Photo Post!

Heya readers :).

I have so much I want to share with you—BUT I CAN’T, because things keep happening! A truly delightful problem to have :). I was inspecting my blog-notes-to-myself-ideas list, and then I took a look at iPhoto, and the result is one of those rare occasions when a photo post must occur. I hope you enjoy it!

*Note: I have no pictures from Spring Open Campus, because I am a failure and am at MIT until 9pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays (my weeks build up to Wednesday and then cycle back around from there.) But I hope you all had a fabulous time on campus meeting with our students, faculty, and community, and I’m so excited for the prospies who found their home here :).

All right, from the top :).

Here is a picture of mussels in some kind of peanut sauce at Bates Dining Hall. Bates Dining Hall is by far my favorite dining hall, and I eat there all of the occasions I can manage, despite living in a different dorm with a dining hall and Bates not really being in the direction of anything else except its lovely dining hall. Anyway, here is some of the food that I eat there when they have extra-special occasions and it is a happy surprise to me since I don’t check menus (I just go to Bates). I think I had about three of these stacked up by the end. Opinions on dining hall food varies, but if you don’t have food restrictions and are happy with salad, life is GOOD.

Previously-mentioned Bates dining hall :). Bit abandoned at the moment, but at lunch (12:28-12:40) it floods :).

More examples of the excellent food I get to eat. (I am so worried about eating in the future :P). When you take classes at MIT like I do, you’re often at MIT a lot of the day, and that can mean skipping meals. However, we all pay Wellesley for the unlimited food plan we have on campus. So, Wellesley gives us $7 to $8.50 a day to spend on a meal at MIT! I have gotten very good at getting $7 worth of food in weight. (Adding to a list of other questionable skills I have acquired. Figuring out the relative lightness of foods, how to use duct tape instead of a vacuum cleaner, what to do when you run out of hangers…)

All right, all right, we don’t care about your food, Monica. (Oh, but you will! Muhahaha. Also, I now spell “all right” instead of “alright” because I lost points on an assignment during my first year, first semester writing class at Wellesley. It will haunt me for the rest of my life. There are just so many tiny experiences embedded in everything we do…) What do we care about? DUCKS!

So a few mornings ago I walked out of the dorm at 7:58am as usual (the bus leaves at 8am, but it’s right outside the building. Stone-D’s location is PRIME. (Stone-Davis is my dorm. Also the dorm Hillary Clinton stayed in!)). And then I started rapidly swiveling around, because there were ducks everywhere! I’m told by 10am they were all gone, but I was there at 7:58am, and there were lots and lots of ducks.

Plastic easter-egg types. I shook one, but didn’t feel anything in them so left them. (I was wrong about that, but my wonderful friend Christine actually picked one up for me because she knew I was at MIT :)).

But you know the craziest thing about these ducks? They were going somewhere. You can see them lined up along the ledge of the road here– and they kept on going.

They passed by the Chapel Swing. (Newly reinstated this year after being taken down for many years. The campus is a huge fan.)

(They were on the swing, in fact.)

And then they led on a path down to the chapel and too far for me to see.

I was deeply torn. To follow the ducks? Or to actually catch the bus and go to class? Oh, the sacrifices I make…

So I turned away. I consoled myself with other pretty yellow things (THINGS THAT ARE GROWING. SPRING IS COMING, DANG IT!)

And I sat on the bus sedately.

But only for about two minutes, because then I couldn’t stand it any longer and asked the white-haired bus driver who drives mornings on Tuesday and Thursday if I could pretty please get off and follow the ducks, because there was something very yellow just over the horizon (ah, past the Chapel Lawn) and could I take a picture, please?

He paused, glanced at the clock, and paused some more. I waited anxiously (but really. There was a lot of nervous anticipation there. I was ready to run for it.)

“Hurry,” he said.

I ran for it.

TOTALLY WORTH IT, READERS. GIGANTIC DUCK WITH ALL THE BABY DUCKS.

(Also, the trail kept going. But I was headed to MIT as a happy camper. I found out later the Office of Student Involvement had done this for us, and there was another gigantic inflatable duck on the Alumnae Hall lawn. They were removed before the afternoon, so I count myself very lucky to have seen this creation in all of its magnificence– because these things were all over campus. I haven’t heard of anything done like this before, but I love this campus so much :). (My absolute favorite thing– there were blue buckets with “recycle any unwanted ducks here!” signs on them placed near the pathways. You can sort of see one of them in this picture. Love love love this campus.))

Ducks, yes. But school, Monica, what about school?

School’s happening :). It’s really odd that I hadn’t realized that I signed up for only applied math classes. I am thus struggling but enjoying myself a lot. Me and a-guy-whose-name-I-still-don’t-know-despite-working-on-several-psets-with-him-because-we-show-up-to-the-same-office-hours worked out this lovely on the board (I actually don’t think I can show the picture, because we haven’t turned the pset in yet. You’ll have to use your imagination– it’s a derivation of maximizing the log likelihood formula for a clustering problem. Very easy to imagine, I know.) We argued quite a bit doing it, but were ultimately successful. I do love working with other head-strong people :). (I have been reliably informed I can be a bit my-way-or-the-highway. Good thing almost everyone else I run into also thinks this way, so we can mutually run each other over.)

[missing pic WITH MATH :P]

And then that evening I was reading one of MIT’s spam boards and realized Dr. Steven Pinker was talking, so as soon as I finished the above derivation I ran downstairs (I actually had to run to the spam board in another building, read the spam, realize that the talk was actually a floor down from the room I’d just been in, and run back) and caught the second half of it. It was based on his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, and I of course loved listening to him :).

