The breaking point
And the slow path to recovery
I got off the escalator and stepped onto the platform. Three minutes until the train, eighteen minutes until I get to MIT, twenty minutes until my meeting. My breath was a bit fast: I’d been walking briskly. Suddenly, my chest tightened, and no more air could get in. My first reaction wasn’t fear – it […]
How to hang in there
For one grad student, holding onto their scientific dreams involves more literal grip strength than you might think!
I was skimming the schedule of a conference last week when I saw the last thing any 6th year PhD student wants to see: a title that could describe my project, on someone else’s abstract. I froze with dread. Did I just get scooped? No: the other project used a different experimental approach in a […]
The conflict and the privilege of MIT
I didn't think I could come here, yet here I am, and that made me question everything
The arrival It feels very strange to be writing this. I never thought I would be writing as a student at MIT but after a rollercoaster of events I was given the opportunity of a lifetime: the opportunity to study at MIT. I applied to MIT as a high school student, and after being rejected, […]
Whales of quals
Prioritizing my mental health over qualifying exams
This is my story of how I prioritized my mental health over qualifying exams. When I was studying for quals1, my phone kept autocorrecting quals to whales. I thought it was funny and poetic, because the stress of quals felt like a whale on me. Before reading this, I want to mention that what you […]
Crafting is engineering, music is math
What I learned from teaching design and engineering to elementary schoolers
I am a serial maker: as a child, I dove deep into a new creative obsession each year. With each medium I explored, my passion for making grew, and projects flooded my house: a giant model of the Parthenon made from recyclables graced our front hallway, a crochet stuffed dragon perched in our kitchen, and […]
