three unedited pieces of writing

these might disappear or be edited with time, and some are being worked on as pieces for the MIT admissions blogger application. i just want to throw something out into the universe, at least for now.

on fall

this post will probably have to be updated tomorrow but i just want to get something out the door before everything comes crashing down around me. Exciting!

news spreads in MIT circles like wildfire. any email that one particular student gets is immediately propagated to everyone. i think some of the most vivid memories of freshman year, the images which will be retained in my mind for years to come, are of the days when we were about to leave campus, but nobody knew when. the one image which comes to mind first is the real analysis classroom where i first saw the slack message which was circulating about an impending email sending us home. the ultimate spiral of dread which gathered within me just sat there for the entire day until someone finally got the email from President Reif, and forwarded it to my dorm mailing list.

a few hours ago, someone, presumably a student, found a link to an as of yet unpublished FAQ, currently available at https://covid19.mit.edu/fall-2020-faq. this was not necessarily surprising—the announcement was scheduled to be made tomorrow, after an Institute Holiday today. the release of Harvard’s decision today was already a harbinger for a bad decision—its operation at 40% capacity seemed likely to be reflected in the MIT decision. and, needless to say, it was. MIT is also inviting one class of students for the fall—seniors, instead of freshmen, as Harvard chose to—and allow all other students to apply to be on campus if their learning environment requires it.

this is not, of course, to say that I expected to be on campus at any point during this process. of all the schools which have released a cohort-based invitation scheme, as far as i know, none have chosen sophomores as the class which is allowed on campus in the fall. there was a shard of hope that if they had chosen to do something major-based for the fall, they would’ve let me in as a 21S, since that major comprises virtually zero students anyways, but such wishful thinking was not borne to fruition, and probably rightfully so. the core parts of this decision are not particularly surprising, for that matter—only the choice of class year(s) was really unknown at this point, and most other important decisions (e.g. grading) will be made about a week from now.

this still begs the question of what, specifically, i should do in light of this new information. i have a few friends who have been in talks with in regards to a living arrangement in the fall. i also have a few other thoughts—i could apply for an exception, although i’m not 100% sure about even the probability i would be granted such an exception. i’m not sure if these two courses of action are necessarily mutually exclusive, but there is not necessarily that much time to find out, either.

there is an obligatory recognition that i am not the person who is losing out the most from this current plan. in particular, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, recently announced that they were severely restricting the international students to whom a visa would be available in the fall depending on the online status of those students and their universities. there are also probably plenty of people in categorically worse situations than i am in. these students should get the support from the university that they deserve, and i am beyond incensed at the present state of things. one of the key factors which i’m weighing about whether or not i apply for an exception is that i would possibly be squeezing someone else out of a spot. hopefully, such a process would be fair, but given everything that we’re seeing right now, almost nothing institutional should be taken for granted as fair.

here’s what isn’t an option for me: a leave of absence is not an option. i cannot for the life of me fathom any world in which i spend a semester or a year just essentially not doing anything, because, at the moment, there doesn’t really appear to be anything for me to do during whatever time i happen to take off. all of my friends are going to be on the same timetable, and i’m not going to disrupt that.

here’s an option that i don’t want to consider: staying at home. i will gladly acknowledge that, for the most part, living at home has been fine for what accomplishing what i need to. i just really don’t feel well at home, and there’s a sort of quintessential malaise that characterizes living back in south dakota. i remember why i spent so much time trying to get out of here. i feel like i could certainly function like this indefinitely, i just don’t want to. given, however, the fact that this disease has already taken away so much of what i want, i guess i also don’t see any particular reason why i should get what i want and not what is strictly necessary.

this is not meant to be complete or, for that matter, coherent summary of the situation or how i feel about it. i just need to throw everything onto a page until i can let it swirl around and settle with time. we’ll see how things change in the morning and on into the coming weeks. hopefully, something tenable will emerge. for now, i’m just confused and concerned.

breathing out

in which Alan discovers his limits.

There's a cliché in a lot of fiction that goes "I let out a breath I didn't know I had been holding." The line is hackneyed, in part, because it's a common experience. There's a sort of anxiety that binds the air in your chest until it feels stale, and you exhale to expunge your lungs of the worry they hold; you sigh and you hope that it makes you feel at least somewhat less terrible.

