The End

So I graduated from college six months ago today.  As such, it seems like an appropriate day to give this blog the ending that I’ve been meaning to give it for approximately six months, plus or minus a day or two.  [When I say appropriate, I mean that I should have probably done this six months ago, plus or minus a day.  But for various reasons, not least of which is my incredible inability to update my blog on time, I didn’t.  So today seems like an appropriate day to do it :P]

To begin, let’s recap what’s happened since we met last: I graduated from MIT, I spent a summer at home doing very few productive (but many wonderful) things, and I moved across the country (again) to start graduate school in Florida.  I gave my first lab meeting of grad school (and it wasn’t completely horrible), I finished my first class of grad school, and as of next Wednesday I’ll be finished with my first semester.  So, you know, nothing major.  

I’ve spent a ridiculously long time neglecting to write this post, for a multitude of reasons.  One of the reasons I took so long to write this was because this blog is kind of irrelevant now.  I started it to keep my family up to date on my life at MIT, and that’s over.  There are no longer “Two Years Left Here”, as my title proclaims, but instead negative six months.  The purpose of the blog isn’t gone- obviously I still would like to have some method of keeping people up to date with my life.  But I’ve grown out of this blog, I think.  The notion of a weekly post, now that I’m in grad school, is slightly ridiculous.  (To be honest, you all saw how ridiculous it was even in undergrad.  I’m at least twice as busy now as I was then, so you can imagine what my posting schedule would look like.)

The major reason though, is that I wasn’t ready to acknowledge the end of college.  Even though I’m kind of just avoiding ‘real life’ by going to grad school and continuing my education for another five-ish years, not being in college was a decently large transition.  For one thing, I get paid now, and I have things to pay for.  (Side note, adulthood thus far seems to be pretty much just trying to pay for all of the things, and making money to be able to do that.  It’s great :P).  I also can’t just walk down the hall and chat with my friends about random crap- I have to put in an effort to contact people.  Apparently adulthood also includes more using the phone for its actual purpose and calling people, rather than just texting.  

Everyone says that college will be the best four years of your life.  Granted, everyone also says that high school is the best four years of your life.  People are really great at contradicting themselves, come to think of it.  But let’s focus on the college portion of things, since that’s what this blog has been about.  

Was college the best four years of my life?  I certainly hope not.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved a lot of college.  I LOVED a lot of things that happened in college.  But there were also a lot of not-so-great things about college- the stress, the homework, the tests, the trying to figure out how to live on my own-ish for the first time.  And, quite frankly, I’m only 23.  If I’m already done with the best four years of my life, the downhill slide from here is really going to suck.  Luckily, post-college life is pretty good so far, so I don’t think I have to worry too much about the good parts of life being behind me already.

Although I won’t say that college was the best four years of my life, I’ll acknowledge that it was a pretty great four years.  It’s an interesting exercise to examine how much I’ve changed in four years.  At a cursory glance, I wouldn’t say that I’ve changed that much.  I’m still a complete nerd, getting excited about scientific advances, my favorite TV shows, and excellent books.  I’m still a fairly quiet person.  I’m still terrified of failing, and of being hit in the head by things, and of public speaking.  But at the same time, I’m a very different person from who I was when I left home to go to college.  I’m leagues better at pretending to be confident when I’m not.  I’m also actually confident a much larger portion of the time than I was prior to college.  And despite the fact that I’m still terrified of all the same things, I’m also much better at overcoming those fears.  

I won’t credit MIT with all of those changes, but I do think that it played a major role in changing me for the better.  I obviously learned a lot in college.  That is sort of the point after all.  But beyond the academic stuff, I was also constantly learning things unrelated to my major.  I learned about myself by going through the variety of trials and tribulations that go into getting a college degree.  I learned about a wide variety of beliefs and viewpoints by interacting with the diverse group of people around me.  I learned about the importance of having a strong set of beliefs.  I learned about the importance of being willing to listen to others, and of being willing to amend your strong set of beliefs if they’re proven flawed.  I learned how not to be terrified of public speaking (the secret, at least for me, is to know the transitions between your slides, and to practice many times before the presentation).  I learned how to ask questions.  I learned how to look for the answers myself.  I learned how to actually be passionate about something, rather than just saying you’re passionate about it.

