blog.
Hello!
Welcome to the new blog. In the coming weeks, I’ll be porting over old posts. This process will likely be painstaking, but will allow me to also review some of my work and likely make some cuts and edits. In the meantime, all the old posts will stay up at the blogspot link.
What do you mean by “old posts?”
Since August of 2018, I have written a blog post every day without fail for over 1000 days. I used to publish these blog posts publicly; I have since moved them to a private blog, but I have kept up some pieces of writing I stand by and occasionally posted new ones. This site contains an archive of those posts, along with blog posts I write on other platforms, such as for MIT Admissions.
The RSS feed for this site is here. An archive organized by month can be found here.
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walking the marathon…
part of a four-day weekend
The four-day weekend which just passed is a result of this obscure Massachusetts holiday known as Patriots’ Day, which falls on the third Monday of April. Traditionally, the Boston Marathon is also run on Patriots’ Day, and, in combination with the hubbub of CP✱, this year’s iteration of CPW, and my general enjoyment of walking long distances, it seemed like the right weekend to try and walk the Boston Marathon path.
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…and other things you can do with your four-day weekend
context around the marathon
This semester has been extremely hard; the exhaustion in the undergraduate community has been palpable since the first long weekend, where professors assigned the same amount of work despite the extra two days of break. I helped write an email to my dorm on March 25th, pleading for folks to take care of themselves, but the feeling persisted. The overall situation seemed worse than anything I had seen in a long time.
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where is south dakota again?
and other fun questions for your south dakotan friends
Back in September, when Shuli introduced the baby bloggers, they mentioned that I know “exactly how many students from South Dakota go to MIT.” This is true; the registrar provides state-by-state data on how many students attend MIT from each state in the US, so knowing that number is not particularly notable.
On the other hand, knowing all of the South Dakotans who go to MIT is somewhat notable.
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busy semesters and how to manage them
it's organizational structures all the way down
I am, by nature, a fairly disorganized person. This sometimes surprises the people I meet, because I am constantly busy, and people expect there to be a method to the madness: maybe Notion, or Dynalist, or whatever other popular strategies people swear by. In a sense, I do have a task-management strategy, but to me it feels more like the oft-quoted line of Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Just as with sleep schedules, I do my best to set up good practices at the beginning of the semester, but I am borne ceaselessly back into the mediocrity of the past.
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[joint post] we can't hear you, you're on mute
another mystery hunt post
joint post written with Shuli
Shuli: MLK weekend 2021 was the 41st annual MIT Mystery Hunt and my third time participating. The Mystery Hunt is an enormous puzzling event, held every year on MIT’s campus, that attracts not only hundreds of MIT students but also thousands of dedicated puzzlers from all over the world. It starts Friday at noon, and then we puzzle nonstop until someone finishes the hunt and ~ finds the hidden coin ~.