The Best Professors Teach Humility
How MIT professor David Autor exemplifies what economics can and should be about
I used to despise economics. ECO101, the introductory economics course I took at the University of Toronto, had convinced me that the field only offered dangerous half-truths. “Minimum wage laws increase unemployment,” I was taught. “Rent control laws are economically harmful; fairness can and should instead be achieved through other means.” I had started the […]
Productivity After Chaos
A semester from hell showed me which productivity practices work for me
This summer, I spent much of my free time digging through my high school diaries. I was a boring diary writer—instead of long entries detailing friendship drama or failed crushes, most of my diary entries were to-do lists and resolutions. “Write paper,” “get up at 5:30 AM,” “5 miles of running per week,” and so […]
Cambridge in the In-Between Moments
A brief guide to the city’s finest unplanned programming
Some of my favorite moments in Cambridge weren’t planned. They weren’t the kinds of things you’d mark on a calendar or schedule your week around. They just happened, quietly and unexpectedly, while I was trying to get home, find dinner, or avoid doing my laundry for the third night in a row. And I’ve noticed […]
Trading the Field for the Lab
How I rediscovered my connections to the natural world at MIT
Many of us are drawn to science by questions we have not found satisfying answers to. During my undergraduate I worked as a research assistant in a field ecology lab, and I fell in love with biology through the patterns and connections found in nature that I could not find a complete description of. In […]
My Ironman preparation: zero to Ironman in 7 months
My journey from having no experience in endurance sports to running an Ironman
When I decided to train for an Ironman, I wasn’t coming in with a background in endurance sports; I was starting from scratch. For me, it wasn’t about chasing numbers or obsessing over the fanciest gear; it was about stepping away from the pressure and seeing what would happen if I simply tried to do […]
