Week 1

Week 1 Registration week was a heinous tangle of scheduling; seven (7) classes knotted my temporal ropes into a gnarly mess, wrapping up any loose pieces of slack time between 7 AM and 9 PM. After Thursday, my self-preservation instincts began sirening for me to pick up the scissors and start cutting classes. As Facebook would say, heres the status update: -Waves and Vibrations (8.03): Required for major, will keep. -Special Relativity (8.033): Same as above. -Intro to Cosmology (8.286): It hurts to drop this class, but four physics problem sets per week hurts even more. Perhaps Ill give it another go in two years. -Electricity and Magnetism II (8.07): Having spent 6+ hours on the problem set already, Im reluctant to drop this class. Im already 3% of the way to completing 8.07! Dont give up now! (Bonus: Thanks to funding from the MIT Class of 22, everyone in 8.07 received a free copy of The Maxwellians on the first day of lecture. On the second day, everyone received an electronic clicker so that the class could answer multiple choice questions in real time during lecture. By extrapolation, I conclude that 8.07 will give me a new car before October.) -Film Studies: Dropped. -Intro to Black Studies: Turns out to be surprisingly engaging. Bonus: class participation involves a daytrip to New York City! Will keep. -Intro to Comparative Media Studies: After an hour of lecture, my interest in comparing mediums had evaporated to the point where I really, really wanted to just go to the grocery store and compare medium-quality produce. I left early and arrived at the grocery store just as an employee was stocking the shelves with grapes ludicrously priced at 88 cents a pound. Im sure CMS.100 is a worthwhile class, but grapes at 88 cents/lb might be an unfair comparison. Anyway, this class was dropped, and I had grapes for dinner. Twice. -20th Century Composition Techniques: I stumbled into this class on a masochistic whim and loved it. Whether I add it to my schedule hinges on whether I have time to read the textbook and crank out a handful of Stravinsky/Debussy analyses before Tuesday. Were I taking this class next semester, Id call this assignment The Write of Spring. Ignoring the lumped mass of four problem sets, five textbook readings, half a novel, a music composition exercise, and two score analyses currently coagulating on my platter, Ive been lately documenting my unreciped forays into experimental gastronomy. Throughout freshman year, cooking served as an expression of self-sufficiency and Ramen-avoidancy; nowadays, Im trying to tighten my culinary grasp in order to make new and exciting friends. And by “friends,” I mean “food.” Perhaps the inspiration for food as a creative catharsis came from the unabashedly sugar-saturated “Introduction to Undergraduate Women in Physics” event that I hosted for the Class of 2013 during orientation. Every year, MITs orientation coordinators organize a themed party/carnival/interactive infomercial in the Student Center for student groups to feed and bedazzle the incoming class. This years theme was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I freely interpreted as a challenge for student groups to 1-up each other in distributing free candy to the 1000+ freshmen. As president of Undergrad Women in Physics, I armed our humble one-table booth for war with the Undergrad Math Association to the West and the Electrical Engineering Club to the East. The secret weapon: Edible circuits- the intersection of technology and sugar. Some people come to MIT to learn the recipe for success. Ultimately, they learn that the recipe includes graham crackers, unpeeled Twizzlers, icing, marshmallows, food coloring, and gumdrops. Conversions: graham cracker = circuit board base gumdrops / Jujubes = LEDs Twizzlers (long) = wires / inductors Kit-Kat = capacitors Starburst = battery packs Marshmallows / short Twizzlers = resistors icing = solder Halfway through, I came up with a gimmicky circuit board construction contest to encourage visitors build circuits out of food instead of eating it. The winner, as advertised, would be mentioned on my blog in no less than one relative clause. As it turns out, I dont remember the name of anyone who submitted a circuit board to the contest, except for Sheila. Hi, Sheila. Furthermore, the winning circuit boards as judged by a panel of volunteers from the Undergrad Math Association and Undergrad Women in Physics were all built by either myself or Symone 12. Oops. Looks like we succeeded so much that we failed. Success fail! Honorable mentions: Circuits like this one left me puzzled. Whats the voltage drop across a gumdrop in series with two marshmallows