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 […]
PhD parenting in a pandemic
Challenges and lessons learned from a tumultuous time in my life
When I first heard about SARS-CoV-2, my wife and I had just flown back to the U.S. from visiting her family in China. She was already in her second trimester of pregnancy and was concerned that the virus might spread to North America. At the time, I didn’t think too much of it. Evidently, her […]
Routine in chaos
Discovering opportunity to hack your own personal productivity habits
About a month into my first semester at MIT, I found myself sitting on my couch at 4pm, still in my pajamas I’d been wearing all day, working on a math Problem Set (PSET), with a bag of pretzels as my only meal of the day beside me when I thought: What the heck am […]
