anatomy of a freshman year 🦴🧠🩸🖐️🫀 by Fiona L. '27

bones

there would be no body without the bones. just how there would be no “college” without the hallmarks typically associated with the classic american college experience: classes, clubs, a diverse group of students smiling and laughing while sitting on a perfectly sunlit lawn under a tree.

in my freshman year, i aimed to get my girs ⁠01 general institute requirements, classes we have to take to graduate. in this case, i am referring to the 6 stem classes that must be taken (or tested out of) by all undergraduates done following the advice of my amazing first year advisor, adam albright. i was disappointed about my advisor placement at first, since i had only applied for advising seminars (includes both advising and a weekly exploratory seminar) and had been placed with a traditional advisor (only advising) instead. but mit’s beloved linguistics professor “prof. albright”, or “adam”, as i knew him, easily found a way into my heart. in our meetings throughout my first semester, we chatted about major plans, extracurriculars, life at mit and how “there are so many ways to be a spider”. 02 adam told me about his interest in entomology, seeing it as his most likely life path after linguistics

my first semester, i took 3.091 03 Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry and 8.022 04 Physics 2 (Electricity and Magnetism) : the former was a pretty standard gir class experience. i wasn’t as interested compared to the classes in my major that i would take later on. but i saw a lot of familiar faces⁠05 the ones who showed up to class and some new information about chemistry. 8.022 was more memorable. i had opted to take 8.022 instead of the “standard” version of physics because i was still stuck in the mindset of always defaulting to the “hardest things available”. looking for challenge, i definitely got what i asked for. i talked to the professor about whether or not i should drop to 8.02 after a particularly disastrous midterm. stubbornly, and a bit riskily, i decided not to. through a combination of psetting with friends, attending office hours, and getting outside help, i somehow managed to scrape through in that class. i think 8.022 for me was what a lot of new students need coming into mit. being thrown into the deep end of mit’s potential for academic rigor, all with the safety net of pnr⁠06 all of our classes are on pass/no record (pnr) freshman fall beneath us. i could no longer get away with viewing my academics as something “trivial”. instead, i had to develop the study habits i’d been neglecting for the first 18 years of my life.

in my freshman spring, i took 21m.701, drawing for designers. the class gave me a brief window of time every week where i was “forced” to dedicate the time to drawing, a hobby that i wanted to get into but never really put a lot of time into. here are some of the pieces i made during that class:

an unfinished still life of four objects

a still life of a bottle

quick gesture drawings of a model

a self portrait i did of me

learning how to draw the human head! ft. my friend Gilford T. '26

a longer figure drawing

a few quick drawings i did for homework

a figure drawing in pink

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i also took 12.409, hands-on astronomy, where i learned how to use a telescope to observe stars from atop the roof of building 37⁠07 yes, all our buildings are numbers. it's just something you get used to. , as well as the locations of major stars and constellations and some terminology covering the coordinates of stars. other perks include being able to go to Wallace observatory, about an hour drive from mit, and get your own photo of an astronomical object. it’s a decent class (maybe slightly overhyped unless you’re really into astronomy), but i feel like i didn’t get as much out of it as i should’ve. my photo of an astronomical object ended up just being a picture of space—apparently, i had entered the coordinates wrong.

on the extracurricular side of things, i feel like i “tried” a whole host of different activities:  Lecture Series Committee (LSC)⁠08 a club that shows films in a lecture hall for free/cheap every week , Digital Art & Animation @ MIT (DAAMIT), The Tech, Asian Dance Team (ADT), Next Sing, to name a few. 09 i was also a desk worker for next house. it felt good to finally be earning my own money, and spend my money on things knowing it was coming from my own work. but the student org i gravitated towards the most, ESP⁠10 stands for 'Educational Studies Program' , gave me two things, things i now look for in every student org i consider joining: things that i genuinely wanted to do, and a tight knit community i feel that i belong in. when i felt that a group lacked one or both of these things, i didn’t feel as much as a desire to get highly involved.

