throughlines by Paolo A. '21
some things never change (but thankfully, only some)
helloooooooo blogosphere!
so i wasn’t planning on posting this week — the usual feelings of hosage, and what to write, and all of that. but reading everyone’s blogs has brought me so much joy, and i’m sitting here on a Sunday afternoon just being chronically online, and so i have decided to give myself exactly one (1) hour to write this blog. we are starting at 4:18 PM GMT, and we will see what is to come.
gmt. greenwich mean time. i’m in the united kingdom for the first time! i just came back from my first sunday roast with some grad school friends and collaborators, which was absolutely delicious and had far too much food but i will enjoy the leftovers for many meals this week.
beef roast, Yorkshire pudding, leeks, cabbage, potatoes, cheesy cauliflower, and sooo much more. all incredible
i’m here in Southampton on grad studenting business. it is still wild to me that i’m a grad student at MIT, that i’ve been around here for 8 years, that i only have 5 more semesters of mit and then i will never be a student again, that there is a world in which in 2.5 years i leave this place that i call home.
the grad school things are going. as said in many more words in other posts, i was never someone who was fully sold on grad school. there are times where grad school has been hard, because of so many reasons — mental health, trying to figure out what to work on, feeling like nothing i was working on was interesting or would make a difference in the world, things in my personal life. but i think in the last year, things have started to take a bit more of an upswing. i’ve met kids who are such nerds that were so happy to be a part of my research giving them more math materials. i’ve worked with entire cities’ school districts to help them figure out how to manage their school assignment process. heck, i’m in the UK right now looking at a whole country’s admissions data to analyze some policy questions. if i look back on senior year me, and the ways they were thinking about what grad school could be, these were the types of things i could only dream of doing them. and just like how whenever i bike to the department, i look across killian and up to the big dome, and think about how wild it is that i’m here at mit. in that same vein, there is this sense of awe at “wow, i cannot believe i’m actually doing this.”
mit. ten years.
at the end of this year, cambridge will be the longest i’ve lived in any one place. and honestly it does feel like it is home these days. nevada, where i am ostensibly from, was only really home for the people it had. and so many of those people are now scattered around the country. including right in Boston — one of my dearest and closest friends from HS lives just a 20-minute trek down the Orange line, just 8 minutes from the Green Street stop. and i’m there multiple times a month, and it is a joy to keep him in my life in this way. and now i’m friends with his partners, and friends of those partners, and also their cat beanie who is an adorable void cat with one brain cell, and we play DnD together across multiple campaigns (i am perhaps too proud of the Aussie and Irish accents i’ve been developing for wella and myrna, respectively). and i am very grateful to Boston and the people i’m around for being this community in my life. the high school friends who’ve known me forever, the grad school friends who commiserate about and share the joys of work, the old undergrad friends who get together and give each other snark and visit texas roadhouse once a year for valentine’s day our birthday mystery hunt.
and while i am someone who has been afraid of stagnation, and still am, it’s something that i’ve felt better about over time. part of that is because of this buildup of community — as someone who moved around a lot as a kid, boston is the first place where i’ve felt settled, where i know how to get around without needing to look up directions, where there are all of these people around me i care about and who care about me, where i feel so comfortable and so much like me.
but the other part of it, and perhaps more important, is recognizing that change will always happen. i think i didn’t use to always believe this. when a close friend asked me, a year or so out of undergrad, how much i’d changed in various eras of life, i said something about how i felt like most of my changing in life (~80%?) had happened to be in high school, the period of my life where i felt like i “became a person”. and maybe 15% had happened in college, and 5% afterward. and to paolo circa 2022, that was truly what i believed.
but i think 2022-me was biased to believe that because the ways that i changed in college were more subtle. yes, high school may have been where i came into a self for the first time. and the values of HS me may have been kept throughout college, and through until now, but the ways i’ve changed have been more about how i interpret those values, the ways i choose to live them out, the things that get done with them.
i started writing that sentence, only to remember halfway through that it’s exactly what my very first sentence on the blogs was.
I like to think that people are defined by two things — the values that they hold and the choices that they make. So I figured that a half-decent way of introducing myself to the world (and give a decent overview of the bajillion things I’m busy with these days) is to share some decisions I’ve made over the past few weeks across all sorts of areas in my life. In alphabetical order…
funny how things come full circle. (time check: 4:47. aaaa.)
there are certainly many ways in which i do feel the same as senior year me, who started blogging 5 years ago during the height of COVID, though often they do play out in different ways. certainly i’m still a very musical person, though it’s now come more to the forefront through a cappella and musicals. i’m also certainly a creature of impulse, making very stupid jokes and enjoying the little things in life.
perhaps the biggest way that last bit comes out is in my GRAing. GRAs, or Graduate Resident Advisors, are grad students who live in undergrad dorms and run study breaks, help students when they need things, provide advice, and just generally be a presence. i like to describe it as “i am an adult if you need one”.
