Escape MIT for a weekend
My favorite weekend getaways around New England
What will you do if you have a weekend free? Netflix? Video games? How about getting out of your (dorm) room and travelling to another state? During my undergraduate study, I spent one seminar in a small town north of Boston doing a co-op (i.e., a 6-month internship). Away from campus, I was free of […]
Christmas in September?
You can’t buy happiness, but sometimes you can find it for free in your neighbor’s trash
There’s an old saying, “you can’t take it with you.” It’s mainly used to caution people against overvaluing money or material possessions because you can’t take them with you when you die. In Boston, the saying could be “you can’t take it with you when you move.” People around here are very familiar with packing […]
Touring colleges on foot
A brief jog through some of Boston’s many universities
Coming from an undergraduate university located in a smaller city, I was used to living in an area with few nearby schools to compare to my own. In contrast, the Boston area is littered with colleges! In fact, Wikipedia cites that there are 45 higher educational institutions in the metropolitan Boston area. When I moved […]
Trying and failing to buy a house
Why can’t grad students get a mortgage?
We did everything right. My husband and I had excellent credit, did not have debt, and we always paid off our credit cards. We had plenty of money in our savings account. We attended financial seminars and learned all the steps involved in buying a house. And yet, when we tried to buy a small, […]
small silver slivers
finding the bright spots in a dark time
It was dark. Like the smallest sliver of a crescent moon, my roommate’s face was barely illuminated by the flickering glow of the twenty-six candles before her. It was just enough to see her manage a smile, lean forward, and, in a plume of smoke, send us into darkness again. It wasn’t the birthday she […]
