It’s been a long road… by Jessie L. '07

Why yes, I am rewatching Star Trek: Enterprise!

My hair has been updated in the last seventeen and a half years.

Hello, blog readers! This is Jessie (they/them or she/her), class of 2007 and one of the earliest MIT Admissions bloggers. I lived on 5^th East in East Campus and I majored in course 9 (Brain & Cognitive Sciences). I started blogging in the summer of 2005.

First of all, I’m running the Boston Marathon in April! I’m raising money for the National Organization for Rare Disorders. I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome myself, which is something I didn’t know in college (you can actually read a little about how I learned at that link). My Linktree has a few links to my different donation incentives. It’s the first time I’ve run the Boston Marathon (or any marathon), but I’ve run the BAA Distance Medley (a 5K, a 10K, and a half-marathon, put on by the same organization that puts on the Marathon) for the past two years.

Me running the 2024 Boston Half-Marathon in November.

For various reasons, I don’t want to specify exactly where I work, but I’ll say that it involves tech safety in the context of a human rights-related field, doing mostly national-level and some international work. I’ve gotten to advise government departments (both US ones and foreign delegations visiting through a Department of State program), tech companies, and the UN, all of which is pretty neat.

I ended up getting a PhD in computer science after a few post-MIT years of working in tech. I did a postdoc at Harvard, in computational public health. Then I decided that I didn’t really want to keep pursuing academia after all. I went into another field altogether, one that saw heightened need during the COVID-19 pandemic, while also learning and practicing digital security in my personal time. That combination of disparate fields led to my current job. It has nothing to do with my undergrad major, but it has everything to do with my attraction – which I had then – to interdisciplinary work.

This was my grad school profile pic from mid-2013. I was 28.

Outside of work, I’ve been busy, and not just with running. I make metal/glass/gemstone jewelry as a hobby, and I do a lot of activism. I learned a decent amount of Haitian Creole and have volunteered with newly-arrived migrant families. I’ve been a street medic – a first aid volunteer – at protests since 2011, and was on the scene providing first aid in 2017 when a neo-Nazi ran a car through a crowd of counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. There was a famous photo of me in the news. I don’t want to post it directly here because it requires big content notes for terrorism and blood/injury, but you can find it at the top of a WDTV (CONTENT NOTE) article from August 12, 2017. My activism has taken me a lot of places: from Ferguson, Missouri, to Washington DC, to Tijuana, to the Southern Arizona deserts, to Palestine. I’m active in my local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, and in 2021 I did a community organizing fellowship with progressive Jewish organization JOIN for Justice.

I made this solid bronze amulet by hand! Also the silver and moonstone pendant in the pic at the top of this post.

I never talked much about Jewishness as a blogger, because I was in a period of my life where I assumed that “normal” Jews wouldn’t accept me. Children of intermarriage have become more and more accepted in Jewish communities, but we weren’t always. In the 17 and a half years since I graduated from college, this is something that has become an integral part of my life. I’m a member of the Boston Workers’ Circle, a left-leaning Jewish cultural center. Somewhat recently, I started volunteering with the food pantry at Jewish Family & Children’s Service (my favorite role is helping the “shopper” volunteers meet complicated combinations of medical and religious restrictions as they fill food bags for the clients). Anyone can receive food from this food pantry, but it’s the only one with kosher options that I know of locally, and my impression is that it’s unusually good at meeting medical food restrictions. A large number of clients are elders, including some Holocaust survivors. I’ve been learning Russian to be a more valuable volunteer, because a lot of people served by JF&CS are Russian speakers.

I’m a very different person than I was from 2005-2007. I’ve been married since 2010 and just became a homeowner. I’m older, wiser, and have been through a whole lot more (seriously, I’ve seen and been through some things). I know more about myself now (it would have been helpful, in college, to have known that I was autistic with ADHD, or that I had Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, or that I was pretty seriously depressed). The concepts of genderqueerness/nonbinariness were only starting to be on the radar of people I knew. But there’s a pretty clear throughline between what I was then and what I am now.

I used to think that an MIT education doesn’t simply open doors – it teaches you how to find creative ways the other side. I thought that as a struggling 20-year-old. I still basically think it now. My intellectual interests are very, very different (and honestly, much deeper) than they were then. My work has nothing to do with my major. But I still think that MIT played a pretty big role in forming me into what I would be as an adult. Forged and formed, like I do with metal when I’m in the studio.

A high school graduation party in 2003, a few months before I started at MIT. It’s been a long road.

P.S. Nobody has cared about my undergrad grades in a very, very, very long time. I promise you that you can have some rocky times academically and still go on to professional and personal success.