How I passed my 1st-year classes
...by skipping them (please don’t tell anyone)
That’s right, I confess: I am a serial class skipper. It all started in high school, when I discovered it was possible to learn a lot more about a subject if I studied the material during class instead of paying attention to the teacher. Of course, I couldn’t physically skip classes back then without getting […]
L’Autre, c’est moi
Sondering away in the heart of a young boy
As a child, I vividly remember staring for hours out the window in the back seat of my parents’ car, scrutinizing nearby people stopped at the red light or passing us on the highway. I’d see a driver singing her favorite tune, a couple absorbed in some deep conversation, or an entire family sitting quietly […]
Am I too busy for radio?
How my time spent on-air made me a better scientist
The way I see it, a major part of being an “entitled millennial” is our personal conviction that we all have a message to share and a voice to be heard; its primary symptoms are the oversaturated podcast market and the unlimited supply of Instagram influencers. As a new graduate student at MIT with new […]
The infinite rotation
After six failed lab rotations, one last chance to find a home
Switching labs is, optimally, disruptive. On September 3, 2019, the very beginning of my second year at MIT, my PhD program director called me into his office to explain that I needed to switch labs because one of my co-advisors was a research fellow, not a tenure-track professor, and the other presently lacked resources to […]
Navigating MIT
How to Survive in the Forest of Numbers
MIT exemplifies a uniquely analytical and quantitative intellectual approach. It’s a good thing, usually; after all, scientific revolutions like Newtonian physics began when we started putting stuff into quantitative perspective. MIT, however, took it a bit too far. Humans are, in general, pretty bad at memorizing numbers (with a few exceptions like Akira Haraguch, who […]
