things i’ve learned as an mit student
“You are fooled by the way that this act behaves/and your beating heart has gone insane/it’s always resonating” -will stetson, “mesmerizer”
style inspired by alan z./cjq of mit admissions
now that my first year is officially over and i am a real person now (conservation of frosh or whatever), i feel like i am finally qualified to give children (aka frosh) advice and tell old people (aka non-’27s) about my experiences. some of these things are Big Life Crises™️ and some of these things are things i learned naturally over the course of my time as a Proper Adult.
before we get into them, i’m going to give the standard “my experiences are not a monolith of the average mit student” blah blah blah disclaimer, so take what i say with whatever level of trustworthiness that you want.
obey the november rule.
also, please don’t date someone ≥2 grades from yours—well, unless you’re dating your friend’s baddie parents, in which case i support this (disclaimer: i do not actually endorse getting into relationships with your friend’s baddie parents.) most likely, you’ll be groomed (or will be grooming them), and nobody wants that. well, i know one couple who have worked out, but lowkey, the ‘27 is grooming the ‘25 (you know who you are.)
so yeah, don’t date until november. hell, wait until your spring semester.
i dated someone in august, like, 4 days after meeting them—don’t do that. i broke up with them the beginning of december for a variety of reasons (untreated/undiagnosed bpd goes kinda crazy.) if you’re anything like me (impulsive, mentally ill, craving attention and love, or queer) it’s really, really easy to latch onto the first person who sees you as an actual person without actually knowing anything about them. or about yourself.
i’m currently in a very happy and healthy relationship (as everyone knows *wink wink*) and although i am still very much traumatized and figuring out who i am, i am much more stable now (well, maybe my boyfriend would disagree with me. they probably would.) i’m also an outlier when it comes to romantic relationships (apparently most people don’t start dating while they’re in the psych ward nor is their ideal date staring into each other’s eyes for hours on end) but hey, i figured out what works for me.
please figure out what you like and need before jumping into a relationship.
prioritize your mental health.
“boooooo vi, everyone says this; why are you telling this to me?”
i’m telling you because i’ve found that very few people actually believe this when they say it.
i love mit for many reasons (namely the people! and also course 9), but one of the things i hate about it is how much the students overwork themselves. more than that, i hate the reasoning behind it: its often something like “i won’t succeed if i don’t work to the fullest” or “i’ll be wasting my potential and privilege as an mit student” or “i don’t want to fall behind my peers.” while it’s not fully illogical—i mean, imposter syndrome definitely is real—it often ends up consuming the thinker to the brink of destruction.
i’ve seen so many people break down because they just couldn’t do everything all at once and they felt so disappointed in themselves. they’d take on so many things although they physically were unable to do all of them to the fullest, but they’d try anyways and burn themselves out in the process.
but that’s not how it has to be.
if you do what makes you happy, there will be meaning in what you do.
i think the best way to combat imposter syndrome and/or general feelings of inferiority is to pursue your passions. as an mit student, you’ll meet people who are leagues more accoladed/talented than you, but honestly?
it doesn’t matter.
in a way, you will never be “as good” as those people you look up to are—you’ll never reach their level of passion/talent/respect/whatever you admire in them because you aren’t them.
as long as you are satisfied with what you’re doing, that’s all that matters. it doesn’t matter whether that satisfaction comes with your clubs, your friends, your meals, your classes, your research, your art, anything goes. the meaning from your life doesn’t have to come from some grand revelation—listen, i started drawing again because i really wanted to make humanized pear girl art—but if it makes you happy, that’s all the meaning that you need.
it’s really easy to forget that it’s your happiness that comes first, not some normalized idea of success.
i know an upperclassman who really wanted to declare course 22 after learning more about it their sophomore year (they work in the nuclear reactor and have taught classes about nuclear power/reactors at ESP), but they were too deep in the course 18 grind to switch majors. to add insult to injury, they’re an international student, so they need a job to stay in the U.S, but math doesn’t really lead to any lucrative job offers, so out of fear, they became an 18-C.
if you couldn’t tell, they’re not in the healthiest of head-spaces. like, i’ve-seen-them-break-down-in-their-room type of miserable. it was really heartbreaking to see: this was someone i respected immensely (role model type shit) and watching them succumb to the overbearing pressures of adulthood and responsibility was… sobering, to say the least, for little frosh vi.
this leads into my next point, which is:
selling out is overrated.
i declared 6-9 my freshman spring because “i like the 9 part more than the 6 part, but we can do a lot of things with The Power of Computation!”
