The unlikely friends you’ll find
I still remember the feeling of disappointment. This was right in the first week as a grad student and I was still in the social-butterfly phase, meeting the people I would be spending the upcoming years with. The thought flew through my head: “what a shame, he seemed like such a nice guy”. This thought […]
A week in the life: Food edition
I love to cook. I picked up most of my culinary know-how during my junior year of college, through a combination of YouTube videos and scrappily assembled family recipes. That year, my housemates and I would go shopping together every weekend and designate one day a week for each of us to cook a family […]
How to cordially interrogate graduate students
This semester, I have had a ton of practice interrogating graduate students. During orientation, I was immediately given the task of rotating in various labs to find my lab home. Our advisors instructed us to reach out to professors who caught our interest, find out if they are looking for PhD students this semester, and […]
A furry solution to the grad school blues
The summer after finishing undergrad, I thought nervously about spending most of my 20’s as a student. I was starting grad school in a few weeks and wasn’t sure when ‘real adult life’ would start for me. I knew going to grad school would be productive for my career, but what about my personal goals? […]
“Deity’s Book Collection” twenty minutes away
Deity’s Book Collection Overseas 「海外嫏嬛」 Façade of the Harvard-Yenching Institute On a bright and crisp morning in late April 2019, when I first set foot into the warm Harvard-Yenching (哈佛燕京) library, it was as if I finally returned home from a long odyssey. The calligraphy overseeing the reading room 海外嫏嬛 (which literally translates into “deity’s […]
Finding UberGirl
I hate Uber. I hate that people love it because it’s convenient. I hate that people think it’s better for the environment than owning a car. I hate that people think it’s a good way for people to earn a living. I hate cars and I hate making excuses to keep them around. I grew […]
Controlling chaos
“Hey, you ready for the call in five?” The what? With who? Did I have to prep for this? When did we decide to schedule a call? What are we even talking about? Maybe I’ve just been getting old, but I never had a problem remembering all my commitments before graduate school. Or maybe I […]
Taking engineering too far
This post is part of a special issue: “Mental Health Matters: Asking for Help & Reaching Out”. I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t trying to lose weight. When I’m sitting in my office and can’t focus on my work because I can’t stop thinking about how much fat I have […]
Overcoming anxiety
This post is part of a special issue: “Mental Health Matters: Asking for Help & Reaching Out”. Hey there! I’m Jessica, a current 3rd year graduate student and PhD candidate, and I have anxiety. I choose to say this in the first sentence because it needs to be out there in the open and talked about. […]
Surviving grad school for the strong of mind
This post is part of a special issue: “Mental Health Matters: Asking for Help & Reaching Out”. It was New Year’s Day ’17 when I first set foot at MIT for a one-week intensive Quantitative Biology Workshop. Little did I know that it was the experience that would change the course of my future. From […]
If something feels wrong, speak up
This post is part of a special issue: “Mental Health Matters: Asking for Help & Reaching Out”. My first year of grad school at MIT was no piece of cake. I struggled to understand what was going on in lab, classes felt like they were ganging up on me, and everything came to a head […]
Mental Health Matters
Encountering setbacks while gaining crucial research skills, struggling to keep up in that one class where you have no prior background, fumbling your way around a new campus during a conference, and preparing last minute for group meeting presentations — these are just some of the common day-to-day grad school challenges. The types of challenges […]
The Myth About Inbox(0)
After extolling the logistical heroics of Alexander the Great and his Macedonian Army, my military history instructor turned to the class and declared, “Good generals study tactics; great generals study logistics.” To my fellow graduate students, I offer a customized message: “Good graduate students study research methods; great graduate students study email.” In this digital […]
Iñupiuraallaniptigun Uqausiptigun Maŋŋuqaqtugut
Aullaqisaaqta! Let’s begin! Iġñiġa Daał miluguuruq. My son Daał nurses often. I once read somewhere that Karl Marx had to chain himself to a library desk in order to finish Das Kapital. You might wonder what Marx has to do with nursing? Well, more than you might imagine. Baby Daał’ feeding habits have essentially tied […]
Where Computing Meets Brain Research
Three years ago, I first came to the U.S. for an international conference in Boston. As I passed through the MIT campus during a morning jog, I saw the beautiful sunrise on the Charles River. The sky was crystal clear and the great dome was golden brown. I was wondering how happy the students at […]
The Craziest Thing I’ve Done during Grad School
Last year, I started to get really into running, in part due to the fact that it’s a great way of relieving some of the stresses of grad school. I’ve written before about all the different ways my labmates tackle stress and how frequently I can be found trying to talk others into going for […]
A Well-Kept Secret for Finding a Job post-PhD
During my PhD, I performed a lot of exit interviews with graduating students and learned that finding a job is often the most stressful part of graduating, and among the most stressful in the entire PhD. After my own defense, however, I was able to avoid some of that stress by discovering a valuable post-PhD […]
Biking Diaries of a Graduate Student
“I guess I’ll just power through the weekend and get this P-set done,” I said to myself. This was a common refrain during the first year of my PhD program in Chemical Engineering. An endless stream of assignments from courses and self-imposed research deadlines meant that I ended up spending most weekends at home trying […]