ESP ran programs for high schoolers and middle schoolers in the area 11 and people who fly in from other places , including Splash, Spark, Spring HSSP, and Cascade. it was also an amazing community, with a large messenger chat that was always active, and a room in the fourth floor of the stud that i could go to at any time, even odd hours of the night, and find somebody to chat or co-work with. they were incredibly supportive as mentors to my naive frosh self, and constantly looking for ways to improve as a club and restructure old systems in a better way. their documentation was impressive, and alumni seemed to want to come back and visit as well. another amazing thing about the club was their approach to failure. i did so many things wrong / non-ideally while learning how to run programs, but i was never ever made to feel like i messed up or that anything was my fault.

i still think fondly of all my time spent with ESP both inside and outside the club, including when i went to new hampshire for a club retreat with them. we had an event called juice bar, where the freshmen concocted “juices” out of various substances for the upperclassmen to enjoy. i’ll never forget the reaction when i brought out “The Kid Who Flew All The Way from California to Attend MIT Splash”, a juice featuring avocado, soy sauce, and a few other ingredients that i can no longer remember. 12 perhaps this is for the better

i also did a urop⁠13 undergraduate research opportunities program, where undergrads help grad students with research or get supervised by grad students in research projects. with urop, we get to learn more about what real research and lab work is like! during iap⁠14 independent activities period. other colleges may call this phenomenon j-term. functions similarly to summer break but shorter and colder and spring semester, which focused on designing an ai tool meant to help comic artists storyboard.

one of the pictures generated by the tool!

during my fpop⁠15 freshman pre-orientation program. freshmen come a bit early to participate in exploratory activities and fun social events hosted by certain departments at mit. , i got the advice of not getting a urop my freshman fall, which i disagree with. 16 although that doesn’t mean i agree with the opposite of this statement, either. i felt that i personally could’ve definitely benefited from experiencing more of mit while i was on pnr, and the advice wasn’t one-size-fits-all for all freshmen. i really liked getting a peek into what life as a grad student was like, as well as how research projects operated. i even got to contribute to some of the paper that my team was writing through a literature review! despite this, i felt that a lot of my work ended up being rote, and i could have advocated for myself more during the urop.

i think something that i took away from all of my freshman year was to do a good job to whatever i commit to. through my own experiences⁠17 and rants from my friends i saw the human cost of what happened when somebody half-assed the commitments. freshmen are told that “upperclassmen will understand”, although from my point of view, dropping a club too late or without communication, or “silently dropping” a club by simply disappearing or half-assing things, can make things a lot harder for others, who then have to pick up the slack. plus, i think having a positive reputation as somebody who works hard and can generally be relied on to do certain things is quite valuable as well.

skin

skin is the barrier between the self and the outside world. in terms of mit, it’s the harvard bridge connecting mit and boston. i crossed this bridge many times, whether i was visiting a museum, going to a comic expo, or attending freshman formal at the top of the prudential. along the way, i went to plymouth over thanksgiving weekend and visited cape cod.

crossing the harvard bridge at night

an adorable and skillful zine i found at mice (massachusetts independant comics expo) i just wish i remembered to get the artist's name :(

a cemetary i encountered while walking the freedom trail

the beautiful beautiful courtyard of the isabella stewart gardener museum

a fancy boston theater!

went to the museum of fine arts and the arts were so fine...

pymouth rock! ft. my first Big Trip from mit

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but the idea of “skin” appears again in social context. to “have a thick skin” means to listen to criticism from others without letting it affect how you feel. it presents the skin as the barrier separating your feelings from others.

in my first semester, confined to one of the smallest triples in simmons⁠18 a dorm at mit known for its many windows and sponge-like appearance , i struggled a lot with the inconveniences of living in a college dorm. that was when i realized how much my emotions could run out of control day after day without a consistent routine and the coziness of my old life. i hated being woken up because a roommate had early morning classes, i hated having to do laundry every week, i hated being late to school because i had left 12 minutes early because of 15.

during my freshman fall, i sometimes felt it when i was at my most frustrated. in my stomach, and in all the air i breathed, a wizened loneliness took root. i wanted so badly for somebody to help me, to tell me they had felt every frustration i’ve felt before and that they would help me through everything that came ahead. i felt that 19 yes, i know this is incredibly cliche there was nobody in the world who could understand my loneliness, this awful feeling that turned my previously planar life into jagged geometries. everybody who truly cared about me was over a thousand miles away, and i was left to fend for myself in this world where everybody seemed to know each other and was doing better than me.