and another gumdrop, and also in parallel with a bigger gumdrop, which is itself in parallel with the two marshmallows and the other gumdrop? I feel like I missed the 8.022 lecture that covered this. Im not sure if I want the real-life version of this circuit inside anything I own, probably because it reminds me of a rickshaw. Honestly, Im fine with having some device that contains three gigantic, unwired LEDs piled on top of each other in the middle of a circuit board where nothing is connected to anything, as long as I didnt have to pay more than $9.99 for it. Its just that this one looks too much like a rickshaw. Nothing personal, Sheila. I really do appreciate your attention to reflective symmetry. This was a short circuit. Its also a blurry circuit. Greg 12, not to be outdone, responded to the above by building a “short” circuit. Its not even a circuit, so Greg loses anyway. Sorry, Greg. Better luck with 6.002. “MisLED: A Study in Unconnected, Non-functional LEDs” by Symone. “Wires oer Wires” by Yan. Scarcely 5/14th of a fortnight later, Alorah 11 and I threw a bacon party at pika. A bacon party is exactly what it sounds like, except with more bacon. For hor doeuvres, I served a tray of grilled melon and peaches wrapped in bacon. I accidentally burnt the bacon-wrapped fruit in the oven, which added a smoky carcinogenic musk of charcoal to each bite. In a moment of divine inspiration, I was left unattended in the kitchen in the company of a lovely organic pie crust, an equally lovely bag of organic apples, and a pack of fat-streaked bacon. With a few plentiful shakes of cinnamon, a glaze of agave nectar, and a wink of patriotism, I had this: Introducing: the Bacon Lattice Apple Pie. I popped it into the oven until the bacon was crisp at the edges and still dripping with sizzling pork juice in the chewy inner folds of each salt-sweaty strip. For the finishing caress, a drizzled spoonful of melted caramel sauce was swirled over pork and apple like a silky ribbon. It turned out to be inadvertently delicious too, albeit murderous. Just like my class schedule. Week 1 Here’s how things have been going lately: I run a lot, I eat too much free pizza, and I’ve spent three of the past seven evenings at Harvard. My friend taught me how to lift weights, and my extracurricular commitments are taking shape. My new room has thin yellow curtains and at least three different paint jobs. Today, I put sunflowers on the windowsill, and now it feels a little more like home. â€" Im a sophomore and a new blogger; this post is an introduction. I’m coming off the levity of the best summer I’ve ever had, so I’ll tell you a little bit about it. On my last night in Hong Kong, I leaned over the balcony in the common room and watched reflected light dance in the ocean. I was trying to catch the Perseids. In the end, I didn’t see a single meteor and ended up crying a little about leaving. Let’s say that my summer was very hedonistic and I liked it too much. Let’s say that Hong Kong is a city dipped in glossy excess and I couldn’t help myself. Hong Kong is home to both the cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant and the highest rooftop bar in the world. Subway stations connect to malls, each of which seems to connect to five more. My dorm room faced the ocean, with distant green mountains splitting the sky in half. Everyone on the streets looks powerful under the white lights of Chanel stores. With four other MIT students, I lived eight weeks on a Hong Kong university campus for MITs IROP research exchange program; I compared the impact on US peanut butter sales of two Salmonella contaminations, one in 2007 and one in 2009. It was about as exciting as it sounds, which is to say, not very. A whole slew of factors beyond my control thwarted my progress, but I’m trying not to talk about it too much. So that was that. â€" Summertime ’06 by Vince Staples has been my background music of choice since its release this summerâ€"it is two discs of aggressively honest, sobering rap verses. My two favorite lines from the album are “Man, I need to fight the power, but I need that new Ferrari” “My feelings told me love is real, but feelings known to get you killed” The word “but” really makes a sentence turn. The lyrics have a lot to do with gang-banging on Long Beach and dealing drugs and being black in America and other lives that are not my own; they also have a lot to do with feelings and selling out, two things that challenge me constantly. The part about selling out: Ive spent literally one week back on campus, and Im already stressed about finding an internship for next summer. Shaking all these recruiters hands makes me feel objectionably