…and then i realized that i actually hate coding for the most part.
it took me a year and 3 UROPs to realize that i can just learn whatever neuro-specific coding things when it comes down to it. i’m very sad that i will no longer be the Haha Funny Number (course 6-9), but it’s the tradeoff i’ve taken in exchange for long-term career happiness.
see, i realized i’d be miserable being a SWE when i took 6.101 (6.009). every week when i sat down to do my lab, i always thought, “man, doing this every day seems so dull, but these skills are valuable, so i guess i’ll keep going.” this sort of passive “well i don’t really want to, but i should” mindset is the backbone of many people’s decisions to sell out (chasing a bag in lucrative fields, i.e. software engineering or high finance) . i’ve seen a lot of people switch from course 18 to 18-C solely because “a math major doesn’t make money” and many pre-meds switch from course 7 or 9 to course 6-7 or 6-9 because “if being pre-med doesn’t work out, then i can just sell out.”
i feel like many course 6s fall into this sad dichotomy of “well it’s money or my passions,” but that’s not really how it is—even though they might not make 150k a year after graduation doesn’t mean that an alternative, more fulfilling career isn’t worth it. this is not to say that all course 6s are sellouts—god, most of my friends have a disturbingly intense passion for AI/LLMs/other tech things. i can’t count the number of times i’ve heard “join MAIA” or “become a tech bro” or “join a vc” or “i love coding!” hell, me and my friends were on vacation and someone was leetcoding at dinner (you know who you are…)
financial security is an incredibly valid concern, and i’m not shaming anybody who chooses to sell out to achieve it. as a fli student who’s been homeless for the past month and a half and has moved thrice in that span of time, i understand how suffocating the need for financial security is, but i also understand that money is often an oppressor than a liberator (yay capitalism!) so we might as well do what we want in spite of it. it’s a privileged take, i know, but i was also very willing to incur 90-180k in debt to escape my abusive household and live freely.
that gamble worked out in my favor—as my favorite video game character aventurine says, “bust? or maybe i’ll take it all!”
be cringe.
“man, your advice sucks.” yeah yeah whatever
but listen, i care more about people’s happiness than their image—i’d rather people be happy (can you tell?) and cringe than ‘normal’ and sad.
by “be cringe,” i mean:
- be unabashedly proud of your interests
- don’t shy away from something because people scoff at it
for example, me and my friend watched 64 episodes of skibidi toilet while i dyed their hair late at night; i woke them up whenever they fell asleep by recapping what she had missed in the skibidi toilet lore™️ (hit me up if you want to hear my thoughts on the skibidi toilet lore!)
while most people would say that this was very #genalpha of us, i honestly don’t care—it’s really fun to throw away the expectations that people have of you, and best of all, it’s freeing. i know a lot of people who care a lot about what others think of them and let that worry drive their actions. “am i being too loud? too quiet? too outspoken? too defensive? not passionate enough? too vulnerable? not vulnerable enough?”
this resignment is very suffocating, especially since it’s that type of subtle it’s-choking-me-from-the-inside-out-millimeters-at-a-time pain, and you don’t realize you’re unhappy until you realize that “man, i have no idea why i’m doing what i’m doing anymore.”
i’ve definitely fallen victim to these thoughts, but luckily for me, i’ve never really let it drive me—i resigned myself to a sort of “i’ll always be a sort of social pariah anyways, so might as well just be myself” mindset. (blame the neurodivergence + transgenderism?)
whether that’s a good thing or not, i don’t really know. but hey, i’m happy!
don’t be afraid of change.
(sorry, this might get to the point in a bit of a roundabout way.)
as someone who was raised as a traditional vietnamese girl, i have a lot of cultural guilt surrounding:
1) not being vietnamese in the “right way”
2) not being feminine in the “right way”
3) not doing (and speaking out against) what my parents want me to do
4) being queer and transgender
5) leaving my biological family
all of which i’ve done (or am). being myself meant going against every single traditional value that was beat into me since i was a child, and for the sake of survival, i had to develop a second persona that was the opposite of who i truly was. the dissonance between my fake self and my real self was so destructive, but it was so, so hard to shed it.
how could i, when my life depended on upholding that persona?
but in june, i was introduced to several people (wink wink you know who you are) who shattered that belief—there is a world where i can be myself safely. i don’t have to pick and choose—but i do have to reach out and fight to get there (which is very unfair, but it’s not the first time things have been unfair for me). it took me many nights of crying and worrying and countless sacrifices, but i got there.
and once i was in a space where i could finally be myself, the biggest change of my life was done with, and the other changes came easily. after, you know, defying everything you’ve known all your life, changing your major/research focus/your friend group/your daily schedule comes a lot smoother.
so, the tl;dr is that change can be—and usually is!—for the better, even though it’s insanely hard and guilt-wracking.
but it’s worth it.