Hitting Rewind on 2013 by Hamsika C. '13

I know, long time no see.

My last entry was almost exactly four months ago…which is terrible. Senior fall ended up being a little more overwhelming than I thought it was going to be – a confusing whirlwind of psets, tests, med school interviews, extracurriculars, and more. By the time finals week rolled around, I was desperate to be done. I stumbled through 1 final presentation, 2 final projects, and 2 final exams then flew home to Houston. For the next two weeks, all I did was read at Barnes and Noble (I finally read the last book in the Eragon series! Yeah…I haven’t really matured in college >.< ), eat my mom’s food, and sleep like 10 hours a night. It was like hitting a huge, much-needed reset button on my life.

At the beginning of January, I flew back to Boston for a month-long externship at a healthcare consulting firm about an hour outside Boston. The externship program is a pretty cool opportunity for MIT students to take advantage of during IAP. Current students can apply to various externship postings and work for a month with an MIT alumnus at a company that matches their interests. While I do plan on going directly to medical school next year, I have always wondered what consulting was all about. My IAP healthcare consulting externship ended up being the perfect way for me to satisfy that curiosity – and it didn’t hurt that the MIT alumnus I got matched up with was a good friend of mine and always awesome and encouraging. Kinda like this –

Because the commute was about an hour each way, I woke up early and slept early all through IAP. And – somehow – IAP flew by and the semester had begun.

Soooo….my semester….is…..AWESOME.

For How I Met Your Mother fans, my semester is so awesome that the following would be appropriate –

The reason it’s so awesome is because I am taking – wait for it – ONE CLASS TOTAL!! Woooooo!

Granted, it’s a lab class, so my Tuesdays and Thursdays are pretty much packed with lab time. But my Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are free – which means EVERY weekend is – at the very least – a 4-day weekend!

I love the extra time – so far I’ve mostly used it to plan Camp Kesem events and teach Intro Psych recitations, but after the next week or so, a lot of CK stuff will be done and I’ll get to do things at MIT/in Boston that I’ve wanted to do forever – like visit the Museum of Fine Arts, learn how to make data visualizations like this one, get back to dancing a lot, and more.

I’ve already started on the dance thing. I’m back on Chamak this semester – MIT’s Indian fusion dance team. We have a big performance coming up the first weekend of March so I’ve been trying to catch up to the rest of team members, who already know most of the choreo. In addition to Chamak, I’m also co-choreographing the senior class dance for MIT’s annual Culture Show – or C-Show. This is my first time ever choreo-ing a Bollywood style dance. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

So yeah – this semester has been busy but not in a pset-test-class kind of way. More in a let-me-absorb-as-much-of-this-place-as-I-can-before-I-leave kind of way. In three short months, I’ll be graduating…can’t believe it. It feels like just yesterday that I wrote those entries from freshman year…

In any case, hopefully more time = more exploring = more interesting stuff for me to tell you! Stay posted for more updates on CK, Chamak, C-Show and more :)