it took a long longer for me to finally find “my people,” but in the end, without even noticing the exact moment, it happened. i didn’t have to look too far. these people were “hiding” in my living group, in my classes, and in the clubs i was in. all i had to do was be patient, to wait for the right string of conversations to pull us together, before one day i would find them sitting comfortably in my heart.

from jujiutsu kaisen, episode 24. ever since i watched it, it's made me think of my relationships as taking up the limited "seats" in my life. there's a study saying that people have a "maximum" number of social connections they can maintain, so this makes some sort of sense to me.

from jujiutsu kaisen, episode 24. ever since i watched it, it's made me think of my relationships as taking up the limited "seats" in my life. there's a study saying that people have a "maximum" number of social connections they can maintain, so this makes some sort of sense to me.

from jujiutsu kaisen, episode 24. ever since i watched it, it's made me think of my relationships as taking up the limited "seats" in my life. there's a study saying that people have a "maximum" number of social connections they can maintain, so this makes some sort of sense to me.

from jujiutsu kaisen, episode 24. ever since i watched it, it's made me think of my relationships as taking up the limited "seats" in my life. there's a study saying that people have a "maximum" number of social connections they can maintain, so this makes some sort of sense to me.

from jujiutsu kaisen, episode 24. ever since i watched it, it's made me think of my relationships as taking up the limited "seats" in my life. there's a study saying that people have a "maximum" number of social connections they can maintain, so this makes some sort of sense to me.

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i think the number of people i grew to trust increased exponentially for me. friends introduced me to friends, and i bonded and got to know more new people. i am reminded of something that would happen whenever i tried to paint in watercolor. i’d use too much water here or too much paint there, and suddenly, a tiny window of color would bleed into its neighbors, consuming everything in its wake. i feel like that pocket of color, bleeding into my neighbors, except, inadvertently, i’d absorb a little fraction of their colors, a little fraction of what made that group of friends grow closer together.

hair

in chinese culture, healthy hair is considered a sign of prosperity and vitality. to be honest, i never knew about that aspect of “my own” culture. my parents were pretty practical about hair 20 and most things in life , down to the point where my mom had me wash my hair in vinegar to get rid of lice. to me, hair is more like a record of time. i dyed my hair dark brown after graduating from high school. it’s not a color that’s really unnatural or stands out, but it’s obvious to see the boundary straddling my skull, a delicate shoreline separating the natural and unnatural, reminding myself that i can never really change the color underneath. as i’ve stumbled through my post-high-school life, that thin line started to fall, as if it represented that very date—may 25, 2023, my high school graduation—being pushed further in the past. yet it still stayed, as well as the brown section of my hair beneath it, just like my high school self, who found an alcove in my consciousness and hid there, refusing to fade into irrelevancy as i started a new chapter of my life.

i could feel its presence, a little bit. in what my favorite teachers had taught me coming back in my girs, in my unquenchable need for academic validation that now went unfilled, in my inability to manage my life without a parent in it. but there were parts of my old self that i really wanted to stick to.

in high school, i built my extracurricular identity almost entirely around being a “teen writer.” i dove head-first into one of the most fascinating microcosms of overachieving high schoolers, one where you’d regularly encounter teens with the publication history of an accomplished 40-year-old writer, where an acceptance to a top summer camp is your ticket to meet the fellow high schoolers whose words you’ve obsessed over and analyzed and tried to emulate in a thousand different unconscious ways. i joined discord servers of other high schoolers who identified as “teen writers,” and together we sent our writing to literary magazines, crumbled over the biggest names in high school writing competitions—Scholastic, Foyle, YoungArts—and, ultimately, shared our admissions to top colleges.

in my freshman fall, i tried to force myself to write every week. consistency was something i struggled with, as i preferred to either procrastinate something eternally or go all into it for one or two days. it took a lot of mental energy to write something every week, but it helped a lot to force myself to write at regular intervals, and be pleasantly content with the results, rather than wait for “inspiration” to strike. 21 it might never strike i am a firm disbeliever in writers block, since i think it’s possible to put yourself in a state to generate ideas by forcing yourself to work at certain times, until it becomes routine.

