My parents go grocery shopping way more than they need to. It’s their hobby. I know others who, by necessity or by personality, treat grocery shopping as a chore to optimize. Solve the traveling…

In my third year of high school, I decided to organize an event called Science and Us. The idea was to introduce fellow high schoolers to people in science communication and give them an opportunity…

Each screenshot asks us how we wish to embed a “subject” in context. In an age where our devices are our most personal objects, screenshots speak volumes about what matters to us. When platforms…

The US’s pandemic response leaves a gaping hole that private entities, including technology companies, have scrambled to fill. It’s critical to examine tech companies’ messages and the narratives they…

If you're entering a new field, in addition to learning the vocabulary and honing your skills, it might also be worth investigating the interplay between the field's traditions and tools. Traditions…

I hear it all the time. “Once you get into the real world…” “This is intended to prepare you for the real world…” Other common phrases like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” hint at it too…

Discord isn’t just for gamers. Teens are creating personal Discord servers for chatting with their friends, fulfilling pandemic-induced desires for social interaction and creating dynamic communities.

Before college, I didn’t know anything about management consulting or finance. When I started at MIT, I immediately began to hear about firms in these industries frequently. At career fairs, they hand…

Although I have no aspirations of becoming a social media influencer, I feel pressure to make my content as “good” as those of professionals. I was surprised to learn that this urge isn’t universal…

Many people, myself included, are calling for the arrest of the police officers who have wrongfully murdered Breonna Taylor, Elijah McClain, and other Black people. At the same time, we’re pushing for…

Not long ago, it was the rule for web designers to cram content “above the fold.” Scrolling beyond the top of the page was too much to ask from audiences with supposedly notoriously short attention…

Hello friends, it’s that time of the year again! Obviously, COVID-19 has impacted everything. I’m grateful to be interning at Gatsby, which was remote and distributed to begin with. My original plan…

Some things that stood out to me: We asked better questions than mainstream media. I have no trouble believing this is the case (having been on the asking and receiving end of bad questions), and the…

For a few months, I've been using the phrase “cities, code, media @ MIT" to describe myself in Professional™ online settings. The time has come for MIT first-years to declare their majors, so I…

The problem Now that I'm home due to the pandemic, I've been trying to make sense of my first year of college and why it felt so unsatisfactory. Though I'm still in the process of figuring that out, I…

At the end of 2018, I told some friends, "This is the first year that wasn't the best year of my life." Fortunately, 2019 went better—it was full of big changes, rare opportunities, and emotional…

I recently made Learned (source code). Every few days, I add a snippet about something I learned that day. Later, when I get more content, I might add features like filtering by topic. It looks…

In 1633, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei stood on trial, facing threats of torture from the Roman Catholic Church. The Inquisition forced him to recant his theory that the Earth revolves around the…

This post is nearly two months late (so late that some of the points no longer apply to my life), but here's my review of the third quarter of 2019! (See quarter 1 and quarter 2.) This time, I'm…

When I was eleven, I was at a youth program when a family friend came up to me. I remember he smiled and asked, “Are you a math and science person, or a history and English person?” I looked at him…

Hi and welcome to the second edition of Figurative Coffee! Today, I’m sharing a conversation I had last summer with Karen Zusi (@kzoosi), Media Relations Manager at the Broad Institute, a genomics…

Hi and welcome to the first edition of Figurative Coffee! I launched this newsletter last week and I’m excited and grateful that 160+ people have signed up. This week, I’m sharing an interview with…

Wow, it’s July! And wow, I overestimated how much I could do this summer! In the same style as my 2019 Q1 Review, I’ll review how my life went from April through June, guided by a list of dated…

I really enjoyed publishing a quarterly review of milestones at the beginning of April and plan on writing another one for July 1, but in the middle of 2019’s second quarter is a major change in my…

We’re already one fourth of the way through 2019! I’m reviewing how my year has been so far, guided by a list of dated milestones. I’m aware that calling this a “Q1” review makes it sound like some…

2018 has been a year of challenges and growth, and I’m excited for 2019. Here’s a recap of the past year, as best as I can remember. Winter In January, I participated in SheHacks, my first 36-hour…

Sometimes people ask me for advice and sometimes I reply lol. This document is in progress. Here's one thing I wrote to a high schooler in response to their questions about MIT: insert "it's free…

tl;dr don't plagiarize, for both our sakes (but mostly your sake) Regarding the possibility of others plagiarizing my work: I've already received all my decisions and committed to a school, so it…

MAHacks: I organized MAHacks III and IV, a high school hackathon in Boston. Among other tasks, I coordinated experiences—office tours, job shadows, chats with entrepreneurs and engineers—that keep…

General Embrace the present. You’ll never get it back again, and it’s the only area you can control for certain. Don’t look at the present as a means or stepping stone toward the future (e.g. working…