actions, not words.

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...

One of my favorite writing prompts of all time was an assignment our AP Lit teacher assigned us at the end of the class. The document begins with the following statement: Rationale: One part of maturing and growing is the ability to reflect. Often, even adults, have a hard time self-reflecting over their past, their mistakes, their successes, etc. This skill is needed in everyday life whether it consists of moments of fighting, regretful words, or learning from failure and likewise success.  It continues to ask you to think and reflect on everything which you faced in that year—whether or not it had to deal with AP Literature. “The struggles, the steps you took to overcome, the successes, the laughter…the boredom, the frustration.” It instructs the reader to “just think and reflect”—and only once that process is complete, does it present you the prompt, which it instructs you to answer in any form: What did I learn? What did I hope to learn that I didn’t learn? What was I sur...

in which sometimes you have make things messier before you can make things clean again [originally written on Thursday, May 14th, 2020] As a person, I do not tend to possess the cleanest of rooms. I am generally fairly organized—I know where things are, and I tend not to forget things—but when it comes to actually decreasing the amount of disorder in my physical spaces I have never been particularly effective. My room at home has  always  been especially messy, in particular because I keep a lot of memorabilia and just general reminders of the past scattered around me, and, based on a cursory search through old blog posts, the last time I successfully cleaned my entire room [more accurately, my floor—my bookshelves have never been cleaned, nor has my windowsill] was November 2018, with a light attempt to do so again in May 2019 which has been held in stasis for essentially a year at this point. To add to this confusion, I brought home a violin, a backpack, and a slightly-la...

this post was written on Friday, May 15th, 2020. i'm not sure if it's actually that well-written, but it has thoughts i want to share, so here goes Today was a pretty good day. I got up this morning and attended the 21W thesis presentations, which was quite an excellent use of two hours of my time, as I got to hear people read from their theses, mostly fiction, one a poetry collection. Everything I heard was pretty good, and the advisors were remarkably supportive, which really makes me look forwards to working with them in the future. I also think that, although there's a lot of distance between my writing and how well-planned-out it is with theirs, I am fairly confident that with sufficient time, effort, and classes, I can eventually make it to that level of writing. Maybe that's Dunning-Kruger effect—in fact, I suspect that it is likely Dunning-Kruger effect, given that I have scarcely finished a single creative writing project since junior fall—but I suppose tha...

The title of this blog post comes from  a really cute song  that one of my friends sent me and which I've been listening to on repeat for probably an hour now. Reminder that most daily posts are not getting published here—instead, they are on a staging blog that will be shared upon request—and that most posts will be edited down in the future to their core content. Today was a great day. In regards to how productive I was, or how today sets me up for the coming few days, a different discussion can and probably should be had. However, I think I made a resolution at some point going into MIT that I was never going to regret not doing problem sets and not sleeping because I was spending time with friends, and I think today has to fall under that exemption. Never regret the good things—they are the only things you have. This doesn't stop you from exercising some time management skills, or planning for the future, but I strongly believe that this is a valuable part of one's life...