The Happiness Challenge

            Last week was something of a bust, so I’m not going to talk about it. Not very many interesting things happened, and the interesting things weren’t very good things (with the absolute exception of care packages from my parents and grandparents- those were awesome, thank you guys!! <3 ). Instead, I’m going to talk about happiness. It’s going to be slightly less structured than the list of happy things that I wrote a while back, but it is, essentially, a list of happy things. Which makes no sense now, but hopefully will after you read the post (Note to self: I should maybe write the introductions to these things AFTER I’ve written the post... maybe we’ll try that next week. :P )

            I’m thinking about happiness this week because I signed up for this thing called “The Happiness Challenge” that MIT is doing. Essentially, each week you get a task to try to perform, and if you succeed, you get entered in drawings for prizes. I figured it would be a relatively low time commitment, it was probably a good way to get new ideas on how to be happy, and if I got some free stuff out of it, all the better. This week’s challenge is to purposefully take 3 study breaks in which you go talk to some friends. (As an aside, I might count this blog as one... I’m taking a study break, and technically I’m talking to you all. :P)

            

          Anyways, the challenge has gotten me thinking about happiness, and how there are a lot of little things in our life that can make us happy. And that made me think about how there are different levels of happiness. There’s little things that make us happy, almost without us knowing. For instance, this gif that I saw on the internet:

Run run run run run run run run (source)

Or the fact that I painted my nails and they’re now ridiculously shiny. And now that I think about it, I really shouldn’t have done that, since I’m going to have to take it off by Thursday so that I can look professional when I have a meeting with my PI (the professor in charge of the lab in which I’m UROPing). But for right now my fingers are stupidly shiny, which is making me happy.

            There are also higher level things, that make us happy for longer periods of time. Some examples of those I’ve experienced recently were the care packages I got from home, or talking to my grad student in lab. I think the difference between these things, and the shorter-term happy things is that they actively involve other people, and specifically that they actively involve other people who care about my well-being. As much as I am occasionally loathe to admit it, as humans we’re incredibly social beings. And while there are days when I really want to be alone with a good book and some tea, I’m ultimately happier on the days that I spend talking with people- whether those conversations are inane, or highly introspective, or extremely politically involved. The best conversations- the ones that often make me happiest- are those that range across those topics. Thinking about it, that’s probably because I can only have conversations like that with people who care about me, and about whom I care. Without that, it’s hard to have conversations that go very deep.

            And then, there are the things that are just totally joyful. These are the things that leave a warm feeling in your chest. [As an aside, this is apparently a scientific thing- emotions are localized in different parts of your body. Which I find incredibly bizarre, and also very cool. The paper that this finding was published in studied multiple cultures, so it seems like this might not just be a cultural thing. I’m not familiar with psychology, so I can’t say what level of credibility the paper has, but it’s interesting nonetheless. And it's published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. So it's probably pretty credible... Okay, aside over].

On a scale of warmth in your chest, I’d say that the first level of happiness I described would be similar to when you take a hot drink, and you can feel the heat traveling down your throat. It’s very noticeable, but it’s also kind of fleeting- it’s gone almost as soon as you notice it. The second level of happiness I described is more like walking into a warm building after having been outside in the cold. It’s not necessarily instantaneous- it takes a while for the tips of your ears to warm back up after having been numb for some time. But they eventually do warm up, and there’s a pleasant burning sensation that comes with that warming up. Eventually though, you equilibrate to the new temperature. You don’t necessarily forget that you’re warm; it just becomes your new state of being. I think the second level of happiness is like that- omnipresent in a way that you definitely notice if it’s missing, but the rest of the time it’s comfortably there, whether you’re thinking about it or not.

            The third level of happiness though- the pure, unadulterated joy- that one is like being curled up in a blanket in front of the fireplace, or a hug that fills a need you weren’t even aware existed (occasionally I’m not aware I need a hug... but then someone gives me a hug and everything is right with the world. That’s what I’m getting at here. I’m not entirely sure that’s a universal sensation, so I thought I should explain). This week, my unadulterated joy came from the realization that there’s more music in the world than I can ever hope to listen to... and a large percentage of it is really excellent music. My friends went to an a capella concert this weekend, and they came back with stories about how amazing it was, and how people had the most brilliant voices, and incredible talent. I was sick, so I didn’t go to the concert (my cold is one of the not-so-good things about this week), but I did reap some of the benefits, in that they brought back tales of new groups and artists that I had never heard before.

