Living Meaningfully by Nisha D. '21

I really was not going to post. There were several excuses I was making to myself as to why I was not going to post:

• I am not even that old! I only graduated 4 years ago, or 1 MIT generation ago. My yapping has not quite faded into obscurity. 
• I did post an update last year, albeit in the top 1000 most used words in the English language. I tried to be descriptive. Not sure if I succeeded.
• Do I have words to post??? Should I be posting words when I have to actually be writing words for my job??? The latter of which actively have a hard deadline???

But then, all my friends started posting, and it was honestly so nice to see all the older bloglums give their updates that I decided to post too.

In real words: since leaving MIT, I have completely overhauled my life twice. The first was to move across the country to (less sunny than you’d think) San Francisco. It was part of an ongoing migration of most of my friends westward, some for grad school and some for work. Andrea M. ‘18 and I got an apartment just off 24th and Mission. My partner since freshman year of East Campus started his first year at Stanford. My childhood best friend moved a fifteen minute bike ride⁠01 For a year, we lived a 4.5 minute bike ride away from each other, which was closer than we had lived growing up. away. 

It took me a while to feel like I lived in California. For the first few months, I was flying back and forth to the East coast somewhat often, and felt like I was never actually in San Francisco for more than a few weeks at a time. I don’t know if I ever felt like I lived there until I decided to leave.

But by all heuristics, I did live there. I made new friends at the Twitch office, where I commuted almost every day for the free lunch, biked to the wholesale coop for groceries, and generally enjoyed the trappings of adult life, like having a tech salary and going to trivia and/or drinks after work. I spent some weekends in Palo Alto, marveling at the beauty of Stanford campus as I biked from the Caltrain station to Rains⁠02 Stanford grad housing ; my partner spent the rest in the city. My best friend and I had a resolution to go to a new bar and meet people every Wednesday evening, which we maybe did exactly once and spent the vast majority of Wednesdays at her apartment laughing at funny text posts and Final Fantasy 7 fan art on Pinterest. My couch featured a rotating cast of MIT friends. When it didn’t, Andrea and I used it to enjoy what we termed “pastoral evenings”, sewing patches onto our clothes and watching Sex and the City, Grey’s Anatomy, or Bojack Horseman while gorging on Meredith Farms goat cheese and the rosemary sourdough from Arizmendi. 

Recounting this now, some part of me wonders: why did I ever leave? How did I ever leave the place with the largest proportion of my loved ones? When we graduate from MIT, we leave because we have to, not usually because we want to. I left San Francisco because I made the choice to.

One of the freedoms of having a 9-5 is that I could pick up hobbies in the meantime. I started fencing again, and used Twitch’s wellness fund to expense all of my gear. I learned how to snowboard. I went on long bike rides and appreciated how beautiful California really is. I traveled – at the end of 2022, I flew in a full circle around the world, stopping back home in Boston, my UROP mentor’s wedding in India, and getting lunch with a friend in Tokyo along the way. I got to take my partner around Japan for our five year anniversary, backpacking down a trail older than the country of America. The European summer trip finally happened. 

On the surface, this is objectively a wonderful life – surrounded by friends, lots of hobbies, and a job that I liked decently well. 

And yet, I suffered from what I can only describe as a weird sort of malaise. With an overabundance of free time, I would always find myself filling it with activities that were fun but not particularly fulfilling. My social battery seemed to always be on 0%; in the absence of tasks to do after work, most of it was spent hanging out with friends, which…should be fulfilling, right? But more often than not, I would reach the end of the week and rue all the social obligations I had signed myself up for. It was almost as if I had choice paralysis with how to spend my free time, and I would end most days unhappy about how I had spent it.

Many of the long time readers will know that I waffled back and forth about grad school many times on the blogs. In light of COVID (and post-MIT induced exhaustion), I had decided to not apply that year.

But mid-malaise, the lurking thought persisted. Should I let the act of working constantly take over my life again? I had tried very hard, through having a 9-5, to not let work be the thing that my life revolved around. Some of my friends can do this very well and set positive examples for what I could be like if I took a page from their book. I spent countless hours rolling the idea over in my head. A PhD was a lot of commitment, what if I just did a masters? But most masters are unfunded and not research based. Maybe I was just having a hard time adjusting to adulting; many of my older MIT friends tried to talk me down from the edge, so to speak. But then I would visit my partner at Stanford and imagine the life I could have there as a PhD student, and romanticize, because the grass is always greener on the other side. 