Possibly the biggest thing that I, personally, learned in college though, was how to ask for help.  This is something that I’ve always been terrible at.  It ties into my fear of failure, I think- I never want to be seen as anything less than completely competent, at whatever I’m doing.  Obviously this is a ridiculous task. It’s impossible to be good at everything, particularly if you’re just starting to learn how to do something.  Nevertheless, it’s a task that I started out with for myself when I went to college.  Luckily it’s not one that I graduated with.  

Learning to ask for help wasn’t a gradual process so much as something I figured out all at once.  I’ve discussed both of these before, but the two catalytic points in my ability to ask for help were when I was told I was a terrible presenter (paraphrasing) and during the week where everyone on campus was talking about imposter syndrome.  These experiences happened relatively close together, and both of them were solved by having open, honest discussions with people that I trust.  I know my parents are going to sigh a bit in frustration when they read this, because they both tried to explain that to me several hundred times when I was growing up.  But another thing I learned in college is that in order to really internalize any information, I need to both do it myself and come to the decision to do so on my own.  In other words, I’m only good at accepting help when I’ve made a conscious decision to do so.  

 

I will put money on the fact that I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am today without the help of a wide variety of people.  I’ve thanked the majority of you several times over, both in person and on this blog.  But it bears repeating: so thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to anyone who has taken the time out of your day to read this.  If you’ve gotten to this point in the post (which is, once again, more than 1000 words long without the benefit of any pictures to make it interesting), odds are that you care about me on some level. [Or you’re just curious about what I do with my life now, which is totally fair.]   And since I have no delusions about my popularity, I know that anyone who cares about me enough to read through my ramblings is someone that I also care about, and have probably asked for help with one thing or another at some point in my lifetime.  It takes a village to raise a child, or in this case, an Alycia.  There aren’t words to really describe how grateful I am to be where I am today, and getting here would have been impossible without everyone I’ve met in the past 23 years of my life.  So I’ll stop my ramblings and end this blog with a thank you.  It’s been a great two-ish years of writing- thank you for your two-ish years of reading, and for your variable number of years helping me become the person I am today.  I’ve obviously needed all the help I can get.

All the best,

Alycia

IHTFP #nostalgia

I think I’ve forgotten how to write.  In the past two weeks I’ve turned in two 10 (ish) page papers, two presentations (one 10 minutes and one 90 minutes), and one pset, as well as taken two exams and read untold numbers of papers in an attempt to magically learn everything there is to know about Xeroderma Pigmentosum, the evolutionary capabilities of E. coli, the use of plaster by the Maya as both a building material and a mode of expressing themselves, gender biases in STEM academia and the reasons they exist, and (of course) etheno lesions and how they are repaired (lab stuff, in English).  Basically, the past two weeks have been a microcosm that looks exactly like how the past four years at MIT have looked, if more condensed.  It should be no surprise then, that more or less immediately after I finished my last assignment for class, I sat down to take a nap (since I still needed to work on some things for lab, and had planned to do so that night) and slept through my alarms and for eight hours straight.  Like I said, pretty much exactly how the past four years at MIT have gone.

But I’m done now, with the exception of a final exam that I need to take next week and lab stuff, because I’m me.  And it should honestly feel weirder than it does.  Maybe it hasn’t sunk in that instead of two years left here, like the title of this blog, I have more like three weeks left here.  And not to be completely maudlin, but I’m not sure when I’ll be in Boston again after that.  I have grand plans, of course, of returning for occasional things.  But the best laid plans of mice and men, as they say, often go awry.  

I’m writing this while sitting in a common area of the MIT Media Lab.  If you’ve never seen it, it’s pretty much one of the coolest places in the world (If you’ve seen Big Hero 6, think the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology.  If you haven’t seen Big Hero 6, go watch it, and come back when you have.  And if you don’t have time for that, imagine really cool things, and glass walls, and spiral staircases and robots in labs.  And you’ll get somewhat close to what the Media Lab is).  Strangely (for me and the reasons I love the place), it has very little to do with biology (at least the parts I’m looking at).  It does, however, have a lot to do with innovation.  People here are working on everything from social robots, to writing code that can be translated into orchestral performances, to coming up with digital pets (think Tamagotchi) that can help keep an eye on one’s health.  And that’s just the UROP openings.  There’s an incredible amount of research being done here, on things that we can only dream about right now.

