actions, not words.

It's been a while, but here's a blog from the daily series on the private blog (email me at az23@mit.edu for access). The Year in Review is coming soon, hopefully by January 31st (but we'll have to see). Also, this title is from a meme song and is absolutely not a reference to my work this IAP, which I love very much. Today was an okay day. As the normal tradeoff goes, I got more work-related stuff done today, but got very little blog writing done, which is problematic because there are multiple blogs I want to produce this week. This is a good reason to try and start recovering my sleep schedule, so, in fact, that is exactly what I will try and do by keeping this blog entry, in general, short. I reserve the right to ramble—but anyways. I got up today just before noon after struggling immensely. I spent today editing an interview that was…extremely difficult to cut down. Last interview was hard enough, but this one includes a lot of sentence fragments and branching tangen...

this post's soundtrack:  a very amusing rendition of Auld Lang Syne I am currently only 2600 words into my traditionally 10000+ word Year in Review, so that might take another few days, unfortunately, but it will be posted on this blog. In the meantime, however, I thought I would provide an extremely unscientific tier list of months from 2019 and 2020, based on data from my private, daily blog: S+ July 2019: RSI 2019 counseling! S August 2019: end of RSI 2019 counseling, start of freshman year of college April 2019: enjoying the end of senior year of high school May 2019: same as April 2019 A January 2020: an IAP of externing and hanging out February 2020: finally being in the swing of college April 2020: successfully drowning out boredom with schoolwork December 2019: holidays + feeling good about college June 2019: visiting China, starting RSI 2019 counseling B September 2019: first semester of college December 2020: holidays, but mostly recovering from the semester March 2019: c...

An umbrella sits on a windowsill in a classroom. Outside, the sky is crying into the grass below. Inside, a boy wonders if he should be crying too, though he knows there is no one there to catch his tears. It's been a while since I've posted on this blog because I've been exceptionally hosed, and because I've been producing a lot of content for the MIT Admissions blogs ; I've written posts about being back on-campus, about running nREXt, and about my schedule this fall. There's a post coming out in a day or two about my journey through the Emerald Necklace, and plenty of other content to come as well. I will, eventually, however, return to this blog, when I feel like I have something that doesn't fit on the Admissions Blogs, like this poem, for example, or a year in review. The content has slowed, but it is not over.

Today was less productive than yesterday, but, on the whole, still not as bad as it could have been. There are particular reasons for celebration and particular reasons for sorrow, but this is has always been and will always be true. Maybe that statement is a sense of resignation more than it is a notion of self-acceptance, but it feels at least somewhat true—or, maybe, it is both. As the famous Whitman quote goes, "do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)." This thought has cropped up on the edge of a lot of small items recently. I don't remember them all—it sort of flits in and out without much impact, although I recall its presence. One thing I do remember it relating to, however, was this fact I discovered on the 18th, based on data from the South Dakota Department of Health and an email from MIT administration: COVID-19 tests done by MIT yesterday: 1930 COVID-19 tests reported by South Dakota yesterday: 954 I tw...

I wrote a post for the ESP blog about my HSSP "We Didn't Start the Fire" history class which can be found here ; more substantive, this-blog-specific posts coming very soon!

this is a post moved over from the daily series, with minimal edits. I am up slightly later than I would like to be, but part of that is due to the fact that I have irreparably broken my sleep schedule, and therefore, in combination with a lot of naps I took in the afternoon, am still capable of being awake at this time. I'm trying to put myself back on track, however, so hopefully that will work itself out. We'll see how it goes. In any case, today was pretty okay. I got up this morning at 9:30 AM, thirty minutes after my alarm was set for, which was unfortunate, since I was supposed to get up at 9 to make HSSP slides. Fortunately, this week's verse of "We Didn't Start the Fire" was shorter than others, so I was able to make the slides for the lyrics I was covering and still have some time left over, and go a little more in-depth to the subjects than I normally would. My coteacher and I managed to finish the slides right under the wire (as is usual), and, onc...

For uninteresting reasons, I've recently had to move all of my stuff from one room in my house to another. There are two factors which combine to make this process interesting: one, I've lived in the first room for over 10 years at this point, and, two, I've always had a penchant for collecting and keeping memorabilia. This means that while cleaning, I've found all sorts of old stuff—a journal I kept in 2008 (i.e. when I was six years old), a small collection of rocks from the hills in the area, the sheet music for a small song I wrote in elementary school. Three particularly prominent categories of items are maps, brochures, and programs, and so over the past few days I've been scouring them and taking an inventory. From the pile I went through, I found 31 brochures (a broadly defined term referring to descriptions of locations, including maps of attractions), 21 maps, and 7 programs. These span a range of around 13 years, from 2006 to 2019; the earliest strongly c...

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 Rei...

I heard about this book through a tech podcaster I listen to, Casey Liss. I recommend you read it. And if you haven't done anything here yet:  https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/ . Why not? This is not meant to be a book report or a discussion of the facts at hand. The facts are obvious—our country has a serious problem with systemic racism, much of which is enforced by the policing system, but which also goes much deeper than that. That has always been clear. Rather, I want to use this space to interrogate some of the ideas presented in this book, as well as my own feelings about it. This is not, and is not intended to be, an interjection to the narrative presented by Coates', which is exceptionally powerful and much more well-constructed than anything I can write at this time. It is an examination of a personal response to such a narrative and an outlet for deeper introspection about such a response. An examination of such a response must first begin with an analysis of the ...

the flowers on the tree are finally blooming Context The review of  all  of 2019 can be found here: http://www.alanzhu.me/2020/01/j-year-in-review-2019.html A Year In Review document has been produced every year since 2016, miraculously. I wrote in January, however, that the format itself had seen better days and felt less than fit for its intended purpose. This is my first at producing a new version of this document; one part for each segment of the year—spring semester, the summer, and then the fall semester. The reflection questions, if still relevant, will probably still fall at the end of the fall document. We'll see how it goes. A Brief Summary of Events January I started January at home, relishing the last few days I had at home with friends after a break that was just the right length to prevent me from lapsing into boredom. Eventually, time came for me to return to MIT. My time at MIT was mostly spent working days starting at 8 AM at an externship with Brain Powe...