            

            These tales led to some inevitable YouTube searching for samples of these amazing musicians. And, as one is wont to do while searching things on YouTube, this led to the discovery of more amazing musicians. And this, in turn, led to the realization that I could probably listen to a different music video on YouTube every minute of every day for the next year, and not make it through all of the amazing material that people have put time and effort into making. Which is honestly incredible on so many levels. The sheer enormity of the amount of music is staggering on its own. But when you think about the fact that there are so many people out there who are willing to share their talents with the world, and that the majority of these people are virtually unknown, you realize that the world is an incredible place.

           

           For me, a lot of moments of pure, unadulterated joy, are moments like these. They’re moments that are seemingly mundane. The fact that there’s a lot of music in the world probably isn’t all that important of a realization in the grand scheme of things. But for me, it served as a reminder that we all have something to share with the world. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever be a famous musician, the way my five-year-old self planned to be. But there’s bound to be something I can share with the world. And if something I can do gives someone else a moment of pure, unadulterated joy- a moment that makes them understand warm hugs and blankets by the fireside- then I will have made the world a better place. And really, that’s all I can ask for.

You know you're at MIT when...

(Disclaimer: a lot of these are probably also true for other colleges, high schools, and/or just life in general. But they’re things that define, for me, the MIT experience. And as a result, they’re the things that let me know I’m at MIT.)

... It’s only the second week of classes and you’re already sleep deprived.

                 

                  Classes in the spring semester started last week. You’d think that at this point I’d still be totally on top of everything that I need to do and getting 8 hours of sleep a night. You’d be wrong about that, unfortunately. I’m not actively behind in anything at the moment (except readings for my classes, but who’s ever on top of those?). But I have been getting not quite enough sleep in order to not be actively behind in anything. A grad student in my lab put it quite nicely the other day. He said, “The semesters at MIT are just so short that you have to jump in with both feet on the first day in order to fit everything in.” I imagine that this plays a big part in the traditional sentiment that going to MIT is like drinking from a fire hose. Everything gets thrown at you at once, and you just have to try your hardest to catch the important bits. (There were a lot of mixed metaphors in that one... sorry guys.)

... Your humanities class for the semester focuses heavily on coding.

                  So if you recall from last week, my humanities class is called “The Word Made Digital”, and it’s about how we can use computers to make art. Full disclosure? The reason I’m taking this class is that it was the only art class that fit in my schedule that didn’t sound like I would actually have to do too much art-y work. (File under: reasons my sister and I are actually totally opposite people... she actually likes art classes. :P ). I need to take an art class to graduate, and this one sounded like it wouldn’t require too much actual art-type work. Having not done very well in art classes in the past, I decided it was probably a good idea to avoid them now. What I wasn’t betting on was the fact that I would need to write computer code in order to do well in this class. I have a basic knowledge of coding, so in practice this isn’t the worst thing in the world. But our first project is due next week, and based on the presentations we’ve had so far, I can already tell that I’m going to be very out-classed. The first presentation was a program that uses an algorithm to model the comments section of a popular website. Let me clarify: one of the guys in my class wrote a program that looks and functions exactly like the comments section of a website. But instead of people leaving comments, his code leaves comments. I think I might be a little out of my league.

... Despite the fact that it was the first week of classes, people found a way to have fun.

                  So last week we got about a foot of snow. The obvious response to said foot of snow was to have a snowball fight on the courtyard. Was it the first day of classes? Yep. Did this occur again on the second day? Yep. Are there currently snowmen and snow creatures and snow thrones and snow forts all over campus? Yep.

One of the things I love about MIT is that it’s widely considered one of the most difficult schools in the country, but people here are basically just brilliant 5 year olds. People are probably going to graduate and run companies, or find cures for various diseases, or come up with some new polymer, or any number of other things, but if you give us a foot of snow, we’re going to play in it. Maybe that’s some sort of commentary on human nature; No matter who you are, there will always be things that amaze you, and that drive you to do something completely frivolous. Or snow is just fun. Either way. :P

                 

... HACKS!