A good friend of mine from work liked to quote the line “Know thyself” from Ted Lasso. Remember the European summer trip I mentioned? One of the stops on that trip was to a conference in Venice to present some research from my UROP that had finally got accepted. I had presented at a few conferences virtually over COVID, but this was my first time attending one in person. It was here that I had my “Know thyself” moment, working on the conference presentation with my UROP mentor at 3 am approximately 8 hours before I was supposed to be giving it. It was still working hours in San Francisco, and my manager called to tell me that my promotion had gone through, and that I effectively was now making twice of my (already very generous for a 23 year old) salary. And in that moment, I found that I…didn’t care, and that I was more excited to talk about this cool research project that I had done than I was about the fact that my total comp was $300k+. At the end of that trip, I asked my UROP mentor to write me a rec letter for grad school. She also told me to not apply, but she did write the letter.

I applied to 2*⁠03 I also threw a half-hearted application to Berkeley because it was There, but I wasn't a good research fit and had no expectation of actually getting in. PhD programs. Given PhD acceptance rates nowadays, this was ill-advised, but I had hubris, a reasonably strong publication record, and an unwillingness to leave the West coast. I had my sights set on Stanford – I could live with my partner in campus housing and not move far away from my friends. I dreamt about this existence so often that it became all-consuming. Tech layoffs were on the rise during my application season, and I was holding out for this vision of my life to manifest so that I wouldn’t have to worry about losing my job. 

One thing that has become exceedingly clear to me as of late is that I’m pretty used to getting what I want in life. I dreamed of MIT since I was a kid, and got admitted early action. I wanted to work in the gaming industry, and I worked at PlayStation and Twitch. I wanted to do a UROP related to games, and I found the perfect one. 

I did not get into Stanford. 

I later learned, after nearly a week spent in bed crying, that they did not accept anybody in my subfield of computer science that year because all the spots had gone to AI people (classic)⁠04 This phenomenon unfortunately continues to plague my life. . This did not make the rejection any less devastating. My dream was shattered, and I was left to wallow in its aftermath.

I did, however, get into the other school I applied to: the University of Washington. UW is in the top 3⁠05 The other two being Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech, both in places that I...did not want to live for 5 years biggest research hubs in human-computer interaction, and in undergrad, I had always toyed with the idea of applying there because I loved (and blogged extensively about) Seattle. 

I was initially so heartbroken about not getting into Stanford – and the prospect of actually leaving the Bay Area was so terrifying – that I wasn’t even going to go to the admitted students weekend. But it was a free trip to Seattle, if nothing else. So I went, with absolutely no expectation that I would actually end up going.

But over the course of three days spent on UW’s beautiful campus (even though the weather was classically Seattle), my imagination went to work. And slowly, I could see it. I could see myself walking hurriedly across Red Square to get to class, maybe peeping Mount Rainier if she was out that day. I could see myself working on my own projects and ideas with a level of research freedom that I hadn’t been able to imagine as an undergrad. I could go to the coffee shops and poke places that I had frequented over the course of two summers in Seattle. I could see myself working and engaging with a community of like-minded researchers from all across the university, and getting to fully immerse myself in the field. 

I could now see it, but the practicality of it was difficult. Even more of my friends were migrating to San Francisco. I didn’t have very many friends in Seattle, but the aforementioned work friend who likes Ted Lasso offered to move with me because he needed a change. I asked my partner if he would still love me if I moved to Seattle, and he said yes. 

