Girly
What a scientist should look like
“Let us choose for ourselves our path in life, and let us try to strew that path with flowers.” – Emilie du Chatelet, Physicist I love dresses and bows, face masks and makeup. When I get ready for a day in lab, I avoid it all. It’s my first semester at MIT, and I wear a […]
Explain the MIT Undergrads to Me
There’s a totally rational reason for the madness, I promise
As a newly arrived graduate student at MIT, you may have noticed that the undergrads are a bit… crazy. Don’t worry, I’m your local neighborhood undergrad-whisperer, and I’m here to help. As a current Graduate Resident Advisor (GRA) at the East Campus undergraduate dorm and a former crazy undergrad myself at Caltech, I have a […]
Carving Nature at Its Joints
A brief timeline of an obsession
Last January. A friend recommends a scientific paper. At this time I am a computer science student thinking of quitting computer science, because I live in California, and love computers but have grown exhausted by Silicon Valley. The paper is called ‘Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People’, and it is sixty pages long. It […]
Sailing Outside My Comfort Zone
The story of a numerical modeler wandering into the Arctic
It all started with an email: ‘Urgent: Help needed for a research cruise in the Arctic ocean. No prior experience required’. The message had been sent to my department’s mailing list and described a month-long research opportunity to conduct oceanographic field work along the coast of Alaska. I read the email with a feeling of […]
On Rooftops in Cambridge and That Elusive Feeling of Hereness
When they go low, you go high
A long time ago, I climbed a roof here. Though I should clarify and revise; this is, after all, an institute built on precision. Recently, a professor returned a response paper I had written with a comment that read, this is all very interesting, but this is a rigorous field, and you need to say […]
