To survive the winter, embrace the winter
My experience with the MIT Outing Club
I am from a hot and humid part of India. When I got into MIT, I was elated, but then the reality of the decision hit me. Could I survive the Boston winters?My first winter was brutal. I had prepared for the cold by investing in a good coat and warm boots, but nothing had […]
More for Your Dollar
The Material and Immaterial Perks of Being a Market Basket Customer
I just returned from my weekly pilgrimage to Somerville’s foremost grocery institution: Market Basket. On this trip I bought enough ingredients to meal-prep approximately 16 servings of a falafel dinner, as well as some staples – eggs, butter, and two pounds of strawberries – for a mere $68. They are not kidding about getting more […]
Random Gone Right
When Facebook Marketplace Housing exceeds expectations
As spring rolls around, many soon-to-be graduate students are receiving their letters of admission, and current MIT students are embarking on summer internships, research, or vacation after a long semester. Both future and current students, however, face the same dilemma: finding housing for the fall. New students may face the challenge of having no or […]
Yes, you can have a life in grad school
A guide to being an almost-close-to-normal twenty-something who also happens to be getting their PhD
“But I’ll be thirty when I finish graduate school!” “Julia, would you rather be thirty with a PhD or without one?” I have repeated this conversation many times in my head and to anyone who will listen. Before I decided to get my PhD in biology, I had heard so many horror stories about graduate […]
Grad School is Just Chess with Pipettes
Lessons learned from 10,642 chess games that also applied to my PhD
In grad school, I learned how to play chess—and got addicted to it. At first, it was just a fun distraction from experiments and papers, but over time I realized that many of the lessons I was learning over the board applied just as much to my PhD. Strategy, patience, resilience—the same principles that helped […]
