my classes are exploding by Joy X. '29

This semester, I’m finally off  the credit limit! ⁠01 MIT limits the number of classes first years can take. Each full-time class is 12 units, with each unit roughly corresponding to each hour per week that you have to spend on the class, whether it is lecture, recitation, or homework.

There’s nothing holding me back >:) 

And so this semester, I cranked the knob on the firehose ⁠02 there’s a famous saying that “getting an education from MIT is like drinking from a firehose” to maximum and made the brilliantly horrible choice to register for 7 classes. They are as follows:

• 8.05: Quantum Mechanics II: I’m now officially a Physics major ⁠03 we declared our majors at the end of first year! . I’d taken 8.04 (Quantum Mechanics I) last year, and this just seemed like the natural next step. I did have some mixed feelings about 8.04—I thought that the class was very heavy on algebra and churning numbers—but I hoped that 8.05 would give me a better understanding and appreciation.

• 8.033: Relativity: Another physics class; I had heard many good things about the lecturer, Scott Hughes, and they did not disappoint—he has a really engaging lecturing style and seems to care a lot about the class. In fact, our class is being recorded for MIT OpenCourseWare, so by the end of the semester, maybe the lectures will be public!

• 18.901: Introduction to Topology: I was actually really excited about this class. I took  Algebra I and II ⁠04 most people who hear this do a double take because they’re like “didn’t you take algebra i and ii in middle school??” and it’s hilarious. I’ve confused so many people with that joke. But this is the abstract algebra track, and covers things like rings, fields, linear algebra, Galois theory, etc. last year, and really enjoyed pure mathematics. I plan to declare a double major in mathematics next semester, and 18.901 is a requirement for the major. Plus, most of my previous math experience was in algebra (which I really like), and I wanted to broaden out to some analysis. 

• 18.404: Theory of Computation: My friend took this class last year and had very high reviews of it. It looked interesting and fit in my schedule, so I added it…and to be honest, in hindsight maybe this is why my schedule exploded so much—when I was selecting classes, my philosophy was “if it fits, I’m taking it”… which looking back, was not a very good philosophy.

• 21G.402: German II: In high school, I really wanted to learn German. I think I just wanted to learn a language, and chose German arbitrarily because it sounded cool, I guess. I self-studied it on and off for a bit but never got too far because I was not very concentrated in my efforts. Since I had some German knowledge beforehand, I was able to skip to German II.

• 21G.611: Russian I: I started “learning” Russian about last year, and by “learning” I mean I had two friends who spoke Russian and I would go about asking one of them for insults in Russian to use against the other. Somehow through this I’ve gotten attached to the language, and this semester I resolved to learn more words than  “дурак” ⁠05 which is also the name of a popular card game in many post-Soviet countries, which is how I learned of it .

• 21G.086: 20th Century Ukraine and Russia: Entangled Histories and Identity Politics: All MIT students are required to take a total of 2  CI-H ⁠06 Communication-Intensive Humanities  subjects in their first and second years, and this is effectively our writing requirement. This was actually my second choice of CI-H—I had really wanted to take a German film class, but it had gotten unexpectedly cancelled. I had really enjoyed my history class in my senior year of high school, and was sad when we ran out of time to finish our Soviet Union unit; hence, I was excited when I saw this in the course catalogue, especially since it’s pretty relevant today.

[Spoiler: I’m not in all of them anymore 😔but somehow, for some reason, possessed by some sort of insanity, at the beginning of the semester I was fully planning to take all of them. When I met with my advisor to confirm my registration before classes started, she had (like a good advisor) expressed concern over my almost-double-the-amount-of-coursework. I therefore promised that I would drop some, but secretly I didn’t plan to. But then I did ¯\_(ツ)_/¯]

This is what my schedule during the first week of classes looked like:

ahhhhhh

…due to some stroke of bad luck (yes yes I’m going to blame it all on luck), my classes all lined up in a row. Here’s what my first day of classes looked like:

I biked ⁠07 I got a bike this year! literally best investment ever; now I actually show up to lecture on time :P to Stata Center at 10:30am to get a bagged lunch before sitting in 18.901 for an hour and a half, speedwalking across campus to make it in time for 8.05, where we reviewed the material for 8.04 for one and a half hours, then scarfing down my lunch outside the lecture room (I was lucky that all the physics classes occur in the same room, 6-120, and so I had ten minutes of break where I didn’t have to relocate) before another hour and a half of lecture.

Then I had a whopping thirty minutes of break! I sat in the LODGE ⁠08 one of the study spaces along the Infinite Corridor, the long corridor that connects most of the buildings in MIT’s main campus   and responded to some emails. I ended my academic day with an hour of Russian, where we said привет to each other for what seemed like a million times. 