The outside of the Media Lab… It’s cooler inside, but I wasn’t thinking and didn’t take a picture.

Despite what I always say when asked why I chose to come to MIT (that I finally found people who consistently laugh at my nerdy jokes (which is true, by the way)), the real reason that I fall in love with MIT over and over is the innovation.  MIT sucks, and making it through with my sanity somewhat intact is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.  But even on the worst days, when I’m convinced that my life would have been infinitely better if I’d just chosen to attend a different school, there’s something cool going on somewhere on campus.  People are constantly working to come up with new things, committing a significant amount of hours to research that will impact the world in some way.  My grad student will frequently be like “Look at this” and then show me some data that he has analyzed that proves something cool, or a video of cells becoming fluorescent over time as they repair DNA mutations.  My friends come home and tell me about something bizarre their professor told them about in class.  I go to a lecture and hear about growing cells in a specific way that lets them form normal brain structures (Out of single cells guys.  Scientists are growing brain-like structures.  They’re not full brains yet, since they don’t have blood vessels.  But they form into the right shapes.  How cool is that??).

I’m going to be science-y for a minute, but I’ll try to be as non-confusing as possible.  The reason I chose biological engineering as a major initially (and actually why I switched to biology eventually) was in part, an innovation.  One of the major problems with transplanted organs is that unless you can exactly match a set of markers that exist on each of your cells (which is rare unless you have an identical twin) you have a very high chance of rejecting the transplanted organ.  The results of this can be anything from mild infection to complete rejection of the organ, meaning that the patient’s body attacks the transplanted organ as if it were an invader.  A really convenient way of getting around this would be if we could just have a copy of the patient’s own organ, but with whatever the problem was fixed.  And people are  working on that (not at MIT specifically, but related research is certainly happening here).  Specifically, a lab at the University of Pittsburgh has stripped a mouse heart of its cells, leaving only the scaffolding, and then taken cells from different mouse and used them to create heart cells to put back onto the scaffolding.  And after all this, when you have a heart back that has all of the appropriate cells in it, it beats again, in the way you would expect a heart to do. To the best of my knowledge, the new heart hasn’t been re-transplanted into a mouse.  But if it were to be done, the heart would be made of the mouse’s own cells, so it would have the correct markers and thus wouldn’t be rejected.  

When I first heard about this research freshman year, I was convinced it was the coolest thing since sliced bread.  Since then, I’ve learned about innumerable other cool things.  I’ve learned that you can use viruses to shrink cancerous tumors, and that you can build a 190 ton structure held together by only gravity and physics.  I’ve learned that you can use a mathematical model to explain the amount of DNA repair that an individual will be able to do.  I’ve seen people make apps, and write code to make their computer play a game of checkers, and discover new interactions between proteins.  But the stripped and rebuilt heart has stayed with me as one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard it was possible to do.  

For me, the possibility of the rebuilt heart exemplifies everything that is good about science and about knowledge in general.  At the center, we do science because we are infinitely curious and want to understand how the world works.  We do science because we want to be able to shape that world to our whims, in order to make it the best world possible.  We do science so that we can make people’s lives a tiny bit better.  Or maybe a lot better.  In 40, or 70, or 100 years, when rebuilt hearts are commonplace, that will affect a ridiculous number of people, hopefully for the better.  

Maybe because I’m a week out from my last final and I’ve finished all of my class assignments, I’m firmly on the “I have truly found paradise” side of IHTFP (MIT students’ favorite saying).  Last week, when I was running on 3 hours of sleep a night, I was firmly on the “I hate this freaking place” side.  But there are two things that got me past those days- the aforementioned innovation, and the people who find my nerdy jokes amusing.  If the reason I fell in love with MIT is innovation, the reason I stay in love with it is the people that that innovation will eventually be done and used by.  If you know me at all, you might find this mildly surprising, since I’m not really a people person in any sense of the term.  But I might not have come to MIT if my family didn’t tell me I could do it.  And I might not have managed to get as much work done as I have if my friends weren’t there to deal with my temporary insanity and to make sure I ate (even if I’ve eaten a considerable amount more candy than is probably advisable).  I almost certainly wouldn’t have managed to stay committed to a career in science without basically everyone, but specifically without my advisor and professors and, of course, my grad student.

