major takeaways: from every semester of mit by Cami M. '23

content warnings: suicide mentions

98 days.

I think oftentimes it’s very easy to get caught up in the daily metronome of life, especially when you’re on a set schedule. Every day, I wake up, I work out, I go to class, I talk to my friends, I do work, I head home, I sleep. Next day. Repeat. Next day. Repeat.

My friends and I have been talking about lately how we recycle the same topics over and over again. Every day it’s a conversation about how Raymond and I are doing, how it’s our last semester, what guy someone is dating, how much work someone has. I think that’s what I hate most about this time of year.

I’ve never had a good spring semester at MIT, or, my falls were always better, at least. I find that by the time February and March rolls around things feel tired, they feel already done. It’s just a crawl to the end of the school year before you can do summer things.

But now I stand at an awkward place where I don’t really want to graduate, but I don’t reaaallly want to do the whole school thing anymore.

But I think one of the benefits of this time of year is that I tend to do a lot more thinking. The weather is colder, usually snowy (it is right now), and people usually become a lot more hosed, so you have a lot of time to yourself to just think.

These past four years have been a whirlwind and there are moments where I feel like I haven’t truly learned everything I needed to at MIT.

But in these moments of reflection, I’ve realized that every semester really has taught me something important, some greater, grand life lesson that I hope to carry with me into the future.

freshman fall: it’s okay to drop things

Perhaps best explained in one of my earliest blogs, freshman Cami learned the importance of drop date. I came into MIT with a lot of hopes and ideas of what I was going to do. I was going to dive in head first, I was going to take the hardest classes possible and be in five different extracurriculars and make things in my free time and go to the gym everyday and cook food and, well, you get the point.

Freshman fall is meant to be a reality check for baby students. It’s why MIT so graciously gives us P/NR. A lot of freshmen enter with warped ideas of what their next four years are going to be like, and realize quickly that a lot of things they set out to do simply just don’t happen. Or, they end up wanting to do other things in life.

freshman spring: i am not the person that i was

I’ve mentioned time and time again that I have trauma, and I think I carried a lot of that with me into college. I wasn’t particularly well liked in high school for my prickly personality among other things and I was struggling a lot with reckoning my high school self with this person I was becoming now in college and figuring out what aspects to keep and throw away. There was some part of me that felt guilty for changing because it felt as though I was admitting that some part of me was “wrong,” that needed correction. And so it was really hard to feel okay with changing myself.

I think still now I struggle with this. I’m often unsatisfied with the person I put forth, but I think my freshman spring was where I really got that first taste of intrinsic change, using the time at home to reflect on the then and now.

sophomore fall: you aren’t really ever done growing (it’s okay to fail)

My sophomore fall was by far my most difficult semester at MIT. I was in a house where I had sour relationships with my housemates, I was close to failing all my classes, and worst of all, I had started thinking of suicide again.

This kind of came as a shock to me because I hadn’t felt that way since high school and those feelings came from feelings of social isolation, of losing my friends in high school. At MIT, though, I figured I had solved all those things. I had friends that cared about me. What could possibly stop me now?

Surprisingly, it was academics. It was the feeling of running freely and openly at MIT to only slam headfirst into a brick wall, realizing that I wasn’t smart enough for this school. I had thought this in the past, almost transferring out of MIT in January 2020, but had never really felt it to such a drastic extent.

It seemed as though no matter how much time or effort I poured into my classes, I still failed to grasp the concept. It was as though I needed double, triple, if not quintuple the time it took the average MIT student and I felt like a failure.

I began really internalizing these doubts and fears, feeling useless and stupid. I started jeopardizing my relationships, both platonic and romantic, by taking out this anger and fear onto them. And ultimately I came very close to attempting suicide.

But of course I survived and pushed through and realized that failing was simply something I was going to have to co-exist with.

sophomore spring: you don’t have to feel bad

Despite coming to this great realization, I was having a hard time putting these words into action, showing the same bad habits as I had last semester.