pre-professional. I’m uneasy because I said I’d never do financeâ€"or really anything other than researchâ€"and now I want to dip my toe (or maybe my head or my entire self) into it. Part of me just wants something faster-paced than research to stay sharp, but part of me needs to prove it can do interviews and compete with other ambitious people and have nice things in the future. It’s pretty harmless, but it feels somehow morally wrong to do something thats more about enjoying myself while confused than about doing valuable work while passionate, but it’ll probably be fine. Its just one summer, after all. Despite my qualms about the future, I’m very content with where I am right now; this year looks like pure potential. My classes seem manageable and interesting (but of course its only week 1). I haven’t faced off with any hard existential questions lately, which means I’ve been relatively good at distracting myself with satisfying choices. I’m just trying to make myself stronger, to get better at thinking and smiling and carrying the weight of this school. â€" In the week Ive been back at MIT, Ive been trying quite a lot of new things, and I thought Id make a list of some of the cool places Ive been. Some places I’ve been this past week SoWa Sundays A vintage/open air market near Broadway station on the red line, open on Sundays May through October. The ambiance is very cozy, and it’s a lot of fun to browse if you’re into vintage/handmade things, though many of the handmade items were beyond the reach of my budget. The farmer’s market is pretty limited. The food trucks have tasty albeit overpriced food. I went with some people from my hall this past Sunday and will definitely return for more. Dumpling House Popular/yummy/crowded Chinese place near Harvard. The soup dumplings were delicious. Boomerangs If you, like me, have a penchant for thrift shopping, this is the place to be. You may have heard of Garment District, Goodwill, and Buffalo Exchange, but Boomerangs has a better selection than Goodwill, has higher-quality clothes than Garment District, and is closer than Buffalo Exchange. Charles River Esplanade My good friend visited MIT because his semester hasn’t started yet. He lived in Boston for a semester, and he showed me a great tree on the Esplanade. I could sit there forever. tEp Rush has been going on this past week, so fraternities and ILGs are holding dinners, parties, and other events in an effort to attract new members. Last year, I went to a few of the steak and lobster dinners, but this year I followed some friends to tEp, a fraternity that behaves more like an ILG. We went to the Food Orgy event, which is a party full of foodâ€"with one rule: you can’t feed yourself. The grapes were fun. List Visual Arts Center An art gallery in the old half of the MIT Media Lab. They run an annual program that allows any interested student to enter a lottery to loan a piece of artwork and keep it in his/her room for a year. They boast a wide selection of artwork, including pieces by well-established artists such as Joan Miró, Roy Lichtenstein, and Cindy Sherman. Harvard My best friend is a sophomore at Harvard, and I’ve been spending more time with her this year, now that both of us are more familiar with Cambridge and with our respective schools. She took me to the “Harvard Underground” performance, which featured some fierce hip-hop flavored performances by various Harvard music and dance groups. My room Im pretty introverted, and I spend quite a lot of time in my room. No shameâ€"last year, I always felt pressure to spend all my time sitting in cafés, running around with people, or literally anything to avoid being alone in my room. It was exhausting and unnecessary, and I still ended up spending a lot of time alone in my room and feeling bad about it. In hindsight, my attitude was pretty silly. Please do not be ashamed to spend time alone in your room if thats what you need. Places I want to visit in the near future Coolidge Corner Theater I have yet to visit, but my friend told me about it. Supposedly shows a lot of indie films, supposedly very cozy. Tatte This is a bakery in Kendall Square, and I have heard nothing but good things about it. Primark Cheap European clothing chain that recently opened a store near Downtown Crossing. Who wants [to browse but not buy] cheap + trendy clothing [due to an overflowing closet]?!! I do!!! â€" Man, am I glad to be back. Sophomore year seems like itll be fun; it comes with the security of old friends and old haunts, but theres not yet much pressure to make post-graduation plans. I suspect Ill be doing a lot of exploring this year, and I cant wait to tell you all about it!