illegal~ combination and instead of eating it with rice, I dump it into a bowl of mac and cheese. It is such a fantastic melding of flavors; I feel like Remy from the movie Ratatouille every time I have the combo.

Whenever I was homesick last year (and I mean really homesick), I made pakaprow. No matter where I was in the world, I knew this dish would always feels like a hug from home.

Food is so much more than just sustenance: it’s an experience that tingles your senses, elicits a consistent bit of joy, captures memories, and acts as means of communion. It’s a part of life we all have to partake in anyways, so we might as well relish in it.

To quote the above almond can that I snacked from while studying one late night, “crave victoriously.”

SHASS Hack

Paige B. '24 — Thu, 04 May 2023 13:15:52 +0000

Approximately two weeks ago in Building 14 (the one between Building 2 and just before Hayden Library for those familiar), a hack was put up celebrating the brilliant and diverse faculty, professors, and staff in SHASS.⁠11 School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences I, for one, think this hack was extremely well done and the end result is beautiful. I will let it speak for itself, with a few comments from members of SHASS.

Before the area was hacked, the wall in Building 14 highlighted several economists such as Joshua Angrist, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Peter Diamond among a few others. And while these economists deserve recognition for their contributions to MIT, well, I think this message from the hackers says it best:

We recognize and appreciate the incredible contributions that the Economics Faculty displayed here have made to both MIT and their fields. However, we disagree with the values inherent in the choices of this display and are recreating it to better reflect the diverse departments and people of SHASS. The specific values and choices we disagree with are as follows:

1. By centering the Department of Economics, this display chooses to center one of the whitest and most male departments in SHASS over other, more diverse departments.

2. By centering the Field of Economics, this display further perpetuates the technical bias pervasive at MIT that the value of a field of research, knowledge, and exploration is linked to its “technical rigor.” SHASS is composed of humanists, artists, and social scientists, but this display reinforces the notation that even in SHASS, the fields involving more technical and scientific modes of inquiry are more valuable and worthy of celebration.

3. By centering the Nobel Prize in Economics, this display is centering an award that has historically had a massive diversity problem and overlooked countless exemplary contributions of women, People of Color, and people from the Global South to their fields and the communities they work with.

This is not to say that the individuals recognized here do not deserve recognition but rather that in choosing to display only these individuals in a corridor dedicated to all of SHASS ignores the contributions of other fields and individuals, particularly those that are not white cis-men.

–the hackers

And recreate the display they did. They, without obstructing the posters of the economists mind you, covered the wall with numerous diverse members of SHASS.

entire wall that was hacked

The entire list of faculty members added to the display is included at the end of this blogpost.

I reached out to some SHASS faculty and some of the professors included in the new exhibit for comment, and recieved the following:

The Dean’s Office is postponing the installation of a planned new exhibit until this summer, and the hack will stay in play until then. We want that space to celebrate the entire SHASS community, and agree [with the hackers] that excellence comes from across our school.

– Michael Brindley, SHASS Director of Communications

Additionally,

There are so many things I love about the hack in the hallway of Building 14. Although it criticizes MIT, it does so in a thoughtful, positive way, ending with an incitement to celebrate SHASS, and giving a lucid, balanced explanation of the students’ concerns about the current display. The hack is appropriately low-tech: its tool is not technological wizardry but images and the written word, infused with careful critical thinking—a tribute to SHASS in style as well as substance. It provides a great opportunity to reflect on what MIT stands for.

– Kieran Setiya, Philosophy

The hackers concluded their message by welcoming others to create a space that celebrates all of SHASS:

We hope you will join us in reimagining this space as one that represents and highlights the work of all members of SHASS. While the changes we have made have taken a step in that direction, there are still others who we were not able to include here, from SHASS staff to librarians to many of the SHASS affiliated artists. We invite you to contribute the pieces that we overlooked! Add a shout-out to a SHASS professor, lecturer, or affiliate on the chalkboard or print out a page yourself and add it to the wall. Let’s create a space that visualizes and appreciates all of SHASS together.

–the hackers

The hack is to be preserved in the Institute Archives.

List of faculty members the wall displayed:
Fox Harrell, Heather Paxson, Erica Caple James, Sulafa Zidani, Eden Medina, Javier Barroso, McKersin Previlus, Lily L. Tsai, Kieran Setiya, Emily Goodling, Mikéah Ernest Jennings, Justin Reich, Chakanesta Mavhunga, Fatin Abbas, Manduhai Buyandelger, Marah Gubar, Sandy Alexandre, Deborah Fitzgerald, Sally Haslanger, Jennifer S. Light, Takako Aikawa, Justin Khoo, Athulya Aravind, Eric J. Goldberg, Wiebke Denecke, Keeril Makan, Michael DeGraff, Charlotte Barthwaithe, Natalie Lin Douglas, Lynn Chang, Emma Teng, Ellen T. Harris, Michael Scott Cuthbert, Tamar Schapiro, Lerna Ekmekeioglu, Graham M. Jones, Sana Aiyar, Melissa Nobles, Ariel White, Mai Hassan, Sabine Iatridou, Nazli Choucri, Héctor Beltrán, Kenneth Manning, and many more that others have added on over the week!

You don’t have to be a founder

CJ Q. '23 — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 04:46:55 +0000

Thanks to Petey, whose ideas I am stealing to write this post. Thanks to Alan and Vincent for reading drafts. This post is dedicated to MIT Facilities, the people who keep MIT running.

In 2014, Walter Isaacson published a book named “The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution”. It’s rated 4.6 on Amazon, and it’s a pretty popular book. Someone made a joke, suggesting that this book be countered with one titled “The Maintainers: How Bureaucrats, Standards Engineers, and Introverts Create Technologies that Kind of Work Most of the Time”.

Philippine science fairs, back in my day, always had “innovation” as their highest-weighted judging criterion. A national science fair announcement from the Department of Education mentions “innovation” an average of once per page. Replicating a previous work’s experiments? Applying another study’s results? Important, maybe, but unglamorous; it wouldn’t win a science fair.

When I went to a party in SF this summer, lots of people I talked to asked me about what startup I was a cofounder of. I heard about pitches ranging from “Tinder between venture capitalists and founders” and “a low-code authentication solution”. To which my gut reactions were:

Tinder for startups? Isn’t that AngelList? Or YC Co-Founder Matching? A one-minute Google search brings up more: The Pitch Portal, CoFoundersLab, Fundsup, 3linepitch. What makes this different?
Low-code authentication solutions? If you’re using a low-code platform like Appian or Mendix or Zoho Creator, wouldn’t that already have authentication? If you’re programming on your own, outside of a platform, what’s wrong with OAuth?

I don’t remember what their answers were, but I do remember that I wasn’t convinced. Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making your own solution, if you find the existing ones lacking. I’ve done this myself with qboard, because I wanted a whiteboard app with custom keyboard shortcuts; I’ve talked about my thought process before too. But it felt to me like they weren’t founding a startup because they wanted their product to exist. It felt like they were founding a startup for the sake of being a startup founder.

Leave the water running

Things tend to stick around longer than anyone expects. Consider the ESP website, which was last rewritten in 2006. Some old meeting minutes talk about whether to create the website in Perl or Python. There’s a bit of discussion, and the question that ended it was “what’s [the website’s] expected lifetime?” How many years before it’d have to be rewritten again? The consensus was, in the best-case, five years. The “upper limit” for how long it should last, they said, was ten years.

It has been 17 years, and the ESP website stands unchanged. Five years? A ten year “upper limit”? They had the right mindset of thinking about future website developers, but they didn’t get close to guessing how long the website would last.

Consider another example, Building 20. It’s a “temporary” building constructed in 1943, during World War II. An architect’s memo says its expected lifetime would be “the duration of the war and six months thereafter”. The war ended in 1945. Building 20 stayed up until 1998.

