Waiting for Rejection, Finding Empathy
How my choice to pursue research at MIT has influenced my personal life
A PhD is lonely. It’s especially lonely when all of your friends are getting married, when you are a perpetual bridesmaid watching your closest friends enter a new chapter while you are literally stuck in the same place. Most days, my life is stagnant: my code doesn’t work, paper writing is in the same place, […]
Always Where the Food’s At
A grad student's guide to free food at MIT
Is there going to be food? If the answer is yes, I’m there. On my lab group’s Slack messaging channel, the description below my name is always where the food’s @. As a student at MIT, you begin to notice that nearly all events provide free food. The usual choices are bagels and pastries for […]
Making Whoopie (Pies)
Baking as a stress relief from the rigor of MIT academics
When you think of things a graduate student might do to relieve stress, baking and assembling 90 whoopie pies probably doesn’t make the cut. Here’s the scene: every surface of my apartment is covered in misshapen disks of chocolate cake. I plop fluffy whipped cream onto the disks and sandwich them together—careful to not let […]
Defining a Real Sloanie
A guide for first-year Sloan students
I still remember when I was about 5 years old, it was my first day at kindergarten and I was scared to meet so many new kids. But I recall it being less scary for me than for most of them because I knew how to tie my shoes. Spending my first few weeks helping […]
Rebooting Your PhD
Switching labs partway through your graduate studies
In July of 2013, I was abruptly told to leave lab. No warning, no chance to explain myself. The fact is, a sizable fraction of students do end up changing labs. Sometimes the cause is relatively benign — a professor gets a job offer elsewhere, or you realize you don’t like working with mice after […]
