Finding light in the long New England winter
On an early spring day, with rare 60F air and blue skies, there’s barely room to walk along the banks of the Charles across from MIT’s main campus. Like the native spotted salamanders, emerging from their winter burrows to mate and lay eggs in vernal pools, graduate students and young professionals clog the packed limestone […]
More for your dollar
The material and immaterial perks of being a Market Basket customer
I just returned from my weekly pilgrimage to Somerville’s foremost grocery institution: Market Basket. On this trip I bought enough ingredients to meal-prep approximately 16 servings of a falafel dinner, as well as some staples – eggs, butter, and two pounds of strawberries – for a mere $68. They are not kidding about getting more […]
Random gone right
When Facebook Marketplace housing exceeds expectations
As spring rolls around, many soon-to-be graduate students are receiving their letters of admission, and current MIT students are embarking on summer internships, research, or vacation after a long semester. Both future and current students, however, face the same dilemma: finding housing for the fall. New students may face the challenge of having no or […]
Yes, you can have a life in grad school
A guide to being an almost-close-to-normal twenty-something who also happens to be getting their PhD
“But I’ll be thirty when I finish graduate school!” “Julia, would you rather be thirty with a PhD or without one?” I have repeated this conversation many times in my head and to anyone who will listen. Before I decided to get my PhD in biology, I had heard so many horror stories about graduate […]
Grad School is Just Chess with Pipettes
Lessons learned from 10,642 chess games that also applied to my PhD
In grad school, I learned how to play chess—and got addicted to it. At first, it was just a fun distraction from experiments and papers, but over time I realized that many of the lessons I was learning over the board applied just as much to my PhD. Strategy, patience, resilience—the same principles that helped […]