After a total of 5.5 hours of lecture, most of them consecutively, I felt… great! I was surprised that I had held my concentration intact for such a long time, and I felt so accomplished and productive. I couldn’t wait for my problem sets to come out, so I could feel even more productive by doing them. That Sunday was a beautiful sunny day out, and I spent ten hours sitting in my room, doing my homework. 

Needless to say (though it was not very needless then and was quite a surprise), it was not sustainable. 

Although I had felt great at the start, by the end of the first full week of classes, I was getting a bad tension headache everyday from sitting in 4-4.5 hours of lecture in a row for four days in a week, then going home and spending many more hours in a row on problem sets. So I decided that if my brain was not going to overload this semester, I simply had to drop some classes. 

Yet even so, when I finally mustered up the strength to submit my Class Drop form, I felt some sort of separation anxiety (maybe others will call it Stockholm Syndrome). I’d psyched myself up so hard for seven classes that taking any less felt…not enough.

Why did I decide to overload my schedule like this? Surely, a mix of hubris, bad foresight, and that desire to optimize everything in my life. 

When I was little and learning to write in Chinese, I had those workbooks of characters where you trace out characters in the book. Having been 8 or 9, at the ripe age where one learns about the Industrial Revolution in school history class, I took inspiration from the factories of the 19th century and pretended my Chinese homework was an assembly line—what happened was I wrote a row of the first strokes of some character, then went back and added the second strokes, then the third, until I had completed the page. 

There were some problems with this—notably, no one writes like that (imagine writing a book by writing the first letters of each word, then the second, then the third, until all your words are complete). And notably, it’s not the way you should learn to write—as a consequence, I’m still illiterate. 

I think the same mindset that made assembly line-ing my Chinese homework was what made me so tempted towards the Sophomore Stupid [see Anika’s blog]. I’m so tempted to treat everything in my life as something that can be optimized—like I’m a video game character and in order to win, I have to minmax my stats. When I was little, I had always measured my success comparatively—to win at life, I had to be the best in the world at something. And to be the best, I had to pour every effort in one direction. Any type of balance meant that something was wasted. 

I don’t mean to disparage ambition or competitiveness. I think a healthy dose of both (though at times it has not been healthy :P) has made me who I am today. But as the classic adage that I just made up goes, “Life is like riding a unicycle. To go fast, you have to not fall off.” And in order to not fall off, you need to maintain some sort of balance. ⁠09 I feel like there’s also some unintended other meaning here since it’s also very hard to balance on a unicycle without going moderately fast. but ignore that :) . As it turns out, happiness is kind of important for motivation. 

So I ended up dropping two classes: my history class and my topology class—and poof! 12 hours of my week (and more, since problem sets also take time outside of class) were back in my possession. Here are some things I did with those extra 12 hours the next week:

• I watched Your Name, a movie that LSC ⁠10 the Lecture Series Committee, which puts on movies on the projectors in the lecture halls every week put on. I hardly ever watch movies, but I’d heard that it was a good movie, plus my friend was running it. I had a great time! It was a really sweet movie; the art style and music was fantastic. I was sobbing at the last few scenes (I’m an easy crier—I cry at most movies that are supposed to make you cry. And sometimes at movies that are not supposed to make you cry, too ⁠11 once when I was watching <em>A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes </em>in the theatre I was crying of laughter so hard because one of the very emotional scenes where the main character picks up a scarf looked like he was eating a croissant ). 
• Instead of speedrunning my bagged lunch because I had no time, now I actually had a free hour around lunchtime! I got Vietnamese Pho with a friend at Eastern Edge, a food court on the—surprise—eastern edge of campus. 
• After a year of promising to go to Spinjam, I went to Spinjam again! Spinjam is basically firespinning, but off fire. We gather on the lawn near East Campus ⁠12 a dorm at MIT , the Spinning Arts club provides lots of props and people to teach tricks on the props, and we spin things! I learned some cool tricks on the dragonstaff and tried to juggle it. Then the next week I had too many psets and skipped it again. ⁠13 I promise I promiseeee I will learn to spin on fire someday

After experiencing true freedom, I’ve forgotten why I wanted to take seven classes in the first place. I’ve realized that by trying to stuff my schedule with all the classes I could fit, I was missing out on so many other things. But then again, I’m always missing out on so many things—the FOMO at this school is real. Even after dropping two classes and taking “only” five classes, I’m still at a heavy courseload. It still feels like I’m rushing from assignment to assignment and from class to class. I wish I had more time to spend on my language classes—after every German class, I end up with ten or more new vocabulary words in my notebook and I keep meaning to turn them into flashcards, but it never happens. I wish I had more time to spend on my UROP ⁠14 undergraduate research opportunity—I’m working on a project related to particle physics . I wish I had more time to blog. I wish I had time to juggle literally and not metaphorically. But alas, such is the curse of time that we are only allowed 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, and 52.1429 weeks in a year.

Someday, I’ll figure out how to make a time turner, so I can go back and do everything I never had the time for.