From procrastination to productivity
How I Found Motivation in a Remote Semester
A few months after receiving the exciting news that I’d been admitted to MIT, I was informed that my semester of grad school would be fully online. Little did I know that it would turn out much worse than I could’ve ever anticipated. Don’t get me wrong, remote learning has many advantages. There is no […]
PhD parenting in a pandemic
Challenges and lessons learned from a tumultuous time in my life
When I first heard about SARS-CoV-2, my wife and I had just flown back to the U.S. from visiting her family in China. She was already in her second trimester of pregnancy and was concerned that the virus might spread to North America. At the time, I didn’t think too much of it. Evidently, her […]
Routine in chaos
Discovering opportunity to hack your own personal productivity habits
About a month into my first semester at MIT, I found myself sitting on my couch at 4pm, still in my pajamas I’d been wearing all day, working on a math Problem Set (PSET), with a bag of pretzels as my only meal of the day beside me when I thought: What the heck am […]
Mayan, what else?
Take the time to breathe and do what you like
I was tired. My first semester at MIT was tougher than I had expected. I still have vivid memories of that defining evening of November. I was making my way back home with research ideas spinning in my head and started to feel anxious about the three p-sets I had to finish by week’s end. […]
Hunting for what we lost
How the MIT Mystery Hunt Reminded Me Of How Bleak Pandemic Life Is
It is a unique feeling to be having such a fantastic time that you make yourself hopelessly, achingly sad. During the Independent Activities Period (IAP) this past January, the annual MIT Mystery Hunt took place, and I competed with my undergraduate team, NES*. For those that don’t know, the MIT Mystery Hunt is a puzzle […]
