The Dubious Life of a Thesising Senior (during Wintersession)

Hey readers :).

I have a collection of anecdotes for you from my life as a thesising senior (during wintersession). All I can say is: I’m so lucky to be here, with so many incredible people around me.

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Thanksgiving, 2014. Tiffany’s house.

“And it was like pulling pigtails, you know,” Fiona said, one of the first-years on the swim team. A good portion of the Wellesley Swim and Dive team, those who hadn’t gone home for Thanksgiving, were assembled along the long dining room table in Tiffany’s house. It was a small table, not big enough for two conversations to be held easily at each end, so all attention was on Fiona.

“Oh yeah,” Suman interjected (a junior and a good friend of mine). All eyes swung down to her, seated at the head of the table.

A pause. “It sounds like you speak from experience,” Fiona prompted.

Suman nodded then went back to eating.

“Is this about one of the Alex-es?” I asked, referring to a story Suman had told me about her middle school experience a while ago. Suman promptly choked on her broccoli, and though everyone was already staring, the interest increased.

“Don’t do that,” she told me, after she’d gasped for a bit and everyone else had chuckled. “It’s so weird you know so much about me.”

Conversation went on—two conversations eventually got going.

Eventually, Suman got going on one—head of the table, like I said, easy to focus on even if you were zoning. “And that’s when I knew,” she had just said, partway into it.

“Is this about the French TA in high school?”

She almost hacked up a lung in her attempt to breathe in her water.

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Last Thursday, Science Center and France.

“Wait, I didn’t know about this,” I objected, gazing intently into the Skype screen on my laptop. I was in the Conway lab in the Science Center at Wellesley—Suman was in Aix-en-Provence, France, sitting in her host family’s room with her phone’s Skype screen on her lap. I could tell it was her phone because the screen shook whenever she said anything.

“Wait, really?” Suman said, looking surprised. Her base assumption is that I know a lot more than I do, which I unfortunately tend to encourage by nodding too much during conversations. One of my professors does the whole nodding thing even worse than I do; I’m working on it.

“Lay it out again. You helped kids with disabilities go horse-riding at what age, you worked with Special Olympics at what age, when did your mother get this job?”

We spend the next fifteen minutes talking about Suman’s middle school and high school volunteer work in California. I hadn’t heard about any of it. Most of this stuff I learn from applications—Gabby sends me her applications for jobs in China, Tiffany sends me her med school apps to read over, I’ve read Suman’s personal statement from when she applied to college. You learn a lot about people from interacting with them, but you’d be surprised how much you can learn from essays. What people care about, their histories, all nice formatting and carefully streamlined passion. My sister, Leslie, a new first-year at Wellesley this year, says her friends talk about boys all the time. I don’t think I had my first conversation about crushes with my friends until about a year into it, and even now I’m still missing a lot of pieces from before we came to college. I learned just a month ago that Gabby got on a bus to New Haven and didn’t tell her parents she was going to high school prom, just because she didn’t want them to make a big deal out of it.

But it’s funny drilling Suman about this, because Suman’s sitting in her room in France and looking at the door occasionally, telling me her host family’s little sister is taken with her and is going to want to play soon. Her name might be Aurélie, very French, and we’ve been talking about Suman arriving in Paris and navigating the subway and starting an improv French class. And here we are, thousands of miles away, talking about Suman’s high school in California, while I’m in Wellesley and she’s in France, and it’s a miracle of technology, it’s a miracle of personhood, that we carry all of this history, that I’m making this call for free, can see her face, can perfectly hear her voice, talking about some past that exists only in Suman’s head, and that Suman’s host sister is knocking on the door.

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Today. Tiffany’s house.

Dorothy (another member of the swim team), Gabby (a diver, close friend), and Tiffany (swimmer, best friend) and I are hanging out on Tiffany’s living room couch, waiting for Tiffany’s mom to serve us a spectacular dinner. They don’t have practice today, since they just finished a 3-day long meet at Smith College. Gabby’s typing on her laptop, emailing with the divers since she’s one of the captains. Dorothy’s reminiscing over the movie we just watched, the Lego Movie, and Tiffany’s knitting a hat with navy yarn. Patricia, Tiffany’s sister and also a first year on the team, is tapping the remote through TV shows. Tiffany’s youngest sister Abby and her parents are talking in the kitchen, over the sound of “Deal or No Deal” playing on the TV in there.

