(another) postcard from GTL spain by Veronica P. '27

barcelona, with casa battló in the background

If there’s anything I’ve learned from being here this long, it’s that when the weather turns and the gloom sets in and everything feels cold and bleak, the one thing that helps is to pick your head up, to stop staring at the sidewalk and instead look at the faces that are right there with you. Sometimes that’s all you need.’

— paraphrased from the instructor on the first day of MIT’s pistol class 01 unfortunately I was on the waitlist and did not make it beyond the first class, so I do not remember his name off the top of my head

Hi again blog,

I write to you from my plane, which departed Barcelona about two hours ago. I just finished watching “My Old Ass” 02 thank you to my roommate Layla, for sending it to me and knowing i would love it . Rather than a plot summary 03 most succinctly, an 18 year old girl who is visited by her 39 year old self the summer before she leaves for college , I’ll give you the feeling the movie gave me: as if someone was shaking me by the shoulders, urging me never to take anyone in my life for granted.

Similarly, my brain is swimming in all the wisdom dispensed by the slew of cruft blogs. Reading them, I can’t help but be left with a heightened appreciation for the 4 years I get to have at this school, and particularly for how much the people are what make them.

Catalonia has been very generous to me. Its teenagers, with their patience as I harp on in English about topics they’ve only ever found the words for in Catalan. My host family, with the two mandarins oranges they pack me for work every morning, or even some spare change so i can look forward to a mid-day cappuccino at the vending machine. Even the streets, with work from the minds of Gaudi and Dali offering up an escape from the mundane, giving me pause as I marvel at how anyone could come up with art so beautiful and complex.

Two weeks into teaching in Roses, my fellow GTLer, Supriya 04 shoutout Supriya, i’m sorry u stepped in dog poop. also, more context provided in previous blog , and I found ourselves being send with our students to a hackathon in Barcelona. It feels wrong to admit this as an MIT student, but I had no clue what a hackathon even was, let alone how I could be useful. All we knew is that we would be checking in on the students from our school and offering advice; otherwise, we’d be in for quite a bit of down time.

But, not ten minutes upon arrival, we were asked: “You’re the MIT Students, right? Awesome. How do you feel about controlled chaos?”

This hackathon was run by MIT’s Edgerton center, as part of an international outreach program called Edventures. Essentially, the event is 100 high school students teaming up for a three day sprint to ideate, prototype, and present an invention of their choice. And when I say of their choice, I mean really, entirely of their choice. One group presented an extreme affinity for chairs, another dreamed of creating a solar vehicle, yet another that came up with a masochistic box 05 it lit up and reacted if you hit or yelled at it lol . The mission was to convey the sense that the sky was the limit: that any progress made within three days wouldn’t even hold a candle to how far they could get if they committed a month, or, say, a year towards their vision. 

Evidently, an event like this takes a lot of care and coordination to put together. One of the coolest things was seeing that local participants from previous years would come back to serve as mentors or distribute materials, helping share part of the effort. The more hands on deck, the better. Learning this, I should’ve known that showing up in my MIT MechE merch would invite some conversation.

So I confirmed that I was, indeed, down to be thrown directly into the fire— thus launching what I call my GTL x Edgerton Center crossover episode. Supriya and I integrated ourselves as best we could into the team— already a very well oiled machine. Before long, we were committing to earlier wakeup times, telling our school that we’d be staying on site later. A year before, I was a prospective Course 20 06 a story for another time, i promise who had barely even touched a tool. Now, I was spending an entire day overseeing the mechanical room, equipped with a fanny pack of exacto knives and troubleshooting construction errors. Every time I had the opportunity to help out, I found myself wanting to do so without hesitation. Despite having zero obligation to, I happily embraced the chaos. But why?

Honestly, I fully believe it was the energy of the Edventures team: from the conversations I had with them to the love I could tell they held towards their project, towards each other. In Spain, my life got the chance to intersect with people I never would have met otherwise. While I knew this would happen with my host family, I didn’t expect this sort of thing to happen with people from my very own school. As small as people like to say MIT is, there’s a lot of people— particularly beyond your course number or your living community— that you may never cross paths with. I’m glad that, this time around, I chose to embrace it.

The night of the last day, the team decided to celebrate together.

“Que causalidad— or how do you say it in English?”

“What a coincidence, isn’t it?”

“No, no, that’s casualidad. I mean causalidad. It happened for a reason.”