This summer, I've been working as RSI 2020's Systems Manager and as a undergraduate researcher (UROP) with an interdisciplinary collaboration working on analysis of prehistoric artefacts as a window to the process of language evolution. These are extremely exciting opportunities. As an RSI alumnus, I know how much the experience meant to me, and getting to pass it on for another year, in spite of the unique challenges posed by present circumstances, is a really satisfying job. The UROP is also on an exceptionally interesting topic, and although my knowledge in the field is limited, it is really satisfying to be working on novel research on such a diverse team.

There's just one thing. In the past week, these two activities have pushed out basically everything else in my life, and I'm doing about the same amount of work I would do during the school year but concentrated entirely in these two buckets. Not only that, the experience is immensely stressful. RSI is a juggernaut with thirty-six years worth of traditions, combined with an exceptional reputation for professionalism. On the other hand, I have a pretty serious obligation to the professors I'm working for, and I have a set amount of UROP funding I need to use up by the end of the summer, which equates to a quantity of about 35-40 hours a week, a quota I have as of yet not met in any week.

This is all to say that it is a pretty stressful time. There are moments when I catch myself holding my breath; immediately after having sent an important email, or right before a group meeting where I’m not quite sure what I have to report. 

Part of it is that, in a way, I am always on call for RSI, a program that, this year, spans at least 13 time zones all the way from Korea to California. All technical questions and a large portion of  questions about scheduling and social events come to me, meaning my email is always inundated. There's always something to do, and we're never quite planned far enough ahead to be comfortable.

Part of it is that I still feel deeply unprepared for my UROP. I have no linguistics background, no material science background, no computational image analysis background, just some applied math research and a penchant for coding. Even though I've read quite a few papers over the course of the past two weeks, I'm still not exactly sure what our specific next steps will be. I feel like I’m just sort of floundering around reading articles and references in those articles because I need to fill up a timesheet, at least to the best of my abilities.

The more insidious part of it, I think, is that part of me doesn’t quite remember what actually breathing out feels like. I remember one particular Concourse seminar towards the end of last semester where we were talking about how we felt after half a semester of online learning. One of the students mentioned that they felt like an inductor; that even as the voltage or the forward drive of the classes waned, they still felt just as busy, because they just kept adding more tasks to do. This is not a novel idea; a cursory Google search for “never learned how to relax” brings up plenty of articles about anxiety and “[switching] off in an always-on world.” In this moment, however, it feels particularly acute.

There’s no particularly good conclusion to this. Most stories have a beginning, middle, and end, but here, the tension’s unresolved. The breath is taken in and sort of just held—and I’m not exactly sure how to let it go. I’m reminded of the song “Breathe,” from In the Heights. “Everything's fine, everything's cool...just breathe.” If only life were quite so easy, to allow us to “just breathe.” Instead, I just sort of sit here, holding my breath, hoping that the next day won’t be quite so hard as the last. 

i want you to imagine

i want you to imagine that you’re sitting off in the grass beside the Steinbrenner track, beneath some trees at the end of the field shielding you from the July sun, attending an Ultimate Frisbee game you have no real investment in. you’re talking to some people from the other team that your friend has introduced you to, also MIT prefrosh. another prefrosh strolls over and, two sentences into the discussion mentions his boyfriend without a break in what he’s saying.

you’ve never really come to grips with being bi. sure, you can talk about it as a sort of abstract theoretical concept, but part of you knows that you will never be able to just casually mention having a boyfriend without pausing for a moment beforehand, if, of course, such a scenario would ever come to pass in the first place.

a month or so passes. you find out that the boy you met earlier is now an admissions blogger; you see him around occasionally, he’s friends with your friends, and you get to talking to him. you start reading his writing, and it’s so beautiful but also so vulnerable. it’s the vulnerability that really captivates you. to share the parts of you that you’re not so proud of, that you’re scared of, that you want to work on—it’s hard, but in a way it is inspirational, to say to the world that “yes, I am human, and here’s what that means to me.” maybe—just maybe—that’s something that you can do too.