Touring colleges on foot
A brief jog through some of Boston’s many universities
Coming from an undergraduate university located in a smaller city, I was used to living in an area with few nearby schools to compare to my own. In contrast, the Boston area is littered with colleges! In fact, Wikipedia cites that there are 45 higher educational institutions in the metropolitan Boston area. When I moved […]
Trying and failing to buy a house
Why can’t grad students get a mortgage?
We did everything right. My husband and I had excellent credit, did not have debt, and we always paid off our credit cards. We had plenty of money in our savings account. We attended financial seminars and learned all the steps involved in buying a house. And yet, when we tried to buy a small, […]
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My rewarding journey of becoming a group kickboxing instructor at MIT
How do you build yourself back up when life gets hard? Some of my friends find comfort in creating art, some in hiking, while some in building relationships. Since I came to MIT, I have found my charging station and creativite outlet in kickboxing. At the beginning of my PhD, I picked up the habit […]
small silver slivers
finding the bright spots in a dark time
It was dark. Like the smallest sliver of a crescent moon, my roommate’s face was barely illuminated by the flickering glow of the twenty-six candles before her. It was just enough to see her manage a smile, lean forward, and, in a plume of smoke, send us into darkness again. It wasn’t the birthday she […]
How leaving MIT convinced me to stay
Navigating academia and industry as a grad student
Industry or academia? It’s a question at the forefront of many MIT grad students’ minds. I first found myself at this crossroads at the end of my undergraduate career, unsure whether I wanted to follow the path of a practicing engineer or that of an academic researcher.