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but for these pieces, i didn’t send them in to any magazines. i wanted to write without the promise of publication or recognition anywhere down the line. because even when i was young, i loved writing. when i was five, i made little booklets of stories: trashy, terrible stories with nonsensical endings, typos, and an obvious self-insert named “Fiona”. each page would have a tacky, crayon pictures of whatever scene i was imagining in my mind. i would “sell” these stories to my dad, and he would pay me in spare change. as i grew older, i stuck with writing even when i didn’t *like* it, when it got hard or i ran out of ideas or i hated my own work, which is how i knew i *loved* it.

heart

the heart always acts as a symbol of love and emotion, the eternal arch-nemesis and reluctant collaborator to the brain. but from a scientific standpoint, i never understood that. perhaps, the heart is even one of the most methodical, unemotional parts of the body. if it even dared to sleep or take a rest, the body would collapse into a corpse, like an entire city robbed of light. and so it continues to beat, over and over, the most diligent worker in my library of organs.

during freshman year, i learned a lot about routines and consistency. as i stayed up late engaged in deep conversation, or skipped studying to hang out with friends, i saw how my work suffered because of these choices. yet those interactions with others were the best i’ve ever had, and i felt that i’d always look back on my present with unblemished nostalgia. i felt like i was responsible for creating the memories that my future self could cling onto in the dregs of adulthood.

responsibility, and the development of it, as well as self improvement as a whole, has always been an incredibly important subject to me. as a kid, i used to be incredibly irresponsible, always forgetting about homework deadlines and pushing work to the last minute. it took a lot of practice to become a more responsible person throughout high school. i thought that would be enough, but mit presented itself as a tougher challenge to me: there was a constant stream of interesting events, and schoolwork that was more rigorous and more abundant.

expected value calculations, in theory, seem to be a good way to live life. i’d just constantly choose to do what brought the greatest value to my life. but in 24.00 22 Problems of Philosophy , i learned about “diversity of value.” how two things are so different they can never be compared, how one can never be more valuable than the other. whether i chose sleep, or work, or my friends, i’d always be “missing out” on a near infinite number of other things i could be doing.

this is something i’m still working on, as i try to balance friends, school, sleep, applications, shifting my finger around until i find the center of gravity of my life.

brain

my brain thought a lot about itself during my freshman year. i came to mit after being hailed as a “math genius” at my high school, who leaned a little bit too much into the identity of loving math and programming, who came to not just crave academic validation, but expect it. at mit, i learned that in terms of ego, a common saying applies. “the higher you go, the harder you fall.”

i remember, freshman fall, checking canvas to see that i had gotten a 59 on my first midterm in 8.022. this was indicative of many things: i was still very much adjusting to the college experience, i had no good support systems at the time, i had incredibly poor study habits, and scores that were considered “bad” in high school can actually be quite “good” in college. but my brain only thought one thing: i am stupid. there were people around me who had founded entire companies, published award winning research, and had gone to international olympiads. i had no research experience, had never created anything “really cool” in high school 23 in fact, i had never even submitted a maker portfolio , and my scores on academic competitions paled against my peers’.

i very much blindly idolized mit as a high schooler. all my mit fantasies glazed over the possibility of me becoming a #academicvictim in college…

freshman spring was no better. 24 and possibly a lot worse. i learned that, at mit, there are a lot of common ways to think about grades and self worth, and most of them aren’t very good for you. i think i fell into that trap after the “grace period” of pnr was lifted.

because of the attitude i had in freshman year, as well as some very flawed things that others had said to me, i came to believe that intelligence was something that could be inferred from grades, and that i had to define myself and my own performance based on somebody else’s standards. it was hell, for both my self-esteem and how i viewed my classes, and my excessive doomerism about what grade i was going to get in a class sometimes got in the way of me focusing on the material.

how i feel thinking about the grind

but looking back on it, i think that putting people on a pedestal for their intelligence or their gpa is something adjacent to objectification. 25 although not in the contexts that we’re used to hearing it in. you’re essentially defining somebody in a very one-sided way based solely on one, superficial aspect of themselves. it’s one thing to admire somebody’s work ethic, study habits, or focus, but a whole other thing to idolize people. when it happened to me back in high school, it make me dependent on validation and gave me a false sense of self that only served to hurt me in my college years.

