Graduate Student becomes Chickpea Master Masher
Finding new skills in unfamiliar places
I am sitting at my desk, debugging some code that does not seem to work. The week has been tiring, to say the least. But next week is Brunch Week! When I first joined MIT, I was plagued by the usual imposter syndrome. This fear of not fitting in not only impacted my work, but […]
Comedy Lab
How a research group in EECS became stand-up comedians in 10 weeks
One year ago, my advisor, Prof. Charles Leiserson in CSAIL, arranged for our research group to take a stand-up comedy class with Dana Jay Bein, a local comedian with Improv Boston. Charles sold it to us as an opportunity to work on our communication skills while participating in a fun activity as a group. Nobody […]
Curiouser and Curiouser…
Why being at MIT is like being Alice in Wonderland
On my first day of grad school. I drank a magic potion from the firehose! And there I went, down the rabbit hole… “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as […]
Fiddling through Grad School
My experiences learning the violin as a grad student
“Do you want to get lunch this weekend?” “Can we get dinner instead? I have a violin class in the afternoon.” You can do that as a grad student? Wow. As a first-year graduate student, I had not yet realized the degree of independence I now had in the choices I made in my life. […]
Where Are All the Engineers in Congress
Lessons from talk radio
The United States has elected one of the most anti-science Congresses in the democratic world. Mainstream leaders unabashedly espouse scientifically untenable positions in areas such as climate change, vaccinations, and evolution. In a world that is becoming increasingly technologically driven, it would be remiss if STEM programs did not encourage more of their students to […]
