100% Completion by Nisha D. '21

HELLO WORLD and welcome to my playthrough of a new game – college! I’m streaming/blogging live from MIT and I’m indescribably excited to start playing. The game takes a pretty long time to complete, but it’s choose your own adventure, and there are an infinity of options to choose from. There are also many ways to play. Sure, you COULD just beat the dungeons to get your hands on the prized diploma, but it’s way more fun to complete all the sidequests as well.

What are sidequests? Well, they’re smaller quests you can complete alongside the main quest (which is, of course, graduation), and often, they make the game a lot more interesting. Completing all the sidequests means that you’ve 100%ed the game – in other words, you got the fullest possible experience. This particular game has a ridiculous amount of sidequests, so I’m going to list the ten that I definitely want to complete. Some of them are easy, and others are a little harder, but if I can finish all of them, I’ll consider myself decently on my way to 100%ing MIT. So, without further ado:

• Sidequest 1: Learn the building numbers. It irks me that after almost two weeks of not leaving this campus one single time, I consistently have no idea what building I’m in. The long term goal is to be able to correctly fill in a blank map of MIT with all the numbers, which will probably take forever, so bear with me here.
• Sidequest 2: Get my Pirate Certificate. To be honest, this is pretty much an irl sidequest. Unfortunately, it can be pretty hard to complete – gym registration usually opens at 8 AM, and when I logged in at 8:01, there were already 16 people on the waitlist for sailing.
• Sidequest 3: Collect 60 free t-shirts. I’m expecting this to be one of the easier ones. I’ve already hoarded around six of them, and I’ve barely been here two weeks. I’m preparing to double my collection at the Career Fair, which is apparently the prime spot to stock up on free stuff (and probably job opportunities if you’re into that).
• Sidequest 4: Get a cool internship/externship. I’m a likely Course 6-3 (that’s computer science in MITese), but I don’t know what I’d like to work on within the CS sphere. However, if you asked me right now where I would want to intern, I would say Square Enix (because they do COOL THINGS with video games, and also because I am the biggest Final Fantasy fan on Earth) and the Jet Propulsion Lab (because they make things FLY into SPACE).
• Sidequest 5: Pull a cool hack. Extra hard mode: meet Jack Florey.
• Sidequest 6: Study abroad as many times as physically possible. Preferably in Japan – as many of you will find out in blogs-to-come, Japan is my city and studying Japanese is one of my favorite things to do. I’ve studied abroad there twice and am dying to return! Luckily, MIT has an abundance of awesome study abroad programs, so I’m confident that I’ll make it back sometime within my four years here.
• Sidequest 7: *serious* Beat Imposter’s Syndrome. This is definitely A Thing. I attended a large public school, and was accustomed to getting solid grades and being Good At Stuff. But all it took was one step onto campus, and suddenly I was surrounded by peers who are Better At Stuff – and not infrequently, The Best At Stuff, which is both inspiring and moderately terrifying.
• Sidequest 8: Survive the winter without a winter coat. One of the many reasons East Campus is the BEST DORM is that it is a 15 second dash to the nearest building, and also very close to MIT’s underground tunnel systems. In theory, there is no need for winter jackets, which is amazing because I think that they are poofy monstrosities. (Extra hard mode: survive the winter in just a t-shirt and basketball shorts, like most of the guys at my high school.)
• Sidequest 9: Build a thing. I have always been terrible at building anything (even with Legos), and I feel obligated as an MIT student to build SOMETHING during my time here. Currently, the closest I’ve gotten to building anything is standing in the East Campus courtyard and staring in awe as my dormmates constructed an entire rollercoaster for REX. One day, I too aspire to work on said rollercoaster. (Extra hard mode: build a thing that can kill cockroaches.)
• Sidequest 10: Find something I genuinely love to do. I consider this the mega boss of sidequests. You can complete the game and have a perfectly fulfilling experience without beating it, but you won’t have 100%-ed the game unless you do. This is my ultimate goal, and I’m hoping that four years will be enough to achieve it.

And there you have it! We’ve got quite a lot of ground to cover, so buckle down – it’s going to be an interesting playthrough. Thanks for joining me and I hope you’ll keep watching!