337A — Now you're just somebody that I used to know...
Today was an overall decent and, in general, very interesting day. I suppose I will be spoiling an event from RSI, but I think it's important for me to do so in order to discuss more broadly a variety of feelings I had today.
After sleeping relatively "early" last night at around 2:30 AM, I managed to sleep for a ridiculous amount of time. Despite the fact that my blinds were up, and light was streaming through my windows throughout the day, I slept on and off for about 11 hours. This certainly does not make up for my sleep debt, but getting out of bed at 1:30 PM was certainly one of the best feelings I've had in a long while.
I went to Barker with my laptop and a notebook, and ended up typing up some of my thoughts about RSI that I mentioned a while ago. They still need to be edited, but I didn't have to energy to do so at the moment. In fact, I noticed my focus wandering randomly, and I eventually figured that this was a result of not having eaten a significant meal since around 6 PM the previous night. As a result, I headed back towards the student center, met up with another few counselors on the way, and ate my breakfast/lunch/dinner at 3 PM or so, all while discussing our concerns and joys about the students at RSI. (I've been eating a lot of the Indian food at W20 recently, because it's warm, has rice, and isn't too similar to Chinese food as to make me uninterested in its slightly substandard cultural quality.) Eventually, after lunch, I went on a trip with the two other counselors into Boston proper to get a few things, including a visit to a very, very good chocolate store. I got an extremely good iced hot chocolate,
After returning to campus, I hung out with the kids in my group for a little while before bringing them all to College Night, which is an event hosted by MIT in cooperation with RSI where RSI, MITES, WTP, and Broad Summer Scholars congregate in one area and listen to two minute presentations from various prestigious colleges, before dispersing into a college fair-like activity. Personally, I remembered the event being very boring last year, with colleges essentially repeating their same talking points over and over, and, having committed to a college this year, expected it to be just as meaningless to me this year.
Somehow, however, as some of the presentations went by, this perspective shifted. I saw representatives from schools I was accepted to go up there and pitch their schools, and I felt so bad about the opportunities I was missing there and the environment I would never actually get to experience. In particular, Columbia (NYC!) and Caltech (LA!) made me feel things I never thought I would about not attending their schools. UChicago, a school I didn't even get into, made me feel evermore attached to its identity and its essays. (There are also other reasons I miss UChicago, which may or may not involve crushes.) I almost felt like crying as I walked through the college fair, knowing I would never attend any of the schools with tables. (As the host of these students for extended periods of time already, MIT did not have its own table at the event.)
What was perhaps more surprising was the fact that Stanford and Harvard did not generate significant emotion to me. Perhaps it was because Stanford was never a very good fit for me, and because Harvard's talk felt performative to me (sidebar: I think including your pronouns in various environments is very important, but I don't know at what point it becomes more performative than actually useful. Similarly, the Harvard person acknowledged the Native American tribes whose land Harvard was on at the beginning of the talk, which felt more performative in its partnership than actually something where she was trying to evoke change. It is hard to reconcile the importance of representation and recognition with the performativity of so much of these talks, and I personally don't know where I should stand on this issue. I suppose we should ask what Harvard is actually doing to assist oppressed peoples, and to that I really do not know the answer.). In any case, the schools I actually missed were the schools that I didn't think would mean as much to me. Goodbye to the dreams I didn't know I had. Goodbye, yellow brick road. Hello, Emerald City.
As a result of all this, I walked out of this in experience in a kind of daze, and it feels so weird to me to feel so much regret about colleges in so many different directions. I will never regret choosing MIT, but I will regret not choosing other colleges. Such a state is contradictory, but it is one where I live nonetheless. I love so much about MIT's campus, the way its majors work, and everything else about it. It's just imagining those other selves that could've been in an environment that encourages something else, and wondering how it would've ever worked. Would these people be better people—either in academics, or in society? There is no way we can ever know, and yet I still worry.
I came back from College Night to a staff meeting, had a relatively short and rowdy bedcheck, and then talked to my kids about all sorts of things for a while after that. I love them so much, and I thank my lucky stars for them every day. At the very least, I have them as a certainty.