Why did Building 20 take 55 years before it got demolished? Why are we still using the same codebase for the ESP website, 17 years later? Partly because of how expensive it is to replace something so large, in both time and money. If I had to guess, a bigger reason would be because so much depends on these systems. Running any of ESP’s programs at our thousand student scale would be difficult without our website’s registration features. If you read anything about Building 20, you’ll see how much people praised the building’s flexibility, and there’s hundreds of articles talking about how it encouraged innovation.

In time, the cost of maintaining these systems becomes too high. There’s parts of ESP’s website that no one in ESP understands, and developers are afraid of making big changes in fear of breaking it. The asbestos hazards of Building 20, and perhaps its disrepair, eventually outweighed whatever creative benefits its occupants got. Leave the water running for too long, and your water bill goes up.

Leave it to me

I talk so much about the student groups I help run that I sometimes forget why I’m with these groups in the first place. In my second blog post, which I wrote three-and-a-half years ago, I talked about my first ever Assassins’ Guild game and how I got dragged to a square dance class by a hallmate, and I said that I found it fun. I find live-action roleplaying, square dancing, teaching, and puzzles fun, which is why I’m part of all these extracurriculars. And I cared about them enough that I took on some responsibility to help keep them going.

Ever since I wrote about gift economies in the puzzlehunt context, I’ve thought about my student groups as having a gift economy, to an extent. (That’s what happens to you when you study CMS; you start applying your humanities knowledge to everything.) In the Assassins’ Guild, work can be anything from helping cart the Nerf guns to and from the office, to writing or reviewing a game. In Tech Squares, work can be anything from doing weekly setup and teardown, to helping organize one-off events like amateur night.

As with the puzzlehunt or fandom gift economies, not everyone who joins a Guild game or comes to Squares will do one of these things, and that’s okay. Some people won’t have the resources to do more than come, and that’s okay. There’s groups that I take from more than I give to, like how I go to SaveTFP and get free food, or how I’ll take hot chocolate from the Lab for Chocolate Science during finals week, or how I’ll go to International Students Association meetings to get dinner. I’ve never done anything in exchange for all their free food, and I probably never will.

I’ve talked to some people who think that the only way they can show “leadership skills” is by being the president of something, or that expressing initiative and risk-taking means founding something. But there are other ways too. I’ve learned skills like delegation, tracking deadlines, and running meetings from groups like Tech Squares or the Puzzle Club, and I’ve never been the president for either of these. I didn’t suggest running ESP’s first virtual program but I took on the risk of doing so.

Leave room to grow

Maybe replacement is inevitable. When Building 20 was constructed, most people weren’t aware of asbestos’s health hazards. There’s always that unknown unknown that you couldn’t have foreseen, that unpredictable disaster you can’t recover from, or some fundamentally broken part of whatever system. And in that case, then yes, we need founders. We need people who’ll create new solutions, people who’ll make whatever invention to fill the gap.

I don’t want to give people the impression that I’m against innovation. There’s lots of cases when founding something is the right thing to do, and this is one of them. And if you make something that’s meant to last for a short time, like a one-off event that’ll never run again, there’s no need to think about maintenance. But if you want to start an event that’ll run every year, you need to think about how it’ll run every year.

My favorite examples of making things that’ll last for years are from software and architecture. For whatever reason, there’s a lot of similar ideas in designing websites and designing buildings, like how I talked about the ESP website and Building 20. I first learned this connection through a Twitter thread by Geoffrey Litt, a PhD student in the MIT Software Design Group. It’s about How Buildings Learn, a book that talks about how buildings adapt to changing requirements over decades. The thread discusses shearing layers, the idea that a building is made of layers that change at different rates, from furniture that can change day by day, to wiring or plumbing that only get replaced every few years.

There’s a lot that’s been written about writing maintainable software, like Big Ball of Mud, Worse is Better, or The Cathedral and the Bazaar. My favorite is probably Growing a Language, a talk you can watch on YouTube or read the text of. It’s by Guy Steele, and in the talk he talks about the philosophy of designing Java. It’s a great talk, and I’d suggest watching at least the first ten mintues, even if you’re not a programmer. His main idea is that designs should leave room to grow:

I stand on this claim: I should not design a small language, and I should not design a large one. I need to design a language that can grow. I need to plan ways in which it might grow—but I need, too, to leave some choices so that other persons can make those choices at a later time.

These thoughts influenced how I designed Hydrant, a rewrite of Firehose. Firehose is a fantastic class scheduling website, but as its Github README says, it was built in a weekend, and “every new feature had been crammed on top.” All these features were in one 2000-line JavaScript file, which I split into several files to make adding new features easier. I also changed the jQuery to React and TypeScript, which I chose because React is taught in web.lab, and TypeScript is taught in 6.102 Software Construction. While I’d have enjoyed trying out new techiques in making Hydrant, I stuck to what future developers might know, because I can’t maintain Hydrant forever.

Leave the lights on

Hydrant is open source. Anyone can look at the Github repo and submit a pull request to get something changed. In theory, if there’s an issue or request that enough people want, one of those people would fix or add it themselves. In practice, this doesn’t happen, because would-be contributors don’t know how or don’t have enough time. Design can only go so far: good maintainers can make up for bad design, but good design can never make up for a lack of maintainers.

This is where SIPB comes in. As Hydrant is a SIPB project, we encourage our members to take on roles like being a Hydrant maintainer, one of the many roles in our many projects. We try to help members choose roles where their skills would be useful, and many roles need skills beyond code. Remember how, earlier, I talked about “delegation, tracking deadlines, and running meetings”? Every project needs someone in this role, and they’re no less of a maintainer than someone who writes code. Other non-code maintainer roles include writing documentation, choosing issues and requests to focus on, and outreach.

These ideas aren’t new. In Breaking apart the monolith, swyx suggests solutions to finding maintainers. One suggestion I like is to treat being a maintainer not only as a responsibility, but as a title or a source of pride. This is something we could do better in SIPB ourselves. I dream that one day, people will step up to be a Hydrant maintainer, because of how cool it’d be to tell people that you work on Hydrant. I’ve gotten a lot of thanks for maintaining Hydrant, and I hope the new maintainers get recognition for their work too.

You could call it passing the torch. But torches remind me of burning out, like how I once burned out doing work for my student groups. Instead, I like to call it leaving the lights on. It’s partly in the sense of the idiom “keep the lights on,” which means to keep something going, even if it’s the bare minimum. But it’s also in the sense of “leave the lights on,” which means being ready to welcome someone when they arrive. It’s a reminder to make people feel welcome to contribute, and a reminder that I will eventually leave the lights for someone else to keep on.

Leave it behind

We give advice we wish we could’ve told our past selves. While it’s true that being older made me think about maintenance more, you don’t have to wait until you’re older before you start thinking about it too. It reminds me of Choose Boring Technology, which someone once called “how to be old, for young people.” Incidentally, part of the talk’s reasons for choosing boring technology is because long-term costs can outweigh short-term benefits. Kind of like how this essay is about maintenance, which is the long-term cost to keep something going.

Here, then, is my advice. Want to change something? Find the role that’ll best let you do so. If that means starting something, then that’s great, do it. But you don’t have to be a founder. You might have more impact as a maintainer.

I’m graduating in two months. Did I leave my mark on MIT as a maintainer? Did I leave things better than I found them? Did I leave the lights on for the people who’ll take my place? I don’t know. I tried my best. I might be leaving, but I’ll still be available for advice, in the same way that others have been available for me.