“So, Monica,” Tiff says over all the background noise, “I was reading your poem on the bus and crying.”

I grin. It had been Tiff’s birthday this Sunday, and true to form I’d written her a birthday poem. I do one every year—this year I’d sent it by email, since she’d been away at Smith. I’m surprised she read it on the bus back from the meet—we usually read notes from each other in private.

“Aw, I’m glad you liked it!” I say. Shrugging, “I think that one took me four hours.”

She smiles. “Yeah, someday I’ll have to have you read it to me. I was having trouble visualizing you reading it ‘passionately, while thumping a hand on the bed dramatically,’ as you mentioned in the email.”

“Ha, it was so funny. It was like me at three in the morning, on my stomach, reading this thing out loud. Wait, why are you unraveling that?”

Tiffany’s unraveling the hat, pulling apart an hour’s work. “It needs a double-stitch.”

I watch her for a while, then go back to watching the TV. TV’s, like, oddly mesmerizing in our family. Even if the show’s completely stupid, put it in front of us and me and both of my sisters will stare, sometimes with our mouths open. It must be genetic.

Tiff’s clicking her needles again. The thing is, I might be more upset at the casualness if this had been a few years ago, when I’d written her a poem for the first time. I think my best writing is when I’m writing to other people, close family or friends, and I feel a visceral need for feedback, make sure they liked it, that they feel the same way.

But we’re several years down the road, and I know that in the next two weeks, I’ll find a letter in my mailbox, “To Monica Gates, Unit #2901, from Tiffany Chen, Unit #xxxx”. It’ll be in the brand of colored pens we’ve both loved since first year, and I’ll get my own thank you poem back.

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Today. My room.

I’ve got a ¼ cup measuring spoon in my mouth, struggling with getting the yogurt out of the edges with my tongue, because a ¼ cup measuring spoon is a hard-to-maneuver object even when you have a mouth as big as mine. I’d left my real spoon at the lab in the Science Center, and I can’t find my fork since my drying dishes are spread out in four locations. I’d considered chopsticks, then decided that going after yogurt with chopsticks was going to be even worse than baking implements.

Anyway, my hands are free, so I’m typing out emails to Emily. Emily’s a science friend (I have swimming friends and science friends, not too many outside those two groups. MIT friends and bus-to-MIT buddy friends are in that exception category, though, and the science-friends group divides into subsections.) Emily’s specifically a neuroscience friend who I get along very well with, and we’ve been hanging out a lot over Wintersession. We’re both stressed about submitting a first draft of our thesis Introductions to the rest of the thesising neuro majors.

I can’t believe these are due on Tuesday, I’m moaning. We’ve set a Tuesday night deadline for sending our drafts to each other to look over. We’d decided that a deadline was necessary, or else all of us would be actually doing experiments instead of writing about them. Much more fun.

that is entirely your fault she emails back. Fine, I’d set a Tuesday night deadline. But they’d all agreed. I’d actually been aiming for Monday. Silly past Monica.

and this is going to be super draft-y. Like, REALLY draft-y.

I’m going to need so many edits before I send this to Barb, she continues, talking about her research mentor, Prof. Barb Beltz. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how to disable the little “ping” that my smart phone gives every time I get an email. I give up, as per usual, and just turn it off. I hate phones.

Plus I can’t concentrate. I can only write like a paragraph at a time during wintersession

‘Sokay. I email back, phone finally turned off, and pulling the measuring spoon from my mouth. I’m procrastinating too. The panic will kick in tomorrow.

…

I love email, so much. Yesterday I went on one of my streaks, and didn’t talk to a single person for 48 hours. But I’d emailed to Galen, are you coming back to the lab next semester?

And

Well, I really want you to come back, so my advice is way biased,

And to Isabelle

wait, can you forward me that email?

