Stop sprinting towards your future
What my time in industry taught me
I always knew I would come back to academia. It didn’t matter that I would be taking at least one year off to work a flashy new job in Seattle biotech. It didn’t matter that the position would be a lot less stressful, and have a lot more benefits, than graduate student life. My mentor […]
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 […]
Packing for MIT: Laptop, winter coat, math phobia
How I survived MIT classes without a math background - and you can too!
When I put my pencil down after muddling through the last particularly hairy integration-by-substitution puzzler on the 2013 AB Calculus AP exam, I felt relieved – both that I had survived the exam, and, more fundamentally, that I’d never have to take a calculus class again. Seven years later, picking up a different pencil to […]
A (rest)room of one’s own
Experiencing MIT through all-gender bathrooms
In the COVID-19 research ramp-up, one return-to-work guideline was hotly contested. Community members should remain seated while flushing to limit viral transmission. For a moment, my department was as obsessed with toilets as I was, although for different reasons. As a non-binary trans person, I’m familiar with non-ideal bathroom situations. The year I started at […]
Mitconceptions
Unlearning what I thought I knew about PhDs and MIT
“Wait up for me!” I shouted after my father as I scrambled to keep up with him. At 6 years old, I didn’t really fit in with the college students dotting the quad under the hot summer sun, but I also didn’t really care. My dad, a professor of economics, was letting me tag along […]
