mit is not home

premortem: imagine something important to you and suppose that you fail to accomplish it. what went wrong?

i’m imagining a world where, in 6 months, i have made no close friends at mit. i know that imagining hypotheticals where this happens is supposed to help me avoid those same scenarios, but what am i supposed to do when i can’t even understand those hypotheticals properly? i have no idea why i’ll have no friends in 6 months- did i not devote enough energy to meeting new people? was i simply not good enough at talking or not readily available enough? did i spend too much time with a small group of people or spread out too much time over a wide range of people? was i not tolerant enough of people different from me? did i take peoples’ company for granted instead of actually trying to understand them?

i don’t know how long i expect this to take and i’m not sure what i even want at the end of it all. somehow it feels like if in 6 months i matched all my expectations perfectly, then i wasn’t open enough to changes in plan. when’s the last time i thought something was good because it went exactly as i wanted it to?

flashes of street views, tiny paths i’ve taken that illuminate the world like little lights in a maze of dark. bright spots that burn on in a darkening haze of fading memories, resurfacing over and over. visions of the taekwondo school i attended briefly in fifth grade at every pe class i go to- i can’t help myself, i look it up and find a perfect 5.0 average rating and images of neat mats and front-door windows. endless flashbacks to my last few months at home, the last time i felt truly free- driving between school and concerts and goodbyes, knowing that every location i visited i might not go to again. i still don’t understand how spring and summer passed by so quickly; i just remember is saying “no” out of some sort of instinct whenever people asked if i was looking forward to college, and so far i can’t say my anticipations have been very far off. 

sometimes after sunset the sky here is a vivid red-purple or deep blue, electric clouds filling the horizons to the brim with color. i remember clear dark skies every time i ran during the summer- relentless cloudless weather scorched the earth during the day and i’d feel the texan swelter around me when i ventured outdoors at night. the first week or so i’d run only when the sprinklers were on, but eventually i stopped caring and i would wipe the sweat off my face and neck continually, it was oily and gross and endless but it made me feel alive and present, running in the heat

castle on the hill (ed sheeran)

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now that we’re close to a month into school i suppose i have a much better idea of what my classes actually are

21M.030 (World Music): basically we learn about folk music from various cultures (eg. mongolia, ireland, scotland, zimbabwe so far) and sometimes we play on cool instruments in class 🙂 there are 5ish essays that might be annoying later though and classes are early in the morning so i’m half-asleep all the time

6.046 (Design and Analysis of Algorithms): not a super interesting algorithms class? idk i would say it’s pretty solidly usaco gold-plat level except with more math involved (eg. FFT, hashing) so i haven’t learned that much yet and it’s kind of slow, especially the lectures 😦 in hindsight i regret taking this first semester- probably should have gone for a more hands-on coding class because i probably need more work on that anyway.

18.675 (Theory of Probability): unfortunately since this is a grad class we’ve spent the first month-ish on measure theory just so we can define what probability, random variables, etc. are rigorously. i’m definitely learning a lot though (eg. i learned a ton of real analysis just from doing the first problem set, and i knew it was only a matter of time before i’d have to go through this…) and i expect it to only get better once we start actual probability/stats 🙂 

7.32 (Systems Biology): this class has pretty cool psets! i signed up for it just because i wanted a “math + bio class” without really knowing what that meant, but so far it’s been good 🙂 basically we use a bunch of diffeq, probability/stats, and graph theory to model biological interactions eg. enzyme kinetics and protein expression. oh and the main instructor is super great 😀 

18.A34 (Putnam Seminar): basically just revolves around weekly putnam-themed problem sets. not much to say i guess. there has been 1 problem so far that i liked a lot, namely: suppose is the set of infinite tuples of integers and is additive. Let be the tuple with a single in the th position and everywhere else. If for each , show that . 

other “classes” i’m in are MITSO (orchestra, self-explanatory; the music is not standard classical repertoire but still pretty cool! it’s lowkey worse than plano west orch though fuck i miss pwsh orch so much) and my pe class (taekwondo, which is pretty fun but i only feel like i’ve exerted myself after around 1/2 the classes)

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some other interesting things that happened:

-had an interview to be on the battlecode developer team (they host a big game-based programming contest during january) and it was the worst interview i’ve had since march-ish of 2017; i didn’t prepare much and overlooked some pretty obvious questions that i should’ve had better answers to because i thought i was more or less ready and didn’t take my time. i think i need a reminder on how to interview properly every once in a while anyway, so this was a healthy experience 🙂 (update: apparently i got in anyway oops)

-had a super chill mitso audition (the director literally told me right afterwards that i got in 😮 and told me to restart $$\ge 3$$ times during sightreading because i was being bad) and some okay rehearsals! the music is pretty fun and hard (mostly just rhythms) and one of my roommates thinks the rhythms are as hard as the ending of rite of spring 😮 

-set off a fire alarm while getting distracted from cooking eggs somehow

-went to my first bday party in a large number of years (5? idk sad life lol)

-went grocery shopping and stopped by the new england holocaust memorial on the way. it was pretty sad and then i realized how tall the glass tower things were and then it was 3x sadder

-rewatched 3 idiots with friends! 🙂 also watched koe no katachi with same friends which was confusing but good

-there was a 10 day period where i went to no dining halls and a 3 day period where i ate no actual meals oops  

-cried while reading over someones college essay wow looking back i really didn’t write anything close to good

-met ryan alweiss for the first time since june 2018 and he didnt recognize me huh

-went to hackmit last weekend, which was my first hackathon! our project involved trying to find lots of different hospital price/quality metrics in different countries so i did a lot of data scraping/processing, which luckily i had experience with from my primes project 🙂 idk my team was a bit intense though and 2 of them stayed up for 36+ hours so i felt bad about sleeping during hackmit and ended up only sleeping from 7-10am

-we “learned” choreo + a song for ohms in a total of like 6 hours and took a video to submit somewhere? you can probably tell that idk the details it was fun though 🙂 songs we are learning in the near future include some indian songs and “rewrite the stars” and “anybody have a map?” all of which im excited for 😀

-career fair was very long and very boring. the vast majority of companies were cs-focused and not freshman-friendly (or even sophomore-friendly it seems) 😦