To Alyssa S. ’24, Colin C. ’26, Diana S. ’25, Julia C. ’25, Lumia N. ’24, and the many, many others I don’t have space to list, I hope I made your job easier, and if not, I hope I didn’t make it harder. I hope that you help maintain the communities and groups I’m leaving behind. I hope that you one day leave the lights on for someone else to maintain them. And I hope you find more joy in your work than I’ve ever had.

study spots at MIT

Ankita D. '23 — Sun, 05 Mar 2023 21:39:11 +0000

since it’s my last semester, I’ve been trying to spend more time working on campus. or rather, I feel guilty whenever I work in my bed since I could be exploring a new and fascinating part of the institute I’ll soon be graduating from!!

to try to get myself out of my room more, I embarked on a quest to document the best study spots at MIT. most of these are relatively well-known—don’t anticipate many niche hidden gems since those will continue to be gatekept by the student body :)) I tried to find them, I promise :))))

what makes a study spot attractive?

I started by polling my friends to find out where they like to study on campus and what they enjoy about their most-frequented spots. The most popular locations were:

Hayden Library (31.7%)
empty classrooms (15.9%)
the student center (Stud) (11.1%)
Stata (4.8%)
Rotch Library (3.2%)
STEAM (3.2%)

I also asked them to choose the most important characteristics of a given study space:

other factors that they wrote in include:

enough chairs and stable desks
nobody gets annoyed if I talk while working with someone
comfy seats next to a table so I can sit cross-legged
I don’t know the people there…I get distracted too easily by anyone I know :(
charging spots near desks
is far from where I live so I stay there
is cozy/has warm lighting
natural light
windows and sunlight

with all this in mind, let’s dive into my definitely not comprehensive list of well-trafficked spots!

Green Building (Building 54)

54-1725

Pros

free coffee and tea
great view
super comfy couch
good table space
has a printer!!

Cons

not enough natural light

14th Floor Lounge

Pros

great view
free coffee/sparkling water
big tables and comfy chairs/sofas

Cons

only a few tables, so you’ll probably have to share during the day when it’s busy

Ida Green Room (9th Floor Lounge)

Pros

incredible view
spacious
lots of couch seating
free coffee/tea

Cons

only one large table + the seats with it are uncomfortable
lighting is eh

DUSP⁠12 Department of Urban Studies and Planning (Building 9)

there are tons of nooks to study in on every floor of building 9 (except maybe the 3rd, I didn’t see much there). there’s a lounge on the second floor and a big workspace with a bunch of chairs, tables, and couches on the fifth.

Pros

lots of seating options
good outlet access
plenty of natural light on second floor
big tables
small circular tables are a nice height

Cons

creepy lighting on higher floors at night
second floor lounge is kind of small and literally never empty

MIT.nano (Building 12)

1st Floor Booths

Pros

booths are great for solo/partner work
comfortable seating
big table
good outlet access

Cons

people are always walking by when classes end and it’s distracting

3rd/4th Floor

Pros

comfy seating
great view of dome (from 3rd floor)
quiet
nano is pretty (I disagree with those who say it looks like an insane asylum)

Cons

outlet access is bad
tables are short

Brain and Cognitive Sciences (Building 46)

(first pic stolen from Joonho’s blog “places at mit,” which has much prettier pictures and some other spots. check it out!)

“Plant Room” aka Reading Terrace

everyone thinks this is a niche spot, but half of campus has worked here. fun fact: it was the first place I ever psetted at MIT!

Pros

so pretty
well-lit
quiet
great view of Stata
vibey even after the sun sets

Cons

tables usually occupied
- there are couches, but they can be hard to work on
outlets hard to reach from certain tables

Main Area

Pros

building is so beautiful & visually interesting
quiet
couches and tables scattered through the floors

Cons

hard to find an empty spot, especially during lunch hours

BCS Tea Room (46-6005)

located right outside the 6th floor elevators, on the opposite side of the plant room.

Pros

quiet and much less crowded than plant room
comfy chairs
coffee
whiteboards
couch
cute little view of plant room
natural light

Cons

only a few tables
kind of small

Stata Center (Building 32)

home to CSAIL⁠13 Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and probably more study nooks than I could ever hope to discover! the main ones I know are:

First Floor

again, first pic credit goes to Joonho

Pros

the cafeteria is right there
lots of people working around you
nice big tables
natural light (near the skylights)

Cons

super busy between classes, hard to get a spot
you’ll always be bumping into people, which might be a positive but for me is distracting
food is so overpriced

Fourth Floor Commons

Pros

very quiet
nice long tables
less crowded than first floor
lots of natural light + windows to work against

Cons

hard to find unoccupied space midday, especially near lunch time
finding outlets is annoying near the middle of the space

Rotch Library

Pros

TONS of study nooks
hidden desks in the stacks are private & secluded
- window-side ones have nice views
large tables
very quiet
well-lit
lots of natural light
couches

Cons

closes at 6 PM on weekdays, closed on weekends

Media Lab

6th Floor

I’m a 6th floor devotee. I romanticized it so much last year that I made a playlist for when I study there…yes, I’m serious. but every time I’ve tried to go this year, there’s been some event going on, so I’m not sure how reliable of a spot it is anymore. last year, it was always empty, had a ton of huge desks set up, and had a GIANT display I’d use to play dance videos whenever I needed a break.

Pros

beautiful at night, incredible view
huge desks
lots of outlets
a nice display to play with if you so desire

Cons

it’s kind of creepy to be alone in a big space
nowadays there’s always events going on here, good luck finding a time it’s empty

5th Floor

if things don’t work out on the 6th floor, you can try here. actually, just kidding—if there’s an event going on upstairs, it might echo through this floor and annoy the hell out of you :)

Pros

the purple chairs are fire
nice big tables to work on
quiet
plenty of natural light
so pretty
lots of different tables to choose from

Cons

outlets in weird areas
can be loud if there’s an event upstairs
weird lighting at night
benches are uncomfortable

I also love the seating area on the 3rd floor with all the interesting furniture. in general, the Media Lab has a bunch of great study spots!! it’s kind of far, but definitely worth it.

Hayden

1st Floor

Pros

natural light!
quiet
nice view
café with sandwiches/snacks/coffee/smoothies etc open weekdays 9-5
lots of people working peripherally
bookable study rooms
comfy couches and desks by the windows
whiteboards
some chairs are configurable

Cons

circular couch tables are small
so crowded all the time, especially since Stud closed
outlet access annoying in places
café is overpriced (as most things are)
study rooms are booked super fast

2nd Floor

Pros

natural light
large tables
quiet study room with single-person sofas and dividers
outlet availability
quiet

Cons

crowded
tall grey sofas are difficult to work on

Building 66

3rd Floor

Pros

always empty
couches! art!
whiteboards everywhere

Cons

short tables
couches are mid

3rd Floor Connection to 68

Pros

always empty
nice big table
chairs are comfortable enough
room is closed off

Cons

I feel like I’m going insane if I’m here for more than two hours

Barker Library

Pros

pin drop silent, if you’re into that
the dome is so pretty
couches and tables available
the tables have dividers
desks around circumference

Cons

couches hard to work on
personally, I find it too quiet (I always end up falling asleep)
closes at 6 PM on weekdays, closed on weekends

Stud 5

note that I’m limited in my ability to document other study spots in the student center since a pipe burst a few weeks ago and certain parts are closed off now. it’s going down for renovations soon anyways

Loud Side

(literally my least favorite place to work ever. haven’t been here since freshman year)

Pros

fun place for working on group projects
seating is nice
study rooms with whiteboards
good sized tables
ambient
close to food places located in building

Cons

loud
busy, you’ll probably see people you know all the time & get distracted
study rooms aren’t closed off so they don’t feel private

Quiet Side

Pros

deathly silent
close to food places located in building
huge tables
dividers
everyone around you is extremely productive

Cons

depressing
lighting is weird at night

iHQ (E38 3rd Floor)

the innovation headquarters!