i was lucky to be surrounded by many people who didn’t have toxic ideas about grades. around these people, i knew i would never be judged for how i did in a class, and that i would never be forced to share a grade if i didn’t want to. they let me know something that everybody should keep in mind when going through college—grades don’t matter. *⁠26 as long as you pass your classes **⁠27 they don’t matter for most people, for those going into prehealth, prelaw, finance, or grad school may see their grades having more of an impact on their lives, which varies based on what field they go into ***⁠28 and by “don’t matter” i mean they don’t really make a tangible difference in most people’s lives. i think that they can still be a good benchmark of what is considered “good” performance in a class by the course staff, which can be something you strive for (although that is still a source of external validation) if you find it motivating

at mit, my entire identity isn’t dependent on being smart. i quickly stopped trying to over-present as “the math kid 📚✖️➕➗🔢” after coming to mit. i also found the freedom to fail or do average or say “not very smart things”⁠29 i am reminded of the time i once saw somebody eating a chicken nugget and asked if they were eating 'a vegan chicken nugget'. 'vegan chicken nugget' ended up becoming my nickname in one of the messenger groups i was in. here without worrying too much about “oh no what if random strangers dont think im super duper smart anymore”. in addition, it’s nice to not have everything come incredibly easily. being average in any environment means that you have to work for basically everything, but that you can do almost anything by working extremely hard. 30 i’ve been doing this thing lately where i’ve been trying to “have faith” in a growth mindset. i am believing, for the good of my motivation, that i can achieve all my goals by putting enough time in them. this also helps with picking what to commit to and what not to commit to, knowing that it will take a lot of time to achieve your goals.

for the time being, i’ve decided to try not sharing my final grades with anybody in my technical subjects. this includes if i get an a in a class. it’s not because i don’t trust people, or because i want to be secretive, it’s more of a deal i have with myself. 31 me when im telling my friends i’m making a deal with the devil but don’t tell them that the devil was just me all along i know i tend to get worried about other people’s perceptions sometimes. i want to make myself get used to operating outside of that, to know for certain that i am not studying for the sake of my friends/classmates and that i can evaluate my performance in a subject by my own standards, and with full knowledge (aka not just a letter grade) of how that semester went for me.

hands

as an mit student, i cannot talk about the brain without following up with the hands. (as per mit’s motto, menus et manus, meaning “mind and hand,” which i think matches mit’s commitment to intellectual pursuits as well as creation of all kinds)

with my hands, i made things ranging from a metal casted pear⁠32 in an iap class in the forge hosted by DMSE, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, also known as Course 3. if you’re a frosh, feel free to email them! i think they take kindly to frosh who are interested in participating to a glass pumpkin⁠33 mit’s glass lab runs classes every semester, as well as a class exclusively for freshmen in iap. the class is incredibly oversubscribed, so they run a lottery every semester to choose the lineup for the class. i was lucky enough to get selected my freshman spring to a rug of kirby. i took classes and workshops that held even the slightest to me, and ended up with a bunch of knowledge about devices i’d never even seen before coming to mit. i also signed up for a bunch of makerspace trainings, which are free and available here! my favorite was the sewing training, where i followed along in making a pencil case that i still use now!

freshman fall was when i started to get into crochet, because one of my roommates at the time, sharon z ’27, had a cute penguin on her bedframe that she made from a crochet kit. i then impulsively ordered some crochet kits off of amazon, and got to work.

at the same time, in 6.101 34 a class i really applied the “pnr mindset” to but wish i paid more attention to i learned to make programs ranging from an SAT Solver⁠35 not for the standardized test, but can be used to solve sudoku!” to but wish i paid more attention to to a game of snake.

a moment from a welding training in metropolis

a bee i crocheted

a pear, fresh from the forge. made in commemoration of spring hssp's theme, human sized smiling pears

a little person cut out of wood

a sweater cookie i made during a christmas cookie decorating study break

glassblowing a jellyfish paperweight

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i realized a love of making cool things, both in and outside of my classes. i loved the feeling that i, a person with little experience in making digital and physical things, could still create projects from raw materials that were coherent, functional, and sometimes even pretty.