                 

                  At some point in my MIT career, I’ve probably mentioned the pranks that MIT students pull. They’re never malicious or property damaging (see the Hacker Code of Ethics), but they are usually pretty incredible. In this case, the one that I’m thinking of was a hack in honor of the Sochi Olympics. Some enterprising students strung 700 feet of wire between two of the dorms and hung Olympic rings over our grass field. I didn’t see this in person, but I was extremely impressed by the picture in the newspaper on Tuesday morning.

source

... You ‘accidentally’ end up staying in lab for 7.5 hours on a Monday. After 2.5 hours of classes.

                  ‘You’ in this case is actually ‘I’... and ‘accidentally’ is more like I didn’t know the time passed that quickly. I knew I had been in lab for a long time, but I didn’t realize it was quite that long. But I got a bunch of things done, which was nice. The experiments didn’t quite work as we were expecting (which seems to be par for the course when I’m doing experiments) but they did give us some interesting information. Which is more or less what science is about, I guess.

... It’s only the second week of classes and you actually have no idea what’s going on.

                  My classes are a lot more engineering heavy this semester... which means that I have to work about 10x as hard to understand what’s going on. Yay not being good at math. For someone whose favorite classes were math and science in grade school, I’ve sure gotten bad at math. I’m actually mildly impressed with how much I’ve forgotten. Unfortunately, this means I have to relearn all of the math concepts in my classes, in addition to learning the new engineering/science classes. On the plus side, maybe I’ll know how to do math again at the end of the semester? A girl can dream, right? :P

On that note, I should go learn the math for my psets and the lecture I have in my engineering class tomorrow. This post was a bit short... but math waits for no man (or person. We’re talking about gender stereotypes in my humanities class, so I’m trying to be more conscious of when I use gendered language. This is probably also a phase that’s pretty consistent throughout the college experience).

As a second aside, I’m trying to decide what to do for my project for my humanities class- I was thinking of either having my computer write made up scientific abstracts (paragraph-long summaries of scientific papers) or new proverbs. But if anyone has any brilliant ideas they want to share, please comment or email me! :)

Welcome to Spring! (Spring semester, anyway...)

            Welcome to Spring semester, 2014. I’ve now completed 5 semesters at MIT, which means there are only three semesters left of college. Which is more than a little bizarre. In two semesters, I’ll be applying to grad schools. And in three semesters, I’ll be a ‘real adult’ (as far as grad students and/or entry-level-job-holders are real adults). But... that’s two or more semesters away, and while I definitely need to start planning that stuff now, I also have to focus on the fact that it’s a new semester, so there are new classes to contend with. Which means another classes explanation post! Your favorite, I know. But I’ll probably slip and refer to one of my classes by number at some point this semester, so it’ll be good to have a reference. (Especially since I, yet again, can’t remember what some of my classes are actually called. I’ll be googling that once I get to it. :P ) So here, in numerical order, are my classes for the semester!

7.06 (Cell Biology)

            As the title suggests, this is a class about cell biology. We’ll learn about how cells signal things, both within a cell and to the surrounding cells, what happens during various cellular processes, and the experimental basis for various discoveries, among other things. Honestly, this class sounds fairly dry... but we had a couple of really awesome demonstrations on Tuesday during the first lecture. Apparently GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) fluoresces if you shine a blue/UV light on it, which I didn’t know. And if you introduce the gene that codes for that protein to a fish’s DNA, you can get fish that glow when you shine the light on them. Which looks really cool in a totally dark classroom. (In fairness, I totally knew that this would happen... I’d just never seen it in practice before, so I was mildly amazed by the results)

20.310 (Molecular, Cellular, and Tissue Biomechanics)

