A graduate school simulator
How playing Stardew Valley prepared me to move to MIT
Stardew Valley, the hit indie farm simulator, consumed much of my senior spring. While writing my thesis and finishing my coursework, I needed an opportunity to relax and focus on ANYTHING other than my mounting deadlines. The game, playable across multiple consoles, is a staple recommendation of the “cozy game” genre, occupying a similar niche […]
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 […]
Nurturing yourself by nurturing some greens
How growing an indoor vegetable garden from scratch became a life-affirming engineering project during the COVID lockdowns
Grad student life is filled with significant transitions like qualification exams, new roommates, selecting PIs and committee members, and more. But the uncertainties of grad school life suddenly became much more prominent with COVID-19. As an experimentalist who does my research in a lab, I was incredibly lost, especially in the first few months of […]
How I realized graduate school was the right choice for me
The best ideas come in the bathroom
The best realizations really do come in the bathroom. I was washing my hands in the sink when I heard the bathroom door shut as another girl entered. If you ever lived in a college dorm in the US, you can imagine what a dorm bathroom looks like. It has multiple stalls and sinks so […]
You have got to have a plan, and a planner!
Putting everything on the calendar makes life at MIT so much easier.
Growing up in India Growing up in a busy middle class household in India, my parents did not once ask about my grades. They would just pick my report card and glance over it annually at the parent-teacher meetings. That was it. This was in stark contrast to some parents who spent what seemed like […]
