Stop sprinting towards your future
What my time in industry taught me
I always knew I would come back to academia. It didn’t matter that I would be taking at least one year off to work a flashy new job in Seattle biotech. It didn’t matter that the position would be a lot less stressful, and have a lot more benefits, than graduate student life. My mentor […]
The scientific method behind burnt mozzarella sticks
The story of how my rogue oven eased my anxiety about graduate school
How many of you know how an oven works? I mean, like, reallllyyy know? Personally, I do not, and yet here I am, a graduate student at MIT. I am a first-year student pursuing a Ph.D. in marine geophysics as part of the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences department. Coming into the program, I—like many […]
Crying in C-Mart
My Asian grocery adventure in the Boston area
I can’t survive for a week without eating Asian food. Honestly, a big reason why I chose to come to MIT was because H-Mart was down the street from campus. However, after looking at my H-Mart grocery receipts from my first couple months here, I was crying (in front of) H-Mart. I realized that H-Mart […]
First-year reflection
Is a PhD really for me?
More than once in our career, most of us will find ourselves asking whether we made the right decision. Often, this questioning is triggered by setbacks, “less-than-ideal” circumstances or a mediocre environment. Without a doubt, the majority of graduate students will probably face this kind of uncertainty during our journey (especially for PhDs, as 5 […]
From B1G to little
My transition from a Big 10 school to MIT
My undergraduate university couldn’t be much more different from MIT. Penn State is a school of 50,000 students in a small town surrounded by farmland. The campus culture centers around varsity sports, and grad students make up a small minority of the student population. MIT is home to approximately 12,000 students, a majority of whom […]