I remember feeling a lot of anger during this semester — why were people doing this to us? Why was I being treated like this? Why did I feel like dogshit every single day? Is this really how I want to spend the rest of my life?

Ultimately, it was these questions that made me realize I don’t have to feel this way. And I soon re-declared 21E⁠01 Humanities and Engineering joint major, as opposed to a full computer science major. after this.

junior fall: there is a life outside of this place

My junior fall was my first semester as a full 21E major. I was taking three humanities classes and an easier technical class, my first semester taking three HASS classes and it was a really eye-opening experience. This was also around the time that I had just moved into DPhiE and all my friends and I were scattered across Boston-Cambridge, new people were coming into my friend group, and ultimately there was a large period of change just happening.

I essentially used this free time to really find my stride socially — I made friends in DPhiE, I started getting daily lunch and dinners with people, I befriended Mikey, Julian, and Savoldy, Eva was now fully part of our friend group. I was also just falling back in love with things I used to do, like concertgoing and playing video games and making videos. I had finally found a way to feel happy at MIT; it wasn’t some great, elusive thing.

junior spring: but learn how to spend your free time wisely

I took my newfound freedoms and had thrown myself into a lot. I was going through sorority drama, dropping jobs, breaking my ankle, getting COVID, and honestly I was still dealing with the burnout of internship hunting in the fall.

My junior spring was essentially the time where all of the good things I got from my fall realizations started to show their ugly side. Filling your free time up with extracurriculars, pouring yourself into too much of your work, checking the clock and realizing that your time is running out.

Once I finally crashed, I was able to pick up the pieces again and realize that I need to find a better balance, something that I thought I had learned to do in my freshman fall, but now was putting into practice again this time as a junior.

senior fall: the power of intention and choice

In my senior fall, I took three media studies classes in regions that I was unfamiliar with: writing comics, making documentaries, and debating. The theme in all of these classes, for the most part, was intention. What choices are you making? What choices are you not making? Why are you spending time on this and not that? What is the significance of a shot from this perspective instead of that one? What does this color bring to the table over this one?

Around this time, too, my friend group was crumbling and I started thinking a lot about choice in this context. Who am I spending my time with? What does it mean to be friends with people who are no longer dating, who no longer want to be around each other? What does it mean to truly be kind, to be intentionally kind and a good friend? How does one go about becoming friends again?

This semester was a growing pains semester, where I learned how to be intentional with my time, choosing just exactly how I wanted to spend it, who I wanted to spend it with.

senior spring: there is no such thing as magic

This is a sentiment expressed in both my rap theory class and my internet studies class: there is no such thing as magic. Lupe Fiasco describes this more of like, in the music industry, creativity isn’t some magical thing that just happens. It is a skill that can be trained and this class is here to show us just how you can train it, remove the mysticism behind lyric writing and metaphors and all of that.

My internet studies class essentially gets at the same thing — the Internet is not some magical force. There are tangible, physical processes that are occurring to make these things possible. Companies intentionally make it seem magical or out of reach to keep their audience in the dark, hiding the labor and work that goes into it to create a gap not only between consumer and company, but company and laborer, and laborer and consumer.

Funnily enough, I think this idea also can extend to my personal life, too. I think adulting always seemed like some abstract concept that would just hit you once you “grew up”. I thought I’d turn 18 or whatever and just suddenly know how to do my taxes. Or I’d turn 25 and I’d just, I don’t know, understand how mortgages and car loans worked.

But now that I’m deep in the throes of apartment hunting (blog coming soon) and adulting (blog coming soon), I realize that none of this is magic. These are things that all the adults in my life had to sit down and learn how to do, and though these processes are often mystified and hidden to make it harder for people, they are not impossible. They are attainable.

I still have 98 days left, so I know there’s many lessons left to be learned. I also wanted to remind myself that college isn’t just for learning technical things or prepping for jobs; it’s also a place to get some (training wheels) life experience and I’m grateful for all the lessons learned at MIT thusfar.

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