Enough school though, Monica. What have you ACTUALLY been doing with your life?

A frankly startling amount of fun stuff, and a TON of thesis stuff. Let me briefly distract you with some of the chalking on Wellesley’s campus–

which is beautiful, and we voted in elections last week– and then bring you some pics from thesising. Sebiha’s my thesis buddy. We work together. We talk together. We eat together. We take selfies on auspiciously warm days together.

We also bemoan and love our advisors together. In this case, I am so, so deeply impressed with Prof. Hildreth, who took the time to read through a nearly 100-page-long double-spaced thesis (I am not kidding and have no idea how my thesis got this long. I even cut half my content. NO ONE ELSE’S IS HALF THIS LONG.) and make comments all over it. She is a master commenter– there are degrees of how good people are at editing, and she is a master. She doesn’t make you feel bad about anything; she’s very objective and clear in her comments; she obviously understands exactly what you’re trying to say and what you need to do to say it. It’s incredibly odd to have her read my work, because she doesn’t just read the finished stuff– she reads the draft stuff, the planning, that I include in really small font for my own notes. I feel like she knows how I think, which feels like the most private thing I have. And she knows how I write– not how I write for the blog and for emails, which is distinctive in its own way, but is a style I have a handle on– but how I write for science, academically. I am far less familiar with the quality of my academic writing, because people usually give me feedback on my ideas, not my structure or grammar. This segment from my thesis (I rewrote quite a few sentences out of this in the final-ish draft) is particularly telling. I’m a grammar nazi– I have been for a long time, though being a grammar nazi in my case is far more about being AWARE of the problems rather than applying them 😛 — and so whenever someone makes a grammar correction, I have to look it up and figure it about and apply it to future writing. In this case, Prof. Hildreth had made the comment in a previous draft that I needed to use “were” instead of “was”. So when I was playing around with that I accidentally left some text in the next draft I sent her– and look at that response. Patient. Crisp. Clear. I am so, so grateful to Professor Hildreth. It was a gift to be mentored by her.

On a less serious note, I told you about how I’ve discovered that listening to music is awesome? But only one song, because otherwise I get distracted? Here’s “Mamacita” by the K-pop band Super Junior. I figured out a great way to get it to play on repeat. I have now listened to this song 375 times.

(Food digression. On Friday I had dimsum with my friend Christine and her father, to celebrate my conditional offer to Cambridge. It was utterly lovely. I loved talking with them, eating with them, showing them around MIT, talking with them some more. Christine and her dad are very special people.)

“The Three Musketeers!” Christine announced when taking this one.

Bubble tea in front of my favorite bakery. I hadn’t even been to this boba place before!

:).

And because it really seems like the last few weeks I have been singularly focused on having fun (the mind boggles. I’m not doing it on purpose, I swear) I also went to Wellesley’s Wushu performance, Once Upon a Time. I have quite a few friends who do Wushu, Wellesley’s Chinese martial arts performance group, and it was great to see the people I met first year and who I fell out of contact with still doing it now. I was surprised to learn that the group had only been founded five years ago– Tiffany says she’s gone to their shows every year, and they’ve made huge improvements every time. I was happy I was able to support them and see what my friends can do :). (Some of the feats were crazy, let me tell you…)

Above: Wellesley’s Asian Dance Organization. Below: no idea what these things are called, but there was a lot of spinning!

Wushu doing a Hogwarts skit! So dear to my heart :).

Senior performance! Way back first year, I had some pictures of Celia and Rebecca– they’re still in Wushu, and ROCKING IT.

Hmm :).

And now, finally, to finish up: today was Marathon Monday. I lost my voice for a few hours, got very emotional and started tearing up at how happy people were to hear us cheering for them (the beaming smiles. Really), got very cold because it was both chilly and raining, did thesis work with Sebiha, had dinner with my uncle Nick who ran the marathon 30 minutes faster than he thought (and qualified for next year!) and am now writing the blog in my room and looking at all of the pictures. I also managed to get two kisses and SO MANY HIGH-FIVES. So many happy people. The Wellesley Scream Tunnel is Wellesley’s best tradition ever.

(Explanation: Massachusetts has a state holiday called “Patriot’s Day” when everyone who knows what’s good for them goes and cheers for the runners in the Boston Marathon. This is made infinitely easier when the halfway point of the Marathon goes through Wellesley College’s front yard. We as students make up the “Wellesley Scream Tunnel”, and you can hear us from a mile away. Best. Tradition. Ever.)

Posin’ for a pic with the Wellesley women!

Keep it up! I don’t have any pictures of the wheelchair racers (they were too speedy) but I got these guys who came through right after :).

ELITES. Women elites are the bomb.

This woman came through– usually when I see runners in this marathon with prosthetic legs, they are attached below the knee. Her’s was all the way up to her hip. I showed Sebiha this picture, and she was like: “What is our excuse for not running, exactly?” I also roared at the woman who had a shirt on with “Expecting in 6 weeks.” Amazing, amazing women.

MORE ELITES. Yeah men!

Pause here to show the poster Tiffany, Gabby and I made for Uncle Nick. It features a banana slug from our mad adventures out in San Jose for Spring Break.

Also I’m skipping the timeline here a second, but here’s my uncle Jim, me, uncle Nick, Tiffany, and Leslie out celebrating uncle Nick’s marathon tonight :).