Mildly related chocolate wrapper I got while having my bout of nostalgia today. (Text: You are exactly where you are supposed to be.)

I’ve been pretty chill about the whole “I’m leaving Boston, possibly forever” thing.  And then I was in the middle of writing this and realized that next week is finals week, and the underclassmen will be leaving, and the nostalgia hit fairly hard.  I was at my department’s poster session this week (I promise that at some point I’ll explain what a poster session is) and my grad student’s college professor was there.  After telling her about my poster, we chatted a little bit about the fact that I’m leaving soon, and whether I was sad about it.  I told her that I hadn’t had time to be sad yet, since I was still in the middle of a couple of assignments.  But we’re getting to the sad bit, which is going to be an issue given that I still have three weeks before I’m actually done.

Despite the fact that I have three weeks left and am honestly fairly ready to be done with the hate part of IHTFP, It’s obviously more difficult to give up on the paradise part.  I’m not going to go into it now, because it’s another post worth of writing, but MIT has changed me in a lot of ways, some obvious and some subtle.  But the change is, in general, for the better, no matter how much I’ve kicked and screamed while getting to the end of the change. It’s going to be hard to leave.  There’s no question in my mind about that.  The real question is how many times I’m going to be nostalgic before getting on a plane back to Seattle.  If you asked me, I’d have to say a lot of times.  Since I’m not a huge fan of being openly emotional, it might be a rough three weeks.  There are going to be a lot of the people that helped me stay in love with being at MIT that I’m going to say goodbye to, which is going to suck, since saying goodbye always sucks.  But at least the innovation bits will be fairly consistent, and will help soften the blow (or at least that’s what I’m telling myself… I’m probably wrong about the blow softening bit.  I can hope though.)

Not actually super relevant, but MIT is really pretty, and I like this picture.

There’s not really a moral to this post, which usually means I should have stopped writing a couple of hundred words ago.  But some things need to be said, even if it’s just in a blog that 10 people, max, read.  To those people, thank you for reading through the past two years.  And get ready for more nostalgic posts- I have exactly zero doubt in my mind that they will happen sometime in the next three weeks.

All the best,

Alycia

Recapping My Time Away

Alrighty, it’s probably finally time for that recap post I’ve been not writing for the past couple of weeks.  Of course, it’s been a long time since I began my hiatus, so I’m likely to forget a few things.  If I forget to mention something fun/impactful that I did with you, I apologize- this post would probably be as long as my final papers if I were to try to include everything.

With that said, I think the best way to go about this is just to go month by month and point out a couple of highlights from each (where applicable... some months were kind of boring).  So, here’s your recap post!

December

Finals were, as usual, horrible.  I managed not to completely stuff my face with cheesecake at the biannual dessert study break (although I did eat a decent amount of sugar, so the abstention from dessert was certainly not a complete one).  I only had one final, and it was in a class that I felt okay about, so taking the exam itself was not that bad.  The horrible part was the lead up to that bit- the part where I have to force myself to sit in one place and study.  As someone who is easily distracted and gets bored with studying fairly quickly, this is never an easy task.  It happened though, and the semester ended up being my best at MIT so far, so it worked out well.

Then I came home for Christmas break, which was as wonderful as it always is.  Seeing my family is always a great change of pace from being at MIT.  Plus, Christmas break means Christmas Eve, which means dinner at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, which is definitely one of the highlights of my year.  We’ve started a tradition of Christmas crackers (the ones with the toys and paper crowns, not the kind that are baked without yeast), and it’s always fun to see people wearing the paper crowns and telling the dorky jokes that are inside the crackers.

Christmas break also marked the start of my entry into the modern era, as I got a smartphone from my parents.  Having the phone has already saved my butt on multiple occasions, and I’m very pleased with it.  It was especially convenient at the end of Christmas break, since my computer decided that it didn’t like working anymore, and went on strike.

