In Cambridge, summer is a season you just can’t beat. The sunshine is fierce, radiant, and clarifying. The heat is a welcome break from the chill, damp months of spring…
“Why are you leaving your job?” “Don’t you make enough money?” “Why would you leave a big tech company?” “Are you going for a bigger paycheck? You must be stuck…
Have you ever looked down inside the blue recycling bins around campus wondering if what we had thrown away is truly recyclable? From a piece of paper that you scribble…
I am an adventurer at heart. I have never embraced routine or normalcy and I consider that a piece of my identity, so when I started getting tired of my…
I was always drawn to bodies of water like rivers and seas. I had visions of sailing on boats and riding on ferries, but I never imagined that I would…
I always dreamed of doing great things and having a positive impact on the world. In my naivety, I believed that only celebrities have this kind of world-reaching influence. With…
It all started when COVID hit. I had all this newfound time while attending classes on Zoom and found an outlet – specialty coffee. Before I knew it, I had…
It was my first ever trip to Cambridge and to the MIT campus and, more importantly, the start of my graduate program in the chemistry department. My fall semester schedule…
A screenshot of the author’s faulty Java code from one of her first attempts at coding When I TA’d for a quantitative methods class in college, I always kept this…
Hi MIT grad students! The MIT Graduate Admissions Blog is excited to announce its upcoming IAP workshop on blog writing. In brief, Attend a 2-day blogging workshop: Wednesday, January 18 (in person)…
I can’t survive for a week without eating Asian food. Honestly, a big reason why I chose to come to MIT was because H-Mart was down the street from campus.…
More than once in our career, most of us will find ourselves asking whether we made the right decision. Often, this questioning is triggered by setbacks, “less-than-ideal” circumstances or a…
My undergraduate university couldn’t be much more different from MIT. Penn State is a school of 50,000 students in a small town surrounded by farmland. The campus culture centers around…
Imagine a group of people falling into a deep ditch. Some make ladders to climb their way out. Others wait for floods to fill the ditch and then swim their…
Mental illness is not unfamiliar to many MIT graduate students. People as smart as typical MIT students, when placed under that much pressure, are bound to have it. Look beyond…
“Congratulations! We are pleased to offer you admission to the Graduate Program of the Department of Biology at MIT,” was probably one of the most awesome starts to an email ever.…
Cracking open the trailer door and peeking out, I checked to see if the storm had subsided. Who knew it could rain so much in the desert? Water had begun…
I’ve always enjoyed collaborating with people. You have fun, you make friends, and in the case of academic collaboration, it opens the door to addressing questions from diverse perspectives. When…
“You’re going to MIT? Pfft, have fun getting a social life – nobody has one there.” “I’ve heard that people only eat, sleep and work at MIT. Sometimes they have…
I come from a tropical country, which means that every December to March, I go to extraordinary lengths to minimize my outdoor time in an effort to escape the Boston…
As I sat down at my desk in the middle of the Pacific Ocean waiting for an Internet connection, I wondered if the long-awaited response would be sitting in my…
At the start of the pandemic, my cooking skills were in top form. I had mastered scrambled eggs and had honed my selection criteria for one pot pastas (the simpler,…
While I remember most events from my past with an extremely high level of detail thanks to my photographic memory, there is more to why I remember what happened on…
You’ve probably seen countless exercise videos promising to help you drop 10 pounds in a month and copious articles telling you why you should start a new fitness regimen, but…
I just finished my third year of graduate school in the Mathematics Department. I work in Fourier analysis, a part of math that studies qualitative and quantitative questions about the…
Do you believe that keeping up with a romantic relationship and completing a graduate degree abroad at a top university are incompatible? This is the story about how I was…
During quarantine, and especially during the era of Zoom classes, I became re-obsessed with crochet. I noticed that crocheting while listening to Zoom lectures helped me stay focused on the…
I got off the escalator and stepped onto the platform. Three minutes until the train, eighteen minutes until I get to MIT, twenty minutes until my meeting. My breath was…
Introduction The Cannoli is a form of dessert, which, in its most basic form, includes a pastry shell wrapped around a sweet ricotta filling. Historians have long debated the origin…
Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t read Harry Potter, Catch-22, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Count of Monte Cristo – there are a few references here that you may want…