Pros

very nice study rooms with monitors, whiteboards, and couches
close to Chipotle
nice communal working areas
monitors and charging spots everywhere
water fountain and bathroom three feet away at all times

Cons

Empty Classrooms

Pros

having a whole room to yourself is great
natural light, esp. in buildings 2/4

Cons

outlet availability, sometimes
hard to find depending on the time of day
awkward interactions with people who walk in thinking it’s their class
you might get kicked out for office hours or something

STEAM (Building 7 4th Floor)

Pros

has a café open on weekdays
large tables
good natural light
great for (quiet-ish) group work
good outlet access

Cons

uncomfortable seating
elevator is slow and annoying
people give you death glares if you’re too loud

Cheney Room (3-308)

Aims to promote community and empower all students at MIT who experience gender-based systems of oppression as it relates to being a women or being coded as a woman. This includes (but is not limited to) self-identified women, transgender women, non-binary women as well as gender diverse individuals who relate to the purpose of the Margaret Cheney Room.

Pros

adorable and vibey, cute art everywhere, soothing color palette
plenty of natural light
tables and cute comfy booths available
lounge space with sofas, pillows, and blankets
TVs with Disney+/Hulu/Netflix if you’re trying to take a study break
kitchen with snacks
free tea and coffee
nice view
outlets everywhere

Cons

sweltering….I get so sweaty whenever I go

Banana Lounge

Pros

free bananas
free coffee (although I personally find it repulsive)
hot chocolate!
wide array of seating
good sized tables
dark space to nap/work on beanbags

Cons

faint to strong scent of rotting bananas..
ranges from ambient to loud
the people always coming in and out are distracting

Martin Trust Center (E40)

the entrepreneurship space, located right next to Sloan

Pros

free coffee and tea + a bevi
sometimes if you scrounge around enough you can find free ramen/snacks
you can book study rooms or phone booths to take/hold meetings
- phone booths are very conducive to grind sessions…have been in there until 5 AM more than a few times
- the bigger rooms have whiteboards!!

Cons

quite the trek from main campus
sometimes there are events going on and it gets pretty loud
- if you don’t blast music, you’ll hear people pitching their shitty startups to randos

Sloan (E51/52/62)

Pros

well-lit
quiet
lots of couches
close to [overpriced] Sloan cafeteria

Cons

far from main campus
short tables
proximity to MBA students (kidding)
busy during the day

Walker Memorial 2nd Floor

this building might traumatize you because of all the exams you’ve taken on the 3rd floor, but the 2nd floor is a nice place to work

Pros

couches!
tables!
lots of seating space

Cons

lighting is mid
there’s dance practice in the studio adjacent to this area, so it might get loud between 7 and 11 pm

Building 36 8th Floor

credit to joonho, again

Pros

so much natural light—there are floor to ceiling windows⁠14 the windows are so huge that they serve as perfect mirrors when it gets dark. dancers used to use this as a practice space. that's been banned since, but I still use them to dance when I need a break from work
large tables in the middle, smaller ones by the windows
perfect place to work as the sun goes down
convenient bathroom access

Cons

gets really hot sometimes?
benches aren’t comfortable
outlets hard to reach from bigger tables depending on location
the water fountain barely works

and finally,

my personal favorite spots:

Hayden
Cheney Room
iHQ
plant room
Building 36 8th floor

let me know what spots I missed!

Solar Catsby

Andi Q. '25 — Thu, 02 Mar 2023 21:20:53 +0000

Meet Catsby:

He was a sweet boy who loved food, sleeping in the dirt, and sunbathing. Sadly, he passed away shortly after I moved to MIT. I was devastated, but luckily, I still have many pictures to remind me of him. This semester, I was fortunate enough to take a class at MIT.nano where I immortalized one of those pictures as a solar cell!

(The cat to the right is a random cat I found online.)

The inspiration

MIT.nano is MIT’s state-of-the-art research facility for nanoscale science and engineering. Built near the end of 2018, it houses the most sophisticated nanofabrication facilities of any university in the world. At the heart of it is a cleanroom with a vast array of advanced (and expensive) machinery used to control and measure material properties down to the nanometer – that’s a billionth of a meter!

Since MIT.nano’s inception, researchers have used the space for all kinds of high-tech research, from paper-thin loudspeakers to new drugs to treat cancer. Almost everything created there is super exciting, so naturally, the MIT.nano staff want students to get excited about it too.

To that end, undergraduates like me get to take classes where we work in the cleanroom to design and fabricate our own nanotechnology. These classes range from 3-hour-long “etch a tiny image onto silicon” seminars (designed to show off the facilities) to semester-long courses where students create novel microelectronic devices using MIT.nano’s equipment.

This wafer contains everyone’s submitted pictures from this past IAP’s seminars.

I’m taking one of those classes this semester – 3.155J/6.2600J (micro/nano processing technologies). In lectures, we learn about semiconductors and nanofabrication techniques; in labs, we apply that knowledge and make devices like microfluidic chips, thin-film transistors, and eventually a device that we design.

Without a doubt, 6.2600 is the most magical and exciting class I’ve taken at MIT – and it has only been four weeks! The lectures are fun and engaging⁠15 Shoutout to Jorg’s top-tier memes and Jesús’s wholesome efforts to learn everyone’s name. , the class policies are fair⁠16 We get extra late hours whenever the course staff take too long to grade our homework. , and students can augment lab assignments with their own designs if they put in some extra work.

Our first lab project is fabricating solar cells from scratch, which involves testing fifteen different designs to see which is the most efficient:

Each silicon wafer can fit 25 solar cells, so we had space left for other designs. The original plan was for students to submit pictures to be etched inside those extra spaces as decorations, but I felt more ambitious – I wanted to take a picture and turn it into a full-on solar cell.

Creating the design

Jorg, the lecturer in charge of our labs, was totally on board with my plan. The only problems were that they had never done something like that before, and I only had two days before the lab to pull it off. Luckily, I had taken one of the IAP seminars a few weeks earlier, so I had a vague notion of how it would work.

The main idea was to use different-sized squares to represent the brightness of each pixel, with large squares being brighter in the final image. It’s pretty much the opposite of halftone dots used to print old newspapers.

I wanted to expose as much silicon as possible to the sunlight (so the solar cell would be decently efficient), so I also needed to squash the image’s dynamic range⁠17 The difference between the lightest and darkest parts of the image. in half. The resulting images didn’t look too great, but at least they were still recognizable.

Finally, I needed to connect everything to collect the generated electric current. I initially coded something complicated to minimize the amount of excess metal, but after some back-and-forth emailing with Jorg, I settled on simple vertical stripes to collect the current instead.

This was the final result:

Fabricating the solar cell

Day 1

Gowning up to enter the cleanroom.

Patterning the wafer using photolithography (AKA a $500,000 laserjet printer).

Using hydrofluoric acid (the same stuff Walter White used to dissolve bodies in Breaking Bad) to etch the wafer after patterning.

Viewing the results under a microscope. The precision is astounding – even the squares' corners are sharp and clean!

The results of day 1.

Day 2

Patterning a second layer on the wafer.

Rinse (with acid) and repeat.

Even more testing (under the microscope and with a multimeter).

My quartet of custom solar cells.

Day 3

Cleaving the wafer to extract the individual solar cells.

All the solar cells together.

Preparing the solar cells for electrical testing.

How effective was the final product?

The electrical testing results from day 3 for Catsby’s solar cell.

My four custom solar cells actually ended up performing surprisingly well.

In particular, the Catsby solar cell achieved an efficiency of 7.7%! For reference, the best-performing of the fifteen solar cells we tested had an efficiency of 9.3%.

Out of the four custom solar cells I made, the one with Catsby’s image was also the second most-efficient cell, with the Megamind solar cell narrowly beating it by 0.3% in efficiency.

Of course, these numbers pale in comparison to the best solar cells available today, with some designs achieving efficiencies of over 45%. Despite these high efficiencies though, none of them contain images of Catsby, so we all know who the real winner is here.

For your enjoyment, here are more pictures of my little ray of sunshine to brighten your day:

major takeaways: from every semester of mit

Cami M. '23 — Tue, 28 Feb 2023 14:00:27 +0000

content warnings: suicide mentions

98 days.