as previously mentioned on the blogs by Amber ’24, i’m the gra for burton 1 (go b1ners!!). it’s very fun to be the b1ner gra, and not just because several bloggers have passed through (Amber V. ’24, Gosha G. ’24, Allison E. ’27, Veronica P. ’27) (god there are SO many of y’all aren’t there). i do find a very, very deep personal joy in getting to feed the b1ners through finals breakfasts, and being there if someone needs to talk about stress or how life is going or etc. but of course, being me, i also find deep joy in it for running my very, very stupid study breaks, including:
- a scavenger/puzzle hunt ending in discovering gallons of tosci’s ice cream in my freezer
- paolo-run taskmaster
- “deface my apartment” (parts 1, 2, and 3, which respectively, created sexy rat, kirby with his dogs out + a debate of whether my freezer was a fridge or a television, and a label saying “gullible” on my ceiling)
(if any b1ners are reading this, this is a secret SECRET announcement that my next study break is going to be T themed. as in, MBTA, tea i’m bringing back from Southampton. a giant T spoon that i made over the holidays. brought to you by the letter T. also lots of British snacks send me your requests :P)
(if you’re not a b1ner, you are not allowed to spill the beans to them. shh.)
(and if you are a b1ner. 💙💙💙 excited to see y’all again soon!)
so what are ways i feel like i’ve changed, ways that i didn’t appreciate before but recognize now, or new ways of change that have cropped up?
- i think there’s more of a calmness. i know that one friend in particular (hi, dean) would laugh at me for saying this, but truly, i do feel like my life is more calm than it used to be in a way i didn’t use to appreciate. the fact that i take practically all of my evenings and weekends off. that i make time for like 6 hours of DnD every week. that i’ve taken up all of these hobbies that i never did before. sure, i may still do a lot of things. but i think there’s a sense in which it feels calm because i feel more willing to let things go. to say no to things. to have an evening where i am just by myself, with a youtube video on or with just my thoughts or just looking at some music. and it is nice to do all of that.
- having more self-understanding about various aspects of myself. it’s one of those things where i feel like these blogs aren’t the best place to talk about it (at least, right now), with how intrinsic and personal they are, but those who know me irl will know precisely what i’m referring to. as with all things, it is a journey, and there is a joy in the process.
- a feeling of agency. through undergrad, i was always flying between activity X and Y and Z and then sleeping and then immediately getting back to it in the morning. hanging out with friends would entail psetting. breakfast in the next house dining hall meant reading a paper, too. but in recent years, i have had more of this sense of “i am allowed to make whatever choices i would like”. i can choose to go to LA with friends for a week, because why not? no one is stopping me from auditioning for musicals i am underqualified for, or learning silly accents, or just taking my bike and sitting in a park somewhere for two hours, or from meeting strangers and becoming friends with them, or making puzzle hunts such an integral part of my life that i fly back to Boston for literally 90 hours to do MIT Mystery Hunt.
me w/ rfong ’12 at mystery hunt 2025 :) see danny b.d. ’15’s post for further mystery hunt thoughts
when i was in chicago over the summer, i grabbed coffee with a high school friend. (i actually hadn’t remembered she was in town until i arrived, and the friend i was staying with asked “so… are you planning to meet up with anyone else while you’re here?”) i hadn’t talked to her in almost 4 years, and there was a deep joy in getting to see her again.
it didn’t take long for the rust to fall off of our friendship, and soon we were giving each other snark and talking about all sorts of things in our lives. i’d forgotten that at some point in high school, between being co-TAs and sharing study halls, we decided that we were people who were allowed to just ask each other anything. one particularly interesting conversation topic that we got to was “what are ways that you think you’ve changed from high school for the worse?”
in some ways, this is a bit of the antithesis of the section above. it’s taking a careful look at yourself and pointing to some part of you and saying “i wish that you weren’t there, and you were the way you were 7 years ago”. and it’s because of this that it feels a bit like an unfair question. it is forcing one to make judgments about oneself, to explicitly assign parts of oneself a negative quality.
of course, that isn’t to say i don’t have an answer — i did. but i bring this all up not to share that answer, but rather to focus on the fact that the part of myself i am working on the most right now is that of self-judgment. of letting myself be the person that i am, and leaving it at that. of feeling like i can identify with who i am. a few years ago, i noted with my therapist that i often said phrases like “when X happens, my brain thinks Y…” or “my body feels Z”. on reflection, that’s a very impersonal way of seeing the world — in some ways, beyond brain in a jar, where instead i am just experiencing the thoughts and feelings through the lens of some third-party brain and body.
when i talk about agency, and self-understanding, i think this really is what i’m referring to: the idea that i can just be the person i am.
i’m a little over time, as it is now 5:24PM, but i’m giving myself a little leeway from adding photos and getting distracted showing some people some photos and one of the grad school friends coming through the kitchen to grab some coffee. we all need a little leeway sometimes, and deadlines often are just recommendations :) [note: this is not advice for your mit app. that one is not a recommendation.]
it’s been fun to see this post come out of absolutely nothing in the last hour, to watch it grow and flourish and become something. and it’s been fun reading everyone’s posts this week, seeing all the ways that the bloggers have changed from their undergrad days, and yet, are still unmistakably themmany years later.
wishing all of you the best, and excited to keep seeing the ways in which everyone grows :)