Discovering the freedom and fun of art without rules
Letting go of perfectionism through adventures in glass
When I stepped into my first glass torchwork class at Metropolis, one of MIT’s makerspaces, I expected to learn a new type of art. I did not expect my experiences with glass to change the way I organize my life. In my first class, my attempts to create a marble resulted in an unintentional and […]
The mountains you didn’t know you needed
Go to New Hampshire, leave the world behind, return happy 🙂
It was 10 pm on an inconsequential day in February when a friend texted me, “What if we went hiking tonight?” Deep in a notorious junior-year thermodynamics assignment, I picked up my phone to turn him down, as I had so many times before, with so many people. There was no question that I needed […]
Money matters: Part 2
How to make your money work for you as a grad student
If you’ve read part one of this blog post, you know how to use a budget to help manage your money. What can we do with what we save, and how can we make what we spend really count? Beyond budgeting, there are some more advanced moves that we can make with our money, even […]
Talking to myself through a reverse to-do list
How keeping a “done” list got me through my first few years of grad school.
Communication is the most important skill I have developed in grad school. The types of communication we usually think about are technical and interpersonal communication, such as publishing and presenting your research, or communicating with your advisor. However, one type of communication I overlooked in my first year was communicating to myself. As a first […]
A nanotechnologist and a social scientist walk into MIT MechE….
Finding my place in the MechE department without a technical background
“What’s your name?” “Where are you from?” “What’s your research area?” These are, without fail, the first three questions exchanged between MIT Mechanical Engineering grad students who are meeting for the first time. I quickly learned this convention after spending just a few minutes at department orientation events when I first got to campus in […]