I think oftentimes it’s very easy to get caught up in the daily metronome of life, especially when you’re on a set schedule. Every day, I wake up, I work out, I go to class, I talk to my friends, I do work, I head home, I sleep. Next day. Repeat. Next day. Repeat.

My friends and I have been talking about lately how we recycle the same topics over and over again. Every day it’s a conversation about how Raymond and I are doing, how it’s our last semester, what guy someone is dating, how much work someone has. I think that’s what I hate most about this time of year.

I’ve never had a good spring semester at MIT, or, my falls were always better, at least. I find that by the time February and March rolls around things feel tired, they feel already done. It’s just a crawl to the end of the school year before you can do summer things.

But now I stand at an awkward place where I don’t really want to graduate, but I don’t reaaallly want to do the whole school thing anymore.

But I think one of the benefits of this time of year is that I tend to do a lot more thinking. The weather is colder, usually snowy (it is right now), and people usually become a lot more hosed, so you have a lot of time to yourself to just think.

These past four years have been a whirlwind and there are moments where I feel like I haven’t truly learned everything I needed to at MIT.

But in these moments of reflection, I’ve realized that every semester really has taught me something important, some greater, grand life lesson that I hope to carry with me into the future.

freshman fall: it’s okay to drop things

Perhaps best explained in one of my earliest blogs, freshman Cami learned the importance of drop date. I came into MIT with a lot of hopes and ideas of what I was going to do. I was going to dive in head first, I was going to take the hardest classes possible and be in five different extracurriculars and make things in my free time and go to the gym everyday and cook food and, well, you get the point.

Freshman fall is meant to be a reality check for baby students. It’s why MIT so graciously gives us P/NR. A lot of freshmen enter with warped ideas of what their next four years are going to be like, and realize quickly that a lot of things they set out to do simply just don’t happen. Or, they end up wanting to do other things in life.

freshman spring: i am not the person that i was

I’ve mentioned time and time again that I have trauma, and I think I carried a lot of that with me into college. I wasn’t particularly well liked in high school for my prickly personality among other things and I was struggling a lot with reckoning my high school self with this person I was becoming now in college and figuring out what aspects to keep and throw away. There was some part of me that felt guilty for changing because it felt as though I was admitting that some part of me was “wrong,” that needed correction. And so it was really hard to feel okay with changing myself.

I think still now I struggle with this. I’m often unsatisfied with the person I put forth, but I think my freshman spring was where I really got that first taste of intrinsic change, using the time at home to reflect on the then and now.

sophomore fall: you aren’t really ever done growing (it’s okay to fail)

My sophomore fall was by far my most difficult semester at MIT. I was in a house where I had sour relationships with my housemates, I was close to failing all my classes, and worst of all, I had started thinking of suicide again.

This kind of came as a shock to me because I hadn’t felt that way since high school and those feelings came from feelings of social isolation, of losing my friends in high school. At MIT, though, I figured I had solved all those things. I had friends that cared about me. What could possibly stop me now?

Surprisingly, it was academics. It was the feeling of running freely and openly at MIT to only slam headfirst into a brick wall, realizing that I wasn’t smart enough for this school. I had thought this in the past, almost transferring out of MIT in January 2020, but had never really felt it to such a drastic extent.

It seemed as though no matter how much time or effort I poured into my classes, I still failed to grasp the concept. It was as though I needed double, triple, if not quintuple the time it took the average MIT student and I felt like a failure.

I began really internalizing these doubts and fears, feeling useless and stupid. I started jeopardizing my relationships, both platonic and romantic, by taking out this anger and fear onto them. And ultimately I came very close to attempting suicide.

But of course I survived and pushed through and realized that failing was simply something I was going to have to co-exist with.

sophomore spring: you don’t have to feel bad

Despite coming to this great realization, I was having a hard time putting these words into action, showing the same bad habits as I had last semester.

I remember feeling a lot of anger during this semester — why were people doing this to us? Why was I being treated like this? Why did I feel like dogshit every single day? Is this really how I want to spend the rest of my life?

Ultimately, it was these questions that made me realize I don’t have to feel this way. And I soon re-declared 21E⁠18 Humanities and Engineering joint major, as opposed to a full computer science major. after this.

junior fall: there is a life outside of this place

My junior fall was my first semester as a full 21E major. I was taking three humanities classes and an easier technical class, my first semester taking three HASS classes and it was a really eye-opening experience. This was also around the time that I had just moved into DPhiE and all my friends and I were scattered across Boston-Cambridge, new people were coming into my friend group, and ultimately there was a large period of change just happening.

I essentially used this free time to really find my stride socially — I made friends in DPhiE, I started getting daily lunch and dinners with people, I befriended Mikey, Julian, and Savoldy, Eva was now fully part of our friend group. I was also just falling back in love with things I used to do, like concertgoing and playing video games and making videos. I had finally found a way to feel happy at MIT; it wasn’t some great, elusive thing.

junior spring: but learn how to spend your free time wisely

I took my newfound freedoms and had thrown myself into a lot. I was going through sorority drama, dropping jobs, breaking my ankle, getting COVID, and honestly I was still dealing with the burnout of internship hunting in the fall.

My junior spring was essentially the time where all of the good things I got from my fall realizations started to show their ugly side. Filling your free time up with extracurriculars, pouring yourself into too much of your work, checking the clock and realizing that your time is running out.

Once I finally crashed, I was able to pick up the pieces again and realize that I need to find a better balance, something that I thought I had learned to do in my freshman fall, but now was putting into practice again this time as a junior.

senior fall: the power of intention and choice

In my senior fall, I took three media studies classes in regions that I was unfamiliar with: writing comics, making documentaries, and debating. The theme in all of these classes, for the most part, was intention. What choices are you making? What choices are you not making? Why are you spending time on this and not that? What is the significance of a shot from this perspective instead of that one? What does this color bring to the table over this one?

Around this time, too, my friend group was crumbling and I started thinking a lot about choice in this context. Who am I spending my time with? What does it mean to be friends with people who are no longer dating, who no longer want to be around each other? What does it mean to truly be kind, to be intentionally kind and a good friend? How does one go about becoming friends again?

This semester was a growing pains semester, where I learned how to be intentional with my time, choosing just exactly how I wanted to spend it, who I wanted to spend it with.

senior spring: there is no such thing as magic

This is a sentiment expressed in both my rap theory class and my internet studies class: there is no such thing as magic. Lupe Fiasco describes this more of like, in the music industry, creativity isn’t some magical thing that just happens. It is a skill that can be trained and this class is here to show us just how you can train it, remove the mysticism behind lyric writing and metaphors and all of that.

My internet studies class essentially gets at the same thing — the Internet is not some magical force. There are tangible, physical processes that are occurring to make these things possible. Companies intentionally make it seem magical or out of reach to keep their audience in the dark, hiding the labor and work that goes into it to create a gap not only between consumer and company, but company and laborer, and laborer and consumer.

Funnily enough, I think this idea also can extend to my personal life, too. I think adulting always seemed like some abstract concept that would just hit you once you “grew up”. I thought I’d turn 18 or whatever and just suddenly know how to do my taxes. Or I’d turn 25 and I’d just, I don’t know, understand how mortgages and car loans worked.

But now that I’m deep in the throes of apartment hunting (blog coming soon) and adulting (blog coming soon), I realize that none of this is magic. These are things that all the adults in my life had to sit down and learn how to do, and though these processes are often mystified and hidden to make it harder for people, they are not impossible. They are attainable.

I still have 98 days left, so I know there’s many lessons left to be learned. I also wanted to remind myself that college isn’t just for learning technical things or prepping for jobs; it’s also a place to get some (training wheels) life experience and I’m grateful for all the lessons learned at MIT thusfar.

if you are struggling, you can text HOME to 741741 to connect with a volunteer crisis counselor. you can find more info here at crisistextline.org

Ten days of live-action roleplaying

CJ Q. '23 — Sun, 19 Feb 2023 23:10:57 +0000

One of MIT’s oldest student groups is the Assassins Guild. We’re the live-action roleplaying group. Over my time in the Guild, I’ve roleplayed as a ghost who didn’t know he was a ghost, an undercover robot working for space police, and a Wookiee stuck in a tavern in the middle of a desert storm.

