The right roomie for you
How asking the right questions can help you find your people
My freshman year of college, I lived in a dorm with five other girls and one bathroom. It could have been a disaster, but by a stroke of luck we lived together incredibly well. Not everyone had such a fortunate random draw—one friend from down the hall still talks about the “mold farm” her roommate […]
Born in the USA!
A foreign American’s journey back to the US
Well, the truth is, that’s all I was: just born in the USA. I’d never set foot on US soil since moving away at the young age of 3 months, when my family’s work relocation period ended and they moved back to France. Later, I would find myself growing up in Israel for the greater […]
Second time’s the charm
Finally at MIT after an undergraduate rejection
I remember driving down Massachusetts Avenue with my mom when I was 16. We were in New England on a family vacation, so she arranged a campus visit at MIT for me since I was trying to decide which colleges I should apply to. It was a beautiful July day. We had a meeting with […]
All the good ideas are gone!
But all the good work is left to do.
The MIT Biological Engineering (BE) interview weekend began with an introduction by the department’s chair. She gave a very motivating speech that ended with “this is the best time to become a bioengineer: find a problem and run with it.” I felt very motivated by the department chair’s speech and spent the next five months […]
Experimenting with love
Attempting to date as a PhD student in Biology
As far as bad dates went, this one was catastrophic. My date (we’ll call him “Brad”) was drunk, not just on his own ego, but also quite literally drunk. Though really, this was not my fault, as he had decided to come that way. As the waitress cleared our table, he swiveled around to look […]