The Pod Leader Experience
Every year, the Office of Graduate Education (OGE) hosts around 40 undergraduate students from around the country to engage in meaningful research at MIT during the summer. This effort, called the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP), aims to provide underrepresented minorities an opportunity to conduct research at world-renowned labs on campus. The cohort consists of […]
The Vicious Cycle of Boston Leases
Raise your hand if you hate moving! The Greater Boston Area, especially lovely places such as Allston, Cambridge, and Somerville, can be quite a painful place August 31st when most housing rental leases end. For one night, until the new lease begins on September 1st, many people become practically homeless — or worse, many students […]
A Nature Lover’s Journey in Cambridge
Are you a nature lover? I sure am, and I only realized how important it was to me when I moved to Cambridge after being admitted to the PhD program in the MIT’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences department. I felt nature deprived for quite some time before experiencing a shift in my perspective. Before coming […]
Learning to Sail
As mentioned in one of my previous blogs, the trio-factors of inability to swim, belonging to a country where sailing is not common, and the presence of the Charles River, always full of sailing boats right next to the campus, instilled a desire to learn sailing in me ever since I joined MIT. But the […]
The Dizzying Cost of Life Science Research
Where were you when you bought the most expensive thing you’ve ever purchased? I was definitely in lab. In life science, you can spend a staggering amount of the lab’s money on tiny tubes of liquid. As a small, delicate, expensive thing, purchasing a tiny tube of liquid feels a bit like buying jewelry. For […]
Graduate Student becomes Chickpea Master Masher
I am sitting at my desk, debugging some code that does not seem to work. The week has been tiring, to say the least. But next week is Brunch Week! When I first joined MIT, I was plagued by the usual imposter syndrome. This fear of not fitting in not only impacted my work, but […]
When Science Is More Art than Science
Maybe climate change is a hoax and vaccinations cause autism. Maybe 9/11 was an inside job, the earth is as flat as my grandma’s pancake, pineapple belongs on a pizza, and you should switch to Geico. Just maybe. Being the curious species that we are, we have to entertain all possibilities, even if they sound […]
Taking the Plunge
Applying to grad school can feel like climbing a mountain. We’ve all heard the analogy, but I’ve found that there’s very little advice on what to do once you’re at the top. After all the effort of making applications and getting in, the decision on what to do next can make you feel like you’re […]
How I became an engineer overnight
Applying to graduate school is a nerve-wracking process. It’s a blanket of excitement that, when uncovered, reveals a flood of conflicting emotions–from wondering whether you are rushing and have no experience and should work for a few years to questioning your self-worth and doubting if you have any unique qualities. Frankly, like any admissions process, […]
Realizing running is awesome
This is a story about me transitioning from occasional running to try and get fit, to becoming super into running. Only two years ago, I was struggling with the boredom and difficulty of exercise and could never sustain regular running for more than a month or two. Now, however, running is an integral part of […]
When Your Hobby Is Your YouTube Channel
It was two months before I was set to move to Boston for my PhD, and I had decided that there would never be a better time to create a science YouTube channel. While it might seem like a crazy idea to take on such a huge commitment while doing a PhD, I strongly believe […]
A Home Away from Home
Prologue When I first came to MIT, I planned to work, but not much else. Certainly no time to play Gu-zheng – the Chinese zither. There are simply too many things to learn, to explore. But, from time to time, I was possessed by a lingering anxiety – an integral part of my voice […]
The Paradox of Choice:
I am a brand-new Ph.D. student and I have already figured out my least favorite part about MIT: the overwhelming number of choices. As I am enrolled as a student in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Medical Engineering Ph.D. program, the situation is even more intense. I can take classes at both Harvard Medical […]
Full Send
What if I told you that the most fun thing that I do regularly since moving to Boston is running up and down a lot of tall steps (technically, seats) a lot of times, twice a week? Would you think that I’m crazy? A masochist? That Guy™ at the party who won’t shut up about […]
Discovering the multiverse at MIT
I still remember that chill running up my spine seeing the MIT dome for the first time from the Harvard Bridge, a chill that was indicative of the bounty of emotions running through each and every nerve in my body. Awe, excitement, nervousness, and pride were but a few of them. After all, Tony Stark […]
Creating my niche in grad school
Imagine being in a roller coaster that’s on fire, adrift, going full speed. That was my first year at MIT. Coming straight from an undergraduate institution in Puerto Rico, it was difficult for me to get used to the fast pace in which topics were taught in a different language and to the amount of […]
Eating my way through Cambridge’s cultural heritage
“What’s for lunch?” is one of the more universal questions of the human experience, though the presence of two large universities in Cambridge affects the range of choices available to a hungry grad student. Many of the food options near MIT and Harvard Square cater to the fast-casual appetites of millennials or the droves of […]
Dynamic equilibrium through Classical dance
Stepping away from India into the US led me to a stage where I was frantically searching for some semblance of my culture to hold on to. It was at this time that Bharatnatyam — an Indian classical dance form — crept onto me subconsciously. First and foremost, I am a major klutz; reactions […]