And one of the Guild’s oldest traditions is the ten-day game, which is exactly what it sounds: a ten-day long larp. These happen in IAP, the glorious time of year when classes aren’t as big of a deal for most people. Such ten-days have been written about in the blogs before, like in 2008 and in 2009. In fact, that 2009 post is from Paul B. ’11, one of the co-authors of Athens, another game that ran that IAP.

This year’s ten-day game was Harry Potter Year 7: Hogwarts Under Siege, co-written by Andrew M. ’97, Ariel S. ’04, E. Rosser ’12, and Krue ’14. This is a rerun of HP7; the last time it ran was in 2011. And it’s the first ten-day I joined: in 2020 no one ran one, and in 2021 and 2022 no ten-days ran due to the pandemic. So I was so hyped that a ten-day ran this year, and got as many of my friends to sign up as I could. The pandemic’s been rough for the Guild, so there were less players than I hoped. But the game still ran, and it was amazing. It was the highlight of my IAP this year, a spot of joy in an otherwise dark winter.

As much as I want to, I don’t have the time or energy to write a huge post about this, but here’s some scattered thoughts.

Almost all Guild games during the semester are one-nights, which take around four hours. Ten-days are a commitment, but it’s not like you’re in-game 24/7. On weekdays I usually entered game at around 7 or 8 PM and stayed until 1 or 2 AM, and on weekends I entered at around 3 or 4 PM and stayed until 2 or 3 AM. To be clear, I spent this much time on game because I was having fun! I spent time outside of game looking forward to coming back and doing things. I’d guess that I was also on the upper end in terms of time spent playing.

Cramming a one-night in the middle of a semester can be hard, sometimes, due to scheduling and school. A ten-day game in IAP sounds like a lot, but I enjoyed every hour of it, and I wish I’d gotten a chance to do this earlier.

Costuming and props are fun. I was reluctant to get robes at first, but some generous donations from alums allowed us to all get robes for free. I played as Neville Longbottom, so I have these gorgeous red-trimmed robes, that fly around when I walk quickly.

it’s a me

You can also see me holding a wand in this picture, which was made by Ariel S. ’04. I loved holding my wand while walking around the halls. It didn’t have a mechanical effect in the game; if I wanted to shoot people I’d use a Nerf gun, not point my wand at them. But it felt so cool to do the hand movements when casting spells, and it was a nice thing to fidget with while walking down hallways at 2 AM.

The best thing about the robes is that I’ve kept them after game end. Wearing the robes while square dancing was great, because it does the spinny thing when I rotate my body, and it looks so cool. It’s mildly warm, so I’ve worn it outside when it isn’t too cold, when I don’t feel like putting on a jacket.

Like many Guild games, HP7 has combat mechanics. Nerf guns for generic spells that did 1 HP each, maybe 2 HP if you had an ability that did extra damage. Then spell packets for other spells. A spell packet is this cloth sphere, maybe five centimeter diameter, filled with bird seed, held with a rubber band. You throw these spell packets and yell what effect they produce when they hit, like “flee”, “cower”, “crucio”, or “death”.

As Neville, I was part of a group called Dumbledore’s Army, and one of our goals was collecting some items. Let’s call these MacGuffins, for lack of a better name. Another group was trying to get the MacGuffins, the Death Eaters. And like many Guild games, there’s some secrecy in hiding which groups you’re a part of. Plus, the Death Eaters are Considered Evil, so they were keeping a low profile.

Anyway, one night, I, Michael Corner (Alex B. ’24), and Charlie Entwhistle (Spruce C. ’26), were breaking into the office of Professor Flitwick (Jesse A. ’11). We got in, saw two MacGuffins. Because they’re MacGuffins, they didn’t do anything on their own, and were mostly useless unless you knew what MacGuffins were and were also looking for them. I offered to split the loot between the three of us, you know, being all polite even if I wanted all of it.

Then Charlie hit me with a flee packet.

I ran away. The flee spell made me run until I reached another building or floor, so I kept running. But that moment, Charlie outed himself as a Death Eater to me, and Michael was a witness. Which, I dunno, I thought was pretty funny.

A shadowrun is a challenge you beat to get into a location that’s otherwise guarded, covered in wards, locked, or inaccessible. As high school students living in a dangerous time, we were forbidden from leaving Hogwarts. So if you wanted to go to the Whomping Willow, you have to defeat these challenges:

there are about twenty of these

A person sorted into Slytherin could beat the slytherin challenge. Someone who has the spell Lumos ready could beat the light challenge. Someone who brings a pet snake can beat the snake challenge. And some people might be inherently nimble or small, and able to beat that challenge.

The thing about spells is that, even if you knew all of them, you couldn’t have all of them ready at the same time. Everyone has a spell hand of around 3 to 4, and you can’t switch spells during a shadowrun. Beating this Whomping Willow shadowrun alone is pretty much impossible; you need the help of others.

This kind of shadowrun, where all the challenges are presented upfront, is the easier kinds of shadowrun. In the harder kind, there’s a certain area, where you have to find the challenges yourself. It starts off with this map:

“blue”

In the area highlighted, there’s small strips of paper taped in hidden places. And I’m talking small, like 1cm × 5cm. They could be below a sign, in the middle of a wall, behind a railing, blending in on top of a poster, wherever. The strip says something like “Challenge: patronus“, and you need to find and beat a certain number of these to do the shadowrun.

tiny sign

The Guild takes down its signs after every game, but because these shadowrun signs are small and hard to find, they can stay up for years. Like this one I found the other day; you can see the date’s from 2019.

found in a basement

I love shadowruns. I loved the feeling of breaking into something, of looking for these small pieces of paper, of saying “I know a spell that can beat that challenge!” Neville’s broken into all the professors’ offices, went into the Chamber of Secrets and back, explored random secret corridors. I love the tension of not knowing what’s behind the envelope after finishing a shadowrun. Is it something that’ll be useful? Maybe everything good’s already been taken by another group? Is someone in my group gonna hit me with a flee packet once we’re there?

Neville was supposed to be good at combat. I started the game with 5 HP, which was on the high end of the HP stat distribution. I started with two combat spells, one that gave me extra HP and another that made my Nerf bullets do more damage. But CJ, the player, was not interested in combat. So I didn’t bring a Nerf gun around, even though there were some people who wanted to kill me.

I remember doing a raid somewhere with a bunch of other students, up against Death Eaters. I didn’t come in ready to do battle. But I was a tank: I could take a lot of hits. I didn’t fire any shots, but I picked up used bullets and spell packets and helped people reload. Because someone’s gotta play the support role in the party, right? I like to think we won in part because of my help.

This tension between player and character is discussed in length in Philip T. ’01 MS ’03’s thesis, Tensions in Live-Action Roleplaying Game Design, if you’re interested in a longer exposition. By the way, he’s now the creative director for the Game Lab, which is so cool to me. Dream job TBH.

Related to shadowruns are dot hunts. In a dot hunt, you’re looking for these small brightly-colored sticker dots. Except the area is much larger, typically a group of buildings. As a hint, the GMs instead give you a picture of a nearby item.

Neville did a dot hunt to look for Trevor, his pet toad. Here’s the first picture the GMs gave me:

can you guess where it is

It’s like doing the MIT Picture Scavenger Hunt. I was looking for details I recognized. Like, which buildings had elevators with that color of wall, or with elevators that telescoped? This one I found within an hour:

it was between two elevator doors

The dot trail was five dots long. And at the end, Neville and Trevor were reunited!

it’s a trevor

Dots are also hard to clean up, so if you go around MIT, you might spot these colored dots in out-of-the-way places. I’ve also been informed that, in the past, Facilities has also used colored dot stickers, so maybe don’t just randomly take them down.