            If any class is going to kill me this semester, I’m going to put an early bet on it being this one. We started off relatively easily, just going over practical examples of how, say, the length of a heartbeat compares to how long a single blood cell takes to circulate your body (For reference, it’s about one second and one minute, respectively). But we’ll be delving much deeper, in what I suspect is a very short time period. We’re going to get into exactly what forces are at work on molecules, cells, and tissues- how and why they move the way they do, and why things bond. Basically, it’s going to be a crazy amount of physics combined with biology... definitely not my strong point. And the professors made a point of the fact that no other school teaches a class like this, so that should be fun. MIT does always know how to make things interesting! :P

20.330 (Fields, Forces, and Flows in Biological Systems)

            This class is also going to be extremely difficult. As far as I can tell, it’s an extension of the previous class, with more of a focus on the forces behind what happens in the body. So at the very least, the two classes will cooperate with each other, I guess. But they’re both very math heavy, and math isn’t really one of my strong points. Which means that I’ll be doing a lot of review of math things, and outside work in order to make sure that I have the concepts down to do the psets and exams. I think I’m going to need to come up with a new song playlist for when I’m studying for these classes, so if anyone has any good song recommendations, you should comment and/or send them to me. I’m especially fond of anything without lyrics or in languages other than English or Spanish, since then I can’t be distracted by the lyrics. This probably severely limits the number of song recommendations people could give me, but it’s worth a shot. :)

20.URG (UROP for credit)

            I’m continuing my UROP this spring, which is good. My class schedule is actually significantly lighter than in previous terms, so I’ll have more consecutive blocks of time to devote to research. Since UROPing for credit serves as both a GPA boost and a good way to continue gaining research experience, this is awesome. I haven’t done many exciting things yet this term, but I do have to give a short presentation to my PI (Principle Investigator- the professor who’s the head of the lab) next week. So that’s exciting. I don’t really have any results to show her yet, since most of the cells we were working on for the past few weeks decided to die on us. So... I’m not really sure what I’m going to present to her. But I’m drafting a presentation for next Monday, and my grad student is going to help me revise it. Hopefully, we’ll come up with something that’s actually presentable.

21W.764 (The Word Made Digital)

            This is my humanities class for the semester. It counts for my Art credit, which I’m happy to finally be fulfilling. It sounds like a really cool class as well, although it’s probably going to be a substantial amount of work. The focus is on how computers and new technology are influencing art forms, particularly literary art. Today in class we looked at some computer programs that generated poetry or short stories. (The links are to examples of those, written by my professor. Both pages also have a link to the Python code that generates the work, if you're interested in looking at that.) There are four units in the class, and for each unit we’ll be writing a short program that generates or interacts with a written work. The first one is writing a program that generates a piece of poetry or a story, like the link above. The programming itself shouldn’t be too difficult (hopefully, knock on wood), but the analysis of the pieces that we’re going to look at requires thinking in a totally different way than I have before, so it’s not going to be intuitive at all. The first class was really interesting though, so I’m excited.

Other things

            In addition to my classes, I’m also officially co-floor chair beginning this semester. This means that, among other things, I’m working with Michelle, the other co-floor chair, to organize floor events, reimburse people for study breaks and things, and generally make sure things run as smoothly as possible. Last week, we organized a Super Bowl party on the floor. I was very excited when the Seahawks won! (Although not nearly as excited as some of the other people on my floor... and they aren’t even from Seattle. We’ve got some extremely avid football fans. :P ) We’ll also be organizing a dance, some floor-wide games, inter-floor activities with the other floors in Burton Conner, and eventually rooming decisions. There are probably some other things we’ll have to organize, but they’re escaping me at the moment. There are more things we need to do next semester, but they’re pretty far in the future.

            We got about a foot of snow over the past day, which was pretty exciting. It made getting to class a bit of an adventure, especially since it’s a lot faster for me to get to all of my classes by walking outside than to go through the buildings. I ended up tromping through about 6 inches of snow this morning on the way to class, and a few inches of slush on the way home, since the walks had mostly been cleared. I forgot to pack my extra shoes in my backpack this morning, so I had to walk around in snow boots all day. This wasn’t the end of the world... but my feet were extremely warm.

            That’s pretty much all that’s new over here. I’m sure there will be more fun details to add about classes as we actually get into the semester. And possibly more snow adventures! We’re supposed to get a blizzard on Sunday and Monday, according to one of the post docs in my lab. That will be exciting, I’m sure. :)