Be water, MIT friend
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 overlapping patterns of waves. Before I was thinking about Fourier analysis, when I was a new graduate student, I was considering the question of what […]
The evermore squares
How my obsession with crochet helped me explore music and find moments of peace amidst the stress of grad school life
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 speaker instead of getting distracted by emails or other work on my computer. Having something to do with my hands gave me an outlet for […]
The breaking point
And the slow path to recovery
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 a bit fast: I’d been walking briskly. Suddenly, my chest tightened, and no more air could get in. My first reaction wasn’t fear – it […]
Getting back to reading for pleasure
…or an ode to now dead literary references?
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 to skip. If I were a troubled friend seeking advice, I might ask you to be the Jeeves to my Wooster, or if grad school […]
Reactivating
Mixing Metaphors with Meaning
As a budding biologist, I am familiar with the way metaphor is employed to effectively communicate scientific concepts. For example, the molecule of the moment is messenger RNA, whose name represents the fact that mRNA is a transient molecule that transports information from the genome to the ribosome (the protein-making machinery), where it is translated […]