but it wasn’t just making ~things~ that excited me. i found that my hands 36 with . could also make interesting events happen. i organized the first [redacted] family dinner, bringing a bunch of mit affiliates with my surname together, sold clothing on dormspam, and walked through the halls of mit dressed in a pear costume. i realized that here in college, i had a lot more freedom to simply make cool things happen. and with this freedom, i stretch the bounds of my imagination on what can be done in pursuit of entertainment 37 and possibly also in the pursuit of personal skill development . after all, i had more than enough passionate, creative people around me, some of whom were happy to help or co-collaborate.

blood

writing the rest of this post was not completely easy. i think of writing about my self like trying to domesticate an ecosystem of wild memories. there are some memories that come easily after being prodded, hundreds of words flowing easily onto the page. there are some memories that feed off of each other, that prey on one another, that cannot stand even being in the same room together. there are memories which are nicked and scarred, which hide in the dark recesses of the mind, often referenced but not often remembered. they come out as a few words at a time, then a deep pause, then deletion, then a few more words. it’s never easy to write about these memories, especially when i know there’s an audience. but there’s something cathartic about writing about them, a way of reorganizing and recategorizing my struggles, in the hopes of viewing things objectively enough to learn lessons from the past.

after both my freshman semesters, i remember turning to instagram and seeing people’s “semester recaps”. i saw pictures of every living group and student org under the sun, and rows upon rows of smiling friends. i guess i had those too, but i had a lot of being confused and doing stuff incredibly badly and feeling incredibly, incredibly lonely along the way. i know, i know, i know the obvious sentiment that instagram does *not* reflect reality, but surrounded by so many pictures of so many “successful” first years, i couldn’t help but feel if i was the odd one out, or if everybody else “knew something” that i didn’t.

sometimes, including now, i think about whether or not i am/was happy. my own mental state was (and still is) the reserve of energy on which everything else depended—the routines in my life, my academic performance, my social interactions, and so much more. if i was motivated, if i was optimistic, if i was dedicated to doing a good job, if i put intrinsic over extrinsic motivation. in every action i took, a little bit of what was going in my mind was left behind as residue, like the faint memory of a fingerprint on everything i touched. it was like blood, the reserve of energy flowing through my body.

“i’d rather be unhappy here than happy anywhere else,” i remember saying to a friend. i don’t think this was the best way to express my sentiment, since i think there are definitely problems with overwork at this school that i don’t want to play into and let ruin me. but what i meant was that all the challenges i experienced here, whether i took them on (difficult classes, a packed schedule) or not (issues with loneliness, homesickness, not knowing how to live day-to-day independently), have pushed me into a period of unprecedented growth.

there are different types of happiness. the happiness you get at completing a bunch of easy challenges is very different than the happiness you get at completing something very difficult. one is feeling dopamine in the moment, yet mentally knowing that you have not used your time in the best way possible. the other is a lot of struggling and gathering the courage to ask questions, and maybe having your self image be called into question, but knowing that you are growing so, so much.

last year, there were points where i felt at the top of the world, and there were points where i felt close to utter despair.

its tough having Moods. some days here, i just feel like i go through the whole spectrum of human emotion in just an hour.

i don’t think anything will be accomplished by trying to describe it with the binary label of “happy” or “sad”, or even to rate it on a one dimensional scale. so i’ll think about it in terms of growth. a year does not make a perfect body, or a perfect blog post, and the beginnings do not perfectly rupture into endings. i am still following the different threads, retracing my steps to uncover clues as to where they will lead. but i know that as long as i persevere, i will come closer to the progress i seek.

sometimes, i think about my freshman year like a ride on a river. it is rough and i am always scared i will fall into the water and drown. the wind lets and i think i might get stuck on the water forever. but would that really be such a bad place to be? yet when i take a moment to breathe. to notice the place i am in and all the infinite places i could go, radiating out of this precious present like light passing through the hundred facets of a gem. i realize i am holding something so tender in my hands that i barely know what to do with. the present is really such a funny thing. it’s the one thing i ignore the most, despite it always being there. in all these moments reminiscing about the past to create this blog post, or thinking about how i will make things better for the future, how many intangible increments of time have i let slip into the past?