total internal reflection

how can a person know everything at eighteen and nothing at twenty-two?

It’s somehow back to school season again for those of us on the quarter system. this year is kind of like most other years, but it’s especially wonderful and terrifying because it’s the first time that I’m starting the year as a truly full-time student researcher with no course requirements to fulfill and no weekly problem sets to write up. I’m still in the process of training myself to be more consistent, which includes being more mindful of how I work and take breaks, as well trying to write more regularly.

While I’ve always appreciated writing as a way of forcing myself to carefully articulate my thoughts, it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve really appreciated looking back on older instances of my writing and recognizing how my views have changed (or not) over time.¹ in honor of that, this post is broadly about school as it relates to the idea of personal development,² as something of a foil / follow-up to my previous (very narrow) note on developing a research direction.

what do we go to school for?

I’ve been revisiting this question lately from a few different angles. one reason that it’s been on my mind is because I’m of the few among my circle of close friends who chose to go to grad school. a secondary reason is that I had the option to attend Caltech for undergrad, and chose to go to MIT instead. now that I teach Caltech undergrads, it’s hard to avoid drawing comparisons and imagining how differently my life could have gone. (also, it randomly hit me the other day that I’m now older, or at least in a later stage of my education, than every single college dropout at the time that they left school, lol.³)

To me, this topic also feels intimately related to discussions about “explore vs. exploit” or maintaining “optionality”. while I’m hesitant to generalize my experiences to other people, I think going to MIT for undergrad might have been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve already written an entire post on my undergrad experience here, but to summarize, I went into college very confident about what parts of STEM I liked, but not sure what I could do with those skills. in particular, I had seen a lot of online advice cautioning younger students and especially women against blindly pursuing a PhD. had I not received mentorship from the people that I met there, or fallen as deeply in love with science and the university as an institution, I might not have considered a career in research as a real option.

One very relevant aspect of my (and many other MIT students’) undergrad experiences which I haven’t really emphasized before is the institutional structures that make the student life experience possible. throughout undergrad, I was an active member of the Education Studies Program, which puts on events on campus for thousands of middle and high school students each year and has been around since 1957. I was also really fortunate to be part of discussions about climate in the physics department. in the same way that I don’t think I could have decided to pursue a PhD in theoretical physics without having tried out theory research, I don’t think I would feel anywhere near as strongly about the institutional aspects of science had I not seen for myself how the work that members of the MIT community came together to make initiatives happen.

life goes on

As of the last few months I’m no longer twenty-two, but the song lyric still resonates with me. life is a lot simpler when you’re in high school, and it’s easy to convince yourself that once you’re in college, you’ll have everything figured out. six years ago I felt as if once I laid out the groundwork in school and shaped the mold for the rest of my life, all I had to do was cast it and polish up the details. I understand better now that 1) I’ve always been too fickle and too much of a perfectionist to stick perfectly to a plan instead of continuously revising everything, and 2) very few people truly know what kind of life they want to live at eighteen, and most people who find something meaningful to do with their lives aren’t prodigies and can take a while to get there.

Relatedly, there’s apparently a pretty well-known effect in psychology called the end-of-history illusion, which is the observation that people consistently underestimate how much their personalities and preferences will change over time. when I was younger I sometimes felt overwhelmed by the alternative lives and possible versions of myself that I would never know because I decided to pursue a career in STEM.⁴ these days, I try to look forward to the inevitable changes and surprises in life, and the person that I’ll become.

Pinball machine as a ray-tracing mechanism. fun fact: pinball is typically chaotic for a wide range of initial conditions!

1. This is partly because I didn’t write very regularly until about midway through high school, but also because up until about a year ago I had never explicitly articulated “documenting my thoughts to reference later” as one of my primary reasons for writing. in high school, I mainly wrote as form of catharsis for my most strongly held thoughts and feelings

2. For more career / professional development-adjacent posts, see my post-undergrad or PhD year one reflections

3. Looking back, I don’t think I ever particularly wanted to drop out of school, since I always loved taking classes. but even early on in high school, I felt pressured to figure out what I wanted my life and career to look like. since most of my friends expected to attend college, someone finishing school early or dropping out seemed to signal that they were pursuing something more unique or interesting in life, and I admired people who were around my age but looked like they knew what they were doing…

4. Again, see this MIT admissions blog comic