A few minutes north of the Charles River and the rest of campus is a 117-year-old building shaped vaguely like two stacks of donuts—Random Hall, MIT’s smallest dorm, founded on leap day of a leap year and soon turning 11. On the third floor, behind the purple door with the Pennsylvania truck license plate, is my home at MIT.

We’re in the lounge, probably. We might be watching Dr. Who, the remains of last night’s p-set party scrawled across the blackboard. A few people are working through another p-set, and another group is talking over cookies. Someone just made tea.

I’m still in rollerblades. There’s probably a camera dangling from my wrist, still screwed into its collapsible tripod.

I’m 5’4’’, 5’6’’ in rollerblades. I have shoulder-length brown hair and, when I can find them, glasses. I was born in Moscow, Russia, and grew up in Chicago and rural-urban central Pennsylvania. I’m currently a junior at MIT, majoring in course 6-7 (computer science and molecular biology) and 18 (math) and minoring in 21W (writing). I like reading, writing, drawing, programming, photography, canoeing, and hiking. Most of what I do is fueled by nature and people. My friends describe me as energetic.

The sky fades to coffee black and the stars climb up our JWindowPanes, dampening our pixels’ brightness but hopefully not our enthusiasm for the long night ahead of us. You and I stare up at the same moon, potentially hours apart depending on our relative locations and proximity to a lunar standstill. I hope I can portal you into my personal universe, at least a little bit, and that you will come to love MIT as much as I do.

Oh, and you should email me (lidusha[at]mit[dot]edu). I love emails.