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Four days after I returned to my home in New Hampshire after the Great Campus Exodus in March, I decided to pick up running again. I decided that I would absolutely lose my mind staying inside all the time, and that I needed some form of exercise that wasn’t just… Read More

While I’m working on a longer post, I wanted to write a quick post and share some of the old bookmarks I was digging through today. It’s a window into the kinds of things I was interested in three to five years ago, so read into it as you will. Read More

There’s a large park system in Boston called the The Emerald Necklace which stretches seven miles from the Boston Common all the way down to Franklin Park Zoo. Before this semester, I’d only been to the Public Garden and the Boston Common, which are two adjacent parks right in… Read More

here’s the thing: most of my MIT friends are currently in the Cambridge area. however, even if there wasn’t a pandemic, I wouldn’t be able to meet up with all of them since I’m hosed all the time. given current circumstances, I’ve had to pick and choose who to spend… Read More

This was originally posted on my personal Medium blog @selamjie,  but I thought it would be good to share here too for those of you who may still be in high school and interested in robotics. Now that I have graduated, this is the type of post-college wisdom I might share from time to time on Admissions :)  _________ When I was in grade school, I distinctly remember not really knowing what different engineering professions looked like. By high school it became somewhat clearer, but honestly, not all that much. By sophomore year of college, I had to declare my major. I knew I liked robotics and what that meant academically, but even at that time, I didn’t really know what it meant to have a job in robotics. I find that this is even more so the case for people whose parents had professions that are far removed from STEM. My mother has a small business doing tax and accounting, and she served a bunch of other small businesses in the Chinese community. Some people did similar work to my mom — insurance, real estate, professional services that people who didn’t always speak the best English could rely on. Others had restaurants, liquor stores, massage parlors. All these small business owners had kids, and as you might guess, they often told them they should be engineers, among other professions. But I’m not sure many of us really knew what being an engineer meant. So that’s why I decided to write this post. I’m hoping it will become a series — “What a Career Looks Like” — where I can interview people in other fields, too, but we’ll see. For now, I’ll just start with my own profession, robotics. Read More

My entire professional life has revolved around education and college admissions.  Even though I have observed many changes, including the transition from an entirely paper-based process (featuring typed or hand-written applications) to a largely digital one (with applications and supporting documents completed and/or transmitted online) to recent COVID-necessitated innovations like… Read More