While Guild games vary widely, many of them have a focus on mechanics over plot. When given a character’s goals, I’m less interested in why I have these goals, and more interested in how I can accomplish them. That doesn’t mean plot or roleplay don’t matter, however. It’s called live-action roleplaying for a reason, and I’ve had my share of beautiful roleplaying moments.

One of my roleplay things was being in this will-they-won’t-they romance with Draco Malfoy (Jerry H. ’23). Literally night one of the game, Draco and I started doing the romance mechanics with each other, and utterly failing. Apparently all the flirts I knew wasn’t compatible with Draco’s tastes, and vice versa. Oops. Thankfully, Lavender Brown (Bianca H. ’24) did everything in her power to set me and Draco up, teaching us flirts she knew the other would like.

arent we cute

Now, there’s no mechanical reason for Neville and Draco to romance each other. It’s not one of my character goals or anything. I mean, it’s a little good for mood, but I didn’t care about that stat too much. But we did it anyway. I think Jerry and I made eye contact during packet handout, realized we had characters that would make for a cute ship, and we, as players, thought it’d be fun to do it. So we did, because who cares about canon?

Anyway it culminated it me dancing with Draco in the Yule Ball, as everyone cheered wildly for us.

dancing 100

The Guild owes much to its alumni. We have a long oral tradition, stories passed down from decades before, over post-game dinners at restaurants around the area. Cruft come and write games for current students, because cruft generally have more free time to write games. Donations and membership fees from alums cover some of the Guild’s costs.

In one sense it gives me joy, thinking about how I’ll be an alum in the future, that I can come back and continue to be a member of the Guild. In another sense it terrifies me, because with each year, there’ve been changes that make it harder for alums to stay involved. For example, over my undergrad, it’s become harder to arrange access to the Guild office, or to game spaces, or to our archives on Athena. Then again, maybe I’m worrying too much.

Some random quotes and pictures that I don’t have time to write about.

Eliza Nicklebury (Jen C. ’23): “If someone searches me, they just get the library.”

Vincent Crabbe (Bella X. ’25), to Neville: “Your bottom has grown too long!”

Pierre Moreau (Shashvat S. ’23): “We are Dumbledore’s secret weapon! The students who survived his teaching!”

Hannah “Cruciatus” Abbott (Izzy R. ’24): “Professor McGonagall, what should students do if they feel unsafe in their own common room?”
Millicent Bulstrode (Julia W. RPI ’20 G): “Then one should kindly ask Hannah Abbott to leave that common room!”

Angelina Norman (Spencer L. SM ’16): “Alright then, I’ll go ask Gryffindor, they’re actually brave, you cowards!”
Anthony Goldstein (Richard F. UMass PhD ’20): “You aren’t wrong.”

Daphne Greengrass (Diana S. ’25): “Being a journalist is so much more fun when 3/4 of your articles are shameless lies and the other is self promotion.”

drawing by Molly Pickville (Skylar L. ’23)

Mary Goodspeare (Giniya A. ’24) and Claude Selwyn (Silk Y. ’25) over Headmaster Snape’s unconscious body

a “mildly breakable vow” here

drawings by Samuel Clarenlocke (Via T. ’26)

ten

Paolo A. '21 G — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 14:26:22 +0000

IHTFP.

the dome

stata

We make fun of the architecture a lot here, but sometimes, MIT really does look nice.

Unfortunately, these are not recent photos. No snow lies on this ground this Valentine’s Day (though of course, love is in the air). These two photos are from Valentine’s Day 2013, during my first time on MIT’s campus — and I’ve spent the past week thinking about how it has been a decade since MIT entered my life.

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. While I’d like to blog (both on here and not), I haven’t been. Finding time to sit back and reflect and then put it all into words in a way that reflects what I think is difficult. And finding that time (especially when blogging isn’t my “job” anymore), even harder.

Many things in my life are still the same. I’m still a grad student. Still trying to do research on education and finding it hard, and also thinking about what the most important questions in education are to me. I’m still in a cappella. I still really like orange.

But not all is the same. My hair is growing out. I just bought a new bike (also orange). I’m living on campus again, but this time as Graduate Resident Advisor (GRA) in a different dorm. I’ll be leaving my a cappella group this spring, and have written a sappy, sentimental, slightly-dramatic “senior” solo to end my time in the group.

It’s sometimes hard to notice all of the things that are different.

Back in 2013, I was a science fair kid. I’d been doing a long series of projects on the effect of radiation on the growth of plants, and, to cut a long story short, got to attend the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston that year. MIT, at that point in time, was somewhat of a mythical place. I was only in 8th grade, and while I probably had heard of MIT, I don’t think I knew anything beyond “oh it’s good at science” and “college is a really long way away”. I was there with a hundred or so other science fair people from across the country, and we got to tour around different parts of MIT. (I have a vague memory of visiting the Broad Institute, and some Googling suggests that Dr. Mandana Sassanfar organized it all. Thanks, Mandana!) To be honest, I don’t have any strong memories of my impressions of the place, as it was literally a decade ago; but, I can definitely say that I knew that MIT existed after that trip.

I know that MIT was in my mind at least a little bit, though. Almost all of my messaging in high school happened over Google Hangouts⁠19 rip which means that I can literally pull up read receipts from conversations. Like this one:

It’s funny to look back and see that economics was on my mind as a potential career option back in 2014. But also, I know I didn’t have a good sense of economics then (particularly, only seeing its relationship to the stock market).⁠20 a tenuous connection at best While I had an answer to my friend’s question, I think the question of “what do I want to do in the future” was only on my mind because of my parents, who really were hoping I had an answer (especially because by then, I’d decided that I didn’t want to do biology/become a doctor, like my older sister). And so any answers I gave here were probably tentative at best.

Reflecting on how MIT has changed me (and as a result, how I view this institution) is hard. There’s the first problem of figuring out exactly how I’ve changed. Then, I need to account for my own “MIT-tinted googles”: for the past 6 years, the longest I’ve been away from Cambridge is just 3 months. Not a lot of time separated, all things considered. Even if I get past that, though, there’s a bigger problem: it’s unfair to credit all of those changes just to MIT.

While yes, these changes did happen at MIT, they also might have happened without MIT. Some of it could be just leaving home for the first time, growing older, or just generally maturing. It could be the people I’ve met — while we were brought together because of MIT, is it really because of MIT that I then had that change, or would it also have happened anywhere else I went?

It’s impossible to reflect and pinpoint the causes of changes with certainty because we’ll never know the counterfactuals. There’s no alternate-universe-self for me to compare to, but such is the nature of life.

Two examples (and these two, I think, are the main things that learned from MIT):

I feel like I’m capable of doing difficult things. Here, the MIT-centered narrative is clear: MIT is a difficult place. I took difficult classes, spent many late nights psetting, and now, I generally feel like I can do things that are “hard”⁠21 of course, some of the ways that i’ve learned this are by being working much with other people, being reasonable in my commitments, taking time for self-care (also, see the next bullet point). i definitely do not view myself as a super-person who can handle literally anything that gets thrown my way in isolation. nothing can make one be like that. (measured by a variety of ways: intellectually challenging, many hours, competing priorities, …). But would this have happened if I went somewhere else? I’m sure I would have found ways to push myself anywhere else I went, and there’s a decent chance that had I finished college anywhere else, I might have changed in the same way.
I don’t want to be a person that keeps pushing myself academically. Perhaps because of the fact that I could choose to devote my whole life to academics and economics have I realized that I don’t really want to. I like having other areas of my life — teaching, singing, socializing, and just time for rest and introspection — because my life doesn’t feel good when I am spending all of my time on just “work”. Instead, I like centering my life around people, and valuing the parts of my life that let me connect with others. But perhaps this was just a natural part of leaving high school and growing up and maturing. Whether I’d have discovered this about myself anywhere else — who knows.