Tomorrow, plenty of things to do and finish. Hopefully, I'll get up at a more reasonable time tomorrow, and we'll see where it goes from there. I might also be meeting my mentor at some point. Hm.
After sleeping relatively "early" last night at around 2:30 AM, I managed to sleep for a ridiculous amount of time. Despite the fact that my blinds were up, and light was streaming through my windows throughout the day, I slept on and off for about 11 hours. This certainly does not make up for my sleep debt, but getting out of bed at 1:30 PM was certainly one of the best feelings I've had in a long while.
I went to Barker with my laptop and a notebook, and ended up typing up some of my thoughts about RSI that I mentioned a while ago. They still need to be edited, but I didn't have to energy to do so at the moment. In fact, I noticed my focus wandering randomly, and I eventually figured that this was a result of not having eaten a significant meal since around 6 PM the previous night. As a result, I headed back towards the student center, met up with another few counselors on the way, and ate my breakfast/lunch/dinner at 3 PM or so, all while discussing our concerns and joys about the students at RSI. (I've been eating a lot of the Indian food at W20 recently, because it's warm, has rice, and isn't too similar to Chinese food as to make me uninterested in its slightly substandard cultural quality.) Eventually, after lunch, I went on a trip with the two other counselors into Boston proper to get a few things, including a visit to a very, very good chocolate store. I got an extremely good iced hot chocolate,
After returning to campus, I hung out with the kids in my group for a little while before bringing them all to College Night, which is an event hosted by MIT in cooperation with RSI where RSI, MITES, WTP, and Broad Summer Scholars congregate in one area and listen to two minute presentations from various prestigious colleges, before dispersing into a college fair-like activity. Personally, I remembered the event being very boring last year, with colleges essentially repeating their same talking points over and over, and, having committed to a college this year, expected it to be just as meaningless to me this year.
Somehow, however, as some of the presentations went by, this perspective shifted. I saw representatives from schools I was accepted to go up there and pitch their schools, and I felt so bad about the opportunities I was missing there and the environment I would never actually get to experience. In particular, Columbia (NYC!) and Caltech (LA!) made me feel things I never thought I would about not attending their schools. UChicago, a school I didn't even get into, made me feel evermore attached to its identity and its essays. (There are also other reasons I miss UChicago, which may or may not involve crushes.) I almost felt like crying as I walked through the college fair, knowing I would never attend any of the schools with tables. (As the host of these students for extended periods of time already, MIT did not have its own table at the event.)
What was perhaps more surprising was the fact that Stanford and Harvard did not generate significant emotion to me. Perhaps it was because Stanford was never a very good fit for me, and because Harvard's talk felt performative to me (sidebar: I think including your pronouns in various environments is very important, but I don't know at what point it becomes more performative than actually useful. Similarly, the Harvard person acknowledged the Native American tribes whose land Harvard was on at the beginning of the talk, which felt more performative in its partnership than actually something where she was trying to evoke change. It is hard to reconcile the importance of representation and recognition with the performativity of so much of these talks, and I personally don't know where I should stand on this issue. I suppose we should ask what Harvard is actually doing to assist oppressed peoples, and to that I really do not know the answer.). In any case, the schools I actually missed were the schools that I didn't think would mean as much to me. Goodbye to the dreams I didn't know I had. Goodbye, yellow brick road. Hello, Emerald City.
As a result of all this, I walked out of this in experience in a kind of daze, and it feels so weird to me to feel so much regret about colleges in so many different directions. I will never regret choosing MIT, but I will regret not choosing other colleges. Such a state is contradictory, but it is one where I live nonetheless. I love so much about MIT's campus, the way its majors work, and everything else about it. It's just imagining those other selves that could've been in an environment that encourages something else, and wondering how it would've ever worked. Would these people be better people—either in academics, or in society? There is no way we can ever know, and yet I still worry.
I came back from College Night to a staff meeting, had a relatively short and rowdy bedcheck, and then talked to my kids about all sorts of things for a while after that. I love them so much, and I thank my lucky stars for them every day. At the very least, I have them as a certainty.
Tomorrow, plenty of things to do and finish. Hopefully, I'll get up at a more reasonable time tomorrow, and we'll see where it goes from there. I might also be meeting my mentor at some point. Hm.
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