January

January didn’t start off particularly well, since my computer wasn’t working at all, and I had no idea what was wrong with it.  I brought it in to the Apple store and they were able to diagnose the issue, but I spent three weeks without my computer.  Luckily the lab has an old one for lab use that I was able to do my work on during the day, and MIT has a great technology infrastructure that I was able to use after going home from lab.  Plus, smart phones are ridiculous and can do pretty much everything computers can at this point, so really I was just missing out on the convenience of a full keyboard.

Overall, being without a computer wasn’t too bad, with the exception that I was supposed to be working on a presentation that I was giving at the end of January.  In a colossal stroke of luck though, it came back to me a week and a half before the presentation, so I was able to get everything done on time.

Every year, the Biology department hosts the Undergraduate Biology Research Symposium, and undergrads who have done something interesting or exciting with their research are invited to speak.  I spent most of January preparing for the presentation, either by doing experiments to have results to present, or by prepping the presentation.  By the time the symposium actually happened, I had probably given my presentation at least 5 times to my grad student, which he somehow managed not to complain about.  I know I was bored with the slides by the time I actually gave the presentation, so I’m not sure how he wasn’t. :P

The presentation itself went fairly smoothly- I was only freaking out a little bit, and I only messed up a few times.  All of the information came across eventually though, and people were able to ask questions beyond basic “could you explain this again” type things, so apparently I was somewhat understandable.  My lab showed up to listen to me speak, as did my friends.  And Bob Weinberg, who’s a major figure in cancer biology research heard me speak, which is only slightly terrifying.  Luckily I didn’t realize he was there until after my presentation, or I might have gone completely to pieces.

February

February brought the start of the new semester- my last at MIT.  It also brought my first grad school interview, which was pretty much completely terrifying.  I was invited to interview at University of South Florida, at the Moffitt Cancer Center.  On the way down, I was excited and nervous and also really nervous. :P  Getting off of the plane was amazing though- it was the first time in several months that I had been able to stand outside comfortably without a jacket, which was a very welcome change from the negative temperatures Boston had been seeing.

The interviews themselves went well, I thought.  Until I was sitting on the plane on my way back to Boston and began second-guessing everything that I had said.  That was a fun couple of hours.  Interviews for grad school were completely different from any interview I had done before- to begin with, there were seven of them on one day, which was a blast.  It was definitely one of the longest days I had experienced in recent memory.  The interviews also seemed a lot less structured- they tended to be more conversations about my work and how it intersected with the professors’ work than “Tell me about a time you failed” type questions.

Overall though, the interviews went well, and I was offered a spot at the Moffitt Cancer Center, which I managed to only freak out a little bit about when I found out.  (By which I mean that I freaked out a lot, internally, and managed to only vibrate a little bit/be incapable of speaking English externally for about two hours).  An hour after I was offered a spot at Moffitt, Vanderbilt invited me to go there for an interview as well, so I scheduled that interview for March.

March

March was still extremely snowy in Boston, and I had some serious cabin fever.  Luckily, heading down to Nashville to visit Vanderbilt provided a change of scenery, if not much change of temperature (the South was having a cold spell, complete with snow and ice storms.  It wasn’t a very good winter for the East Coast).  Again, I felt like my interviews went well, even though I was fairly exhausted from getting in to Nashville at 3 am after several delayed flights. 

I also ended up getting offered a spot at Vanderbilt, which meant that I got a chance to make a decision, which everyone who knows me well knows is my favorite thing.  After much deliberation including several conversations with various professors, and many pro and con lists, and talking to my grad student several times, I finally decided to accept the offer from the Moffitt Cancer Center at USF, so I’ll be spending the next several years in sunny Tampa.  It’ll be my first real experience spending any considerable amount of time in the heat, so we’ll see how that bit goes.  I’m excited about the research portion though, so if all else fails I’ll just hang out in the air-conditioned labs all the time. :P

The rest of March was not that exciting- it mostly consisted of trying to play catch up from the classes that I had missed for interviews, and trying not to drown under mountains of work.  And, of course, the traditional week of procrastination on work that is Spring Break.  I spent a good deal of it in lab, which was as enjoyable as always.  I spent approximately none of it doing the homework that I was supposed to start during my week without classes.  It was possibly a poor life choice, but probably one that I needed, since I was feeling a tiny bit burnt out before spring break. 