I can also point to dozens of other ways in which I’ve changed over the last six years,⁠22 enjoying teaching; caring about organizational culture, and what makes communities work; knowing that i’m bad at prioritizing socialness; feeling more adult, but also more lonely, in grad school that have even more tenuous connections to MIT as an institution. But it is human nature to try and describe why something happened rather than just being content with observing that it did happen — after all, some believe that storytelling is what makes us human.

Truth be told, I didn’t think a lot about MIT — or college at all — during most of high school.

During my sophomore year, a good friend of mine who was one year older went to MIT for a science research camp, and I remember hearing about how cool he thought MIT was. He got in the next year — but eventually chose to not go. While panicking about what I’d do the summer after my junior year, I applied to a (now non-existent) summer camp at MIT on entrepreneurship. My incredibly cringe-y application was rejected (the correct decision, I think) — but that summer I ended up in Boston anyways, teaching at a small math camp.⁠23 my first time teaching with big stakes, and where i started falling in love with teaching We make a quick pit stop at MIT as part of a field trip, and I remember the feeling of awe at the university — but also trying to figure out where I’d like it here. I talked a lot that summer to my older friend, asking him for the reasons that he ended up going somewhere else instead of MIT. I’ve found one of these chats, and it’s interesting to think about his critiques now that I have been through MIT.

It was that summer I had to start thinking about applying to colleges: doing research about different colleges, reading their websites, and of course, inevitably stumbling on the MIT Blogs. I sent a few links around to friends — my (continued) consideration of economics led me here, this post really started making me feel like a senior. Yet, I didn’t fall in love with MIT, partly because I didn’t let myself — as much as I liked everything I saw about MIT, I didn’t want to get my hopes up about getting in. In hindsight, I wish I did, for to love is to be vulnerable, and hoping for things is part of the joy of life.

But despite believing that I’d be rejected, I got in — and very quickly started absorbing everything about MIT that I could. A livecast with some bloggers let me see the human side of this institution, and how cool the people were. I started reading every blog I could. And I quickly grew so excited about the chance to come to MIT.

To write this section, I went back and looked through dozens and dozens of chats that I had in high school. It’s so interesting going back and re-experiencing the awe of “how in the world did I get in”, the hope that I had for what college could be like, seeing my awkwardness and anxiety and nerdiness of 7 years prior. Most importantly, I got to re-read all of these chats and relive a little bit of the friendships that I had back then; while I’m still close with many of those people, many is not all. That is alright, though, because people change and lives change, and sometimes, people just drift apart. But, to any high school friends who happen to read this — know that I’m incredibly grateful for you, and love you lots <3

During a cappella auditions this past weekend, I mentioned that I was drafting this post; after learning how long I’ve been here, one of the members of our group asked me, almost incredulously, “are you not tired of this place yet?”

It’s a fair question — I’ve been here for literally a quarter of my life, and by the time that I leave, it’ll be the longest I’ve ever stayed in one place. At this point, I know Cambridge and Boston in and out. I can navigate almost anywhere without needing to stop and check directions on the way. I have been to almost every single restaurant within a mile of MIT. And while there’s much more to explore (down in Boston, out to any of the suburbs), I have seen a lot of it.

Exploring Cambridge and Boston didn’t really start until graduate school; I didn’t leave campus too much during my first few years, and only when I started living off-campus did I start feeling more connected to the town as a whole. I still don’t think I have that much connection to it, but at this point, it feels stronger than my ties to Nevada.

I’ve witnessed a lot of change at MIT. New buildings are always being made. There’s a new president. There are new people; in my time at MIT, I’ve been around people from the Class of 2018 to the Class of 2026, and by the time I leave, the incoming first-years will be the Class of 2031.

Perhaps part of the reason MIT itself doesn’t feel old yet is that I’ve kept having new experiences with new people: new roommates my freshman year, new people in every club I joined, becoming a part of the economics graduate student community, and more. But at this point in my life, especially with so few friends from college still in the area, I feel like my social life has stagnated a little, and that I might start feeling a bit more tired of MIT in the next few years.

So, after all of this time, how do I view MIT now?

For me, what made MIT special was the people. As an undergrad, meeting amazing people who kept challenging the ways I think, inspiring me to be more, or helping me to better person. As a graduate student, being a part of a cohort that supports each other through the long journey of research, and also getting to watch current undergrads learn to appreciate the same things I did. But how much of that is MIT? Or is it just me choosing to be a part of communities that had these kinds of people, and this would have happened anywhere? Who knows.
In education more broadly, I think that too much public consciousness goes toward places like MIT (and other elite colleges). While they are important, they are not overly so. MIT has 4000 undergraduates; 16 million people in the United States go to college right now, over half of them at colleges accepting over two-thirds of applicants.
I came to MIT partially because of wanting to feel challenged. It did that for me, and I am glad. I grew a lot here, in many ways. At the same time, I wonder if MIT needs to be as hard as it is.
I deeply appreciated the amount of self-governance that undergrads received: the ability to make choices about how their living group operated, the input we got to give into larger policy decisions, the freedom to crazy events (2000 students on campus?!), and more. This autonomy has led to wonderful amounts of creativity and quirkiness that make MIT unique, and it feels like some in the MIT administration don’t understand how valuable that culture is. (See here and here for other relevant reading.)
There is a lot to be said about the amount of resources that MIT has — classes, professors, research opportunities, funding for fun projects, massive career fairs — but I’m pretty sure it’s all been said already. Anything I say on it has no use.
As a tour guide, I often said that “everyone at MIT is passionate about something;⁠24 where “something” extends far beyond academics: performing arts, fun hobbies, or even just being a good friend they do what they love and love what they do”, and I knew that every conversation with someone here would lead somewhere interesting or inspire me in some way. Everyone here has something that makes them tick, and it’s always exciting to find that…
…but now that it’s been a few years, I also see that this has a drawback; namely it leads to some amount of homogeneity⁠25 i’ll note that one of the reasons i chose mit was because of this homogeneity; mit was much more similar to my high school than the big other option i had, and i didn’t feel ready for an experience that would be totally unfamiliar . Everyone here has some passion, and when I was constantly surrounded by people I was excited to hang out with, I found it easy to forget to interact with the world beyond MIT (contributing to the unfortunate fact that MIT can feel like a “bubble”). Only in the last few years do I feel like I’ve gotten better at this, largely driven by actually living off campus.
MIT is incredibly collaborative (and not competitive); people tend to learn quickly that the only way to make it through here is by working with and supporting each other. But because at MIT, you’re constantly surrounded by such smart people doing such cool things, it’s easy to feel like you always have to be doing something productive, and it means that it can feel bad to just do things for yourself. It’s not easy to let go of this feeling. (I think I’m much better at it now than I was, say, four years ago, but it’s still hard.)

I’m aware that none of these are new observations. They’ve been said time and time again by many who have come before me, and many more will figure out similar things in their own time. But it’s different to live through it all and see first-hand how they have been (and are) in my own experience at this institution.

I do deeply love MIT. It has been wonderful to me, and I’m so lucky to be here. I have never regretted coming here, and if I had to go back, I’d happily choose MIT again.

At the same time, it’s important to remember that MIT is just another place. A very special place with so much to offer; but also, the parts of MIT that really make it special can be found everywhere. MIT is not perfect; but also, no place is.

It’s been ten years since I first stepped foot on MIT’s campus. By the time I leave here (presuming I graduate when I think I will), I’ll have been here for ten years. A decade. Over a third of my life.

I’ll be here for four more years. I’m thinking of all of the ways that I changed in high school and undergrad — both four-year periods — and realizing that I have that amount of time left here in Cambridge. What kind of person will I be, come 2027? How will I change (either because of, or in spite of, MIT)? How will MIT change?

I guess we’ll see.

the dome, 2/14/23

stata, 2/14/23

IHTFP.