Something about this decision has always been inevitable. In the parking lot of a gas station in Truckee, California, en route back from my partner’s lab Tahoe trip, at the end of a harrowing week wherein Twitch laid off 20% of its staff, I accepted UW’s offer. A few months later, my partner and I crammed my new car – a Subaru Crosstrek⁠06 It is...a very ugly color. Plasma yellow. Look it up. I bought off a friend – with all my belongings that didn’t go in the UHaul shipping boxes and we took a meandering drive up to Seattle for my new life to begin. 

~~~

I am now a 2nd year PhD student. There have been ups and downs on this journey for sure. I had a wonderful first year, but am definitely crashing out a bit in my second. Before moving here, I don’t think I could have imagined myself owning a car, but I have grown into a version of myself who is capable of deciding to do an activity by myself and drive to it. Being long distance from my partner and most of my close friends is hard sometimes, but the short flights make it easy for us to see each other every 3-4 weeks. I have gotten rejected from more things in my first year in academia than I ever have in my life. My range of experienced emotions, which always seemed to be hovering somewhere within +/- 1 standard deviations of the mean in San Francisco, is now back to a more MIT-like +/- 3 standard deviations of the mean, which means that I sometimes feel more fulfilled than I ever have in my life and sometimes I am concerningly depressed.

I have less time to do things now. Most of it is spent on classes and research. But I fill the time I do have with the things that I really, really like doing. I fence three times a week, 2-3 hours every time, and have simultaneously improved and gotten worse at it. This is the first year that I’ve ever competed individually at fencing, and I have done terribly at every competition this year, despite improving technically. Fencing, it turns out, is mostly about mental fortitude under pressure, something which I find myself lacking in, even after 4 years of getting firehosed at MIT. But I know there’s a lesson somewhere in pushing through failure and showing up for something every day even if you’re doing bad at it.

I drive myself to snowboarding, sometimes on random weekdays if I feel so inclined. I live near the lake I really liked running around in the summer of 2020 and have run two Seattle half-marathons, with my eyes on the full. I’m 30 hours into Baldur’s Gate III, which I allow myself to play an hour of at the end of every day. I go to movies with my grad school pals. Limited time means that I’m forced to spend it in a way that I feel is meaningful. This includes grinding myself into the ground for my research, or crying over whatever failure is haunting me in the moment.

I purposely haven’t mentioned what I research until the very end of this post. The thing that I’ve realized about myself is that I need to have some sort of mission or quest that defines my life. Having a regular tech job is not conducive to this, but slaving day in and day out on your ideas is, even if you’re the only person who cares about your ideas.

A little over four years ago, in one of my last blog posts, I said:

Somewhere hidden in the word limits of the college essays I wrote for MIT was a dream: to one day make a video game that changes somebody’s life like a game changed mine.

This is it. I played that game⁠07 Final Fantasy 7, of course over half my lifetime ago now, but this mission has not changed: to show, to prove, to put my stake into the world that games are wonderful, educational, and can change lives for the better. The malaise that haunted me at Twitch was due to deviating a little too far from that mission. The thing that keeps me going through the slog of grad school is knowing that what I’m doing feels in service of that mission, even if nobody else cares about it. Even if the government is collapsing, even if its been raining for weeks, even if nothing in my life is actually going well, I know that I’m working on externalizing my most longstanding passion, and that makes things okay.

I research meaningful experiences in games. Some of the projects I’ve worked on in the last year include: misinformation education escape rooms, designing apps for people in long distance relationships who stay connected through games⁠08 inspired very directly by my own experience , and a smattering of other projects related to games, education, and mental health. The project I’m working on right now is attempting to tackle the large task of modelling personally meaningful experiences in games and how they’ve tangibly affected peoples’ behaviors. Technology can be pretty horrible, but it can also be a positive force in peoples’ lives. I attribute a large part of being a functional and motivated human being to playing games, and I’m invested in more people having those sorts of experiences.

I’m writing this post on the same day that the NSF is literally getting nuked. As a researcher, I obviously have a lot of uncertainty about what that could mean for me. I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll be able to make it to the end of my degree with funding. I’ve surprised myself by having vague dreams of being a professor, something that I did NOT enter grad school even considering. For now, I’m hoping to just put my head down and keep working on the things that I enjoy, and crossing my fingers to land on my feet. This strategy has mostly been successful thus far.

This post has ended up being at least 3x as long as I expected it to be – posters instinct never dies, I guess. But I’ll leave it with another 4 year old quote from past Nisha:

I hope that this path I’m on will keep stretching to greener and greener pastures, and that I can continue to say that I’m in the place that I am because, many years ago, I opened a tiny PSX emulator window on my chunky MacBook 2011 and fell deeply in love with the poorly pixelated world of Final Fantasy VII.

It took some hard choices. But I’m glad to be able to report to past Nisha, and to all of you, that I can, in fact, continue to say that.