And to Prof. Hildreth

Do you think I should apply for this?

And to the people who’d also won a scholarship to go to Cosyne, a computational neuroscience conference,

I’m so excited to meet you all; here’s my preliminary log of how much this will cost. Who wants to share a hotel?

And to the professors who’d written me a letter of recommendation

I’m sorry to say I did not receive the Churchill Scholarship. But I am applying for Wellesley Graduate Scholarships, so the dream is not dead yet! 

And there’s melancholy, of course, because humans are social creatures, and if I go longer than a day I really can’t help being melancholy. But it feels like a day rather than two, because my brain is doing plenty of talking. Talking to myself and to all of these others, to real-time virtual presences and not, because being alone in today’s world is different from alone in past worlds, and I’m chatting with Emily all the same.

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Today, 3pm my time, 9pm Suman’s time.

She’s telling me about how she has to conscious of being a woman. How she has to be careful walking around Paris, how she always thought she could do anything a man can do: but she can’t. That she physically—Suman pauses—that she can’t defend herself, if necessary. That it’s so different from walking around Wellesley at night. I hear I don’t feel safe. When my grandmother came to Wellesley, asked me if it’s all right to be walking around at 11pm, and I said yes, of course, it’s Wellesley, I hear her saying I worry. When my dad tells me not to walk around at midnight in Boston, I hear you’re not safe. Boston has a low crime rate for a city of its size, but I still don’t like walking around after 9pm. After the bars open, in the run-down area of town where one of my friends lives. I walk close to the major roads, and I make sure my backpack’s light so I can run. One of my weirder things is that I always wear tennis shoes in Boston. I wear tennis shoes all the time, but very occasionally I’ll wear boots at Wellesley. In Boston, it’s irrational, but if I need heels I’ll carry them in my backpack, roll on a dress when I get to wherever I need to be. And Suman’s saying she doesn’t feel safe, and I’m saying I know, that I love taking classes at MIT, that I love staying over the summer in Boston, and it’s lovely we come home to Wellesley, you know?

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Today, lunch, Science Center.

“D’you think it’s up for grabs?” Angela says. She’s in the communal kitchen in the Science Center, the one students aren’t technically allowed to be in. But we’re mostly seniors and it’s Wintersession, so the few professors here are turning a blind eye.

I hear the frown in Elena’s voice. “It says FREE on the side. I think you’re good.”

I pop up from around the corner, from where I’d been following their voices. “Hello!”

“Monica! How are you? Look what I found, free hot chocolate!”

I peer at my previously-full-of-yogurt-tub now full of raviolis. “Think I can put hot water in this once I’m done eating?”

They look at it: it’s plastic. “Maybe mix the hot water with cold water first. But I saw you were eating with Professor Caplan?”

I had indeed been eating with Professor Caplan and Professor Reisberg, but I was all up for finishing my food in a second lunch. I’d learned that if I hung out in Sage Lounge around noon, I could spend a whole two hours chatting with people. They came in groups of two, since all my thesising science friends were in bio and thus had lab partners. They usually had timestamps too—30 minute lunches, then they needed to transfer this or that medium, or take counts on their cells.

(They were all madly jealous of my computational work that ensured that I could work from my dorm room.)

“I’m always down for more lunch. Come sit!”

Conversationally we veered from siblings into adopted families, into Native American tribes and Ecuador. A bit of science thrown in there for fun, some griping about literature reviews. Elena telling us what book she’d think we’d like, talk about how we all liked reading stories about that kind of overcoming, a casual mention and agreement when I said: “especially about inspirational women.”

In several of my first-year blogs, I’d said “the girls here are super welcoming.” Using the word “women” seemed pretentious, and I certainly didn’t feel like one at the time. But these conversations, these lunch-room back and forths, they’re very Wellesley, entirely Wellesley, women’s colleges and use of language. We’re science majors, all of us, but we’re careful with our use of pronouns, in what news/events/books/writing we read, in what we pay attention to.

We’re Wellesley women now, in every casual conversation. I wonder how long it takes to feel that—for me, right now, I do.

~