Next steps by Mollie B. '06

I finished my last final exam yesterday, and barring any unforeseen complications, I’ll be graduating from MIT on June 9. (The ceremony will be webcast here. You should watch it and cheer for me.) My parents and younger brother are coming up from Ohio, and that weekend is also Adam’s 21st birthday, so his parents are coming up from Plymouth for a big family dinner to celebrate his birthday and my graduation.

Adam still has a year to go until he graduates, and then he hopes to stay at MIT to get his masters in aero/astro. He and I are moving into Westgate, which is an MIT grad/family dorm on the very west end of campus, tomorrow (omg so excited). All of our stuff is carefully packed and ready to move, and I am super-excited about our little apartment. So all of you who are fretting about me being gone — don’t! I’ll be living on campus. You’ll probably see me in Laverde’s all the time.

I’ll be continuing to work in my undergrad lab full-time for June and July. Morgan, my boss (in biology we call them “principal investigator” or PI), wants me to write some sort of short and sweet paper on the work I’ve been doing for the past year and a half. I’ll be graduating with three publications on my CV! That’s pretty exciting.

I’m taking the month of August off… sort of. I am not so good at the “do nothing” thing, so I’ll be working a few hours a week in the Admissions Reception Center.

As far as other summer plans go, my parents have also informed me that as a graduation present, they will foot the bill for Adam and me to go on a vacation to the Bahamas (yessss). Adam is less excited about this, because his family goes on ski vacations rather than beach vacations; he’s like, “But what do you do on vacation to the beach?” So far, we’re also planning to go to Water Country at least once with our friend Mark ’07 again this year. We’ll be going to the Quonset Point air show with Adam’s family for the third year in a row (well, third year in a row for me, second year in a row for Mark, and twenty-first year in a row for Adam, probably), and Adam and I will be heading to Plymouth, “America’s hometown”, for fourth-of-July festivities. I’ve been informed by my mother that I’m expected back in Ohio for at least a few days — apparently the relatives need to throw me a graduation party. (Hey, I’m not going to complain.)

My PhD program‘s orientation starts September 5, and school begins September 18. I’ll be taking a few classes (at least one of which will be a repeat of a class I took at MIT, yay!) and working part-time in my “rotation” lab — you get to rotate through as many labs as you need to decide which lab you’d like to do your thesis project in. There are approximately a majillion labs to rotate in, and I need to get crackin’ on picking a few that sound good to me.

As far as further developments in my life with Adam… well, look for some updates on that sometime between Christmas and Valentine’s Day. :)