Innovation and the daily grind
How admission into MIT Sloan Fellow MBA transformed my way of thinking about careers, entrepreneurship and innovation
A life with daily grinds Over the last ten years, I remember working long hours on mergers and acquisitions (M&A), project finance deals, and operational issues without even realizing when the sun set. And then COVID struck! Suddenly, I had nothing to work on and nowhere to go. Somewhere inside me, I knew that I […]
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 […]
A graduate school simulator
How playing Stardew Valley prepared me to move to MIT
Stardew Valley, the hit indie farm simulator, consumed much of my senior spring. While writing my thesis and finishing my coursework, I needed an opportunity to relax and focus on ANYTHING other than my mounting deadlines. The game, playable across multiple consoles, is a staple recommendation of the “cozy game” genre, occupying a similar niche […]
Escape MIT for a weekend
My favorite weekend getaways around New England
What will you do if you have a weekend free? Netflix? Video games? How about getting out of your (dorm) room and travelling to another state? During my undergraduate study, I spent one seminar in a small town north of Boston doing a co-op (i.e., a 6-month internship). Away from campus, I was free of […]
Nurturing yourself by nurturing some greens
How growing an indoor vegetable garden from scratch became a life-affirming engineering project during the COVID lockdowns
Grad student life is filled with significant transitions like qualification exams, new roommates, selecting PIs and committee members, and more. But the uncertainties of grad school life suddenly became much more prominent with COVID-19. As an experimentalist who does my research in a lab, I was incredibly lost, especially in the first few months of […]