April

April marked the start of senioritis... I’ve got that one pretty bad.  The realization that everything was almost done and that there were only about two months left to finish everything in lab and in my classes was terrifying, but in such a way that I pretty much just wanted to curl up and sleep until it was over.  The amount of work that I had to do was (and still is) daunting, and sleep is pretty much the best thing ever (with the possible exception of eating and then taking a nap... or napping and then having a snack.  Or reading and napping and eating... okay, you get my drift.  Basically anything besides working is the best thing ever). 

Looking at my calendar has gotten terrifying to the point that I’ve had to break up my stuff into categories so that I can look at pieces of it at a time- both because I have to take a minute to calm down if I try to consider it all at once, and because I honestly can’t see everything if I don’t hide some of it most of the time.  To be fair, it’s still pretty cramped-looking if I hide everything except my calendar of exams and assignment due dates, so it’s possibly just a thing that for the next three weeks I’m going to be stupidly busy, and I’ll probably consume a lot more coffee than I would on average.

April has, more than anything, consisted of due dates, many of which I have struggled a bit to meet, largely due to the aforementioned lack of motivation that comes with senioritis.  None of my final projects have had due dates yet though, so I’ll give you a sneak peek at what’s coming up in the next two weeks in order to close out this post (This is doubling as my To-do list for the next two weeks, so you can feel free to skip it if you want- I’ll probably complain about at least one of these things in the coming weeks.)

Final Projects

10-12 page paper for WGS.115 (Gender and Technology), on a topic of my choice.  I’ve chosen to look at gender biases in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) research and higher education fields, with a focus on any hiring biases that may exist.  I’m going to try to look at why there tend to be fewer women in STEM fields as a whole.

10-12 page paper for 7.27 (Principles of Human Disease) on a disease of my choice, proposing a research project (either experiment-based or clinical trial based).  This is the paper I wrote about in my last post, where I had something of a realization about science and myself. I’m writing about Xeroderma Pigmentosum, which is conveniently something I need to do research for lab about as well.  Yes, I planned that, in a somewhat misguided effort to make my life easier.  Misguided because I think that I need two very different depths of knowledge for the class versus for lab, not because I think my efforts will go to waste. :P

25-30 minute presentation for 7.33 (Evolutionary Biology) on two scientific papers about a topic in evolution.  Somehow I managed to not plan this one very well, and I’ll be giving a presentation on two papers about the evolution of E. coli.  It’s not exactly the most interesting topic I could have chosen.  And I need to know these papers backwards and forwards, since the 25-30 minute presentation will be stretched out into a 90 minute discussion with the class professors about these two papers.  Keeping in mind that evolutionary biology is probably my least favorite class this semester, you can understand why I’m not looking forward to this particular project at all.

Final Exams

Take-home exam for 3.985 (Intro to Archeological Sciences).  This one shouldn’t be too difficult, it’s just time consuming and not very interesting.  Pretending to be interested in things that I’m not is certainly not one of my strong points.  However, I did decently on my last take-home exam (particularly considering that I wrote my answers in a grand total of about 3 hours) so I’m not too concerned with this one.

Actual final exam for 18.05 (Intro to Probability and Statistics).  This one is going to take some serious reviewing.  Luckily, I’ll be done with everything other than lab by the time that I need to start studying for this, so at least I’ll have some time on my hands to review the material.  Unluckily, this will probably involve me sitting in a classroom doing a large number of practice problems over and over until I understand the material, so we’re probably going to run into my problem with focusing and staying interested in what I’m doing again.  So basically the same thing that’s happened in every final exam so far at MIT.  At least I’m consistent. :P

Other stuff

On top of my final assignments/exams, I’ve still got a few minor assignments to turn in, and I’m still doing lab stuff.  One of the lab things I’m still working on is a poster for a poster session that my department holds every year.  Poster sessions are weird things, and since this post is already a couple of thousand words long, I’m going to refrain from describing them here.  Suffice it to say that I have to make a poster describing my research, and it’s yet another thing that I get bored/frustrated with doing, and find ways to procrastinate on (like writing this blog post... or doing pretty much anything besides making the poster).  I really am an expert procrastinator. :P